Appraisal in online discussions of literary texts
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Kristina Love
Kristina Love is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Language, Literacy, and Arts Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She works with pre-service secondary English teachers and postgraduate English and literacy teachers, and teaches systemic functional linguistics at Masters level. Her research interests lie in the analysis of spoken and online discourse in educational contexts, and in the principles underpinning the design of educational multimedia. She has co-produced a video-based CD-ROM entitled
Building Understandings in Literacy and Teaching. 
Abstract
Using the Appraisal framework developed by Martin (1996, 2000) and White (2005), this paper analyses the Appraisal resources drawn on by one group of senior secondary school students in Australia when responding online to teacher prompts about a postmodernist narrative. Appraisal analysis can reveal the extent to which affective, ethical, or critical stances are being negotiated in literature-based online discussions, and is used in this paper to examine how these evaluation resources are drawn on in a curriculum context where critical literary approaches are espoused. The analysis suggests that, while Australian students may be being provided with more postmodernist texts, and more flexible modes of negotiating meanings around those texts, they are still not yet able to take up those interpersonal positions that draw on knowledge of text construction either from a linguistic or a literary criticism perspective. The paper concludes by suggesting the value of Appraisal analysis as a diagnostic tool in English/Language Arts curriculum in Australian and other cultural contexts.
About the author
Kristina Love is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Language, Literacy, and Arts Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She works with pre-service secondary English teachers and postgraduate English and literacy teachers, and teaches systemic functional linguistics at Masters level. Her research interests lie in the analysis of spoken and online discourse in educational contexts, and in the principles underpinning the design of educational multimedia. She has co-produced a video-based CD-ROM entitled Building Understandings in Literacy and Teaching.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Multimodal text analysis: A corpus linguistic approach to situated discourse
- Same evidence, different meanings: Transformation of textual evidence in hospital new drugs committees
- A lexico-syntactic analysis of antonym co-occurrence in spoken English
- Appraisal in online discussions of literary texts
Articles in the same Issue
- Multimodal text analysis: A corpus linguistic approach to situated discourse
- Same evidence, different meanings: Transformation of textual evidence in hospital new drugs committees
- A lexico-syntactic analysis of antonym co-occurrence in spoken English
- Appraisal in online discussions of literary texts
