<p> This study aims to clarify the nature of the theatrical way of Henry Caldwell Cook who was the first to introduce theatre into education for English as a first language. This study critically examines the content of his original teaching method, Play Way, and attempts to appropriately place its context in the history of drama education in England in order to explore how effectively drama can be used in language education. The use of theatre for education has a long history. Commencing in ancient Greece and Rome, it has continued until the present time. However, modern drama education has no more than about a hundred years of history. It was Cook and Harriet Finlay-Johnson who opened the history of this theatrical education. Finlay-Johnson had persistently used theatre to teach all subjects, mainly because of her educational stance as an elementary school teacher. She is closely associated with the leaders of DIE (Drama-in-Education) who adhere to the same educational policy. While Cook also used theatre as a means for language education and did his best to maintain a theatrical framework, there is a fundamental difference between Cook's educational method and that of DIE. His Play Way seems to closely resemble TIE (Theatre-in-Education) in that both bring in theatre for school education. However, this similarity is superficial. In the TIE method, while the autonomy of theatre has always been maintained, theatre in Cook's method was used as a means for education to the end, although concurrently he had been able to properly grasp the nature of theatre. Behind such a view of theatre as an educational end in itself is Cook's recognition of the theatricality of human beings. His theatrical teaching tells us that when using theatre as a tool for language education, we must first correctly understand its intrinsic qualities. </p>

<p>Abstract This dissertation examines the ways in which the incorporation of a multimodal social semiotic curriculum into a university composition class provided non-traditional options for learning that brought about agentive and empowering identity shifts in students who were labeled as academically underprepared for college level work. Building on a body of research that challenges the dominant discourse of deficit through a view of literacy and of learners as a complex and context-related social practice, this qualitative study employs ethnographic methods to track and document the self-affirming transformations in student's identities as manifested in their written, multimodal, and discoursal performances. The data collected from this study indicates that students' perceptions of self and of potential for academic success within the University were influenced by prior institutional labels and were exacerbated by feelings of marginalization brought on by placement into a University support program. In order to counter the sense of deficiency that usually accompanies such labeling practices, a transformative pedagogical approach designed to invoke change was practiced with the aim to create a learning environment which countered the rigidity of an autonomous view of literacy and instead, embraced a view of literacy that was sociocultural and ideological in nature. To this end, curricular choices were made in an effort to offer students alternative, non-traditional methods of demonstrating their individualized ways of meaning making. The data indicated that a multimodal infused pedagogy and interactions with multimodality served to reveal, track, capture, and document the ways in which identities shifted and changed with the resultant finding of an increased sense of academic achievement and agency in students as identity transformation took place. In addition, significant instances of students' acquisition of agency through self-generated writing and consequent successful repositioning were documented. In light of these findings, I encourage and endorse the assimilation of non- traditional transformative and multimodal practices into the 21st Century college composition class.

<p> This introduction serves to provide a sketch of the circumstances that led to the prominence of "nativist," or <i>xiangtu</i> literature from the Republic of China (i.e. Taiwan) in the late twentieth century. Huang Chunming, the author of the stories featured in this thesis, has been a prolific writer from the east of the Taiwan Straits since 1962, and has contributed to the popularization of Taiwanese xiangtu literature in the decades of the island's industrialization experience. In Huang's world of fictional characters, readers have multifaceted records of the Taiwanese people's lives and the culture of their native soil.</p>

Interlanguage pragmatics research has contributed a great deal to our understanding of L2 pragmatic use but less to our understanding of L2 pragmatic development, although developmental issues are also its primary research goal. Additionally, previous studies have been confined to a rather small set of speech acts, under-researching such face-damaging acts as criticizing and responding to criticism even though these may be more challenging for L2 learners. The present study examines pragmatic development in the use of criticizing and responding to criticism by a group of Vietnamese EFL learners with a view to shedding light on the pragmatic properties of these speech acts. IL data were collected from 12 high beginners, 12 intermediate learners, and 12 advanced learners, via a written questionnaire and role play, and analyzed with reference to L1 and L2 baseline data collected from 12 Vietnamese and 12 Australian NSs via the same methods. Metapragmatic data were collected via retrospective interview. Four main findings are discussed. Firstly, the learners criticized and responded to criticism very differently from the NSs. This difference might have adversely affected how the learners negotiated their intentions expressed via speech act realizations. Secondly, there was little evidence of any proficiency effect on the learners' use of these two speech acts. This was probably because pragmatic development was limited by the EFL context, as the learners had had insufficient exposure to the target norms. Thirdly, there was evidence of pragmatic transfer in the learners' production. This transfer was affected by the learners' perception of L1-L2 proximity and assumption of L2 reasonableness. Finally, the retrospective interviews with learners suggested four main sources of influence on their pragmatic decision-making: insufficient L2 pragmatic knowledge, transfer of communication and learning, processing difficulty, and learning experience. The present study lends support to a number of SLA theories, including Bialystoks' processing model and Meisel et al.'s complexification hypothesis. It found that the major challenge for learners in L2 pragmatic acquisition is to gain control over processing. It also found an acquisitional order of modality markers which was dependent upon their structural complexity and the processing demands involved in producing them. / Subscription resource available via Digital Dissertations only.

Interlanguage pragmatics research has contributed a great deal to our understanding of L2 pragmatic use but less to our understanding of L2 pragmatic development, although developmental issues are also its primary research goal. Additionally, previous studies have been confined to a rather small set of speech acts, under-researching such face-damaging acts as criticizing and responding to criticism even though these may be more challenging for L2 learners. The present study examines pragmatic development in the use of criticizing and responding to criticism by a group of Vietnamese EFL learners with a view to shedding light on the pragmatic properties of these speech acts. IL data were collected from 12 high beginners, 12 intermediate learners, and 12 advanced learners, via a written questionnaire and role play, and analyzed with reference to L1 and L2 baseline data collected from 12 Vietnamese and 12 Australian NSs via the same methods. Metapragmatic data were collected via retrospective interview. Four main findings are discussed. Firstly, the learners criticized and responded to criticism very differently from the NSs. This difference might have adversely affected how the learners negotiated their intentions expressed via speech act realizations. Secondly, there was little evidence of any proficiency effect on the learners' use of these two speech acts. This was probably because pragmatic development was limited by the EFL context, as the learners had had insufficient exposure to the target norms. Thirdly, there was evidence of pragmatic transfer in the learners' production. This transfer was affected by the learners' perception of L1-L2 proximity and assumption of L2 reasonableness. Finally, the retrospective interviews with learners suggested four main sources of influence on their pragmatic decision-making: insufficient L2 pragmatic knowledge, transfer of communication and learning, processing difficulty, and learning experience. The present study lends support to a number of SLA theories, including Bialystoks' processing model and Meisel et al.'s complexification hypothesis. It found that the major challenge for learners in L2 pragmatic acquisition is to gain control over processing. It also found an acquisitional order of modality markers which was dependent upon their structural complexity and the processing demands involved in producing them. / Subscription resource available via Digital Dissertations only.

Interlanguage pragmatics research has contributed a great deal to our understanding of L2 pragmatic use but less to our understanding of L2 pragmatic development, although developmental issues are also its primary research goal. Additionally, previous studies have been confined to a rather small set of speech acts, under-researching such face-damaging acts as criticizing and responding to criticism even though these may be more challenging for L2 learners. The present study examines pragmatic development in the use of criticizing and responding to criticism by a group of Vietnamese EFL learners with a view to shedding light on the pragmatic properties of these speech acts. IL data were collected from 12 high beginners, 12 intermediate learners, and 12 advanced learners, via a written questionnaire and role play, and analyzed with reference to L1 and L2 baseline data collected from 12 Vietnamese and 12 Australian NSs via the same methods. Metapragmatic data were collected via retrospective interview. Four main findings are discussed. Firstly, the learners criticized and responded to criticism very differently from the NSs. This difference might have adversely affected how the learners negotiated their intentions expressed via speech act realizations. Secondly, there was little evidence of any proficiency effect on the learners' use of these two speech acts. This was probably because pragmatic development was limited by the EFL context, as the learners had had insufficient exposure to the target norms. Thirdly, there was evidence of pragmatic transfer in the learners' production. This transfer was affected by the learners' perception of L1-L2 proximity and assumption of L2 reasonableness. Finally, the retrospective interviews with learners suggested four main sources of influence on their pragmatic decision-making: insufficient L2 pragmatic knowledge, transfer of communication and learning, processing difficulty, and learning experience. The present study lends support to a number of SLA theories, including Bialystoks' processing model and Meisel et al.'s complexification hypothesis. It found that the major challenge for learners in L2 pragmatic acquisition is to gain control over processing. It also found an acquisitional order of modality markers which was dependent upon their structural complexity and the processing demands involved in producing them. / Subscription resource available via Digital Dissertations only.

Interlanguage pragmatics research has contributed a great deal to our understanding of L2 pragmatic use but less to our understanding of L2 pragmatic development, although developmental issues are also its primary research goal. Additionally, previous studies have been confined to a rather small set of speech acts, under-researching such face-damaging acts as criticizing and responding to criticism even though these may be more challenging for L2 learners. The present study examines pragmatic development in the use of criticizing and responding to criticism by a group of Vietnamese EFL learners with a view to shedding light on the pragmatic properties of these speech acts. IL data were collected from 12 high beginners, 12 intermediate learners, and 12 advanced learners, via a written questionnaire and role play, and analyzed with reference to L1 and L2 baseline data collected from 12 Vietnamese and 12 Australian NSs via the same methods. Metapragmatic data were collected via retrospective interview. Four main findings are discussed. Firstly, the learners criticized and responded to criticism very differently from the NSs. This difference might have adversely affected how the learners negotiated their intentions expressed via speech act realizations. Secondly, there was little evidence of any proficiency effect on the learners' use of these two speech acts. This was probably because pragmatic development was limited by the EFL context, as the learners had had insufficient exposure to the target norms. Thirdly, there was evidence of pragmatic transfer in the learners' production. This transfer was affected by the learners' perception of L1-L2 proximity and assumption of L2 reasonableness. Finally, the retrospective interviews with learners suggested four main sources of influence on their pragmatic decision-making: insufficient L2 pragmatic knowledge, transfer of communication and learning, processing difficulty, and learning experience. The present study lends support to a number of SLA theories, including Bialystoks' processing model and Meisel et al.'s complexification hypothesis. It found that the major challenge for learners in L2 pragmatic acquisition is to gain control over processing. It also found an acquisitional order of modality markers which was dependent upon their structural complexity and the processing demands involved in producing them. / Subscription resource available via Digital Dissertations only.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: A, page: 0545. Adviser: Anna Maria Escobar. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 128-137) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Language Education, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-05, Section: A, page: 1853. Adviser: Larry Mikulecky. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 12, 2008)."

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: A, page: 0498. Advisers: Gary Cziko; Kim McDonough. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-90) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.