文化教學對於語言教學乃不可或缺且有益，然而，仍然只有相當少數的文化相關教材及文化教學被使用及實踐於國中英語課堂上。 本研究旨在了解 1 ) 利用英語漫畫帶入國中英語文化概念教學之效果，以及 2)學生們對英語漫畫輔助文化教學之態度, 是否與其文化概念學習成效有相互關連性。 研究對象為基隆市一所國中二年級學生。實驗組施予口說加上漫畫輔助教學。而控制組則只單獨施以口說教學。實驗研究共進行八週，實驗前給予兩組學生美國文化概念背景測驗，實驗後兩組學生再進行同一份文化概念測驗。其後，並由實驗組學生填寫漫畫輔助文化教學態度問卷。 本研究結果顯示：英語漫畫輔助學習確實能促進文化概念學習，問卷結果亦顯示出學生們整體上對於漫畫輔助教學持有正面態度，然而學生們對漫畫輔助學習之態度與其文化學習成效, 整體上, 並無顯著關聯。 / Culture learning is inevitable during, and beneficial to, language learning. Regrettably, comparatively few target culture materials are found or target culture teaching is practiced in the junior high English class, though both were considered important and interesting by a majority of junior high school students. The aim of this study was to find out if comic strips can help facilitate students’ culture learning and if students’ positive attitude toward comic strip-aided cultural instruction can affect their learning performance. Two groups of junior high second graders of similar background were treated as experimental and control group respectively; the former was instructed by way of culture relevant comic materials, and the latter, teacher’s narration alone. The result indicated comic strip-aided instruction indeed can better promote participants’ culture learning. A positive attitude from the subjects toward comic-aided cultural instruction was also found. In conclusion, comic aids contributed, to a significant degree, to students’ improved performance in culture learning, and, though students’ attitude toward their introduction and effects was positive, it did not significantly correlate with improvements in students’ performance.

The concept of self-directed learning (SDL) has been extensively studied; however, the majority of studies have explored learners’ perspectives on SDL, with less attention paid to investigating SDL from educators’ perspectives. Surprisingly, while assessment and feedback have long been recognized as powerful elements which influence how learners approach their learning, and key research studies have examined how both assessment and feedback can encourage and enhance the development of SDL, this nevertheless remains an area that would benefit from increased attention. Moreover, although there is a growing body of literature investigating the cultural dimension of SDL, most of these studies are limited to examining the formation of SDL among individuals influenced by Western or Confucian cultures, ignoring the existence of other cultural groups. This study, which investigates Malaysian teacher educators’ conceptualisations of SDL, begins to address these gaps. The key research questions which guided the study are: 1) How do teacher educators in Malaysia conceptualise learning? 2) How do teacher educators in Malaysia conceptualise SDL? 3) To what extent do teacher educators in Malaysia perceive themselves as self-directed learners? 4) What kind of learning opportunities do teacher educators in Malaysia create for their learners to foster the development of SDL, and what is the particular role of assessment and feedback in SDL? Twenty Malaysian teacher educators were interviewed to obtain their views on SDL and to identify their pedagogical practices which may foster or hinder the development of SDL approaches among their learners. A constructivist grounded theory approach was used to inform the methodological framework of this study, whilst a hybrid inductive and deductive analysis approach was used to analyse the interview data. The findings of the current study suggest that most assessment and feedback practices are heavily focused on assessments designed by educators and on educator-generated feedback, in which learners are passive recipients. It is argued that these practices have significantly contradicted the primary principle of SDL, which characterises the learner as the key agent of his or her own learning. The findings of this study suggest that a more comprehensive conceptualisation of SDL is required that recognises the fundamental role of both the self and of educators in SDL, and acknowledges the impact of the socio-cultural context on SDL. Informed by the existing SDL literature, and derived from fine-grained analysis of the interview data, the proposed definition of SDL and reconceptualised SDL framework foreground SDL as socially constructed learning where the learner takes control of his or her own learning processes within complex socio cultural contexts. The thesis concludes by recommending that future research (i) explores the central role of assessment and feedback in the context of SDL and (ii) investigates the impact of various cultures on learning, in order to develop a broader and more nuanced understanding of SDL.

In terms of the British Army in the Great War, the study of whether or how the army learned has become the dominant historiographical theme in the past thirty years. Previous studies have often viewed learning and institutional change through the lens of the 'learning curve', a concept which emphasises that the high command of the British Army learned to win the war through a combination of trial and error in battle planning, and through careful consideration of their collective and individual experiences. This thesis demonstrates that in order to understand the complexities of institutional change in the Great War, we must look beyond ill-defined concepts such as the learning curve and adopt a more rigid framework. This thesis examines institutional change in the British First Army in the 1915 campaign on the western front. It applies concepts more commonly found in business studies, such as organisational culture, knowledge management and organisational memory, to understand how the First Army developed as an institution in 1915. It presents a five-stage model - termed the Organisational Development Model - which demonstrates how the high command of the First Army considered their experiences and changed their operational practices in response. This thesis finds that the 'war managers' decision-making was affected by a number of institutional and personal 'inputs' which shaped their approach to understanding warfare. This thesis examines the manner in which new knowledge was created and collated in the immediate post-battle period, before studying how the war managers considered new information, disseminated it across the force and institutionalised it in the organisation's formal practices, structures and routines. In a broad sense, this thesis does three things. First, by examining how the army learned it moves beyond standard narratives of learning in the British Army in the Great War and highlights the complex interplay between personal and institutional learning processes. Second, by focusing on institutional change in the 1915 campaign, it sheds new light on an understudied yet crucial part of the British war experience. Finally, in creating the Organisational Development Model, it provides a robust platform on which future research can be built.

Given current changes and trends in foreign language (FL) education (National Standards, waning interest in FL study), educators need to develop intellectually stimulating tasks to encourage personal, inter-/intrapersonal and cultural growth. Although many researchers postulate that fictional texts are a superior means to accomplish this goal (Swaffar, 1992; Shanahan, 1997; Einbeck, 2002), only few have experimented with using them as a basis for culture learning (Scott and Huntington, 2002) or measured their overall efficacy for FL learning. This study investigated the effectiveness of fictional media in the German intermediate FL classroom using a multi-faceted research design incorporating different data sets (questionnaires, student journals, and CMC chats), which underwent quantitative and/or qualitative analyses.The pre-posttest format for of three questionnaires assessed changes in learners' responses to FL attitude and motivation for study, course interest, the National Standards, perceptions about the intellectual content of fictional media, motivation, and enjoyment. Results showed that literature provides educational value beyond the level of language acquisition and encourages a multitude of learning dimensions.Students' CMC journals written about fictional media were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker, Francis, & Booth, 2001) to ascertain changes of word usage in certain categories over the duration of the semester. A qualitative analysis using Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Glaser 1992 & 1998) showed emergent changes and themes relevant for culture and language learning. In addition to the journals, learners' CMC chats were also analyzed qualitatively to investigate the social nature of L2 language use and its pedagogical implications (Vygotsky, 1986). Shifts in categories and the emergence of themes were attributed to the effect of Text content/Genre rather than Time, and learners' chat did not evidence co-constructivist/dialogic learning as first postulated.

The main objective of this dissertation was compare of two firms from aspect corporate culture. The questionnaire, interviews and observational metod were used for the research and for the understanding of the companies culture. After studying the literature I summarized the theoretical information, which forms the first part of my thesis. Based on the study of literature, I analyzed corporate culture in a selected companies. This analysis forms the second part of my thesis. In order to discover the results, the questionnaire VSM 94 of Geert Hofstede was used. From this questionnaire, 20 questions were used which were supplemented with 15 own questions. Furthermore, the unstructured interviews were conducted with the employees and I also took part the observations in both companies in order to help understand and discover the symbols. After that, I focused on finding the dimensions according to Geert Hofstede. The calculations were made on the established formulas. At the end of my thesis I proposed the recommendations for overall improvement and streamlining the current situation.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-07-29T16:28:00Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 RONNEdissertacao.pdf: 598471 bytes, checksum: 90574c7c9848b1126a429865f6b02a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-12-15 / This study has its focus on the masks of the feast of St. James of Mazagão Velho in the state of Amapá - Brazil. Held since 1777 by the residents of the city in the margins of the Mutuacá River, the feast celebrates the transfer of the former Portuguese colony from the Dukkala region, in the North of Africa. Full of rich and diversified visualities, rituals and symbols of Catholicism, the community lives with intensity its cultural and religious manifestations. The masks are distinguished during a ball exclusive for masked individuals and, in this study they are analyzed from the perspective of visual culture as visual artifacts. The research aims to build interpretations on the relations between mask and identity, observing and discussing the learning processes connected to the production and use of the masks in the symbolic context of the feast. The work also investigates the meanings of possible points of infiltration, resistance and hybridization that the masks present originated from a multicultural community formation and the influences of a global world. The text is built taking into consideration the multiple interpretations of the research participants that, through open interviews, recollect and reconstruct histories of the cultural and oral memory of the city / Esta pesquisa tem como objeto de estudo as máscaras da Festa de São Tiago de Mazagão Velho, no estado do Amapá. Realizada desde 1777 pelos moradores da cidade amapaense às margens do rio Mutuacá, a festa celebra a transferência da ex-colônia portuguesa da região de Dukkala, ao norte da África. Repleta de visualidades diversificadas, rituais e símbolos do catolicismo, a comunidade vive com intensidade suas manifestações culturais e religiosas. As máscaras ganham destaque durante um baile exclusivo para brincantes mascarados e, neste estudo, são analisadas como artefatos visuais a partir da perspectiva da cultura visual. A pesquisa visa construir interpretações sobre relações entre máscara e identidade, observando e discutindo processos de aprendizagem ligados à feitura e utilização das máscaras no contexto simbólico da festa. O trabalho investiga, também, os significados de prováveis pontos de infiltração, resistência e hibridização que as máscaras apresentam em decorrência da formação multicultural da comunidade e das influências do mundo globalizado. O texto é construído a partir de múltiplas interpretações dos colaboradores da pesquisa que, através de entrevistas abertas, revisitam e reconstroem histórias da memória oral e cultural da cidade

This dissertation is a qualitative case study exploring the process of culture learning in a Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) classroom. Guided by a socioculturally based theoretical perspective and adopting the stance of the National Standards, which says that language students "cannot truly master the language until they have also mastered the cultural contexts in which the language occurs" (1996, p. 27), this study describes how culture learning is tied to class practices aimed at developing students' language proficiency by exploring how culture and language are integrated in spoken discourse and interactions in the classroom. The research questions of the study focus on both the instructor's and the students' perspectives towards the interrelationship between language learning and culture learning and their actual practices in the dynamic, complex, and emerging speech community of classroom contexts. Through analysis of student questionnaires, classroom observations, instructor interview, and stimulated-recall sessions with students, this study examines the contexts of culture learning, illustrates how language classroom contexts shape and are shaped by all the class members, including both the instructor and the students, and describes how the classroom spoken discourse in the current advanced-level undergraduate CFL course provides opportunities for culture learning and how culture learning actually happens in this language classroom. The findings suggest that as the instructor and the students interact in the language classroom, it is not so much the particular pieces of cultural and linguistic information under discussion that delineate the actual culture learning process, but rather the active exchanges and sometimes disagreements between the instructor and the students that provide opportunities for interactive cultural dialogues and discussions. In other words, cultural knowledge and understanding are situated in actual contexts of language use. Language learning is also embedded in the same interactive and collaborative discussion of texts. By exploring the complexity of the culture learning process in the language classroom setting, this study adds theoretical and pedagogical support to the premise that culture learning should be an integral part of language instruction at different levels throughout the language curriculum.

本研究旨在探討國中英語低成就生接受一文化學習計畫之後，對於英語本身學習態度之成效影響，並藉由此實驗進而探究英語科低成就者最佳的文化學習模式。本研究採等組前後測準實驗之設計，研究對象為新竹縣一所中型國中的九年級的英語科低成就學生，總共三十人。將受試者隨機等程度分配到對照組和實驗組各十五人。研究期間，實驗組進行每週一節共十週的文化學習活動，而對照組則於同時間自修英語功課，但無任何學習活動。資料之收集包括有研究者參考文獻編製的英語態度問卷調查、文化單元學習回饋問卷、及追蹤訪談。 本研究以「英語學習態度」，分別測量受試者在實驗處理前、後在英語學習態度上的反應情形，所得資料以獨立樣本t檢定及配對t檢定分析，同時以實驗組成員所填寫的文化單元學習回饋問卷、及追蹤訪談結果作進一步研究結果佐證及補充分析。 本研究結果顯示實驗組於接受文化學習計劃後，其整體的英語學習態度問卷分數，有意義優於對照組，其中尤以其對英文概括性的態度及對英文的社會文化態度有顯著性改變。但實驗組英語學習動機分數並無有意義高於控制組，且受試者於訪談中表達其課後英語學習態度尤無明顯改變。另文化學習單元回饋問卷的分析，亦顯示英語低成就者對文化學習過程及內容的偏好。據研究結果，研究者對英語低成就者的文化學習設計及未來相關研究提出數點建議。 / The study was to investigate whether culture learning can efficiently and effectively improve low-achievers’ English learning attitude and to perceive the characteristics of English low achievers’ culture learning. A total of 30 JHS English low achievers, matched into two groups—the experimental group and the control group participated in the study. SELAM Questionnaire was distributed to each subject before and after the treatment, the culture learning project, to perceive the change of their English learning attitude. The pretest and posttest scores of SELAM Questionnaire were examined by the software SAS (Statistic Analysis System) Version 9.1, including t-test and paired t-test. Besides, the interval CLF Questionnaires and the follow-up interview were analyzed to provide the answer to the qualitative study on English low achievers’ optimal culture learning mode. The results of the study were summarized as follows. (1) The subjects’ overall learning attitudes toward English were significantly and positively affected by the cultural learning project especially their general attitude and social cultural attitudes toward English learning but the culture learning project exerted no evident effect on their desire and motive to learn. (2) In terms of culture learning content, the subjects’ interest in the culture project was highly related to the content of the culture study unit—cultural materials relevant to their background knowledge and catering to their preferences could lead to their more active learning involvement. (3) As to the culture learning process, English low achievers’ culture learning requires a lower pace of culture instruction, more instructional repetition, a variety of cultural learning activities and cultural instructors’ attention to their ongoing learning feedbacks is in need in English low achievers’ culture learning process. The major findings of this study suggested that a culture learning project experience helped significantly to enhance English low-achievers’ English learning attitude but other measures should be adopted to sustain their motivation to learn and affirmative attitude toward English learning.

Background: Mind-body dualisms create particular difficulties for researching and justifying learning and knowledge within PE practices. These issues are compounded in the UK by prevailing cognitivistic ideas of education, knowledge and learning. Crum (1993) suggests reconceptualising PE as movement culture as a potential solution to the limitations created by dualistic positions within education. How knowledge and learning within movement culture is positioned, however, was left underdeveloped by Crum. The aim of this thesis is to explore an embodied, action position on knowledge and learning, as a potential solution to this issue. Purpose: This thesis is driven by two purposes. The first; to examine and discuss how John Dewey’s theorising of knowledge and learning within experience provides a theoretical position on knowledge and learning within movement culture. The second; to utilise this position to explore how pupils’ and teachers’ actions within primary PE lessons constitute and negotiate the movement cultures within their school. Findings: In adopting a position which dissolves mind-body dualisms, movement culture allows the practical work of PE lessons to be considered as contexts of knowledge production. This opens up our understanding of different ways of knowing in PE through pupils’ epistemological ‘action-in-PE-settings’. Rather than creating another hybrid of educational ideology by objectifying what to ‘do’ or ‘know’, movement culture keeps the ‘who’ of participation in PE practice in view. Such a position is achieved because pupils are seen as ‘coming to know’ through their immediate and continuous experiences of sports and physical activities both in PE and beyond the school gates. By dissolving traditional dualisms within educational ideology, movement culture allows ideologies and assumptions about learning in PE to be decoded and managed. It also provides a framework to explore subject-matter for learning and analyses some of the disconnections which exist within PE practice. Conclusions: Reconceptualising PE as movement culture is not intended to create a logic of practice to which I claim PE should ascribe. In this thesis, movement culture offers a position from which to consider the continuity between PE and pupils’ lives within and outside of the school gates. Such a standpoint can challenge our ideas as to what subject-matter could be within PE and the possibilities of learning outcomes other than those that focus on performance sport or bodily training for fitness. From a research perspective questions arise in relation to understanding very young pupils’ experiences of knowing within PE and how learning and knowledge are embodied across other subject areas. Addressing such questions may help to support new understandings of learning and knowledge within schools that are concurrent with developing new methodologies and research tools. These may in turn support the continuing development of pedagogical practices.

The main objective of this diploma thesis is to characterize forms of education in selected enterprise, analyse it in relation to the corporate culture and suggest changes leading to a desirable future state of the knowledge-based economy. In connection with the theme and the main objective of this thesis is the research also focused on the corporate culture, the recruitment and the selection of employees. The theoretical part consists of theoretical knowledge, which relate to the issue of development of employees through lifelong learning, selection of employees, corporate culture and knowledge economy. The practical part contains information about selected company. This part also analyses the corporate culture, the selection and training of employees, through the use of quantitative and qualitative methods. The obtained results are the basis for proposing effective changes. At the end of the diploma thesis are proposed some changes which should improve the current situation, especially the area of employee training to reach a knowledge-based economy in the future.