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During pandemics, uncertainty is a given condition, as are the potential risks of which the public needs to be informed via the media. In such dire straits there tends to be a shortage of certain knowledge and an abundance of speculations that can potentially inform as well as misinform the public. In this study, we conduct a conversation analysis of the interactional dynamics of speculations between Danish journalists and health experts in televised news interviews and press conferences during the initial phase of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. The analysis shows how journalists and experts construct and moderate speculations interactionally by entering both convergent and divergent roles. In conclusion, the potentials and pitfalls of such speculations are discussed, and implications are suggested for journalism practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So-called "sloppy speech" is a frequent subject of criticism in broadcast and electronic news media. In particular, phonetic reductions are accused of compromising comprehension. This paper presents the results of an experimental self-sampling study (9015 participants) that examines the effects of reductions in scripted news speak. Overall, the results show that reductions have limited effects on comprehension. However, abstract, complex and ambiguous linguistic conditions seem to involve an efficient word recognition that is slightly hindered by reduced pronunciation. There are no correlations with sex, geographic region or length of education, whereas age seems to play a partial, though inconclusive, role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last couple of decades, girls and women have generally outperformed boys and men in the educational system, and in the Danish media, high-achieving girls and women are often referred to as straight A girls (Danish: 12-talspiger). In this article, we conduct a corpus linguistic analysis of the frames constructed around the concept of straight A girls in Danish national newspapers (N = 215 articles). The analysis shows that straight A girls are framed as sick and conform in a societal culture dominated by performance pressure. The frames are primarily manifested in contrasting pairs where seemingly positive attributes are affected by or turned into negative assessments, and in highly generalizing and exorbitant accounts reflecting a stereotypical conception of the girls. Conversely, the under-achieving boys are framed as easy-going and festive, but concurrently, also more innovative and independent. The article gives a critical account of such stereotypes, which could have substantial consequences for society's understanding and treatment of girls and women under education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research suggests that learning biology in an outdoor environment has a positive cognitive and affective impact on 13–15-year-old, Swedish high school pupils. Eighty-five pupils in four classes participated in a quasi-experimental design. Half the pupils, taking a biology course in ecology or diversity of life, had several lessons outdoors and the other half were taught indoors. All of the classes, but one, also had mathematics lessons outdoors once a week. Twenty-one pupils were interviewed five months after the course and all were positive towards the new learning environment they had experienced outdoors in biology and/or mathematics. They also valued the higher degree of interaction among the pupils. Other findings from the interviews were that the pupils from the outdoor classes showed a higher degree of long-term knowledge retention. They remembered both activities and contents better than the pupils in the indoor classes. An essay-type question assessing their biological understanding qualitatively according to the Structure of Observed Learning Outcome taxonomy revealed no differences between the groups. The results are discussed in the light of neurocognitive models of long-term memory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present article documents a diachronic decline in syntactic complexity in manuscript based radio news on the primary Danish public service channel, DR, from 1946 to 2006. This decline corresponds to a general shift in radio news language from a traditional formal news style to a modern news style based on the principles of natural spoken language. It is, however, hard to assess whether the syntactic changes have had an effect on how easy or difficult it is to understand what is being said on DR - a topic that has been frequently and fervently debated in the Danish press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]