Based upon a survey of 409 university-level students in 14 institutions in 5 areas of Brazil, this dissertation reassesses relationships among English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) proficiency, attitudes, uses and needs. Students in this study reported infrequent present use of spoken English, although verbal skills were those most desired. This inconsistency in reported uses and needs is supported by the observations of many educators who state that students want more practice with oral skills, while they most use and need English reading skills Factor analyses of students' responses to a 63-item questionnaire supported Fishman's (1977) findings that nonattitudinal factors correlate most highly with self-rated EFL proficiency. Complementary competence, use of English with native and non-native speakers, and number of languages spoken were more highly correlated with proficiency than were motivational or attitudinal variables. Attitudinal variables demonstrated a low correlation with proficiency. Implications are that attempts to boost motivation in ways unrelated to students' goals may have less effect than increasing the availability of meaningful opportunities to use the additional language Analyses of variance indicated that students from urban settings and those from private institutions reported higher proficiency than rural students and those from public institutions. Future teachers and private-school students reported more frequent use of English and higher native-speaker integrative motivation than non-teachers and public-school students. These findings supported the view (Hamp-Lyons 1983) that teachers may assume a native-speaker integrative motivation in their students, since they themselves seemed to identify more closely with native speakers and cultures Gardner and Lambert (1972) reported on the importance of integrative motivation in second language learning. In this study, reported motivation was most often instrumental rather than integrative, yet reported proficiency was high. The majority of students reported that they 'liked' English-speaking countries and native speakers of English less than they 'liked' or appreciated the usefulness of English in international communication, travel, business and study. It may be useful to describe 'integrative motivation' for the study of English in such sociolinguistic situations as Brazil as an identification with an international community of lingua franca speakers / acase@tulane.edu

The purpose of this study was to describe the staff development model for writing instruction, developed by the National Writing Project and adapted by the schools in Bay County, Florida, during the summer of 1988 and the school year of 1988-89. This description was based upon data obtained from questionnaires and field notes of both in-service meetings and classroom observations. The study chronicled the participants as they implemented new writing strategies in their classroom and emerged as instructional leaders in their schools. Based upon the evidence obtained during the observations and the data from the questionnaires, the researcher identified several factors which influenced the success or the failure of staff development efforts in the various schools. One of the factors that seemed to impact in a negative way was the involvement of schools in more than one staff development effort which made it more difficult for participants to implement and practice strategies. An instructional leader was the county level who was committed to the effort and supportive of the teachers and the provision of released time, insuring the participants of an opportunity to nurture each other through sharing and coaching activities, were instrumental in the accomplishment of their efforts. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-07, Section: A, page: 2335. / Major Professor: John Simmons. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

The primary purpose of this study was to analyze four original Spanish literary books and their adapted versions (readers) to determine the primary changes that occur in the adaptation process. / The secondary purpose of this study was to determine the extent of agreement/disagreement between methods of classifying adapted texts to develop a generalization of "intermediateness" as a classification. / The data of this study were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. / Qualitative analysis was through a thorough analysis of lexical, syntactical and content factors of the eight literary works under study and quantitative analysis through the application of the Spaulding Readability Formula and the Vari-Cartier Readability Formula. / The significant findings of the study were that the Vari-Cartier formula tended to rely on the factor "syllables/100 words" as a component of the formula in determining the reading difficulty rating over the other component, "sentence/100 words" while the Spaulding formula tended to rely more on the factor word "density" as a component of the formula in determining the reading difficulty assigned to each Spanish prose rather than the other component "average sentence length". / The Vari-Cartier Readability Formula did not detect simplification in the Spanish readers under study while the Spaulding readability Formula did detect simplification in the Spanish readers under study. / Qualitatively it was determined that the original and adapted versions of the books in this study differed according to their lexical, syntactical and content factors while all the adapted readers had been simplified to different degrees in their lexicon, syntax and content. / It was also determined that the results of the qualitative analysis related far close with the Spaulding Readability Formula while the Vari-Cartier Readability Formula agreed little with the qualitative analysis. / "Intermediateness" in the adapted readers essentially was characterized by a simplification of the lexical, syntactical and content factors of the original versions. / This study implied that the reading difficulty assigned a reader is dramatically affected by the measure used to determine the reading difficulty and the components making up that measure. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-09, Section: A, page: 3208. / Major Professor: Frederick L. Jenks. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

This dissertation reports the results of an ethnographic study of the personal and academic literacies of four students during their first year at Florida State University. This research was shaped by one main question: How do first-year students use personal and academic literacies? / To investigate this question, I followed four students through three semesters of college, beginning the summer term preceding their first academic year. I conducted over one hundred student and teacher interviews, collected over sixty formal essays, observed seventy-plus days of class, and collected other artifacts, including personal journals and class handouts. By analyzing all of this data as well as reading theorists' and teachers' accounts of students' experiences, I constructed a descriptive and analytical account of these students' literacies and lives. / This study concludes that students' literacies relate to their academic success, which is heavily determined by non-academic factors, including family support, confidence, and reliance upon teachers. Student literacies are related to the roles students play. Some students come to college more equipped to handle the various student and writer roles expected of them. / I propose that support services be put into place to help students succeed. Also, this study suggests that keeping personal writing in the first-semester writing course helps students develop confidence in themselves as writers and students. All students should experience at least one safe writing environment. The classroom cultures created by teachers and students prove vital to students' academic success. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-08, Section: A, page: 3037. / Major Professor: Wendy Bishop. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

This ethnographic study is set in the milieu of a shelter for runaway youth as they participate in a ten-week series of poetry workshops, a Florida State University outreach effort. In the style of naturalistic and organic research, this study presents a narrative of and a response to the workshop experience. At times, the response is theoretical as the author presents a personal philosophy of writing and teaching of writing, interlaced with quotes and comments from other authors and theorists, ancient through contemporary. At other times, the response is creative and autobiographical, with surprising asides, sewing, in part, to explain the workshop leader's personality. / Subjects considered within the study include the student-centered, student-driven, interactive classroom; praise; authority; respect; community; identity; writing as a practice of wondering; the craft of writing; literacy as a creative and critical act; the possibility of a woman's rhetoric; and the intersections of rhetoric and composition and creative writing. In spite of objective passages and long scholarly discussions, the paper strives to maintain the reader's interest in an almost novel-like fashion. / Using qualitative methods of data collection, including field notes, participants' observations, tape-recordings of workshops, and photographs of workshops in progress, the researcher examines herself as ethnographer, creative writer, theoretician and workshop leader within the culture of the outreach workshops. What crystallizes, through the analysis of the lens worn by the ethnographer as a teacher and philosopher, is an ethnography turned in on itself. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-04, Section: A, page: 1351. / Major Professor: Joann Gardner. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

Within social media and popular culture, new and diverse forms of online identity representation are emerging in virtual spaces. As traditional literacy practices yield to newer literacies, these forms of identity representation require and receive critical scrutiny. Personalized avatars are one such form. They provide a site through which individuals may represent themselves as a constructed product of identity and the discursive practices that contribute to it. / This qualitative study explores the cultural politics of representation with ten teenaged girls who constructed personalized avatars for social networking sites. Its purpose is to investigate the truth effects about representation, girlhood identity and culture, and to analyze the power structures present in the narrative and graphic images of girlhood self-representation. As part of this analysis, personalized avatars are deconstructed as forms of visual language within a broader context of critical media literacy. / The ubiquitous character of social networking places girls and their images under a scrutiny within which they become objects of a regulatory gaze. Drawing from a cultural studies methodology, this study utilizes critical ethnography informed by feminist poststructuralism to examine the politics of this gaze and to articulate the tensions between attempting to be true to lived experience while remaining cognizant of the always partial and ever political nature of representation. This framework challenges normative notions of the self and attempts to expose how power structures within a site of avatar production intersect with girlhood performative desire. / This study finds that normative discourses around gender, ability, class, ethnicity, and beauty govern representation for teenaged girls in online spaces in a manner similar to real life locations. Despite a widely held belief that girls have an expanded capacity to represent themselves through online forums of individual creativity, this study suggests that structures of social media continue to contribute to the power of these regulatory discourses. This study finds that girls report a constant insecurity and questioning around their self-representations and, as such, these findings have implications for critical media education as well as future research related to girlhood identities in new media spaces.

This dissertation is a study of what selected literature teachers report to be their sources of practical knowledge. The data for the study was collected through open-ended interviews with three practicing public school literature teachers in two school districts in a large southwestern city between 1996 and 1998. The informants were selected more on the basis of convenience of access than any other criteria, though I also considered their length of time in the profession and limited the study to persons who were actually teaching literature at the time of the study. The interviews followed an extended observation. After the interviews were transcribed, I analyzed them by the "constant comparison" method (Merriam, 1988, p. 138), using a set of data codes derived from the interview data, then sorted the data according to the codes. That permitted me to bring together pieces of conversation from various points in the interview in a way that is most useful to me (Rubin and Rubin, 1995, pp. 238--241). While the selection and data collection methods were such that I cannot extrapolate the findings to other literature teachers, the data shows quite clearly that, for these teachers, there is a disjuncture between what the research literature assumes are teachers' primary sources of practical knowledge and what the teachers themselves think it to be. Both their statements about their sources of practical knowledge and the metaphoric language they use to describe themselves argue that, for these three teachers, alternative sources of practical knowledge---self, publisher-generated materials, reading in the professional literature, conversations with colleagues, and professional conferences and staff development workshops---are more important sources of their practices than are the sources upon which the research literature puts its primary focus---the apprenticeship of observation, content courses, and pedagogy courses. This finding suggests to me that a broader, more detailed study of this question is warranted.

This thesis explores links between the fields of literacy and drama in education for the elementary whole-language classroom. In her transactional theory of reading, Louise Rosenblatt has provided a theory regarding students' transactions with text, and the exploration of ideas and impressions generated during a reading event. This thesis extends Rosenblatt's theory into the uses of drama in the learning process. Marjorie Siegel propels the notion of transmediation in education. Students should be encouraged to generate and express meanings gathered in reading across multiple sign systems. As a meeting place for many language-based and nonlinguistic sign systems, drama provides an ideal place for transmediation to occur. Several drama strategies, advocated by Dorothy Heathcote, Brian Edmiston, David Booth, and others, are introduced. Finally, two drama systems, story drama and narrative theatre, are introduced to show how drama, when linked to the curriculum, can generate rich and layered learning experiences.

The focus of this study was the perceptions of preservice teachers regarding the major contributing factors in their construction of identity as readers. I wanted to explore their lives as readers and what factors, such as parental and family interactions, the telling of reading of stories, and the role of a children's literature course, influenced their reading. Qualitative methods of research and case study were used in the study. The research questions that guided the study were: (1) What are the preservice teachers' perceptions of themselves as readers? (2) How have their identities as readers evolved and what factors do preservice teachers identify as influencing them as readers? (3) What is the influence of the LRC 480 children's literature course on their identities as readers? (4) What are preservice teachers' understandings of the role of children's literature in literacy development at home and in school? The findings of the study demonstrated the positive influence of several factors in the lives of the preservice teachers, such as, the importance of family involvement in reading, early reading activities, the reading and telling of oral histories, traditions and family stories, and exposure to children's literature including multicultural literature, and the LRC 480 children's literature course. The preservice teachers grew as readers during the children's literature course. They discovered new insights into the reading process and have constructed positive attitudes toward reading. In addition, they have constructed beliefs about reading and the teaching of literature to children as a result of their literacy experiences during their lifetime and the children's literature course.

Many misconceptions and misunderstandings about what writing is pervade in the field of literacy research and practice, and often school children from almost every household bear the brunt of misguided literacy research and inappropriate literacy practice. This dissertation examined the nature of written language generally and the nature of Chinese writing specifically from historical, linguistic, and social literacies perspectives. The problems with the evolutionary concept of writing development are discussed in depth. Several possible explanations for this evolutionary account of writing are discussed, and these are followed by some alternative ways to understand the historical change of writing. The Chinese writing system is examined in detail in order to present a prime example of a non-alphabetic writing system that has been in use and serving its language users effectively for thousands of years. The unique strategies of character formation and word formation of Chinese writing make it possible to create new vocabulary without increasing the number of signs. The use of phonetic component in semantic-phonetic compound characters builds the connection between oral and written Chinese. Chinese writing is a modern logograph that works, and it is a proof that the alphabet is not necessarily the final stage towards which all written languages must proceed. The choice of a writing system has to be understood from the linguistic and socio-cultural background of the language community. Every written language is ambiguous as it is redundant, and every written language has both phonographic and logographic elements. There is no pure written language. Different writing systems represent different linguistic levels, but all written languages of different writing principles are semiotic system in which symbols are used to communicate meaning. A distinction between word or character recognition and reading whole real text is made, and it is argued that using the experimental results of the former to suggest the process and teaching of the latter which resembles the reading in real life is misleading and very inappropriate. When researchers focus on the word or character level of reading, there are more dissimilarities than similarities among different written languages. However, when the reading of whole text in real life situation is studied, the process of making sense of print is similar across all different writings. At the end of this study, research on Chinese word recognition and reading process is reviewed, and some suggestions for literacy practice are made.