This dissertation describes interactions between tribal and federal program bureaucrats of an education and labor training program for Indian youth, and tribal members on a reservation in the western United States. The goal of the program was to prepare Indian youth to enter the workforce through education, and training and then maintain employment. This goal was undermined at the program site by non-Native executive program personnel and tribal bureaucrats whose definition of "success" and expectation of youth achievement were culturally different than that of tribal youth workers and youth. Systems in which Indian people participate are in many cases socially disruptive as well as psychologically violent---they are often, quite literally, "out of control." Yet indigenous communities resist compliance within these systems. The focus of this study is on the complex nature of this historical matrix of power, control, resistance, and compliance. This dissertation uses a combined focus of social and psychological analysis to document the social history of Indian education administered as a ritual of assimilation, the bureaucratic processes that constrain Indian people from using education as a ritual of empowerment, and critically examines the people's resistance within the bureaucracies. The primary research questions are: (a) What are the bureaucratic processes that hindered the youth workers in successfully in advocating for their youth? (b) How do the youth workers resist these bureaucratic machinations? Through participant and non participant observation and ethnographic interview I describe how the bureaucratic processes which hinder collectively manifest from a deficit paradigm projected upon the workers. The youth worker's most consistent form of resistance was to voice their opinions about what was going on, and to explicitly name the actions of oppression.

In this study, I examine ideologies of language and schooling in the Republic of Guinea (West Africa). The focus of this study is a specific language policy that favored the use of African languages in the schools as media of instruction for more than 15 years (1968--1984). I discuss this policy from the standpoint of elementary teachers using a methodological approach that combines classroom micro-ethnography, interviews, and historical research. The research questions that guided my inquiry are as follows: How do teachers remember their personal experiences with the use of African languages as means of instruction in the past? What are the themes of those who express positive experiences and how do they relate with the themes of those who express negative experiences? Do age, gender, level of education, and place of residency/work make a difference in the perspectives of teachers? This is an exploratory study that approaches teachers' perspectives as flexible meaning-making processes influenced by time, space, and audience. The theoretical framework that guides this research is informed by historical approaches to the study of language ideologies (Bloomaert, 1999; Ricento, 2440; Ruiz, 1984). The findings of this study suggest that personal experiences and memories affect teacher beliefs and practices about language choice in the schools. For example, in this study teachers with experience in the classroom before 1984 appeared to be more sympathetic toward the use of African languages as means of instruction than their younger colleagues who lacked professional experience as teachers before 1984, Guinean teachers would have to confirm these findings for themselves through systematic research in formal and informal settings. This dissertation study makes a modest contribution toward this end by focusing on the beliefs and practices of elementary teachers. Also, this dissertation study highlights the importance of including historical and interpretive approaches to the study of language ideologies in language policy studies and in teacher education programs.

This dissertation study examines urban and bilingual children's dialogue in the contexts of school and home. First and second graders talked about children's literature in literature circles throughout one academic school year. I was guided by the following main purpose in this qualitative classroom study: What issues of language diversity and culture do first and second grade students discuss in home and school contexts? Data sources connected to the children's dialogue in school included audiotapes, transcripts, response journals, and field notes. All families discussed the literature and three bilingual families consistently audiotaped their home discussions. The findings from this research demonstrate that working class bilingual children and their families do have the resources to construct rich literacy experiences through dialogue related to complex issues of language diversity and culture. Key issues that parents and children discovered to be relevant for discussion in the home and school contexts are: literacy, positionality within society, and resistance to structural inequality. Additionally, this study reveals how the home context ultimately scaffolds the child's native language by acting as a linguistically rich resource for the child. The child draws upon his or her linguistic resources from the home and has linguistic support as he/she enters the primarily English dialogue within small group literature circles in the schooling context. This study demonstrates the significance of drawing upon the home as a resource to support children in their native languages. Additionally, this study examines how one classroom uses children's native languages as a resource.

Fundamental school reform continues to elude educators. Lessons from past reform efforts point to the influence of a school's culture in resisting reform efforts, leading reformers to adopt a cultural perspective of school change. The need for school reform is particularly alarming in economically poor minority communities where students are failing and dropping out of school in high numbers. One of the factors cited as contributing to this failure is the disconnection/differences between the student's home culture and school culture. These differences create a high degree of incongruity for these children resulting in confusion, resistance, and withdrawal--physically and/or mentally. This study examines a high minority, low SES urban elementary school that has been involved in a school cultural change project, the Educational and Community Change Project. This research sought to identify developments in the home-school-community relationship throughout the first four years of the project. Three dimensions of this home-school-community relationship were examined: the nature of activities in which parents and school personnel engaged, views teachers held about the families and community, and connection between the curricular and community lives of the children. The study involved an examination of multiple data sources gathered during the first year and fourth year of the project. A description was developed for each of these dimensions during these two time periods. Findings. The overall nature of the school's relationship with the families and community was shifting from one of disconnection to increased interactions and connections. This overall finding illustrates several significant developments in the nature of the school's relationship with the families and community. These developments indicate the need for further examination of this cultural approach to school change in relation to other aspects of the school. Further research on this approach to school reform may hold more clues for educators seeking to reform schools. Several conditions present throughout this process were weekly inquiry sessions with school staff, a third party serving as a critical friend in inquiry sessions and in the classroom, and the permission and support of school administration. These conditions also call for further exploration.

As a reform movement in education, multicultural education is one response to the realities of cultural diversity in the United States. Current programs in multicultural education rely on multicultural experiences to teach students to think and act multiculturally. Teachers are required to know and respond to learning differences which arise from students' cultural diversity. Goals for existing programs vary, but a generally held goal is equal access and open opportunity for all students to the benefits of education. Current multicultural education programs fail to address the cognitive patterns of students as they relate to the processing of information about cultural diversity. The information they bring to experiences enables students to inform and learn from their experiences. Without examining the a priori by which students determine the truth of their multicultural experiences, multicultural educators are perpetuating existing patterns of prejudice and discrimination. By creating a synthetic a priori, students are able to more effectively learn the intended lessons from the multicultural experiences provided in the curriculum. In anthropology, investigation into other cultures is guided by the Kluckhohn Model. This model stresses cultural relativism in the observation and collection of data about other cultures. Anthropologists suspend, as far as reasonably possible, their own cultural values as they describe other cultures in terms of those cultures' own systems of values, beliefs, and responses to the world. Once the other culture is responsibly understood, comparisons may be made in reference to the anthropologists' own culture, and evaluations may be made based on reliable data. By adapting the Kluckhohn Model to education, and implementing it as part of proposed and existing programs in multicultural education, the effectiveness of those programs will be greatly improved. Students will create a synthetic a priori which will empower them to approach multicultuiral experiences in the manner of the anthropologist. Their ability to make reasoned inquiry into and decisions about cultural diversity will be enhanced. Resistance to multiculturalism from a variety of sources cannot change the realities of global and national cultural pluralism. Through the Kluckhohn Model, education will provide students with the skills necessary to assume first-class national and global citizenship.

This study examines the usefulness of an adjunct course (Precourse) that was taught by a language teacher who accompanied her students to an undergraduate history course at the university level. Qualitative methods and quantitative measurements were employed to: (a) to assess the effectiveness of the Precourse on improving the participants' proficiency level, and (b) to examine the effect of such a course on improving the students' academic competence and performance. Special attention was paid to the influence of the first social and academic culture of the participants on their process of learning English as a second language.

Despite the many factors that contribute to the maintenance of their language, the Navajo people are experiencing a rapid shift from Navajo to English. My research points to an ideological component in this shift, defining ideology as a self-interested pattern of thoughts and beliefs about the hierarchical relationship with others that is held by people individually or as members of a specific group. This project concludes that the diverse and contradictory ideologies held by Navajo people about their unequal relationship to the dominant American society have led to language (and cultural) choices and behaviors that have contributed to the current alarming language situation and that will, if unchecked, result in further erosion of the language. These ideologies are organized around a powerful oppositional dichotomy that represents the Navajo and the United States as essentialized opposites, with the Navajo occupying the positive end of the spectrum and the United States the negative end. This dichotomy shapes and is shaped by the content of Navajo counter-hegemonic discourse. The pervasive existence and consequences of the friction between these ideological positions are further substantiated through an analysis of the content and contexts of language use by Navajos in a contemporary Navajo school setting.

This dissertation reports the findings of a study on pragmatic ability and metapragmatic judgments of native and nonnative speakers of English conducted at a public university in the United States and also at a public university in Singapore. Specifically, the research study investigated the realization of apologies, complaints and requests focusing on the production of downgraders and upgraders. In addition, the study also examined metapragmatic ratings provided by these subjects and their reasons for the ratings. Thirty-eight native and thirty nonnative speakers participated in the first phase of the study, which involved responding to a 30-item discourse completion task (DCT). In the second phase of data collection, responses to the DCT were used to construct a metapragmatic judgment task (MJT) in order to investigate subjects' metapragmatic ratings of apologies, complaints and requests. A new group of native speakers (69 total) and thirty-seven nonnative speakers (a new but comparable group) completed the MJT (the Singaporean subjects were unavailable for participation in the MJT). Fourteen native and 16 nonnative speakers participated in the interviews. Various statistical tests were conducted to analyze the coded DCT responses as well as the MJT data. Interview protocols were summarized to study opinions provided by subjects for the MJT ratings. Results of this research study indicated that native speakers used a significantly higher number of downgraders in complaints and requests than nonnative speakers. A significantly higher number of downgraders were also supplied in requests than in complaints. Metapragmatic ratings of native speakers differed significantly from those of nonnative speakers in 29/90 cases. While the two groups were significantly different in their performance on the DCT and the MJT, the subjective opinions expressed about the appropriateness of responses converged to a great extent. In conclusion, this dissertation was able to contribute to our understanding of native and nonnative speakers' use of modality markers and their perceptions about appropriate language use. The results of this study also concur with previous research that indicates the need for instruction in pragmatic aspects of the L2.

Cross-language priming has been found to be asymmetrical in that priming is found from L1 to L2, but not the reverse. In this project, I examined two issues raised by the asymmetry that are related to the organization of the bilingual lexicon. The first is what attributes to the asymmetry. Two approaches to the asymmetry are distinguished, one attributing it to the representational features of the bilingual lexicon and the other to the processing characteristics associated with the two languages of bilingual speakers. The five experiments in the first series first replicated the asymmetry and then examined three processing-related explanations. The results suggest that none of them provides a satisfactory explanation of the asymmetry. The second series of four experiments tested the hypothesis that lexical links from L2 to L1 are episodic in nature. The results of these experiments provide strong evidence for this hypothesis. It is proposed in the study that, due to the practical constraints imposed on SLA, lexical information in L2 may be represented in the episodic system. A model of vocabulary acquisition in L2 is proposed. In this model, vocabulary acquisition is seen in terms of how the structure and content of the lexical entry evolve in the learning process. Research and pedagogical implications of the model are discussed.

This interdisciplinary study examines the education and migration experiences of children, and their families, in a migrant-sending community in Mexico. It seeks to inform U.S. policy-makers campaigning for anti-immigrant legislation who have failed to examine the historical consequences of the contradictions existing between policy and practice. Additionally, it argues against U.S. educational practice that begins with intervention models based on deficiencies for immigrant and migrant students, rather than build on rich linguistic and cultural resources these children bring to the classroom. Data were collected for this ethnographic study over a period of 3½ years to examine historical and sociocultural backgrounds, dialect variations in patterns of communication, attitudes toward education, and causal roots of the migratory work experience. The researcher lived as a participatory member of a rural community in Guanajuato, Mexico, and conducted 81 formal interviews with parents, children, teachers, administrators and elders. The results of this research are deeply rooted in history. The U.S. political economy played a key role in establishing patterns of migration northward. The first members of the community began working in the United States in 1942, because of the Bracero Program, a contract between the United States and Mexico whereby low-cost seasonal workers were sent to U.S. growers to fulfill the demand for field labor. Because families lived from subsitence farming practices, the appeal was great to head North, work temporarily, and return home. Though the Bracero Program officially ended, and many workers were denied legal access to the United States, the demand for cheap labor has not subsided. Agribusiness continues to seek Mexican workers, encouraging undocumented passage by guaranteeing work opportunities. Children have been socialized into this work pattern, and today most believe they eventually will have to work en El Norte, though they would prefer to stay home. Women assume familial responsibilities and traditional roles are transformed, and females become heads of household. Children who travel with their fathers or parents are penalized within the U.S. school system when viewed as empty slates, yet these children have much to offer U.S. multuicultural classrooms in the way of diverse perspectives and experiences.