Reading Group Discourse

Kieran O'Halloran studied reading groups - of which there are a lot (50,000+ in UK, 500,000+ US). Studied 10 groups reading different books - each twice with qualitative and quantative analysys (Atlas-ti & WMatrix). This involved coding in categories of Discussio, Phasal (on and off topic) and Thematic. it was interesting the way that software has been used: Atlas-ti allowed the words to be divided into different thematic sections (corpora) and then WMatrix (http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/) used to bring out keywords and automatic tagging of parts of speech in the corpora and semantic links. This enabled Kieran to show how for example evaluative language is in the past and energetic, whereas co-construction uses interpretive language and is in the present and less emotive.