Constructing Confidence and Trust Online (CoConTrustO)

Introduction: Constructing confidence and trust online. Technical affordances and online professional identities.

Trusting the stories we live by: Environmentalist online groups’ manifestos in ecological discourse analysis

The aim of this paper is to examine what stories the manifestos of certain online environmentalist groups are built on and to what extent they evoke trust. According to Stibbe, stories are cognitive structures which influence how individuals perceive the world while metaphors, as forms of stories, are manifested in language as trigger words which create a specific frame in the recipient’s mind. Therefore, the objective of this research is to determine the existing ecology-related metaphors and their use in online environment protection discourse as tools of building trustworthy content. This will be achieved through the employment of ecological discourse analysis and the ecocentric philosophy based upon which a trusting individual may consider themselves a part of nature and regard non-human life and the physical environment with respect.

Negotiating truth between persuasive pro-vaccination memes and readers' comments

This paper attempts to study how truth is negotiated in an interplay between persuasive pro-vaccination memes on the popular website 9gag and the users' reactions to them in the comment section. The concept of the meme is often used to refer to the social dissemination of ideas and images that shape and reflect general social mindsets in the context of new media. The paper will utilise the framework of sociocognitive discourse studies as expounded by van Dijk (2016) since readers' comments can be said to represent the reflection of the interaction between discourse structures and social structures via a sociocognitive dimension.

Rhetorical structure analysis of Serbian and American online daily news: How is readers’ trust increased?

The aim of this study is to analyse the rhetorical structures of articles from Serbian and American daily online news sources based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), an approach used to determine the conversational role of combinations of linguistic content (or multimodal elements) in a given text. The rhetorical structures will be compared to discover whether there are any larger differences in the way Serbian and American online news organize their articles in terms of their rhetorical structure aimed at building trust among their readers. The corpus will be gathered from the three most visited Serbian and American online news outlets (according to the website Alexa) over a two-week period.

Building trust in mental health related texts during the Corona pandemic: Approaching online readers’ positive and negative face

This paper focuses on trust building pragmatic strategies in texts about mental health during the Corona pandemic used to help readers preserve their positive and negative face, i.e., the more social and more self-sufficient part of the readers’ self-image. People with mental health problems are usually biased towards negative interpretations of utterances. This means that they are more sensitive about both their positive and negative face and less able to interpret utterances in accordance with the Pollyanna Principle, i.e., choosing the most well-intentioned interpretation of the utterance. The corpus used in this research consists of texts written mostly by psychotherapists compiled from Facebook pages and online sites dedicated to mental health. The texts analyzed primarily addressed people with mental health problems, or those in their environment. The hypothesis of this research is that different trust building strategies were used intuitively, but also that face threatening acts were not completely precluded. The aim of this research is to show how pragmatic strategies included in politeness theory can be used to a certain extent to improve the communication with people struggling with mental health issues. The analysis confirms that trust building strategies can successfully diminish the effect of face threatening acts.

The question of trust during the crisis-promoted online teaching

The existence of trust is one of the integral prerequisites for successful teaching and learning. In online education trust is more difficult to build and maintain and therefore requires a more prominent place in the teaching process. With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and the fast and forceful transition form face to face teaching to crisis promoted online teaching, the question of trust in education has become even more relevant. The aim of the present paper is to explore students’ levels of trust in the crisis-promoted online teaching. The subjects of the study are students at the Preschool Teacher Training College “Mihailo Palov” in Vršac. The study explores the questions of how much trust the students had in the education process during the school year 2020/2021, how they accepted the different online teaching solutions presented to them and which of the practices increased and decreased the levels of trust that the students felt. The study implements a quantitative and a qualitative approach by implementing a questionnaire and conducting semi-structured in depth interviews with students. An overview of the results is given together with suggestions for improvements in the development and nurturing of trust in the online education process.

Keywords: trust, crisis-promoted online teaching, students, best practices

The representation of the vaccination issue in British and Bosnian news discourse.

The spread of mis- and disinformation on COVID-19 and the ongoing vaccination, typically via social media, has engendered a great deal of confusion, uncertainty and mistrust in the media. Unsurprisingly, this has had a strong impact on people's attitudes towards vaccination, leading to vaccine hesitancy or even rigid anti-vaccination attitudes. This kind of coverage is to some extent counterbalanced by what can be considered as more objective and neutral reporting together with news media reports which convey pro-vaccination attitudes overtly. Both often employ different strategies to gain the public's trust. To establish how this trust is built in European news media, the present paper will analyse extracts from five British and five Bosnian pro-vaccination newspaper articles. The analysis will be based on an analytical framework within the Appraisal theory, which was designed by Peter White as a tool for distinguishing between subjective and objective texts with a special focus on evaluation and the phenomenon of attitudinal positioning.

Keywords: trust-gaining strategies, Appraisal theory, evaluation, attitudinal positioning, vaccination

Talk is Easy: English fluency development in Czech students before and after their transition from grammar school to university

While fluency has been investigated within second language studies (Sauer & Ellis, 2019), the concept has rarely been the sole focus of research attention (Peltonen, 2017). Rather, it is mentioned alongside other language features. Furthermore, when fluency has been investigated, it has been as a monologue - that is, not as part of an interaction between two or more speakers (Tavakoli, 2019). With academic writing typically being the focus at university level, my research so far has not uncovered many English language studies on the spoken fluency of Czech speakers of English, and none focusing on interactive fluency between native Czech speakers in the range of B1 to B2 CEFR.

The project will record and analyse the changes in the communicative competence, with a focus on fluency, of Czech teenagers during their final year of gymnazium study to their semester at university. To do this, spoken samples are recorded from participants as they complete a discussion activity. After being transcribed and annotated, the data is then subjected to a fluency analysis in order to reveal how fluency has changed over the study period. This project, in conjunction with my Ph.D research, reports on the changes to learner language over the study period and suggests how English language instruction at high school and university level can be altered in order to facilitate a coherent transition for students.

Nigerian stand-up comediennes performing femininity: A pragmatic analysis

Language and cultural modulation of psychiatric discourse in Nigerian orthodox psychiatry

Establishing confidence and trust in online academic discourse: Linguistic cues to bridge digital distance.

Developing interactive confidence online: Experience from English learning at Palestinian universities.

Negotiating truth between persuasive pro-vaccination memes and users’ comments on 9gag.

The present research focuses on how the truth about COVID-19 vaccination is negotiated in the comment sections accompanying predominantly pro-vaccination memes on the humorous website 9gag. A total of 341 comments in response to 25 memes were included in the corpus, which was subsequently analysed within the framework of van Dijk’s theory of Sociocognitive Discourse Studies (SCDS). SCDS postulates the existence of a sociocognitive interface between discourse and society, and emphasises mental models as one of the most important features of cognition. The most common discourse structures identified in the corpus were opinion and emotion words, as well as global topics and themes. The paper hypothesises that despite overwhelmingly persuasive pro-vaccination content on the website, the comment section will reveal distinct division into at least two opposing groups with different mental models pertaining to vaccination. In times of crisis, the truth about vaccination as one of the most controversial aspects of the pandemic seems to be negotiated and co-created through the interaction of these mental models in the multimodal dialogue between content creators and users on 9gag.

Keywords: COVID-19 vaccination, sociocognitive discourse structures, memes, comment sections, mental models, negotiation of truth

Changes in the English Language and the Importance of Language Use During Pandemics

Building Trust in Mental Health Related Texts: Approaching Online Readers’ Positive and Negative Face

This paper focuses on trust building pragmatic strategies applied in texts about mental health, used to help readers preserve their positive and negative face, i.e., the more social and more self-sufficient part of the readers’ self-image, in order to gain their trust. This construction of trust allows the text to be more helpful to the readers. The corpus used in this research consists of texts written during April and May 2021, compiled from one Facebook page and one website dedicated to mental health. The aim of this contribution is to show, through qualitative analysis, in what way and to what extent strategies from politeness theory are being used in these texts. The analysis also addresses the politeness strategies used with regards to the sensitivity of the topic and specific functions of these texts. The analysis confirms that trust building strategies can successfully diminish the effect of face threatening acts, but also that the framework could be expanded to grasp the meaning and context beside the form of the message.

Keywords: politeness theory, positive face, negative face, trust, mental health discourse

Speech Acts in the COVID-19 Political Discourse: Inspiring Public (Mis)trust

The present study investigates the utilisation of speech acts in the COVID-19 discourse. The findings revealed that both productive and non-productive types of linguistic manipulation (Asya 2013) can be accomplished via utterances that contain: lexical verb in the imperative form, the verbs be and get in the imperative form and the participle I or II, and the verb let in combination with the first-person plural pronoun we. According to Ghazala (2011), techniques such as transitivity, modality, permutation, innuendo, and lexico-semantic manipulation serve the purpose of exploitation as performed by the media. Whereas previous studies have shown those means of manipulation to be effective, this study focuses on modality and transitivity.

This paper explores the degree to which old and contemporary sources aim to deceive their readers by misinformation. Mainly, the paper focuses on the media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic through the contrastive analysis between the discourse of Anthony Fauci and Vili Beroš. The corpus consists of 149 media statements from February 2020 to October 2021, out of which 74 pertain to Beroš and 75 to Fauci.

The results of the analysis show that the discourse of the two public figures changes to a different extent with the development of the insights around the pandemic. Still, the imperative form, the passive voice, as well as emotionally charged words are the main markers of their COVID-19 disourse. The linguistic engineering behind the language of Beroš and Fauci exists in proportion to their role in politics. Beroš and Fauci use political speech which can have manipulative purposes and its persuasion depends on the evoked (mis)trust.

Keywords: speech acts, discourse analysis, fake news, COVID-19, Beroš, Fauci