This action research project examines the role classroom culture and discourse can play on student learning, with a focus on female students. A sixth grade science classroom was evaluated through analysis of two videotaped astronomy lessons. The classroom environment utilized qualitative methods to examine teacher and student interactions, student and student interactions, and classroom environment. The research project began in response to a previous research project which found that after completing an astronomy unit male students not only out preformed female students, but female students lost gains in several area. Findings suggested that there may be a connection between the classroom discourse and microculture and the girls’ low performance.

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The ecosystem services approach is a set of institutional practices which aim to improve natural resource management and policy making, by highlighting the relationship between well-functioning ecosystems and human wellbeing. Within the approach, cultural services (CS) signify the psycho-social aspects of people-nature interrelations. This concept is an understudied area, and is recognised to exhibit high levels of complexity which make it difficult to evaluate. This thesis deconstructs, explores, clarifies and enhances the CS concept. A flexible, phased research design explores cultural services in relation to a specific case-study site, 'Aspley Woods and Heaths' (England). Cultural services are examined through a series of lenses: as an interdisciplinary construct, as an experience of place, as context, as a resource regime, as a discursive resource and as a personal discourse. Mixed qualitative methods identify how CS is constructed through action, speech and text; via an in depth analysis of primary data from semi-structured visitor and expert interviews, unstructured key informant interviews, and marginal participant observation. Additional data informs the enquiry, from a discourse analysis of key study site documents, and a review of site-related historic, ecological, land management, and policy documents. Results from this thesis subsequently challenge the current published definition and subcategorisation of cultural services. The notion that cultural services are nonmaterial is disputed due to the centrality of physical activities, physical sensations, and access management regimes which require material inputs. The benefits premise is challenged since CS experiences included references to anxiety, injury and conflict. The notion that CS are obtained is disputed due to the reciprocal nature of information exchange between people and features of the environment. The idea that CS are solely from ecosystems is challenged due to the part played by interpretative socio-cultural contexts, and natural and social processes which occur outside site boundaries and specified time frames. Instead, this thesis recommends that cultural services be redefined as the ways that humans use discourse to construct and communicate perceptions of nature. CS arise from processes of interaction (activities) and reciprocal information exchange (information functions) with ecosystems. CS subcategories are hence a series of cognitive, retrospective, intuitive, creative, communicative and regenerative interpretative repertoires, which form the basis of social practices such as designation, restoration and policy. The propensity of environments to embody discourse is concluded to be crucial in defining what is valuable about natural ecosystems, and how these contribute to wellbeing.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Humanities / Master / Master of Philosophy

This study examines the language situation in the media discourse on The Opposite Direction, al-Jazeera’s flagship talk show hosted by Faisal al-Qasim. It investigates the phenomenon of code-switching between Standard Arabic and different spoken vernaculars during the talk exchange. Theories of code-switching proposed by Gumperz, Giles, and Myers-Scotton et al. are introduced after the history of Arabic discourse analysis is briefly discussed. In order to explain under what conditions code-switching happens, I choose to observe and analyze instances of code-switching in four episodes of the program, focusing on the communicative functions and motivations for language choice. The applicability of relevant theories is examined to find the theories that best account for speakers’ engaging in code-switching in the pan-Arab media discourse. / text

The principal objective of this thesis is to explore the representation of China in British television documentaries broadcast between 1980 and 2000, focusing on historical documentaries. The thesis addresses, as its primary research questions and on the basis of substantial database, what is represented, how that representation is realised, and the social, historical influences which contextualise and underpin the representation of China. These questions relating to textual representation are framed within the wider context of Sino-Western relations, Western self-perceptions and conceptions of China. The study aims to reveal mechanisms of textual representation by concentrating on two main dimensions: the internal narrative structures and key discursive formations of the documentary text (including visuals), and structures of power relations operating to shape the representation in both the textual domain of meaning mediation and institutional domain of documentary production. Two aspects of the representation are foregrounded: China as a civilisation and China as a Communist `other'. The thesis focuses primarily on the narrative as a methodology in approaching representation, as documentary achieves meaning mainly through the stories it tells. Two dimensions of narrative are explored: a structuralist dimension drawing on theories developed by Propp and Silverstone, and a discursive dimension which is framed within Foucault's concept of power and knowledge. Extensive primary research established the database for the study, which is made up of 170 documentaries broadcast during the sample period between 1980 and 2000, and 18 field interviews with key personnel in broadcasting and production companies. The thesis argues that the British television documentary representation presents a largely Western understanding of China filtered through, among other things, selfperceptions and conceptions of the `other', and mediated by various sources of power. The process of representing `what is China' is enmeshed with the process of constructing how China should be viewed. The result of this social construction of truth and knowledge is that certain values, convictions, and ideologies are reinforced and reproduced in the vital domain of documentary representation

在兒童習得談話溝通的發展過程中，兒童需要習得多種談話技巧才能全然地參與談話，而其中一項重要的談話技巧即為引語的使用。引語在言談分析中是指一種半固定的語句用以加速言談的流暢。然而至今沒有研究探討過兒童使用引語的情形，因此本研究旨在探討中文言談中學齡兒童使用引語的發展情形。本研究將十二名學齡兒童依年齡分為兩組，並將其自然談話內容錄音且加以轉錄，以資進一步之分析與研究。此研究結果發現隨著年紀的增長兒童愈常使用引語，且愈能行使不同的種類形式來表達。這些發展性的成長與兒童的心智、語言及社會發展有關；此外，本研究結果亦發現學齡兒童最常使用的引語種類。本研究期待能增加人們對於兒童引語的認識，更能提供國小教師指導或幫助學齡兒童在言談中使用引語，進而增進兒童言談順暢無誤。

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This paper analyzes racist discourse resulting from and related to California's Proposition 187. Contrary to the views of politicians and economists, I maintain that 187 is indeed a racist measure designed to prevent the entry of people of color, mostly Latinos, into California. Analyses of racist discourse should be contextualized within issues of power, cultural difference, space, culture, and nationalism. After outlining theories of racism, I use Teun van Dijk's work on racist discourse to analyze some of the discursive strategies employed in relation to Proposition 187. The next section discusses the discourse of resistance in Tucson, Arizona and California. Some attention is given to the symbolic violence against Latinos. I argue that discourse cannot be separated from the material world in which it is practiced.

Few studies have examined educators' understandings of racial politics in schools and the larger social world through a social interactionist lens (Mead, 1934). Scholars such as Milner (2006) and Sleeter (2008) focus on improving multicultural teacher education. While understandable, this focus prevents scholars from forming a deeper, multi-dimensional picture of teacher learning, racial ideas (synthetic, conscious) and ideologies (derivative, un-examined), and social interaction. This year-long study of 15 participants in the 2009-10 Institutes for Transformative Education asks how educator discourse about the Institute contributes to this picture.Teacher life narratives have been linked to conceptions of race, class, and culture effectively (Johnson, 2002), and constructivist reflection in teacher education (Loughran, 2002) continues to command attention in current work on teacher learning. Yet the context of spoken discourse is often absent from the analysis in these studies, making it difficult to understand how contextual framing in conversation reflects and affects teachers' social mediation of racial politics in their daily practice and their civic lives. This study focuses on talk between the researcher and 15 educators, connecting the local frames of participants' stories of race in schools with state, national, and theoretical discourses.Understandings of critical multicultural education build on interactions between critical multicultural scholars including Grande (2004), hooks (1994, 2006), and Spivak (1988). Analysis of individual educator discourse can only be effective with the aid of previous work on teachers and race (Pollock, 2004, 2008), socially situated learning (Cole, et al., 1978; Guitart, 2008), racetalk in conversation (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Anderson, 2008), conversation in social interaction (Goffman, 1959; Wooffitt, 2005), institutional theory (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Foucault, 1972), and educational philosophy (Freire, 1984, 1988).