THE "US" PROJECT

Our First Comp App Mini Assignment

Mini Assignment 1

Reflections and Questions

1. Which courses incorporate the use of computer in teaching and learning?
2. Were the computer-based activities related to any of the three stages of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL)?
3.  What are the important concepts in the three stages of CALL related to the activities?

Answer

1.    Subject: Critical Discourse Analysis

Task: Students were asked to analyse an article from an online newspaper from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis using Norman’s Fairclough notion of discourse and hegemony.

2.    Yes. This activity implies two stages of CALL: Communicative CALL and Integrative CALL.

3.    Communicative CALL: The students have to discover and choose which article fits into the criteria to be used in the assignments. Students have their own liberty of choosing which article they wanted to use for the assignment.  

Integrative CALL: The involvement of the lecturer during the process of completing the assignments. Consultations were made necessary so that the students were on the right track. The students also use the computer to browse the database as well as using the word processor. Thus, the computer only acted as a tool.

Introduction

Grammatical Analysis is a system of grammatical account founded by Michael Halliday. In his account of grammatical account, Halliday has claimed that it is fundamentally functional. Halliday denotes to his functions of language as metafunctions. He suggests three overall functions including the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual metafunction.

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday

              Ideational Metafunction

The ideational metafunction function as the interpreter of human daily experience. It can be also viewed as to make sense of "reality". Halliday splits the ideational metafunction into two parts, the logical and the experiential metafunctions. Logical metafunction denotes the grammatical possessions for structuring grammatical units into complexes, for example, by combining two or more clauses into a clause complex. The experiential function denotes to the grammatical resources tangled in interpreting the change of experience through the element of the clause

Interpersonal Metafunction

The interpersonal metafunction relates to a text's features of tenor or interactivity. For example, the areas such as speaker/writer persona, social distance, and relative social status which fall under interpersonal metafunction or tenor. For social distance and relative social, it is applicable only to spoken texts.

Textual Metafunction

The textual metafunction or mode is the interior association that includes textual interactivity and distance in communication. For instance, textual interactivity is observed with the orientation towards disfluencies in text such as pauses, hesitators and repetitions.

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