This study resulted in the creation of a conceptual framework for ethical academic writing that can be applied to cases of authorship identification. The framework is the culmination of research into various other forensic frameworks and aspects related to cyber forensics, in order to ensure maximum effectiveness of this newly developed methodology. The research shows how synergies between forensic linguistics and electronic forensics (computer forensics) create the conceptual space for a new, interdisciplinary, cyber forensic linguistics, along with forensic auditing procedures and tools for authorship identification. The research also shows that an individual’s unique word pattern usage can be used to determine document authorship, and that in other instances, authorship can be attributed with a significant degree of probability using the identified process. The importance of this fact cannot be understated, because accusations of plagiarism have to be based on facts that will withstand cross examination in a court of law. Therefore, forensic auditing procedures are required when attributing authorship in cases of suspected plagiarism, which is regarded as one of the most serious problems facing any academic institution. This study identifies and characterises various forms of plagiarism as well the responses that can be implemented to prevent and deter it. A number of online and offline tools for the detection and prevention of plagiarism are identified, over and above the more commonly used popular tools that, in the author’s view, are overrated because they are based on mechanistic identification of word similarities in source and target texts, rather than on proper grammatical and semantic principles. Linguistic analysis is a field not well understood and often underestimated. Yet it is a critical field of inquiry in determining specific cases of authorship. The research identifies the various methods of linguistic analysis that could be applied to help establish authorship identity, as well as how they can be applied within a forensic environment. Various software tools that could be used to identify and analyse source documents that were plagiarised are identified and briefly characterised. Concordance, function word analysis and other methods of corpus analysis are explained, along with some of their related software packages. Corpus analysis that in the past would have taken months to perform manually, could now only take a matter of hours using the correct programs, given the availability of computerised analysis tools. This research integrates the strengths of these tools within a structurally sound forensic auditing framework, the result of which is a conceptual framework that encompasses all the pertinent factors and ensures admissibility in a court of law by adhering to strict rules and features that are characteristic of the legal requirements for a forensic investigation. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2009.

In the teaching and learning of literacy, descriptions of text have a problematic status as a result of the growing understanding of literacy as both a cognitive process and a social practice. In the teaching of academic subjects at university, student text is not usually an object of study. The research in this thesis draws on a language based theory oflearning to place textual description at the centre of the teaching and learning of both literacy and academic subjects at university. Participant observation and practice-based research methods were used to implement a form of text-oriented literacy teaching and to explore its compatibility with processes and practices orientations to literacy. Over an eighteen month period, systemic functional grammar was used to investigate and describe the texts of a film studies classroom and the descriptions were used in genre based literacy pedagogy. The effects of the pedagogy are measured in terms of students' performance in an end of course assignment, students' accounts of their writing processes, and student and subject-tutor perception of the text description and the pedagogy. In the thesis, a linguistic description of a key curriculum genre -a Taxonomic Film Analysis -is presented. An account is given of the pedagogy by means of which this essay genre was represented in the film studies classroom as a realisation of choices from linguistic, conceptual and activity systems. Systemic functional grammar-based text description is seen to have provided a means whereby a literacy tutor could collaborate with a subject tutor to provide a subject-specific form of literacy teaching which was evaluated as relevant by students and tutors. The account and the evaluation help to clarify the role that description of text can play in relation to processes and practices ofliteracy use in the teaching and learning of literacy in a film studies classroom and have implications for the teaching and learning of literacy at university more generally.

Creative practitioners, undertaking practice-led research, theorise their practice within an academic domain. Within a three-tiered, performative research paradigm, this project researched writerly identity during the writing of a novel and exegesis. Firstly, based on the writer’s experience with creative and academic writing, the differences were explored through two first-person narratives in a frametale novel, The Fragility Papers, a process documented by critical and reflective journaling. Secondly, the insights gained during the writing of the novel were theorised within the domain of creative writers. Thirdly, the understandings embedded in the novel were considered in the light of these insights and those gained during writing of the exegesis and further theorised within the areas of voice, the writing process and ontological change. Novel writing, it was found, drew not only on the imagination, research, in-flow stream of consciousness writing and serendipitous occurrences but also on personal embodied inscriptions, linguistic play, logic and reason in the development of narrative coherence, forward planning, previously unidentified editing values based in the sonority of language, and a knowledge of the expectations associated with the literary genre. Acknowledging this breadth of experience led to changes in the writer’s creative-writing process, a questioning of the theorised sole influence of language based texts as proposed in intertextual theory, and the proposal to italicise ‘text’ within intertextual to accommodate this breadth. The theorising of insights and emerging, experiential knowledge during the writing of the exegesis was realised in a series of evolving drafts in which interiorised knowledge was increasingly drawn upon in stream of consciousness writing. Further, in both genres, the dialogic engagement of the writer in conscious and unconscious activity at different stages of the writing process was found, suggesting that unconscious activity has a larger than envisaged role to play in academic writing.

This thesis reports on the effectiveness of using a genre-based approach in teaching academic English writing to studnet teachers who were learning English as a foreign language in a state university.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Missouri State University, 2008. / "May 2008." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-68). Also available online.

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-93). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--Western Washington University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-65). Also available in electronic format.

Thesis (Ph. D. (Education))--Rhodes University, 2004.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves: [38]-39)