Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing - Volume 42, Issue 3, 2020

The writing center as research object: A broad exploration of effectiveness studies

The concept of the writing center is on the rise in Dutch education institutions. However, there is little clarity about the real effects of the non-directive tutoring model the writing centers use. In order to create a basis for research on Dutch centers, this literature review provides an overview of worldwide empirical research on this subject. It shows that researchers have difficulty finding the right approach. Research that takes into account the mission of the writing center seems the most valuable. This kind of research focuses on the behavioral changes a center tries to make with students, such as a reduction of the anxiety about writing and a larger self-efficacy.

Co-leadership in meetings: A multimodal discourse analytical study

In the last decade, leadership has been increasingly studied from a discursive perspective and attention has been drawn to how this process of influencing others towards achieving organizationally relevant goals, takes place in real life. Yet, not many studies have looked at (1) the way in which co-leadership constellations are negotiated in interaction, and (2) how this process takes place by means of verbal as well as non-verbal resources. In this paper, we integrate a multimodal perspective into our discourse analytical approach and analyze the co-leadership practices taking place during a scouting group meeting. In our analyses, we draw on the concepts of proximal and distal deontic status and stance to investigate these leadership processes in interaction, while also drawing attention to the role of epistemics in relation to how these deontic rights are enacted. From these analyses, we conclude that (1) in this co-leadership constellation, deontic rights are neatly divided, sometimes also in relation to the participants’ epistemic statuses; and (2) in spite of some ostensive challenges to the exertion of proximal and distal deontic claims, only claims that are congruent with the speakers’ statuses turn out to be influential in the interaction.

Issue framing as equivalence framing: The effect of conservative and progressive introduction texts on political attitudes reported in Voting Advice Applications

The framing of a message can affect the way people think about an issue, and the framing of attitude questions influences the opinions expressed. Current research investigated political emphasis framing in the context of Voting Advice Applications. In an online survey regarding the European Elections (2019), a conservative vs. progressive frame was manipulated across 15 questions. As the original VAA did not include introductory texts to the questions, a control condition without introduction texts was also added. Participants (N = 106) were randomly assigned to one of these three conditions. Results show that there is an effect for conservative introductions to elicit answers reflecting more progressive attitudes, but only for the group of respondents with conservative voting positions (PTV). This pattern could not be explained by political sophistication: higher political sophistication is related to a main effect of more progressive answering behaviour, but does not explain the framing effect for conservative frames in the conservative group.