This study examines the potential benefits of using the native language of learners in a principled way by reviewing research that represents the dominant view of using only the second or target language (L2) against a growing body of literature that argues for principled L1 use. The development of the direct and monolingual method and its key aspects are discussed, and bilingual methods and arguments for implementing the first language (L1) in a foreign language classroom are reviewed and evaluated. An attitudinal case study investigating learners' attitudes towards L1 use in the classroom showed that students prefer a mixture of L1 and L2, and that the principled use of the L1 has positive effects on the learner. / by Isabel Osswald. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

With the growth of the Latino population in the United States on the rise and the limited number of bilingual Spanish social workers, it is critical to explore the Master of Social Work student’s self-perceived competency in Spanish skills and the support they receive. These are the emerging professionals that will be interacting and providing services for Latinos in our communities. Exploring and understanding the challenges students encounter, their self-perceived competency, and how students can be supported, will be beneficial not only to them but also to Latino clients seeking services in Spanish. Providing appropriate services in Spanish may alleviate the language barrier that many Latinos are concerned about when seeking services. This research utilized a mixed methods design with self-administered surveys and interviews conducted and analyzed with SPSS and transcriptions. The study findings suggest that bilingual Spanish-speaking Masters of Social Work students are not provided with adequate training, resources, and support from their MSW program or their field placements in order to provide high quality services to the Latino population. The study findings also suggest that not all bilingual individuals are comfortable with working with monolingual Spanish-speaking clients.

This thesis is based on a qualitative study on four different preschools in Sweden of which two are monolingual and two are multilingual. The purpose has been to study and compare literacy practices initiated by preschool teachers in mono- and multilingual preschools to examine how the preschool teachers themselves discuss on this topic. The theoretical framework of the study draws upon a socio-cultural theory based on literacy with an emergent literacy perspective in focus. The empirical material has been collected through observations and interviews. We are two authors on this study and the result is distributed in two case studies which are divided on the mono – and multilingual preschools. We have handled the responsibility for one case study each, including the collection of the empirical material. Results show that children in preschools are introduced and schooled in different literacy- practices where the preschool teachers work actively with the development of childrens literacity. Preschool teachers want to develop childrens literacy with the purpose to give children an interest and curiosity to develop the written language. Literacy practices that preschool teachers initiate to children are reading and narrative literacy practices and literacy- practices based on text and writing. Results have shown that there generally are no larger differencies in which literacy practices preschool teachers initiate in monolingual and multilingual preschools. However the results show that multilingual preschools have more aspects to consider, among them the native languages importance for the development of literacy. The importance to concretize in order to give support in the context and the relationship between spoken language and future reading comprehension.

The increasing multicultural and multilingual population of the UK has set new challenges for the education system. This study focuses on a particular aspect of this, namely pupils in schools in the city of Leicester who use English as an additional language (EAL). It compares their lexical understanding with that of their monolingual English-speaking peers, when both sets of pupils appeared to have attained the same surface proficiency in reading. This work also investigates teachers' awareness of any lexical comprehension gap that might exist for their EAL pupils. These key issues could not be studied in isolation, so this research was set in a sociocultural framework. This drew together social and cultural strands to give a situational understanding of the target pupils in city schools. It encompassed their teachers' observations and perceptions through a series of thirty interviews undertaken with these practitioners. This was complemented by interviews with ten key management personnel from the Language Support Service undertaken to investigate the objectives of the Service, and how successfully these were implemented in schools. The empirical research of this study was a Vocabulary Test undertaken with one hundred primary school pupils to test the key hypothesis that EAL pupils' lexical understanding was not as comprehensive as that of their L1 peers. Fifty of the pupils used English as an additional language, forming the EAL group of this study, and these were matched with fifty monolingual English-speaking pupils, the L1 group. The results of the Vocabulary Test substantiated this hypothesis for the target lexemes included in the test, and they also substantiated the additional hypothesis that mainstream teachers did not always fully recognise lexical misunderstandings that their EAL pupils might have. The research was classroom-based, and incorporated some principles of action research. A key factor in the action research paradigm has been disseminating the finding to schools and to teachers to effect changes in classroom practice by increasing awareness of lexical difficulties that EAL pupils might have. For this study, the dissemination has taken the form of Vocabulary Workshops for school staff, and these are ongoing at the present time. The workshops are designed to help teachers enhance EAL pupils' understanding of lexis in English and their learning through English.

The traditional definition of a dynamic web application is about a collection of programs executed at server-side to provide content for clients. These types of web applications produce content at server-side and deliver it to their clients via multiple pages. In result, the client-side has the responsibility to render the content and perform a limited amount of calculations to increase the performance and user experience.    Meteor is a web framework designed for developing Single Page Applications and compared with traditional web frameworks, it takes a new approach in which most of the computations are done at the client-side. This leads to having the server-side primarily used for data storage and secondarily performing a limited amount of computations based on the Model View View-Model pattern.    This thesis tries to examine how web development is affected by Meteor framework from different angles by performing an experimental analysis on Meteor framework. It will investigate different attributes of Meteor framework used for developing a real-world application and finally concludes by presenting the advantages and disadvantages of using it.

Magister Artium (Psychology) - MA(Psych) / South Africa's Language-in-Education Policy is one of additive multilingualism, but in reality this policy is not adhered to, in that most black children are being educated through the medium of English from Grade 4. This type of instruction affects the development of academic language proficiency in their primary language, as these children are not engaging in cognitively demanding tasks in their primary or first language. The Woodcock Muñoz Language Survey (WMLS) is a test to assess academic language proficiency in Additive Bilingual Education, and is extensively used in the United States of America (USA) for this purpose. It is important to note that the proposed study is a sub-study of a larger study, in which the original WMLS (American-English version) was adapted into English and Xhosa, to be used in South Africa to assess additive bilingual programmes. For this sub-study, the researcher was interested in examining the overall equivalence of the adapted English version of the WMLS. Owing to insufficient tests evaluating academic language proficiency in the South African context, the significance, as well as the overall aim, of the study is to ensure that the issues of group difference and item bias have been assessed to ensure that the adapted English version of the WMLS is suitable to be used across English first-language and Xhosa first-language speakers. Because this is a sub-study, the researcher (of the sub-study) has conducted an exploratory quantitative study with the use of Secondary Data. The researcher has used the framework of equivalence as a theoretical framework in order to examine the research question. Given the use of existing data, the procedures of the collection of the data by the researcher of the larger study have been outlined in the Methodology section of the present study. The sample consisted of 198 English and 197 Xhosa first-language speakers. / South Africa

Although, to a great extent, research has been done on pictorial illustrations in other text types, research into their use in dictionaries has been relatively limited. This study looks at the inclusion of pictorial illustrations in dictionaries with a special emphasis on African Language dictionaries. Ostensive addressing is an important lexicographic tool as it aids the lexicographer in conveying all the necessary details of the lemma and thus go a long way in making the dictionary a useful resource. In African Language dictionaries in particular, this is a good technique to express several of the concepts that probably do not have an equivalent in another language or are culture-specific. This can be attributed to the fact that the use of illustrations not only saves much needed space but also aids the lexicographer in defining the lemma thus leaving little room for misinterpretation. A survey of the African language dictionaries reveals that very few of these dictionaries do actually employ pictorial illustrations. This study argues that lexicographers need to consider this technique as an important element of dictionary compilation. / Thesis (MA (African Languages))--University of Pretoria, 2004. / African Languages / unrestricted

Researchers have conducted many studies to examine the academic, social and general self-concept of pupils of differing ages and in varied settings. Yet, not very much is known about the varied facets of self-concept of bilingual pupils and the monolingual who have specific literacy difficulties (SpLD). Furthermore, the influence of learning a second language on the self-concept or the motivation to learn a second language in the Arabic- English pupils in the Middle Eastern region has also not been addressed by any researchers. So, the main focus of this study was to examine the self-concept of bilingual (Arabic-English) and monolingual pupils who have specific literacy difficulties. The motivation to learn a foreign language and its impact on the pupils' English and general self-concept was also studied. This study used a mixed methodology design using a systematic survey followed by purposive case studies. Established measures were used to examine each facet of the self-concept moving from the literacy in both English and Arabic (reading, writing and spelling) to the maths self-concept and to a more general self-concept, academic self-concept and school self-concept. Furthermore, this study also examined the non-academic self-concept such as athletic self-concept and social self-concept among a group of bilingual (Arabic-English) and monolingual (Arabic) who have SpLD. The study was conducted in Oman in a bilingual private schools and monolingual state schools which included 99 pupils. A Foreign Language Learning Orientation Scale/ intrinsic – extrinsic motivation was also designed to measure the motivation to learning English as a second language. In phase two, this study examined the consistency between the pupils’ and Arabic and English teachers’ interview reports and the pupil's questionnaire for 6 bilingual pupils who had SpLD. This study compared 4 groups (monolingual SpLD, bilingual SpLD, monolingual typical literacy level and bilingual typical literacy level). The quantitative results showed differences between the four groups in terms of the self-concept. There were no differences in terms of the self-concept between the monolingual SpLD and bilingual SpLD in any facets of the self-concept. However, there were a significantly lower Arabic handwriting self concept, Arabic spelling self-concept and general school self-concept for monolingual SpLD pupils in comparison to their peers who had typical literacy level. Also bilingual pupils with SpLD showed significantly lower English reading self-concept, English spelling self-concept, and the general school self-concept than for the bilingual typical literacy pupils. The last comparison showed that there were significantly lower Arabic reading, Arabic handwriting, and Arabic spelling self-concept for the monolingual typical literacy levels in comparison to their bilingual typical literacy peers. In terms of intrinsic extrinsic motivation there were no significant differences shown between the SpLD bilingual and the bilingual typical literacy levels groups. According to the case study analysis there was a general inconsistency between the pupils’ interview and their questionnaire reports for their general, English and Arabic self-concept and the intrinsic and the extrinsic motivation for learning a foreign language. In many cases the pupils were negative about their literacy self-concept according to the questionnaire, but they perceived themselves more positively in the interview. In general, there was a tendency for both quantitative and qualitative results to indicate positive social self-concept for the bilingual and monolingual pupils who had SpLD and the 6 case studies. It was concluded that as research into self-concept of the bilingual (Arabic- English) is not well developed, more research is need in this area, especially in the Middle East using the same methods from this study. It is concluded that it is important for language assessors to consider assessing the literacy difficulties in two languages when the pupils are bilingual.

There are many different perceptions when it comes to teachers’ instructional language choice in the EFL classroom. Some argue for maximum use of the target language while others believe that judicious use of the L1 can benefit the students’ second language learning. The aim of this study is to investigate what research says about teachers’ target language use and first language use in upper level EFL classrooms, as well as teachers’ attitudes and beliefs regarding the choice of instructional language. The findings from this systematic literature review show that teachers mainly used L1 to save time, to explain grammar and vocabulary and to create a positive classroom atmosphere. Furthermore, the results also showed that teachers’ choice to use L1 heavily depended on students’ level of proficiency. Lastly, the results indicate that teachers not always use the L1 for pedagogical reasons, but in many cases for pragmatical reasons, individual beliefs and out of concern for students’ well-being.

This study is an investigation of the contribution of second language learning experience to the professional knowledge and beliefs of teachers of ESL to adults. The literature reveals that very little has been written about the language background of the ESL teacher who teaches English through English to adult immigrants. The thesis proposes an explanation for this based on the historical development of the profession, and argues that despite vast changes in second language acquisition theory and pedagogy in the last fifty years, an English-only classroom fronted by a teacher who is monolingual or who is encouraged to behave as if he or she is monolingual, has remained the dominant practice in Australia. The research study is not a consideration of the merits of bilingual teaching versus monolingual teaching in English-only. Instead, it seeks to understand whether teachers who do have another language draw on it in ways relevant to the teaching of English, and to suggest reasons why teachers' languages are disregarded in the profession. In doing so, the thesis draws on key bodies of literature in bilingualism, second language acquisition, teacher cognition and critical studies in an attempt to provide a framework for considering the research questions. The study employed a qualitative, interpretive research design involving semi-structured interviews and the taking of detailed language biographies from a total of thirty-one practising teachers of ESL. Language biographies were analysed and categorised along several parameters, and the major distinctions made were between circumstantial bilinguals, elective bilinguals and monolinguals. Three key themes emerged: teachers' beliefs about learning a second language, the contribution made by teachers' language learning experience to their reported beliefs and practices, and teachers' beliefs about the role of the first language in second language learning. Bilingual teachers, both circumstantial and elective, appeared to have more realistic and optimistic beliefs about the nature of language learning than did monolingual teachers. Bilingual teachers appeared to see language learning as challenging but achievable. They recognised the dynamic nature of learning as incorporating progress, stagnation, attrition and re-learning. Monolingual teachers tended to see second language learning as almost impossible, and fraught with the potential for loss of self-esteem. Both groups talked about their own language learning as a private undertaking unrelated in any public way to their professional lives. The contribution made by language learning background fell into two groupings: of insights about language and language use, and about language learning and language teaching. Four key aspects of the former were insights about language in general deriving from knowledge of more than one; insights from contrasting LOTE and English; insights about the language-using experiences of bilinguals and biculturals, and insights about the possibilities of LOTE as a pedagogical tool in the ESL class. The second grouping included insights into learning strategies; insights about the affective aspects of being a language learner; knowledge of different teaching approaches from experience, and insights from different teaching contexts made possible by bilingualism. Overall the broader and richer the language background, the more sophisticated and developed were the insights which appeared to be relevant to teaching ESL. The third data chapter analysed teachers' expressed beliefs about the role of learners' first language(s) (L1) in the ESL class. Here little difference was found between bilingual and monolingual teachers, but overall L1 was characterised as an undesirable element in the ESL class. Teachers' discourse regarding L1 was analysed and found to be heavily characterised by negative and pejorative terms. This finding, combined with the teachers' generally weakly-articulated rationales for the exclusion of L1, led to the conclusion that beliefs and practices regarding L1 are a consequence of the monolingual focus of the ESL profession. The findings of the study in general are that ESL teachers draw on any language learning experience as a resource in teaching, and 'experiential knowledge' seems to be readily available to them in the ways they represent their own knowledge and beliefs in talk. It appears to be important in informing and shaping their conceptions of their practice as language teachers. There are differences between bilingual and monolingual teachers in that the former have much richer resources on which to draw. There are added insights which come from circumstantial or elective bilingual experience, from being a non-native English speaker, and from formal and informal learning experience. In general, the more and varied the language learning experience, the deeper and more sophisticated the resource it is to draw on in teaching. It is argued that the teaching of ESL is constructed as "the teaching of English" rather than as "the teaching of a second language", meaning that the 'experiential knowledge' (Wallace 1991) of bilingual teachers is unvalued. It appears to be accepted and unquestioned that a monolingual teacher can teach a learner to be bilingual. These propositions are discussed in the light of the writings of critical theorists to give a wider perspective on the monolingual discourse of the ESL profession. Bourdieu's notion of 'habitus' as strategic practice which is structured by a sociocultural environment (Bourdieu 1977a) is the basis for Gogolin's (1994) idea of a 'monolingual habitus' in education. Their work, and that of Skutnabb-Kangas (2000a) who refers to 'monolingual reductionism', suggest a social, political and discursal explanation for the invisibility of teachers' languages in the ESL profession. It is suggested that teacher language learning background should become a legitimate topic for discussion and further research.