Paraphrase? - Oh, It entails something new!: A corpus-based study of learner talk on moodle

Abstract

This study relates corpus-driven discourse analysis to the concept of collaborative knowledge construction. The fundamental assumption underlying this work is that knowledge is understood from a social epistemological perspective, and that incremental knowledge about an object of the discourse corresponds to continual change of meaning of the term that stands for it. This stance is based on the assumption of the discourse as a self-referential system that uses paraphrase as a key device to construct new knowledge. Knowledge is thus seen as the result of collaboration between the members of a discourse community. The study found that instead of replacing existing knowledge, via asynchronous communication on MOODLE, learners can create knowledge by assigning a meaning to the features of a discourse object repeatedly and in different ways that can be called as paraphrase. Attention also turns to adopting corpus methods as a valid approach to contribute to the study of the knowledgeconstruction process. This is followed by a discussion of a comprehensive categorisation of a wide range of paraphrase types, and overt and covert signs of intertextuality linking a new paraphrase to previous contributions. © Common Ground, Lisa Cheung.