This study reconstructed the world of five children, aged 19 months to 24 months at the beginning of the study, coming to literacy in a day care center over a three and a half year period. This study utilized the ethnographic methods of participant observation, in-depth interviewing, informal casual interviewing and conversations, audiotaping and videotaping. The respective parents, teachers and the Center Director were formally and informally interviewed. Addressing the questions how do children become literate and how do significant others directly and indirectly socialize children to literacy this study suggests several points. First, teachers were culture bearers who consciously and unconsciously organized a supportive literacy environment that developed out of their particular cultural orientation in which literacy was taken for granted. Second, meaning making occurred in an interactive collaboration between the children and the teacher. Third, teachers modeled literacy behaviors for the children and in turn the children learned these behaviors and demonstrated them for their peers. Fourth, as children learned more literacy knowledge they became more capable in the meaning making process by themselves. Fifth, the events of literacy learning were most influenced by the mutual social relationships among the children. Children served as models, supports and partners for their peers in the meaning making process. Children learned literacy from interacting with adults and other children, talking and writing with adults and other children, from books that were read to them and that they read, and from the demonstrations and support of their teachers and peers. Sixth, much learning went on in the crevices of classroom life and this learning was not directed by the teachers. Seventh, group circle reading was initially used to socialize the children to the extra-literate rules for group participation. This study identified key dimensions that this particular social group provided for their children. The findings in this ethnography cannot be approached as universal, but instead are culture specific. This ethnography offers ways of looking, thinking, and talking about early socialization to literacy.

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Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation seeks to answer the question: What are the language contexts, preferences and behaviours of EAL students and staff in the Faculty of Humanities at UCT? The language contexts EAL students and staff find themselves in are either formal or informal. The former refers to domains such as the classroom and administration offices, while the latter alludes to student residences and generally out-of-class social interaction. Language preferences refer to attitudes of both EAL students and of staff towards language(s) that are used in their linguistic context. The language behaviours of EAL students and of staff are their language practices in the various social contexts within which they find themselves. The following research instruments were used to collect data in order to answer the research question: questionnaires, interviews and observations. I opted for self-administered questionnaires and conducted semi-structured interviews to validate questionnaire responses. Both the questionnaires and interviews had closed-ended and open-ended questions to accommodate a variety of responses. I observed a group of respondents, who were part of purposive samples of convenience (snowball samples), for three months and subsequently processed data qualitatively through thematic analysis. The first finding of this study is that EAL students find the UCT language context to be different to their home language context. In the home context they use their PLs more while on UCT campus the institutional culture forces them to use mainly English. The second finding is with regard to their language preferences. EAL students show an ambivalent attitude towards English and their own primary languages in teaching and learning programmes. This attitude of EAL students towards English at UCT is also documented in research by Bangeni (2001), Bangeni & Kapp (2005), and Thesen & van Pletzen (eds.) (2006). This attitude is in tandem with their language behaviour. EAL students shuttle between their PLs and English. The data show that EAL students code-switch in conversations outside class and in their residences. They mainly use English for instrumental reasons (see also De Klerk & Barkhuizen 1998: 159-160). As for staff members they use English inside and outside class. ix The language contexts, preferences and practices of EAL students constitute part of the UCT institutional culture. This institutional culture is the social context within which institutional policy documents such as the UCT Language Plan (2003) are to be implemented. Implications for the implementation of the UCT Language Policy and Plan could be drawn from the language preferences and behaviours discussed above. The study concludes by making recommendations for the implementation of the UCT Language Policy and Plan. The study recommends that the Multilingualism Education Project (MEP) collaborate with language departments so as to explore possibilities of designing programmes that target EAL students and staff for postgraduate certificate courses. Such courses could focus on workplace-oriented communicative skills. Renewed marketability of African languages, as well as reviewing how they are taught and used within the UCT speech community, should be considered. Though the small sample sizes underpinning this study do not justify generalisation on the UCT community, its findings could nonetheless serve as preliminary evidence of significant language contexts, preferences and behaviours of EAL students and of staff in the Faculty of Humanities at UCT. The outcome of this research could be invaluable for language planning at UCT and similar institutions.

The South African constitution recognises 11 official languages, of which isiXhosa is one. IsiXhosa belongs to the Nguni language family which also comprises of isiZulu, isiNdebele, and siSwati. IsiXhosa is mostly spoken in the Eastern and Western Cape Provinces. Those that regard isiXhosa as their home language (HL) are referred to as amaXhosa. However, as a teacher of isiXhosa HL, I have observed that there is often a mismatch between the isiXhosa used by the students and the one used in the schooling context. Thus, this study explores and investigates the written language varieties Grade 6 isiXhosa HL students use in their formally assessed and informal writing. The theoretical framework used in this study reviews literature on discourse/language and literacy as social practice, language ideologies and identity, heteroglossic and translingual practices, as well as primary school children's writing in South Africa to understand the complexities of students' language varieties. Moreover, this study explores the way in which the isiXhosa HL students represent their varied language resources through use of a language body portrait. Further, issues of language standardisation in relation to children's literacy are also reviewed. This study takes the form of qualitative case study in design. Students' Formal Assessment Task (FATs), language body portrait and informal paragraph writing about their linguistic repertoire were collected and analysed. Data analysis revealed the following themes: language ideologies, linguistic repertoires, use of urban and everyday language varieties, Standard Written isiXhosa (orthography), language borrowings, as well as unconventional spellings. Themes and categories are intensively analysed in Chapters four and five of this study. This study displays evidence of hybridity and fluidity of named languages, as well as heteroglossic practices that the students employ. Analysing the students' writing was effective in helping understand how bi/multilinguals engage in writing and that, while the adopted curriculum approach to language and FAT is monoglossic, children's writing is heteroglossic (see also Bakhtin, 1981; Krause and Prinsloo, 2016). The implications of teaching languages as bounded, fixed and separate entities are explored and problematized. Chapter six of this study concludes the study and offers recommendations that are important for deliberation when teaching writing in isiXhosa/African language contexts.

This research investigates how the ASK (Assessment of Sustainability Knowledge) Scale, developed by Zwickle and Jones (2018), can be used to assess the current state of sustainability knowledge at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC). The goal of this research is to identify an assessment process that is efficient and meaningful for SIUC in future planning and programming. To answer the research questions, students were surveyed online in Spring 2020 using the ASK Scale survey. The survey consisted of all 12 unaltered questions from the ASK Scale, in addition to questions about participant’s year in school and major. The questions from the survey were analyzed using Microsoft Excel to find the results. This study found that the average ASK score among students at SIUC is 8.61 (out of 12.00), which shows that students who took this survey do possess a relatively high sustainability literacy. The results show that students at SIUC have the highest understanding of the social domain of sustainability (average score 84.63%), followed by the environmental domain (average score 74.11%), while the economic domain was the lowest (average score 59.17%). This shows that SIUC has ample opportunity to integrate the concepts of economic sustainability into their curriculum and programming. The research also found that students at SIUC are experiencing an increase in sustainability knowledge as they move through their academic career. This research shows that the ASK Scale can be used as an effective tool for assessing students’ current sustainability literacy.

>Doctor Literarum - DLit / This thesis suggests that there is an urgent need for academic work in literary and cultural studies to become more responsive to the contemporary eco-social crisis of environment and development. Questioning the sustainability of current practices, I introduce an approach which has emerged in the attempt to reorient my own work in English Studies towards what I call environmental literacy. My discussion consists of a prologue, six chapters, and an epilogue. The prologue is a story essay which presents through metaphor and narrative some of the questions which later chapters explore in more familiarly academic register. Chapters One and Two assemble the theoretical tools which have shaped my priorities. The first situates the project in terms of issues in South African eco-politics, and goes on to introduce potentially useful models in eco-criticism , environmental history, ecological philosophy and feminist theory. The second chapter argues that elements in Mahayana Buddhism (specifically teachings on emptiness and dependent arising and their relation to compassion) offer suggestive models for further radicalizing our theory I practice. The following degree chapters experiment with writing environmentally literate responses to several texts (one historical and the rest contemporary). Chapter Three is an appreciative reading of the representation of the Garden in William Blake's poem The Book of Thel (1789), Chapter Four brings personal narrative into an analysis of Gary Snyder's epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996), and Chapter Five is a critical survey of eco-cultural texts produced in South Africa during the period 1986- 1996. In Chapter Si.." I report on some of the pedagogical implications of thee orientation 1 have described , drawing on thee experience of teaching at the University of the Western Cape. The epilogue is brief and imagistic. The written text of the thesis is accompanied by pictures of people, plants and places.

This study, conducted at an urban public school, explored the engagements of five, fourth grade, African American students who struggled with reading in school as they participated in critical literacy practices and social action projects with the assumption that critical analysis of written texts and concrete social actions were necessary for student empowerment. Using Discourse Analysis within a microethnographic framework, participants’ responses were analyzed. Early in the study, participants were hesitant to join in critical conversations about race. Over time, as participants deepened their critical literacy engagements, they divulged lived racism both in their private and public worlds. Specifically, the participants described the tensions and transgressions they experienced as minorities from civil rights curriculum, teachers and other students. The findings revealed instead of text based analyses, critical literacy practices transformed into the participants’ critical analysis of racism they experienced in their various worlds (home, school, and the larger, outside world) through language (not text). Similarly, the pre-conceived idea of social action projects changed from the creation of concrete products or actions into discussions in which mainstream discourse was interrupted. Tacit and overt understandings about race, identity and power suggested that the participants assumed multiple and contradictory identities (such as “victim of racism” and “racially prejudiced”) that both empowered and oppressed others in the social action group. Implications for critical literacy practices include that empowering and liberating pedagogy through ‘risky conversations’ is difficult, transitory and radical within the context of school.

This is a study of the application in South Africa of a social practices approach to the study of literacy. A social practices approach conceptualizes literacy practices as variable practices which link people, linguistic resources, media objects, and strategies for meaning-making in contextualized ways. These literacy practices are seen as varying across broad social contexts, and across social domains within these contexts, and they can be studied ethnographically. I examine how this approach is applied across four critical themes of study in South Africa, namely: the uses and valuations of reading and writing by adults without schooling; the historical circumstances whereby literacy comes to be identified as a resource of European culture in colonial South Africa; children's early engagement with literacy informal and informal contexts; and reading and writing in relation to electronic and digital media. I review examples of ethnographic research in each case, in which I have participated as a researcher, and examine how the approach has been applied, tested and modified in each case of its application. The research in each case showed literacy's incorporation in complex and variable ways in situated, located human activities. Whereas the first application of the social practices approach, that of the SoUL project detailed how literacy operated as everyday practice amongst people with little or no schooling, the research lacked a theoretical perspective to explain how these practices came to take the form and status that they did, as regards the influences upon them from outside the immediate settings that were studied. Over the subsequent studies I developed a revised approach to the study of literacy which detailed the explanatory usefulness of studying how literacy practices that network across larger domains than the local have effect on the construction of local practices, in both historical as well as contemporary examples. Literacy practices were not simply the products of local activity but involved rather the particular local application of communication technologies, language and artefacts that originated from outside the immediate social space. However, local applications involved original, indeterminate and varied uses of those resources. Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-223).

Thirty Hispanic second graders enrolled in regular (as opposed to bilingual) classrooms were administered the Spanish and English versions of the LAS and the Reading Miscue Inventory. The study was guided by questions related to the subjects' oral language proficiency and its relationship to their reading proficiency. It was found that the great majority of the subjects were fluent speakers of prestige dialects of English. Further, the majority of the children were found to be non-Spanish-speaking. Fourteen of the fifteen more proficient readers were speakers of the prestige dialects of English. The only LAS subscale which emerged as a predictor of the subjects' RMI reading levels was Subscale V, reflecting the subjects' syntax, vocabulary, and oral fluency. Finally, in almost 50% of the instances, teacher judgment differed from the RMI judgment in terms of the Hispanic beginning readers' reading proficiency. Each of the findings suggested a topic which would be well-considered through future research efforts.

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