Discourse Analysis for Educational Practices

Understanding reading and writing comprehension through discourse analysis, with an eye toward the design of educational technologies.

With Drs. Danielle McNamara and Phil McCarthy, I have been involved in several projects (and papers) that are aimed at better understanding reading and writing comprehension through discourse analysis. In addition to gaining basic insights on cognitive processes, the ultimate goal is to apply our findings to the design of educational technologies.

Selected papers

  • Duran, N. D., McCarthy, P. M., Graesser, A. C., & McNamara, D. S. (2007). Using temporal cohesion to predict temporal coherence in narrative and expository texts. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 212–221. [PDF]
  • McCarthy, P. M., Renner, A. M., Duncan, M. G., Duran, N. D., Lightman, E. J., & McNamara, D. S. (2008). Identifying topic sentencehood. Behavior Research Methods, 40, 647–664. [PDF]
  • McCarthy, P. M., Hall, C., Duran, N. D., Doiuchi, M., Fujiwara, Y., Duncan, B., & McNamara, D. S. (2009). Analyzing journal abstracts written by Japanese, American, and British scientists using Coh-Metrix and the Gramulator. the ESPecialist, 30, 141–173. [PDF]
  • Duran, N. D., Bellissens, C., Taylor, R. S., & McNamara, D. S. (2007). Quantifying text difficulty with automated indices of cohesion and semantics. Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]
  • Bellissens, C., Jeuniaux, P., Duran, N. D., & McNamara, D. S. (2007). Towards a textual cohesion model that predicts self-explanation inference generation as a function of text structure and readers’ knowledge levels. Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]

See the full list on the publications page.