Fundamental school reform continues to elude educators. Lessons from past reform efforts point to the influence of a school's culture in resisting reform efforts, leading reformers to adopt a cultural perspective of school change. The need for school reform is particularly alarming in economically poor minority communities where students are failing and dropping out of school in high numbers. One of the factors cited as contributing to this failure is the disconnection/differences between the student's home culture and school culture. These differences create a high degree of incongruity for these children resulting in confusion, resistance, and withdrawal--physically and/or mentally. This study examines a high minority, low SES urban elementary school that has been involved in a school cultural change project, the Educational and Community Change Project. This research sought to identify developments in the home-school-community relationship throughout the first four years of the project. Three dimensions of this home-school-community relationship were examined: the nature of activities in which parents and school personnel engaged, views teachers held about the families and community, and connection between the curricular and community lives of the children. The study involved an examination of multiple data sources gathered during the first year and fourth year of the project. A description was developed for each of these dimensions during these two time periods. Findings. The overall nature of the school's relationship with the families and community was shifting from one of disconnection to increased interactions and connections. This overall finding illustrates several significant developments in the nature of the school's relationship with the families and community. These developments indicate the need for further examination of this cultural approach to school change in relation to other aspects of the school. Further research on this approach to school reform may hold more clues for educators seeking to reform schools. Several conditions present throughout this process were weekly inquiry sessions with school staff, a third party serving as a critical friend in inquiry sessions and in the classroom, and the permission and support of school administration. These conditions also call for further exploration.

As a reform movement in education, multicultural education is one response to the realities of cultural diversity in the United States. Current programs in multicultural education rely on multicultural experiences to teach students to think and act multiculturally. Teachers are required to know and respond to learning differences which arise from students' cultural diversity. Goals for existing programs vary, but a generally held goal is equal access and open opportunity for all students to the benefits of education. Current multicultural education programs fail to address the cognitive patterns of students as they relate to the processing of information about cultural diversity. The information they bring to experiences enables students to inform and learn from their experiences. Without examining the a priori by which students determine the truth of their multicultural experiences, multicultural educators are perpetuating existing patterns of prejudice and discrimination. By creating a synthetic a priori, students are able to more effectively learn the intended lessons from the multicultural experiences provided in the curriculum. In anthropology, investigation into other cultures is guided by the Kluckhohn Model. This model stresses cultural relativism in the observation and collection of data about other cultures. Anthropologists suspend, as far as reasonably possible, their own cultural values as they describe other cultures in terms of those cultures' own systems of values, beliefs, and responses to the world. Once the other culture is responsibly understood, comparisons may be made in reference to the anthropologists' own culture, and evaluations may be made based on reliable data. By adapting the Kluckhohn Model to education, and implementing it as part of proposed and existing programs in multicultural education, the effectiveness of those programs will be greatly improved. Students will create a synthetic a priori which will empower them to approach multicultuiral experiences in the manner of the anthropologist. Their ability to make reasoned inquiry into and decisions about cultural diversity will be enhanced. Resistance to multiculturalism from a variety of sources cannot change the realities of global and national cultural pluralism. Through the Kluckhohn Model, education will provide students with the skills necessary to assume first-class national and global citizenship.

This study examines the usefulness of an adjunct course (Precourse) that was taught by a language teacher who accompanied her students to an undergraduate history course at the university level. Qualitative methods and quantitative measurements were employed to: (a) to assess the effectiveness of the Precourse on improving the participants' proficiency level, and (b) to examine the effect of such a course on improving the students' academic competence and performance. Special attention was paid to the influence of the first social and academic culture of the participants on their process of learning English as a second language.

Despite the many factors that contribute to the maintenance of their language, the Navajo people are experiencing a rapid shift from Navajo to English. My research points to an ideological component in this shift, defining ideology as a self-interested pattern of thoughts and beliefs about the hierarchical relationship with others that is held by people individually or as members of a specific group. This project concludes that the diverse and contradictory ideologies held by Navajo people about their unequal relationship to the dominant American society have led to language (and cultural) choices and behaviors that have contributed to the current alarming language situation and that will, if unchecked, result in further erosion of the language. These ideologies are organized around a powerful oppositional dichotomy that represents the Navajo and the United States as essentialized opposites, with the Navajo occupying the positive end of the spectrum and the United States the negative end. This dichotomy shapes and is shaped by the content of Navajo counter-hegemonic discourse. The pervasive existence and consequences of the friction between these ideological positions are further substantiated through an analysis of the content and contexts of language use by Navajos in a contemporary Navajo school setting.

This dissertation reports the findings of a study on pragmatic ability and metapragmatic judgments of native and nonnative speakers of English conducted at a public university in the United States and also at a public university in Singapore. Specifically, the research study investigated the realization of apologies, complaints and requests focusing on the production of downgraders and upgraders. In addition, the study also examined metapragmatic ratings provided by these subjects and their reasons for the ratings. Thirty-eight native and thirty nonnative speakers participated in the first phase of the study, which involved responding to a 30-item discourse completion task (DCT). In the second phase of data collection, responses to the DCT were used to construct a metapragmatic judgment task (MJT) in order to investigate subjects' metapragmatic ratings of apologies, complaints and requests. A new group of native speakers (69 total) and thirty-seven nonnative speakers (a new but comparable group) completed the MJT (the Singaporean subjects were unavailable for participation in the MJT). Fourteen native and 16 nonnative speakers participated in the interviews. Various statistical tests were conducted to analyze the coded DCT responses as well as the MJT data. Interview protocols were summarized to study opinions provided by subjects for the MJT ratings. Results of this research study indicated that native speakers used a significantly higher number of downgraders in complaints and requests than nonnative speakers. A significantly higher number of downgraders were also supplied in requests than in complaints. Metapragmatic ratings of native speakers differed significantly from those of nonnative speakers in 29/90 cases. While the two groups were significantly different in their performance on the DCT and the MJT, the subjective opinions expressed about the appropriateness of responses converged to a great extent. In conclusion, this dissertation was able to contribute to our understanding of native and nonnative speakers' use of modality markers and their perceptions about appropriate language use. The results of this study also concur with previous research that indicates the need for instruction in pragmatic aspects of the L2.

Cross-language priming has been found to be asymmetrical in that priming is found from L1 to L2, but not the reverse. In this project, I examined two issues raised by the asymmetry that are related to the organization of the bilingual lexicon. The first is what attributes to the asymmetry. Two approaches to the asymmetry are distinguished, one attributing it to the representational features of the bilingual lexicon and the other to the processing characteristics associated with the two languages of bilingual speakers. The five experiments in the first series first replicated the asymmetry and then examined three processing-related explanations. The results suggest that none of them provides a satisfactory explanation of the asymmetry. The second series of four experiments tested the hypothesis that lexical links from L2 to L1 are episodic in nature. The results of these experiments provide strong evidence for this hypothesis. It is proposed in the study that, due to the practical constraints imposed on SLA, lexical information in L2 may be represented in the episodic system. A model of vocabulary acquisition in L2 is proposed. In this model, vocabulary acquisition is seen in terms of how the structure and content of the lexical entry evolve in the learning process. Research and pedagogical implications of the model are discussed.

This interdisciplinary study examines the education and migration experiences of children, and their families, in a migrant-sending community in Mexico. It seeks to inform U.S. policy-makers campaigning for anti-immigrant legislation who have failed to examine the historical consequences of the contradictions existing between policy and practice. Additionally, it argues against U.S. educational practice that begins with intervention models based on deficiencies for immigrant and migrant students, rather than build on rich linguistic and cultural resources these children bring to the classroom. Data were collected for this ethnographic study over a period of 3½ years to examine historical and sociocultural backgrounds, dialect variations in patterns of communication, attitudes toward education, and causal roots of the migratory work experience. The researcher lived as a participatory member of a rural community in Guanajuato, Mexico, and conducted 81 formal interviews with parents, children, teachers, administrators and elders. The results of this research are deeply rooted in history. The U.S. political economy played a key role in establishing patterns of migration northward. The first members of the community began working in the United States in 1942, because of the Bracero Program, a contract between the United States and Mexico whereby low-cost seasonal workers were sent to U.S. growers to fulfill the demand for field labor. Because families lived from subsitence farming practices, the appeal was great to head North, work temporarily, and return home. Though the Bracero Program officially ended, and many workers were denied legal access to the United States, the demand for cheap labor has not subsided. Agribusiness continues to seek Mexican workers, encouraging undocumented passage by guaranteeing work opportunities. Children have been socialized into this work pattern, and today most believe they eventually will have to work en El Norte, though they would prefer to stay home. Women assume familial responsibilities and traditional roles are transformed, and females become heads of household. Children who travel with their fathers or parents are penalized within the U.S. school system when viewed as empty slates, yet these children have much to offer U.S. multuicultural classrooms in the way of diverse perspectives and experiences.

Minority language people are sometimes simplistically viewed as lacking the language of the majority, and Deaf people are simplistically viewed as lacking hearing, thus ignoring the sociocultural realities of both groups. It is only in the last two decades that attempts have been made to articulate a Deaf ideology that considers deafness as a sociocultural characteristic rather than a defect. This dissertation asserts that there are three different types of ideologies that have co-existed since the beginning of time, and that influence deaf education even today: (1) Deafness as a terminal trait: this is defined as the type of ideology that places deaf individuals on a track that leads to a dead end. (2) Deafness as a limiting trait: This ideology views the deaf as handicapped people with limited possibilities for attaining the highest possible intellectual goals; and (3) Deafness as a socio-cultural trait: This ideology views deaf people as having their own language and culture who can fully develop their intellectual capacity through their natural language and culture and the language and culture of the hearing society in which they live, thus becoming bilingual and bicultural. This dissertation will answer the following question: How have these ideologies shaped deaf education in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela, in the areas of (a) language use; (b) educational trends; and (c) societal aims for the deaf population? The results of this research can help Latin American educators to re-evaluate deaf educational systems in use today, and educators of the deaf around the world. The Deaf in Hispanic America are witnessing the evolution of national paradigms as their languages are recognized as official in Venezuela, Uruguay, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Cuba. Governments are taking legal action to recognize and to accept other forms of communication, such as sign language for the Deaf and Braille for the blind in Ecuador. The remaining countries do not recognize their sign language as official. Educators are implementing programs different approaches, such as oralism, Total Communication, and bilingual education, and integrating Deaf students into regular classes.

Most published studies of ESL/EFL vocabulary learning were grounded in the paradigm of L1 English literacy research. This case study, however, emphasized a simultaneous examination of the functions of the dictionary, of the learner's native language, as well as of the context, as one unitary process of ESL/EFL vocabulary learning through reading defined in its own terms. Four Chinese students (three graduates and one undergraduate) participated in the study. Each was assigned to read a passage, to take a vocabulary test based on reading, and to answer questions concerning her approach to vocabulary learning. They were allowed to use a dictionary for reading--but not the test--and to report their thoughts orally in English or Chinese or both. All these were recorded and transcribed. The final report was based on the protocols from two of the four cases. A series of lexical-semantic notions were applied to represent the learners' knowledge statuses in finer terms. Word, the basic unit of analysis, is defined as a lexical item, a combination of a lexical form and its essential meaning aspects. Context is defined as a set of relations--the semantic, the grammatical, and the rhetorical--a lexical item holds to the other items. The analyses thus better reflected the complex aspects of the English vocabulary--denotation, reference, sense, semantic traits, etc. These are potentially useful for designing sophisticated quantitative studies. The implications are manifold: the students should realize the scope of vocabulary learning in estimating their knowledge--whether be able to illustrative meanings, to distinguish synonyms, to perceive the selectional restrictions, etc.; they should train to absorb the contextual information to establish, refine, and substantiate their knowledge, as well as to infer meanings; they should learn to use the dictionary effectively and pay attention to absorbing information on usage; they should form a systemic perspective on translating English words into equivalents of their native language; ESL teachers, need to know a good deal of the students' native language to effectively deal with the issues concerned in teaching and research; and these L2 cases also threw light on the nature of L1 literacy teaching and research.

This multiple-case study examines the Literacy Assistance Project, an early intervention reading program for "at-risk" students in the Tucson Unified School District. First, this study seeks to thoroughly describe the programmatic, administrative, theoretical and pedagogical framework of LAP and document how these concerns are reflected in the context of LAP lessons. The LAP program claims to be a holistic, or constructivist, reading program. Cambourne's (1988) eight conditions of learning are descriptors of literacy events and activities that are consistent with a constructivist perspective of learning. As a second goal, the study determines the extent to which LAP meets Cambourne's eight conditions of learning, and thirdly, the ways that two LAP teachers' beliefs and practices are consistent with those eight conditions. Whole language proponents are often concerned with aspects of Reading Recovery and other reading intervention programs. In Chapter 1 whole language concerns with reading intervention programs such as Reading Recovery and LAP are addressed and responses to those concerns by Reading Recovery and LAP follow. Data for the study was collected in two elementary schools over a five-month period. They include researcher field notes of lesson observations, interviews with two LAP teachers, eight LAP students, one principal, the LAP designer, and current director. They also include audiotaped transcriptions of lessons and children's writing samples. Analysis of the data was conducted by observing Glaser and Strauss's (1967) grounded theory technique. The data indicate that, notwithstanding the constructivist nature of the reading intervention program, teachers themselves determine how holistic, or constructivist, LAP lessons are. Both teachers reported constructivist teaching and learning beliefs about literacy, but only one teacher practiced those beliefs consonant with Cambourne's (1988) eight constructivist conditions. This finding evidences the critical importance of understanding how teacher beliefs shape teachers' classroom practice. Because teacher beliefs about language, learning, and literacy in great part determine the nature of teachers' practices, and because teachers' reported claims about teaching, reading, and writing strategies may not actually be what they practice due to the influence of those beliefs, it is recommended that pre-service and continuing teacher education programs and in-services carefully examine the foundation and efficacy of teacher beliefs. It is further recommended that educators who instruct pre-service and continuing teacher education coursework make the examination and understanding of teacher beliefs a major curricular emphasis.