Descriptive versus Explanatory

Thu Aug 11 04:22:35 UTC 2005

Gisela,

Thank you for your suggestions.  I am a slow thinker will need to ponder 
them a bit.  Months ago when I read your article on fund-raising letters my 
motivation had more to do with learning RST than with understanding what to 
use it for!  I will revisit it with new set of eyes.

I did not mean to sound mysterious about the research I am doing, but was 
concerned not to derail my question with a digression.  Maybe a short 
excursion would give the problem better context (besides it is my favorite 
subject:).

My topic is interactional coherence in asynchronous learning environments. 
Several researchers have observed that in these types of environments (and 
in asynchronous CMC in general) there is a tendency for discussions to 
become incoherent in a variety of ways.  They have a tendency to drift from 
one topic to another, without returning to key points or questions raised 
earlier in the discussion. A discussion may split into numerous threads, 
with no prospect for eventual convergence. Participants frequently ignore 
the contributions of others, so that the resulting transcript reads more 
like a collection of monologues than a discussion.

A variety of approaches have been proposed for investigating these issues, 
based on content analysis, conversation analysis, a number of types of 
response diagrams, and various statistical approaches.  None of these 
approaches, it seems to me, begins to tell us what it is about the way 
people use language in these environments, or what it is about these 
environments that make people use language in a way that leads to these 
forms of incoherence.  They do not attempt to talk in a clear way about what 
coherence is, and only a few talk about what interaction is.  In an earlier 
article I tried to discuss some of the issues in terms of classical 
rhetoric, and although the research was interesting, it did not really get 
to the point.

So I was delighted earlier this year to discover coherence relations in 
general and RST in particular. Although RST is only a partial account of 
coherence, it does what it does in a direct manner.  And although RST was 
not developed to address asynchronous discussions, it seems to me quite 
applicable.  For one thing, I would urge anyone with an interest in this 
area to take a look at Maite's new book, where she analyzes task oriented 
dialogue using the classic RST relation set.  And although asynchronous 
discussions seem to carry some characteristics of spoken conversation, they 
also share characteristics with planned written texts.  Further, although I 
do not yet have access to the corpuses I will be using for the dissertation 
research, I have done a number of preliminary analyses, and while it seems 
that some special considerations may be in order,  the discussions do seem 
analyzable.

Interesting among the special considerations, it seems to me helpful to 
analyze the discussions incrementally. That is, as each message is added to 
the discussion, it is useful to evaluate the way it back-propagates through 
the earlier discussion. With mutiple participants, the intent alters from 
message to message; for example, a question that may have implied an 
evaluation of an earlier remark now becomes a satellite in a solutionhood 
relation. So the analysis of a discussion consists of a series of RST 
analyses, and these analyses reflect the dynamic of the discussion.

The research questions I am interested  in have to do with the appicability 
of RST to asynchronous discussion, the use of argumentative structures in 
these discussions, the structural patterns of topic drift, and comparative 
effects of two different conferencing software products. I will be using one 
set of discussions generated using WebCT and another using Allaire Forums. 
The coursework, institution, and hopefully instructor will be the same.

What prompted me to send my question to RST-LIST was that I am concerned 
about bridging the gap between the results of an RST analysis and the kinds 
of questions I want to address.  For argumentative structures, it seems 
quite possible to identify specific relations as argumentive, to count the 
use of these relations, and then say something interesting about them. And 
my preliminary work suggests that topic drift will have a rather peculiar 
looking pattern in an RST diagram.

Maybe I am simply falling into the classic trap of trying to overreach my 
findings.  If in fact I analyze a number of examples of topic drift and 
contrast these diagrams to discussions that stay on topic, I will able to 
say, yes, here is what the one looks like, and there is what the other looks 
like, and we can all see the difference.  We may all nod our heads and say 
well yes there is a difference--but did we need RST to tell us that?  What 
do we know now that we did not know before?

In a separate email from David Weber, and I hope he does not mind me 
mentioning this here, he compared the clauses on which an RST analysis is 
based to the tip of an iceberg.  I think I am going to have a freezer full 
of iceberg tips, carefully bound and labeled!

Please don't get me wrong. I really enjoy and am committed to RST, and I 
find it gratifying to use RST to probe and nudge a text to see what sort of 
perspective it will yield (Sometime just for fun try analyzing Jabberwocky). 
I am just having trouble deciding what the next step is... a giant step or a 
lot of little baby steps.  Your suggestions seem to indicate that perhaps I 
need push my analyses a little harder to get them to tell me more about what 
they know, and to keep me from supposing that I know more than I really do. 
I am sure I would not be the first doctoral student to discover a disconnect 
between my research questions and my analysis.

Regards,
 Andy

In the interests of readability, I have not wanted to clutter my email with 
citations, but if I had, they would have been to at least the following 
references:

Abelen, E., Redeker, G., & Thompson, S. (1993). The rhetorical structure of 
US-American and Dutch fund-raising letters. Text, 3, 323-350.

Azar, M. (1999). Argumentative text as rhetorical structure: An application 
of rhetorical structure theory. Argumentation, 13(1), 97-114.

Clark, H. H., & Brennan, S. E. (1991). Grounding in communication. In L. B. 
Resnick, J. M. Levine & S. D. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially 
shared cognition (pp. 127--149). Washington: APA Books.

Henri, F. (1995). Distance learning and computer-mediated communication: 
Interactive, quasi-interactive, or monologue? In C. O'Malley (Ed.), Computer 
Supported Collaborative Learning (pp. 145-161). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Herring, S. C. (1999, June). Interactional coherence in CMC. Journal of 
Computer-Mediated Communication, 4, 4. Retrieved January 9, 2004, from 
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol4/issue4/herring.html

Hew, K. F., & Cheung, W. S. (2003a). Evaluating the participation and 
quality of thinking of pre-service teachers in an asynchronous online 
discussion environment: Part I. International Journal of Instructional 
Media, 30(3), 247-262.

Hew, K. F., & Cheung, W. S. (2003b). Evaluating the participation and 
quality of thinking of pre-service teachers in an asynchronous online 
discussion environment: Part II. International Journal of Instructional 
Media, 30(4), 355-366.

Hewitt, J. (2001). Beyond threaded discourse. International Journal of 
Educational Telecommunications, 7(3), 207-221.

Hiltz, S. R., & Turoff, M. (1985). Structuring computer-mediated 
communication systems to avoid information overload. Communications of the 
ACM, 28(7), 680-689.

Hobbs, J. R. (1990). Topic drift. In B. Dorval (Ed.), Conversational 
Organization and Its Development (pp. 3-22). Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing.

Jeong, A. C. (2004). The combined effects of response time and message 
content on growth patterns of discussion threads in computer-supported 
collaborative argumentation. Journal of Distance Education, 19(1), 36-53.

Mann, W. C., & Thompson, S. A. (1988). Rhetorical structure theory: A theory 
of text organization. In L. Polanyi (Ed.), The Structure of Discourse: 
Ablex.

Pena-Shaff, J. B., & Nicholls, C. (2004). Analyzing student interactions and 
meaning construction in computer bulletin board discussions. Computers & 
Education, 42(3), 243-265.

Potter, A. (2004). Interactive rhetoric for online learning environments. 
The Internet and Higher Education, 7(3), 183-198.

Reed, D. (2001, January 3-6, 2001). 'Making conversation': Sequential 
integrity and the local management of interaction on Internet newsgroups. 
Paper presented at the 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System 
Sciences ( HICSS-34), Maui, Hawaii.

Severinson Eklundh, K., & Macdonald, C. (1994). The use of quoting to 
preserve context in electronic mail dialogues. IEEE Transactions of 
Professional Communication, 37(4), 197-202.

Siegel, M. A., Ellis, S. E., & Lewis, M. B. (2004, January 05 - 08). 
Designing for deep conversation in a scenarios-based e-learning environment. 
Paper presented at the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System 
Sciences (HICSS'04), Big Island, Hawaii.

Taboada, M. T. (2004). Building coherence and cohesion: Task-oriented 
dialogue in English and Spanish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

van der Meij, H., de Vries, B., Boersma, K., Pieters, J., & Wegerif, R. 
(2005). An examination of interactional coherence in email use in elementary 
school. Computers in Human Behavior, 21(3), 417-439.

Yates, S. J. (1996). Oral and written linguistic aspects of computer 
conferencing: a corpus-based study. In S. C. Herring (Ed.), 
Computer-mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-cultural 
Perspectives (pp. 29-46). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gisela Redeker" <g.redeker at rug.nl>
To: "'Andy Potter'" <anpotter at HIWAAY.NET>; 
<RSTLIST at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2005 3:58 AM
Subject: RE: [RST-LIST] Descriptive versus Explanatory

> Dear Andy,
>
> One of the ways in which RST-analyses can support explanatory conclusions 
> is
> to compare subgenres which you'd expect to differ in respects that should 
> be
> reflected in differences in the analyses (e.g., the depth of the trees, 
> the
> frequency with which relations are used, maybe the direction of N-S
> relations). Examples would be good vs bad writers, planned vs unplanned
> texts, simple vs complex/difficult expository texts, written vs. oral 
> texts
> (where oral texts might i.a. prefer N-S over S-N order), and of course
> differences in overt persuasiveness (see e.g. Abelen, Redeker & Thompson
> 1993*, where we found that U.S. fundraising letters were much more openly
> persuasive than Dutch ones -- reflected i.a. in much more frequent use of
> presentational relations, esp. in the highest levels of the text 
> structure).
>
>
> * Abelen, E., Redeker, G., & Thompson, S.A. (1993).
> The rhetorical structure of US-American and Dutch
> fund-raising letters. _Text_ 13: 323-350.
>
> While corpus studies (comparing subgenres of naturally produced texts) can
> obviously not support strong causality claims, they can still yield pretty
> good evidence for any theory that can provide a plausible account of
> systematic differences found between subgenres. An experimental variant
> would be to have writers produce texts under controlled experimental
> conditions, but the unnaturalness of a lab setting can severely limit the
> external validity and generalizability of the results of such studies.
>
> Another way to use RST in explanation-oriented research is to manipulate
> texts experimentally and then test how readers process, understand, and/or
> appreciate them. E.g., in Abelen et al (1993), we report a small study on
> the acceptability of manipulated texts (with relations changed from
> subject-matter to presentational and vice versa) at the end of the paper.
>
> Maybe this can give you some ideas and/or other list members can react.
>
> Concerning you intriguing remark about the document type you've been 
> looking
> at: What kinds of texts are they and what are the problems in analysing 
> them
> with RST?
>
> Cheers,
> Gisela
>
> -- 
> Gisela Redeker, Professor of Communication
> Department of Communication and Information Sciences
> University of Groningen
> P.O. Box 716, NL-9700 AS Groningen, The Netherlands
> g.redeker at rug.nl tel: +31-50-3635973 fax: +31-50-3636855
> http://www.let.rug.nl/~redeker
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: RST Discussion List [mailto:rstlist at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG] On
> Behalf Of Andy Potter
> Sent: woensdag 10 augustus 2005 5:31
> To: RSTLIST at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
> Subject: [RST-LIST] Descriptive versus Explanatory
>
>
> Several years ago in this list Bill Mann wrote:
>
> "RST is defined in a way that makes it a descriptive approach rather than 
> an
> explanatory approach. While RST helps in identifying things that go on in
> coherent monologue text, it does not say how or why they occur."
>
> (http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0011&L=RSTLIST&P=R36&I=-3
> )
>
> I am using RST as a means for exploring the nature and extent of coherence
> of a type of document (a type of document problematic for RST, but that is 
> a
> separate discussion), and I find I can perform the analyses and these
> invariably lead to useful insights.  However, reaching these insights is,
> thus far, ad hoc, and thus, for dissertation research, a scary thing.
>
> It might be fun to think about what an explanatory approach would look 
> like.
>
> Short of that, if you have any wisdom, suggestions, citations, or
> methodological hints you would care to share, I would love to hear from 
> you.
>
> Andy
>
>
>
> 