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This thesis is in two parts. Part 1 reviews work on comprehension of grammatical structure in children and describes the development of a new Test for the Reception of Grammar (TRCG). TROG assesses understanding of a variety of grammatical contrasts using a format where the child is required to select from an array a picture to correspond to a phrase or sentence spoken by the tester. Results from 280 normal children aged from 3—6 to 13-2 are presented. It is shown that several grammatical structures are not completely mastered by age 13. and in some instances it appears that the accepted rule that comprehension precedes production is contravened. Data on reliability and validity of TROG are also presented. Part 2 is Concerned with the application of TROG to 73 children with receptive and expressive developmental language disorders. It is shown that the majority of these children perform below age level both on TROG and on a test of receptive vocabulary. Further. there is a strong relationship between performance on TROG and grammatical complexity of expressive speech. Structures involving decoding of .word order appear to give these children particular difficulty, over and above their general comprehension deficits. Results are discussed in relation to psychological theories of developmental language disorders, and implications for the classification of these disorders are considered.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New South Wales, 1999. / Also available online.

Despite increased efforts by linguists and educationalists to facilitate literacy and literature development in minority languages, there are still many languages worldwide which do not have a written form. One area that needs attention in literature production for a newly written language is the question of writing style. As the features of good style are language-specific, writing style guidelines have to be developed for each language anew. It has been assumed that such vernacular writing style develops predominantly by mother tongue speaker intuition. However, very few studies have been carried out to verify this. This research is set within the confines of the literacy project in the Rangi language of Northern Tanzania. As a contribution to the development of a natural writing style in Rangi, this research investigates what evidence for stylistic preferences can be found in texts that were produced by Rangi authors writing in their mother tongue for the first time. The main data of this study are 112 texts which were collected during a one-day writers workshop conducted between May 2005 and January 2006 in four different locations. One way of observing stylistic preferences is through analysing the changes which authors make in successive versions of their text. Of the 112 texts in the database, 71 display stylistic changes between draft and revised versions. These texts are then investigated in more detail, e.g. with regard to text length, lexical density and story components. The subsequent comparative analysis of draft version versus revised version of each text operates at three levels: narrative elements at the text level, lexical choice at the word level, and word order, tense-aspect verb forms and participant reference at the clause level. At all three levels, stylistic conventions could be identified, e.g. formulaic introductions and codas, elimination of Swahili loanwords, or certain tense-aspect usages. Despite such commonalities, this research suggests that, far from developing intuitively, vernacular writing style is influenced by a variety of factors, not least by previously available literature in languages of wider communication or in the target language itself. Among the concluding recommendations of this study for future vernacular writers workshops is the advice to employ guided editing which encourages multiple drafting and treats the different levels of editing separately, i.e. story structure, lexical choice and grammatical features.

The main purpose of this thesis is to deepen the current understanding of how the teacher self is constructed. Specifically, the study intends to integrate into this understanding the way in which language personal, professional, and student teacher identities inform this process. A special emphasis is placed on the role that language teachers’ life histories play on the construction of teacher selves. Narrative research constitutes the research design for this thesis project since I strongly believe that selves are narratively constructed through stories. This study is focused on the storied self (Chase, 2005) that is co-constructed between the researcher and narrator that reveals how personal, professional, and student teacher identities resist and interact with discursive environments in order to create and recreate a language teacher’s self. Life histories constitute the source of data collection in this study. This facilitated the construction of a broader understanding of how six language teachers’ personal, professional, and student teacher identities are shaped throughout a lifetime and the way these impact the formation of the teacher self. The results suggest that language teachers’ selves are in close relation to emotions. Language teachers negotiate their identities and emotions in order to make sense of the different sets of values that the social context presents to them. This in turn leads them to create/recreate their own teacher selves that serve as sources of agency that generates new sets of social/moral rules or stagnation that leads to the preservation of the current status quo. The thesis concludes by providing a series of suggestions tailored to the needs of the teaching context where this research took place with the purpose of fostering a continuous engagement with individual actors and socio-cultural factors that motivate transformation through reflection.

The objective of this work is to determine whether the political instability has had a significant impact on the development of Quebec during the last 35 years. The method of approach is to examine whether there is a correlation between economic indicators and political instability. In the first part the history of French Canadians, from the first settlements to the crucial political events of the 20th century are examined. Since this study is based on a time-correlation between political events and changes in socio-economic indicators, special attention is paid to the reception and interpretation of events by historians, the media and opinion leaders. As a next step the development of economic and socio-demographic indicators during the last 40 years is examined. Factors studied include gross domestic product, investment, consumption, and unemployment as well as demographic and demolinguistic indicators. In order to ensure that changes in factors are linked to political instability comparisons with other provinces, notably with Ontario, and other countries are made in the conclusion it will be summarized that a direct relation between separatism and Quebec's long-term economic development cannot be demonstrated by examining macro-economic indicators. However, the October crisis of 1960 and the referendum of 1995 had short-term negative impacts on Quebec's economic development. Other factors such as the French language legislation of 1977, which further accentuated Quebec's special linguistic status in North America and the historical differences between the development of the French, Catholic society and the English, Protestant one better explain the existing differences between Quebec and the rest of Canada.

The association between receptive language skills and reading comprehension has been established in the research literature. Even when the importance of receptive skills for reading comprehension has been strongly supported, in practice lower levels of skills tend to go unnoticed in typically developing children. A potentially more visible modality of language, expressive skills using speech samples, has been rarely examined despite the longitudinal links between speech and later reading development, and the connections between language and reading impairments. Even fewer reading studies have examined expressive skills using a subgroup of speech samples – narrative samples – which are closer to the kind of language practitioners can observe in their classrooms, and are also a rich source of linguistic and discourse-level data in school-aged children. This thesis presents a study examining the relationship between expressive language skills in narrative samples and reading comprehension after the first two years of formal reading instruction, with considerable attention given to methodological and developmental issues. In order to address the main methodological issues surrounding the identification of the optimal linguistic indices in terms of reliability and the existence of developmental patterns, two studies of language development in oral narratives were carried out. The first of the narrative language studies drew data from an existing corpus, while the other analysed primary data, collected specifically for this purpose. Having identified the optimal narrative indices in two different samples, the main study examined the relationships between these expressive narrative measures along with receptive standardised measures, and reading comprehension in a monolingual sample of eighty 7- and 8-year-old children attending Year 3 in the UK. Both receptive and expressive oral language skills were assessed at three different levels: vocabulary, grammar and discourse. Regression analyses indicated that, when considering expressive narrative variables on their own, expressive grammar and vocabulary, in that order, contributed to explain over a fifth of reading comprehension variance in typically developing children. When controlling for receptive language however, expressive skills were not able to account for significant unique variance in the outcome measure. Nonetheless, mediation analyses revealed that receptive vocabulary and grammar played a mediating role in the relationship between expressive skills from narratives and reading comprehension. Results and further research directions are discussed in the context of this study’s methodological considerations.

The goal of this diploma thesis is to describe the origin and development of the concept of national language in France and to analyze the meaning of this concept in the French environment. Task of the first part is to define the key concepts like "langue nationale", "langue officielle" and to explain their conception in the French environment. The next part pays attention to the relation between national language and dialects and describe the approach to dialects during the French revolution. The aim of the third chapter is to introduce the issue of "grammatisation" and to outline the proces of grammatization of the French language. Follows the chapter analyzing the chronological development of the French as the national language of France, the most important periods of the 18th century and the French revolution are described in particular chapters. The final chapter outlines the importance and role of the language policy and mentions some most significant institutional interventions into the development of the French.

För att skapa möjligheter för elever att utveckla sitt språk samt sin läs- och skrivförmåga behöver de goda förebilder. Genom vår utbildning har vi tagit del av hur högläsning möjliggör för läraren att vara en läsande förebild och hur man genom att prata om ord, meningsbyggnad och det skrivna språket kan främja elevers språk-, läs- och skrivutveckling. I vår studie har vi undersökt högläsning som verksamhet i skolans första år genom att identifiera samband mellan vad, när och varför lärare läser högt.   Vi har använt oss av en kvalitativ studie där vi genom intervjuer av lärare erhållit den data som ligger till grund för vårt resultat. Av resultatet framkom tre samband mellan vad, när och varför lärare använder högläsning i verksamheten. De rådande sambanden har att göra med de olikheter som visar sig utifrån om högläsning används som integrerad del av undervisningen eller inte. Det är något anmärkningsvärt att lärarna visar en slående medvetenhet om högläsningens inverkan på elevernas språk-, läs- och skrivutveckling, men att den inte alltid framkommer i deras egna utsagor av arbetet med högläsning.   Högläsning kan ske med syfte att ha en mysig stund, utveckla elevernas språkliga förmåga generellt samt främja deras läs- och skrivutveckling. Då högläsning bedrivs vid olika tillfällen under dagen innebär det en variation i de texter läraren läser ur och möjligheterna till fortsatt arbete är beroende på syftet med högläsningen. / To create opportunities for students to develop their language as well as reading and writing abilities they need good role models. Through our education we have acknowledged how reading aloud makes it possible for the teacher to be a role model when it comes to reading, and how you can promote students development concerning language, reading and writing by talking about words, sentence construction and the written language. In our study we have examined reading aloud as an activity in the first years of schooling by identifying connections between what, when and why teachers read aloud.     We have conducted a qualitative study in which we by interviewing teachers have accumulated the data on which we are basing our results. The result gives us three correlations between what, when and why teachers use reading aloud as an activity. The correlations has to do with the differences that are visible if a teacher uses reading aloud as an integrated part of the education or not. It is somewhat extraordinary that the teachers are showing a striking awareness of the effect that reading aloud has on the students language as well as reading and writing capabilities, but that this awareness is not always shown in their own statements of their work with reading aloud.     Reading aloud can have the purpose of being a cosy moment, to develop the students language abilities in general as well as being beneficial for their development in reading and writing. There is a variation in the texts the teacher is reading from since reading aloud is conducted at different times of the day, and the opportunities for further work is dependent on the purpose with reading aloud.