No description available.

No description available.

This thesis is about the role played by story telling in a Metropolitan Police Probationer Classroom in South London in the early 1990s. The method used is one of discourse analysis of the type advocated by Potter and Wetherall, 1987):The form and function of themes, role-plays, case studies, anecdotes and hypothetical accounts are considered in this setting. The central argument here is that all these types of story are used to introduce an element of work place practice into the classroom context. This serves to motivate the students to learn by emphasising the relevance of the lesson material. Such motivation gives rise to student involvement in the classroom activity. In this way, the pedagogical goals of experiential learning and student involvement are achieved and a broader cultural value favouring practice over theory is realised. As with all stories, themes, role-plays, case studies and hypothetical accounts are subject to the constraint of verisimilitude. This thesis suggests that the way in which verisimilitude is defined and applied in any given setting is highly context dependent. In this setting, verisimilitude focuses on the cognitive and task oriented elements of experiences that the students are thought to be likely to encounter in their work place. Stories that deviate from this focus might result in the students becoming bored or distracted; this may result in a situation in which the objectives of the curriculum are not met. For these reasons, trainers endeavour to control the use of stories by influencing every aspect of their telling. The rigour with which this definition of verisimilitude is applied in this setting varies according to the type of the story to be told and the lesson material in which it is to be used. Judgements of verisimilitude are more rigorous when stories that are likely to exert high attentional or emotional demands on the students are used.

No description available.

No description available.

To date, semiotics has not concerned itself with a systematic theorization of dialogue structures within narrative prose. Per- ceived as microtextual phenomena, deprived, therefore, of their own particular structure and function on the underlying syntactico-semantic structure of narrative logic, the linguistic activities of characters have generally been considered as more or less perfect copies of real speech, responsible for elements of characterization, pittoresque and narrative detente. In this paper, an attempt is made to reinstate narrative dialogue within the problematic relations to which it gives rise, that is, the relations it maintains with real speech and with other narrative components, so as to discern not only its specific written structure, which leads to numerous mimetic effects, but also its differential structures, distributions and functions within the narrative framework, which corroborate its specificity as a text- ual sign and confirm its semiotic status.

This thesis is an investigation into processes of gendered subject production in literate practices in school settings. Focusing on student writing in geography, the study explores gender differences in written texts with a view to asking what is differently at stake for girls and for boys in 'becoming literate' in school geography. The study is an ethnographic case study of a geography classroom, focusing in particular on contexts for the production of two texts which are subject to close textual analysis. Drawing on a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives: curriculum studies, linguistics and feminist theory, the thesis argue that classrooms are sites of multiple and competing discourses. Student texts are oriented discursively and generically in different ways. These orientations both reflect and produce wider discursive alignments within the discipline of geography and elsewhere. The thesis investigates the politics of these differences. Part I builds a detailed account of the Year 11 geography classroom as a set of curriculum contexts within which students' literate practices are located. Readings are produced of the official curriculum resources, focusing in particular on the syllabus and the classroom textbook material. The spoken language dynamics of the classroom are investigated in terms of the materiality of processes of speaker positioning along gender lines in the production and negotiation of geographical meanings. Part II produces detailed readings of two student essays: one by a girl, one by a boy. Differences between the two are investigated, drawing links between the texts and the discursive contexts of their production and reception. The argument is made that the two texts enact a significant gender difference in and through different geographies. Part III discusses the consequences of the thesis findings for contemporary debates about literacy pedagogy. This includes a critique of one dominant framework within which the notion of 'critical literacy' is being engaged: that of educational linguistics. Finally, the argument is made that existing accounts of 'subject-specific literacy' need to be expanded to engage two senses of the word 'subject': both the specificity and multiplicity of the discourses of subject-disciplines and the concomitant production of different human subject positions through textual practice. To investigate the implications of this, theories of literacy pedagogy, it is argued, need to engage more substantially with available theories of the subject, such as feminist theories, while at the same time engaging sophisticated analytics for the exposure of the material workings of discursive practices in school-literate productions.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Anthropology, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves i-xvii).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duquesne University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p. 138-149) and index.

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Also available in print.