This thesis explores some ways in which language can be employed as a tool for crosscurricular learning in Key Stage 3 (KS3) education. An examination of how linguistic interaction is employed by pupils as a means of facilitating their attainment of curriculaspecific learning objectives provides a case study for exemplifying how language can be used effectively across disciplines in secondary education. Within the context of exploring pupils' interaction in the subject of Technology, this thesis explores some gender differences in interaction and the potential effects that such differences can have upon gender-differentiated attainment levels in KS3 Technology. The data obtained for the thesis comprises transcripts of small group pupil-pupil discussion taken from KS3 Technology lessons. The conversations of the groups were recorded, transcribed and then analysed using a revised version of Francis and Hunston's (1992) system of discourse analysis. Gender differences in the types of discourse strategies employed by the participants were identified and evaluated in terms of how effectively they function to facilitate the successful attainment of specific learning objectives. The conclusions drawn from the findings of the research are that the discourse collectively produced by the girls in the study tends to be more effective in facilitating the attainment of learning objectives than that which is produced by the boys. This may, in part, provide one possible explanation as to why the girls in the study achieve higher attainment levels in KS3 Technology than the boys.

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This study investigates a well-explored topic, the relationship between gender and language, with a unique set of data--Japanese translations of highly gendered discourse contexts in Cosmopolitan and Playboy magazines. In both magazines, being attractive, heterosexual (wo)men is one of the ultimate goals. Therefore, choosing the 'right' words and expressions to display their gender identities is expected to be important for the writers. For this reason, language use in both magazines is expected to correspond to hegemonic masculinities and femininities in today's Japan.Comparative analysis of the two languages is limited to an examination of the use of passive voice. The results suggest one gender-specific constraint--Japanese women avoid maintaining the inanimate subject of English passive sentences--and one language-specific constraint--Japanese passive sentences are preferred when the speakers discuss their personal relationships.In addition to the comparative analysis of passives in English and Japanese, gender differences for the Japanese data are also examined in other linguistic aspects. Over 14,000 Japanese sentences from Cosmopolitan Japan and Playboy Japan were divided into three groups of senders (authors)--male, female, and editorial--and compared in relation to the following three aspects: person referential forms, sentence endings, and directive expressions. The results suggest that male senders of both magazines are moderately masculine, while female senders of both magazines are extremely feminine. This may suggest that sociocultural pressure on Japanese women to preserve their 'women's language' is strong, while such pressure is not obvious with men's language use.This study further argues that male-centered and female-centered discourse communities in the two magazines provide their readers not only sociocultural conventions of language use, but also gender-specific socialization experiences and different senses of preferred social structures. More specifically, the readers of Cosmopolitan Japan learn the importance of peer approval, and the importance of gender difference, hierarchy, and politeness as a part of femininity. However, they may not learn how to make femininity and power coexist. In contrast, the readers of Playboy Japan learn the value of independence and may learn that gender and hierarchy/power are not rigid and that one can be simultaneously feminine and powerful, and masculine and polite.

The Return Home : Mongo Beti's Late OeuvreIn 1991 amid the wave of democracy sweeping Africa, Mongo Beti returned to his native country of Cameroon to continue his literary career after 32 years of exile in France. My dissertation investigates the originality of his homecoming discourse. I explore how this prominent writer's late oeuvre illustrates his struggle to re-discover the country he left decades earlier as well as how his experience of returning shaped a new literary perception. His work after returning home reflects his gradual re-acquaintance with and re-integration into his native country. I argue that at the outset, his perception is initially guided by a backward glance on the past and that his assessment of the present aims at resisting pessimistic representations of Africa. In his later works, however, one cannot but notice the same sentiments of dissatisfaction and disillusion that were based on his first hand experience. To this extent, Mongo Beti's post-return literature can be considered dynamic as it evolved over time. A diachronic approach allowed me to examine his changing perceptions and representations of Africa based on the magnitude of his comprehension of his environment at each point in time. His post-return writing demonstrates a progressive redefinition of some of his previous narrative techniques as regards such elements as political resistance, authoritative narrators, linear unfolding of the plot, time and space, and character development. My analysis also questions the concept of "home" as a place of safety and refuge just as his post-return novels portray exile as an ambiguous state of being in-between worlds, as an expression of a simultaneous connection to the "new old" home and the distant former one abroad. Therefore, there is a shift in Mongo Beti's post-return discourse away from questions of national responsibility and social progress rooted in a consciousness of belonging to a defined community. The conceptual organization of my dissertation is derived from my reading of each of the four texts of the post-return era, and the way they illustrate the author's process of re-discovery of postcolonial Cameroon.

Through analysis of written texts produced by school districts and high schools with predominantly Mexican American populations, beliefs about Mexican American students that mediate attitudes and expectations can be exposed. In this work, I conduct comparative critical discourse analyses (CDA) of school district and high school mission statements from a total of 35 schools and 20 school districts in the Southwestern United States and Chicago, Illinois. The sites were selected because of their large to predominantly Mexican American students populations. Of the 35 school mission statements I researched, 19 were from predominantly Mexican American high schools and 16 were from predominantly White high schools. Of the 20 school district mission statements I collected, 11 were from largely to predominantly Mexican American school districts and 9 were from largely to predominantly White school districts.Analyses conducted in this study of the mission statements utilizing several `tools' of CDA revealed ideologies, or ideological discursive formations (IDFs), of low expectations and negative attitudes for Mexican American students when compared to White students. These IDFs materialize by way of frames and signs that are (re)created in the district and school mission statements. The IDFs serve to mediate the discourses that are utilized to describe Mexican American students and the districts and schools they attend. These discourses serve to mediate beliefs about Mexican American students that in turn reinforce the IDFs already in place.Understanding the types of discourses that (re)produce low expectations for and negative attitudes about Mexican American students is a first step in changing these schooling discourses that ultimately contribute to low academic achievement.

The aim with this thesis was to investigate how the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet construct and reproduce imaginations of gender and gender order. An important premise for our work is the agenda theory, which states that media has great impact on what is on their audience mind. We chose to investigate how Aftonbladet wrote about two Swedish footballers, Lotta Schelin and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, during a European championship with each players national team. By using a method of critical discourse analysis based on Teun van Dijks idea and with gender glasses, we analysed eight articles and two chronicles regarding each player. Our results show that Aftonbladet construct and reproduce gender and gender order by its different ways of portraying Lotta Schelin and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Articles regarding Lotta Schelin tend to be more audience oriented, focus more on her and her teammates emotions and more often focus on things outside her profession as a footballer. On a contrary, articles regarding Zlatan Ibrahimovic tend to upgrade masculinity, power and more often highlights his performances on the pitch. He is also portrayed as a person of much greater status than Lotta Schelin.

In this dissertation, I examine the marking of focus and givenness in Nte?kepmxcin (Thompson River Salish). The focus is, roughly, the answer to a wh-question, and is highlighted by the primary sentential accent in stress languages like English. This has been formalized as the Stress-Focus Correspondence Principle. Given material is old information, and is de-accented in languages like English. Nte?kepmxcin is a stress language, but marks focus structurally. However, I argue that the structure has a prosodie motivation: the clause is restructured such that the focus is leftmost in the intonational phrase. It follows that Salish focus structures lack the special semantics that motivates the use of English structural focus (clefts). As a theoretical contribution, I show that the Stress-Focus Correspondence Principle does not account for focus marking in all stress languages, nor does the "distress-given" generalization account for the marking of given information. This is because focus surfaces leftmost, while the nuclear stress position is rightmost. Instead of "stress-focus", I propose that alignment with prosodie phrase edges is the universally common thread in focus marking. This mechanism enables listeners to rapidly recover the location of the focus, by identifying coarse-grained phonological categories (p-phrases and i-phrases). In Thompson River Salish, the focus is associated with the leftmost p-phrase in the matrix intonational phrase. The analysis unifies the marking of focus across languages by claiming that focus is always marked prosodically, by alignment to a prosodie category. The study combines syntactic analysis of focus utterances with their phonetic realization and semantic characteristics. As such, this dissertation is a story about the interfaces. This research is based on a corpus of conversational data as well as single sentence elicitations, all of which are original data collected during fieldwork. The second contribution of this dissertation is thus methodological: I have developed various fieldwork techniques for collecting both spontaneous and scripted conversational discourses. The empirical contribution that results is a collection of conversational discourses, to add to the single speaker traditional texts already recorded for Nte?kepmxcin.

In this study I explored the research questions, how do students understand membership in a community and the responsibilities of our various locations and what pedagogical rationales and practices move students from awareness of social injustice towards acting to transform the societal structures that reinforce injustice? This project engaged in a critical and classroom action research using ethnographic tools with a class of Grade 7 students from a Vancouver elementary school. The purpose was to create spaces in curriculum for student initiated social justice oriented actions while testing a pedagogy founded in student inquiry, criticality and praxis. This was an experiment in applying critical discourse to instructional design. While teaching about social justice issues, the teacher- researcher sought to employ the principles of social justice in the pedagogy as well as the methodology of this study. The methodology sought to be consistent with the principles of social justice through attempting to create a collaborative critical research cohort with students through using data collection to foster a dialogic relationship between teacher- researcher and students. The data collection was in the forms of teacher and student generated fieldnotes, a communal research log, photography, questionnaires, interviews and written reflections. The findings from this research were analyzed through the themes of teacher tensions, constructs of student and teachers, and resistance. The analysis of the data provided opportunities for identifying power dynamics within the concepts being critiqued, exploring the makings of the cognitive unconscious and entering into a dialogic relationship with students about official and hidden curricula. Conclusions drawn from this research included that the experiment of teaching and researching for social justice in a socially just manner requires not only a grounding in theory and an awareness of the normative discourse, but an investigation of and critical reflection on those social constructions of teacher and student that are deeply embedded in the collective cognitive unconscious of the classroom. Teacher tensions and student resistance are productive as they provoke awareness of these constructions and their effects on the classroom.

Students in every classroom construct a (D)iscourse of literacy that reflects not only who they are but their environment as well. (D)iscourses are more than just dialogues, rather they integrate not only the cultural values and norms of that situation, but also the specific language needs (Gee, 2001). Additionally, (D)iscourses reveal the internal narratives of individuals as they present themselves within context to others (Bruner, 2002). The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) introduced new influences on school and classroom environments. NCLB implemented standardized, high-stakes testing to measure student, teacher and school performance, attaching serious consequences to not meeting appropriate norms (Allington & McGill-Frazen, 2004). Thus the tests, and the need for specific results, frequently influenced classroom practices (Valencia & Wixson, 2004). This research explored these influences upon students’ (D)iscourses during classroom literacy events through three research questions: (1) What are fourth-graders’ (D)iscourses of literacy in a standards-based/testing driven world? (2) What or whom mediates those (D)iscourses? (3) What do the (D)iscourses reveal about the fourth-graders’ developing identities as literacy learners? Data sources included classroom observations by the researcher, audiotaped classroom dialogues, participant student and teacher interviews, as well as student artifacts. Constant comparative analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) viewed through the lens of critical literacy theory (Giroux, 1990) was used to analyze the data. Methodological rigor was established using the criteria of trustworthiness (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). The students’ (D)iscourse was found to be personal, pragmatic and particular. It was mediated principally by their teacher through her role as the filter of knowledge in the classroom. Her role as filter shifted with different classroom requirements (such as standardized testing) to become a project manager, a coach/trainer and a gatekeeper. The students were found to have detached themselves from school literacy, developing self-reliant or ambivalent stances toward literacy. These results illustrate the collision between traditional and progressive philosophies in many schools today.

The present study is concerned with the issue of discourse markers as text forming devices in the English discourse. We base our research on the following hypotheses: - discourse markers are indispensable in all registers - though some discourse markers can be met across several registers and their functions may overlap, the register itself determines the choice of discourse marker On the basis of the existing and available researches on discourse markers we aim to define the functions discourse markers play in a coherent text. On the basis of quantitative and qualitative approaches to the obtained data we aim to reveal distribution of discourse markers in certain registers. The research is based on the analysis of the texts of four different registers: drama, which is considered to be closest to spoken discourse, academic prose, legal documents and newspaper articles. The scope of the research material is fifty pages of each text. The paper is divided into three parts: •PART 1 examines some basic notions in text linguistics. It provides an overview of the concepts of discourse, cohesion, textuality, cohesive devices and the notion of register and its components. •PART 2 of the paper gives a closer outlook of discourse markers. It presents points of view of such linguists as Halliday and Hasan (1992), Schiffrin (1987), Blakemore (1987), Fraser (1996), Trujillo Saez (2003) on the definition and delimitation of these particles. Also, the discussion of the functions of these... [to full text]