Hi all!
Just a reminder about the Friday seminar this arvo 😊
Yaegan
________________________________
From: Yaegan Doran <yaegan.doran@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, November 1, 2021 1:14 pm
To: asflanet@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; sys-func@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Friday Seminar
Hello all!
This week’s Sydney Friday seminar is from Claire Simpson-Smith, 4pm Sydney time
Friday 5th October.
Although lockdown has just wrapped up for most of Sydney, it hasn’t yet for the
universities, so we’ll still be online, but hopefully we will be able to come
together face to face again in not too long.
The link is: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84093744071
All welcome. Below is the abstract and the schedule for the semester.
Yaegan
A question of worthiness: Use of evaluative language for persuasive purposes in
engineering
Claire Simpson-Smith
This presentation will report on in progress findings from a study on the
construction of persuasion and objectivity in professional engineering written
discourse. The research is motivated by a widely acknowledged need to improve
the writing ability of engineering graduates (King 2008; Yong & Ashman 2019),
and in particular by an understanding that engineers must be able to present
persuasive arguments framed for a particular audience and in an objective style
(Winsor 2006). The study uses the system of Appraisal as the central
methodological framework to investigate a corpus of publicly available
professional engineering reports. Beginning with the broad findings on the use
of Attitude resources in a sub-set of the main corpus, the presentation will
expand into ongoing investigation of how evaluative prosodies establish key
couplings between appraisal resources and central targets, drawing on Martin &
White (2005), Hood (2010) and Szenes (2017). These key couplings underpin the
persuasive stance presented by each text. Aspects of the results will also be
considered through the lens of Specialisation from Legitimation Code Theory
(Maton 2014), to increase understanding of the underlying values being
construed by the language choices.
References
King, R. (2008). Engineers for the future: Addressing the supply and quality of
Australian engineering graduates for the 21st century. Sydney: Australian
Council of Enigneering Deans.
Hood, S. (2010). Appraising research: Evaluation in academic writing. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Maton, K. (2014). Knowledge and knowers: Towards a realist sociology of
education. London: Routledge.
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation : Appraisal
in english. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Szenes, E. (2017). The linguistic construction of business reasoning: towards a
language based model of decision-making in undergraduate business [Doctoral
dissertation, theUniversity of Sydney].
Winsor, D.A. (2006). Using writing to structure agency: An examination of
engineers' practice. Technical Communication Quarterly, 15(4), 411-430.
https://doi.org/10.1207/s15427625tcq1504_1.
Yong, E., & Ashman, P. J. (2019). Integration of the structured development of
communication skills within a chemical engineering curriculum at the University
of Adelaide. Education for Chemical Engineers, 27, 20-27.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ece.2018.12.002
Date
Presenter
Topic
13th August
Jim Martin
Construing entities: types of structure
20th August
Ed McDonald
Back to the future: Descriptive adequacy in Halliday’s The Language of the
Chinese "Secret History of the Mongols"
27th August
Dragana Stosic
An axial perspective on Serbian nominal groups
3rd September
Yaegan Doran
Factoring out structure: Nuclearity, linearity and iteration
10th September
Geoff Williams
Semantic variation theory as appliable linguistics: Exploring contexts for
melanoma treatment.
17th September
Helen Caple & Ping Tian
Analysing the representation of diversity in early childhood picture books:
Challenges for multimodal discourse analysis
24th September
Mary Macken-Horarik
Building a knowledge structure in school English: Troubles and (potential)
triumphs
Mid-semester break
(ASFLA)
8th October
Sally Humphrey & Dragana Stosic
Towards a social semiotic perspective on Health Literacy
15th October
Xiaoqin Wu
Articulating social discourse and enacting spatial pedagogy: A multifaceted
understanding of rhythm and space
22nd October
Anna Crane
Interpersonal meaning in Gija: contributing understandings to revitalisation
programs
29th October
Bev Derewianka
Recontextualising a pedagogical grammar from theory to classroom practice
5th November
Claire Simpson-Smith
A question of worthiness: Use of evaluative language for persuasive purposes in
engineering
12th November
Thu Ngo
Functions of film sounds from the systemic functional semiotics perspective
Y. J. DORAN
THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
