abstract: The purpose of this study is to investigate the literacy practices of three members of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) and to explore how they use these practices to support and maintain their recovery in their lives. This study also aims to examine how each participant used specialist language, enacted certain identities and acquired the secondary Discourse in A.A. through literacy use. This dissertation study is the result of in-depth interviewing in which each participant was interviewed three times for 90-minutes. These interviews were then transcribed and analyzed using discourse analysis. Study results are presented in three chapters, each one designated to one of the participants. Within these chapters is a life history (chronology) of the participant leading up to the point in which they got sober. The chapters also include a thematic discourse analysis of the interview transcripts across themes of literacy practice and topics in A.A. A conclusion is then presented to investigate how literacy was used from a sociocultural perspective in the study. Due to the emotionally charged nature of this dissertation, it has been formatted to present the stories of the participants first, leaving the theoretical framework, literature review and research methods to be included as appendices to the main text. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction 2013

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M.A. / The aim of this dissertation is to establish the relevance, if not, of the debate surrounding standard and non-standard language with specific reference to the current South African situation. Some background to the debate is provided by means of a concise study of literature where opposing perspectives of several South African and foreign linguists are analysed. The debate is consequently viewed from an educational perspective. Attention is also paid to extra-linguistic factors currently influencing the unique linguistic situation in South Africa; South Africa's membership of Africa as well as its twenty-first century time-spirit comes under scrutiny. An empirical study tries to establish attitudes of a group tertiary college students towards varieties of English, i.e. Standard English, Black English Vernacular and Black South African English. Certain deductions are made from all aquired information whereupon some recommendations follow.

M.A. / Although codeswitching as an area of sociolinguistic behaviour has become increasingly prevalent in the public and social life of a multilinguistic and multicultural South Africa, it remains an unexplored area. To many codeswitching is something impure which shows the lack of understanding of this phenomenon. Since 1993 students and lecturers at the Sohnge College of Education have been exposed to a new language contact situation between Afrikaans and English. The alternating between Afrikaans and English within the same conversation (codeswitching) is an option that has been taken in an effort to facilitate the communication process. The aim of this study is to indicate the effectiveness of codeswitching as a means of communication in the language use of lecturers at the Sohnge College of Education. A group interview had been conducted in order to establish what the lecturers' ideas and experiences of codeswitching are. Recordings of lectures, tutorials and meetings were made to ascertain when, where and why lecturers codeswitch. The data was analysed with regard to social motivations and linguistic structures. For this the models of Carol Myers- Scotton, one of the leading researchers in the field of codeswitching, were used. These are the Markedness Model (for establishing the social motivations) and the Matrix Language Frame Model (for analysing the linguistic constraints). Given the fact that this study is the first to investigate codeswitching between Afrikaans and English by using the models of Myers—Scotton, one can only hope that this first effort will cast some light on this common and yet unexplored phenomenon of codeswitching between Afrikaans and English.

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This thesis explores the nature and the mechanism of change of language prestige and language attitudes in two neighbouring languages: Occitan and Catalan. These two Romance minority languages show great similarities in their early external history and striking differences in their more recent past. The concepts of language attitudes and prestige call for a multidisciplinary approach which incorporates aspects from social psychology, ethnography, historical sociolinguistics and sociology to enable the author to depict in a comprehensive manner the interaction between the formation of the perception of language prestige and the declaration of language attitudes.An important rationale in this thesis is the search for an understanding of the patterns of change in prestige descriptions. Prestige and attitudes are generally interpreted as static entities but a diachronic overview of the values attached to Catalan and Occitan displays signs of disparity and evolution which are scrutinised through the analysis of selected Occitan and Catalan grammars from different periods. The data collected through semi-structured interviews with Occitan and Catalan speakers and processed with the method of Critical Discourse Analysis provides an enlightening synchronic perspective on the language situations. The combination of diachronic and present-day approaches to language representations fosters an original apparatus to investigate the gradually developing contrasts between the symbolisation of the two languages. A second point of focus for the comparison of the Occitan and Catalan linguistic situations resides in the transnational position of their linguistic communities. Since Occitan and Catalan are both spoken in France and Spain, the fascinating mismatch between the linguistic borders and the political territories provide an original and supplementary instrument of analysis of the influences of the national policies on individual attitudes. The bi-national division of Catalan and Occitan offers an examination of the inter-relation between macro-level representations and micro-level perceptions and a clarification of the dynamicity of the power relations between minority and majority groups.The objective of the study is primarily to contribute to a theorisation of language prestige through its conceptualisation as a process, and not an inherent quality, influencing, renewing or destroying, positive language attitudes which, in turn, can reinforce or challenge the preconceived and established form of prestige. The dynamic and malleable forms of prestige and attitudes need the explanatory help of the concept of language ideologies which, taken as beliefs about a language, embodies the modern and growing differentiation in the attribution of language values to Catalan and Occitan. Language ideologies as well as constituting a link between the macro and micro-domains reflect the emblematic discrepancies between a growingly powerful and confrontational Catalan prestige and a compartmentalised and disunited Occitan prestige.

This dissertation investigates the linguistic outcomes of Japanese-English language contact in Canada. Adopting a sociolinguistic variationist framework (Labov 1966; Sankoff & Labov 1985), the main objective is to determine whether or not Japanese spoken in Canada (hereafter, heritage Japanese) is showing structural change due to prolonged contact with English. The study is based on naturalistic speech data collected from 16 Japanese-English bilingual speakers in Canada. A key component of this dissertation is the use of a comparative sociolinguistic framework (Poplack and Tagliamonte 2001; Tagliamonte 2002) to assess structural affinities between heritage Japanese and the homeland Japanese benchmark variety. Speech patterns in heritage Japanese are systematically compared with patterns found in a commensurate monolingual benchmark variety of Japanese with regard to three linguistic variables, which are considered to be vulnerable to contact-induced language change (i.e. Bullock 2004, Sorace 2011). In terms of the first variable analyzed, variable realization of subject pronouns, it was found that the underlying grammar in heritage Japanese is shared by the homeland benchmark variety, showing that the variable is conditioned by the factor groups of subject continuity (i.e. switch reference) and grammatical person; the null variant is favoured by the same subject referent and the second person pronoun. Second, with regard to variable case marking on subject nouns and variable case marking on direct object nouns, it was found that the same underlying grammar is shared for case marking. For example, the constraint hierarchies in heritage Japanese were identical with those in the homeland variety for focus particles, with presence of a focus particle favouring null marking consistently for all types of nouns (i.e. English-origin nouns and Japanese nouns in heritage Japanese, and Japanese nouns and loanwords in homeland Japanese). The constraint hierarchies (and direction of the effect) for the other significant factor groups of verbal adjacency and sentence-final particle were identical between heritage Japanese and the homeland variety, with the exception of a reversed direction of effect for loanword subject nouns in heritage Japanese for the non-significant factor group of verbal adjacency, and a neutralized effect for Japanese nouns in heritage Japanese and loanwords in homeland Japanese when these nouns are located in direct object position. Considered in the aggregate, constraint hierarchies were found to exhibit a number of parallels across comparison varieties. This finding bolsters the general conclusion that there is little evidence indicating that extensive contact with English has had any discernible impact on structural patterns in these sectors of the heritage grammar. Furthermore, it was shown that no social factor group (i.e. length of stay in Canada) has an appreciable effect on heritage Japanese. Summarizing, the multiple lines of evidence emerging from the empirical quantitative analyses of the variables targeted in this dissertation converge in indicating that heritage Japanese, as spoken in Canada, broadly shares the same underlying grammar as homeland Japanese. Structural affinities in variable patterning shared by heritage and homeland varieties reveal little compelling evidence indicating that heritage Japanese exhibits structural change due to contact with English.

This study investigates variable positioning of adverbs in compound verb tenses in vernacular Quebec French using the sociolinguistic framework of Variation Theory (Weinreich et al. 1968; Labov 1969). While variable adverb placement is addressed in both the prescriptive and linguistic literature, whether their explanations for it hold in practice remains to be determined; quantitative research of this phenomenon in usage-based corpora is limited, and rare in French. The research objectives are therefore to determine the productivity of variable adverb placement in French in these verbal contexts, to uncover the linguistic and/or social factors which constrain it, and to evaluate the extent to which current treatments of this variable in the literature accurately reflect what occurs in speech. Data is thus extracted from a corpus of spontaneous discourse, is coded for several linguistic and social factors, and is quantitatively analysed using standard variationist methodology (Poplack & Tagliamonte 2001). Overall rates of variant use suggest that variable adverb placement is robust, with adverbs occurring just slightly more frequently after the past participle than between the auxiliary and the participle; placement at the beginning of the sentence is rare. The results of the distributional and multivariate analyses largely confirm the purported conditioning effects of the tested linguistic factors, suggesting that prescriptive and theoretical linguistic approaches are generally correct in their accounts of this phenomenon. However, closer investigation reveals these effects to be sensitive to the lexical identity of the adverb, namely, their particular placement preferences; once these positioning predilections are taken into consideration, the conditioning effects of the linguistic factors essentially disappear. Sociodemographic factors are also found to be mildly implicated in variable adverb placement, and these too are sensitive to the influence of the lexical identity of the adverb. Ultimately, it is argued that this variable is primarily lexically-constrained, a finding which can be only minimally and indirectly inferred from the relevant literature. Taken together, the results of this study provide new and vital insight into the mechanisms underlying variable adverb placement in French, and also highlight the importance of quantitatively investigating such variable language phenomena in corpora of vernacular speech.

Teaching about culture at the college level is always a challenge with regards to the heterogeneous reality of Spanish. The debatable status of the language within the United States is not always reflected in the language and literature departments of institutions of higher education. Moreover, standardization has been continuously favored in the context of Spanish teaching and learning. From this perspective, it is challenging for the students coming from the mainstream culture of the United States to approach the culture of everyday life in the Spanish speaking communities inside and outside the country. At the same time, literature has mostly been used a pedagogical tool to promote accuracy in the foreign language. However, in my study, I argue the use of literature as a fundamental teaching / learning tool to expose students to the different aspects of cultural learning. Literature becomes a window to understand the nuances of living in Spanish with a critical look. In this process, cultural learning becomes a dialogic process through which the learners of a foreign language and literature incorporate and readjust their values, perceptions, and practices in a redefined internally persuasive discourse. In this journey, the role of the teacher seems fundamental to connect and dialogize the first culture of the students and the foreign one that progressively gets incorporated as their own in a sort of new space.

Although multilingualism has been investigated in London, no studies have addressed the multilingual linguistic landscape of this linguistically diverse globalized mega-city. In addition, no previous research has addressed the linguistic impacts of colonialism on the colonizer with respect to signage in the linguistic landscape. With increasing rates of immigration and globalization in London, it is advantageous to fully document and research the nature of the linguistic landscape in order to create a baseline for future comparison. Consequently, aspects of the linguistic landscape of five London boroughs were collected and analyzed in terms of 2,062 signage items. The study noted multilingual signage situations in each borough with respect to the formal top-down and informal bottom-up nature of the signage. The results of this study document the significant impact of colonial and EU languages on London's linguistic landscape. These findings suggest that Britain's colonial languages make up the majority of London's multilingualism, followed by European Union languages. We suggest that future research attempt to track the changes of London's linguistic landscape by comparing future data to the data presented in this study as immigration laws change.