The purpose of this study was to design and evaluate the feasibility of a writing professional development (PD) model and its effects on primary grade teachers' confidence and on students' writing ...quality. Participants were 17 teachers across two sites in a rural district, administrators, and 422 students across grades K to 2. A design based research was employed with students responding to three genres across five times with no control group utilized. A repeated measures multilevel model revealed statistically significant differences on students' writing quality across all genres while quality was retained across time. Teachers’ confidence also increased and stakeholders identified specific components as most effective.
When socialism collapsed in Tanzania, the government-controlled music industry gave way to a vibrant independent music scene. Alex Perullo explores the world of the bands, music distributors, ...managers, and clubs that attest to the lively and creative music industry in Dar es Salaam. Perullo examines the formation of the city's music economy, considering the means of musical production, distribution, protection, broadcasting, and performance. He exposes both legal and illegal strategies for creating business opportunities employed by entrepreneurs who battle government restrictions and give flight to their musical aspirations. This is a singular look at the complex music landscape in one of Africa's most dynamic cities.
Digital spaces offer scientists new ways to share scientific knowledge with a broad public audience, in some cases leading to the emergence of new genres. This paper examines one new genre intended ...to inform a non-expert audience about scientific content: the informational tweet thread, or tweetorial. More specifically, the paper explores the rhetorical structure of 50 tweetorials on COVID19 content, focusing on how writers use rhetorical moves to share scientific information and to attract and retain readers’ attention in the content-saturated space of social media. The analysis identifies eight rhetorical moves that regularly appear in these COVID19 tweetorial introduction and body posts. The moves emphasize urgency through their focus on immediate exigencies and their repetition and recirculation throughout a thread. The study’s findings contribute to a growing body of research on public science genres and how they support the goals of Open Science.
While video games have been widely investigated from the perspective of play, an emerging online media phenomenon is the spectating of video game play, captivating millions of users daily. This study ...investigates the relationship of video game genres, content type and viewer gratification in the context of live gaming. To study this phenomenon, we employ an online questionnaire study (N = 1097) to investigate six categories of gratifications: affective, information seeking, learning to play, personal integrative, social integrative & tension release motivations and their relationship with game genres and stream types. The results of this study demonstrate that “the medium is the message”, highlight the importance of archetypal structure (i.e. the type of streamed content) over content topic (i.e. the genre of games being streamed), and help to build a better understanding of user generated content and the democratization of media.
•This study helps understand the relation between content type and topic.•Content structure is shown to be more important than content topic for consumption.•The results indicate that, indeed, “the medium is the message”.•Games may offer highly varying gratifications when played and when spectated.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports are becoming a widespread corporate discourse practice and are often considered corporate image-building documents. The present study examines ...forward-looking statements in CSR reports from a genre-based perspective, aiming to better understand the textual practices of reporting genres in a globalized context and to raise awareness about ways they are used to shape perception of corporate activity. Using a corpus of 90 CSR reports in Chinese, English, and Italian and a subcorpus annotated with the “previewing future performance” move, the study combines a focus on genre-related contextual features and rhetorical patterns of CSR reports with a corpus-based study of future markers. The analysis reveals some cross-cultural variation in the distribution of the move, while its commissive function marks a common trend. Words indicating change (miglior*/提升/improv*) are found to be frequently used for future reference in all three languages, suggesting that future discourse, though regarded as an optional element of the genre, is widely exploited by companies in actual practice to promote a committed corporate image in CSR. Based on this analysis, the study puts forward the notion of “writing conformity,” a general feature of many reporting genres, which may turn out to pose new and important challenges for professional writers.
South End Shout: Boston’s Forgotten Music Scene in the Jazz Age details the power of music in the city’s African American community, spotlighting the era of ragtime culture in the early 1900s to the ...rise of big band orchestras in the 1930s. This story is deeply embedded in the larger social condition of Black Bostonians and the account is brought to life by the addition of 20 illustrations of musicians, theaters, dance halls, phonographs, and radios used to enjoy the music. South End Shout is part of an emerging field of studies that examines jazz culture outside of the major centers of music production. In extensive detail, author Roger R. House covers the activities of jazz musicians, jazz bands, the places they played, the relationships between Black and white musicians, the segregated local branches of the American Federation of Musicians (AFL-CIO), and the economics of Boston’s music industry. Readers will be captivated by the inclusion of vintage local newspaper reports, classified advertisements, and details of hard-to-access oral history accounts by musicians and residents. These precious documentary materials help to understand how jazz culture evolved as a Boston art form and contributed to the national art form between the world wars. With this book, House makes an important contribution to American studies and jazz history. Scholars and general readers alike who are interested in jazz and jazz culture, the history of Boston and its Black culture, and 20th century American and urban studies will be enlightened and delighted by this book.
Musical Gentrification is an exploration of the role of popular music in processes of socio-cultural inclusion and exclusion in a variety of contexts. Twelve chapters by international scholars reveal ...how cultural objects of relatively lower status, in this case popular musics, are made objects of acquisition by subjects or institutions of higher social status, thereby playing an important role in social elevation, mobility and distinction. The phenomenon of musical gentrification is approached from a variety of angles: theoretically, methodologically and with reference to a number of key issues in popular music, from class, gender and ethnicity to cultural consumption, activism, hegemony and musical agency. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, empirical examples and ethnographic data, this is a valuable study for scholars and researchers of Music Education, Ethnomusicology, Cultural Studies and Cultural Sociology. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
This major study offers a broad view of the writing and careers of eighteenth-century women poets, casting new light on the ways in which poetry was read and enjoyed, on changing poetic tastes in ...British culture, and on the development of many major poetic genres and traditions.
Rather than presenting a chronological survey, Paula R. Backscheider explores the forms in which women wrote and the uses to which they put those forms. Considering more than forty women in relation to canonical male writers of the same era, she concludes that women wrote in all of the genres that men did but often adapted, revised, and even created new poetic kinds from traditional forms.
Backscheider demonstrates that knowledge of these women's poetry is necessary for an accurate and nuanced literary history. Within chapters on important canonical and popular verse forms, she gives particular attention to such topics as women's use of religious poetry to express candid ideas about patriarchy and rape; the continuing evolution and important role of the supposedly antiquarian genre of the friendship poetry; same-sex desire in elegy by women as well as by men; and the status of Charlotte Smith as a key figure of the long eighteenth century, not only as a Romantic-era poet.
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