Abstract not available.

This thesis investigates the acquisition of sentential negation in English by three groups of bilingual Basque/Spanish speakers. All groups received instruction for a similar period of time, although they differ as to the age at which they began to learn English: four, eight and ten years respectively. The syntax of sentential negation concerns two main aspects: the nature of negative markers and the position of the negation phrase in the structure of the clause. Both Basque and Spanish have a negative marker that realizes the head of the negation phrase. The negation phrase in these languages dominates the tense phrase in the structure of the clause. On the contrary, in English the negative marker occupies the specifier position and the negation phrase appears lower than the tense phrase in the structure of the clause. The results of our analysis show a clear advantage in favor of the learners who began to learn English at eight and ten years old when compared to the younger ones. We have interpreted the differences between the groups as an attempt to adapt the lexical elements of English into the structures of their L1s. This interpretation is based on the learners' preferences with respect to the negative marker. Thus, younger learners show a clear preference for the marker of anaphoric negation no, whereas older learners prefer the morpheme n't, which appears together with auxiliary and modal verbs. In all cases, learners seem to be transferring the order of projections from their L1s and treating the lexical units isn't and don't as negative markers rather than as inflection markers followed by the negative morpheme n't, which leads us to conclude that there has not been a change in the order of projections but that these L2 learners are simply substituting one negative marker by another.

Taboo language (essentially 'bad' language) is a fixture of many aspects of contemporary English communication. Yet frank discussions regarding this topic are typically absent from ESL (English Second Language) classrooms. This ethnographic study, guided by a conceptual framework layering Bourdieu's Theory of Practice with insights from a multiple literacies perspective, seeks to understand something of the complex interplay of ESL learner/user identities and power relationships they experience as they relate to English taboo language. Findings indicate that taboo language literacy practices are taken up in hybrid and sometimes contradictory ways as ESL learners/users cross linguistic and cultural boundaries. Identities-in-transition become sites of tension and struggle, situated within the structures of symbolic domination, as ESL learners/users resist and appropriate different literacy practices in strategic struggles for legitimacy and symbolic power. By raising awareness of the social implications of taboo language, this research encourages ESL praxis more in tune with the identities and empowerment of ESL learners.

This research study examines second language learning and identity construction through a hybrid design of case study and autoethnography. It argues for an elaborated understanding of the way that second language learners of English participate in the learning process in multiple contexts, in multiple discourses. From this perspective it considers the interdependence of language and identity in order to understand the experiences and difficulties of many second language learners. This research focuses on the identity struggles of Japanese women learning English as a second language from the perspective of sociocultural theory and critical theory in a postmodern stance. This framework allows me to consider how social identities are created discursively, how our conceptual metaphors function in Japanese and English, and how the process of participating in a new language and a new culture results in our living in neither culture but in hybrid spaces. Using autoethnography, I draw on my experiences as a Japanese woman learning English as a second language to understand what it means for a Japanese woman to be an English language learner as well as how English affects the identities of Japanese women. At the same time, the study also involves additional participants, namely three female Japanese students learning English in a Canadian University in Ontario. This hybrid design allows for a broader understanding of our everyday lives, languages, metaphors, and known and un-known selves as they take shape and transform. Using diary research, interviews and conversational group meetings, I examine how our individual and collective stories emerge. To do this I turn to four different discourse genres; narrative, haiku, metaphor and academic discourse. I choose to write narrative discourse to express our stories poetically. My decision to create was inspired by haiku, a genre that expresses my changing values and never-ending painful transformations. The untranslatable nature of language and this journey of women inspire haiku that emerges in a third space of the said and the unsaid. Finally, I turn to academic discourse to compose the meta-story of what I am doing and why, and to situate my identity and my research in a theoretical framework. The stories from the four of us contribute to a portrait of the tremendous ideological transformations involved in learning a second language. From the language of the research participants, we see how our conceptual system varies across cultures, implying multiple realities. This suggests that to promote cross-cultural understanding, we need to engage deeply with our experiences as they evoke the curriculum as lived.

Thornton W. Burgess (b. 1874, d. 1965) was a children's writer who attained great popularity and commercial success, with stories such as Old Mother West Wind (1910) and The Adventures of Peter Cottontail (1914) published by Little, Brown and Company, and with reprinted titles now published by Dover Press. His stories have been read from their initial publication in the early 1900s until the present day, and numerous titles have been translated to languages such as Japanese, French, Italian, and Gaelic. However, at times his works were not well-reviewed by children's literary critics, and so his mixed reception creates a mystery around "What is it about Burgess that readers either loved or hated?" My conceptual framework grounded in ideas of New Historicism and cultural studies draws upon psychoanalytic concepts (after Kristeva, others) and film theory (after Bordwell, others) to explore the narrative appeal of three related Burgess works: The Adventures of Poor Mrs. Quack (1917), The Adventures of Bob White (1919), and Lightfoot the Deer (1921). I was able to trace how Mr. Burgess conveyed his inner-most thoughts of primal drama (after Freud, Kristeva and Adler) of the lived and imagined stories of family and domestic affairs of friends and family, co joined with a political message of the early 20th century show-down between nature and encroaching urbanization. I found that Burgess practiced an economy of story-telling known for cinema and film (after Heath). The result in his well-known stories was an emergent aesthetic experience of seeing/feeling/meaning I term the cine-semiotic, evoking notions of le semiotique = psychoanalytic semiotics and la semiotique = filmic or sign operation semiotics (Rosen, 1986). It seems that Burgess shares a visual aesthetic with other children's writers such as Beatrix Potter, the English creator of Peter Cottontail (Carpenter, 1989). Through a close reading, documentation, and interpretation of three selected stories of Burgess which I term his Anti-Hunting Trilogy, this study seeks to understand the enigmatic nature of his mixed reception in early 20 th century children's literature. I have used archival-historical primary research materials along with readings of his stories to provide data around the nature of his popularly appealing narrative aesthetic. I became aware of a mode of address to the reader that I have termed the "cine-semiotic," which speaks to the language of Mr. Burgess's stories based in deep renditions of psychic dynamics which emanate through: (a) scripted movements of the abject and abjection, terror and anxiety, and community and wholeness; and (b) telling and showing aspects of narrative that play out through visual iconicity and other cinematic operations of the story language (after Bordwell, 1985). The results of my study provide a new means for interpreting, understanding and expressing the social, cultural and psychic effects resident within three stories written and published by Mr. Burgess from 1917 to 1921, and republished into the 21st century by Dover Publications for an avid and devoted contemporary readership. The implications of the study are that, under the conditions of language looking in at language, scholars looking in at children's stories can begin to discern meaningful patterns of cultural discourse that may otherwise go undiscerned.

My dissertation explores an approach to the teaching of college writing that coordinates expressivist and social constructionist pedagogies. An expressivist orientation, usually associated with Peter Elbow and Ken Macrorie, foregrounds individual experiences of invention, sensitizing teachers to the nuances of students' motivations and creativity. A social constructionist orientation, which enjoys wide consensus in contemporary composition studies, foregrounds the ways in which the oral and written practices of discourse communities, and the broader contexts of power in which they occur, construct identity and knowledge, so that the solitary writer's text is actually dialogical because of the social nature of language. In my dissertation, I turn to theatrical metaphors and practices in order to coordinate these orientations. From the works of Kenneth Burke, Mikhail Bakhtin, Victor Turner, and a variety of feminist theorists, I borrow a dramatistic rhetorical approach that values the dynamic interdependence of individual and context. This orientation guides my teaching, and helps me explore the results. I turn to theater practices themselves, such as role-play and dialogue, in order to provide writers a range of oral and textual experiences, in a way that allows for group inquiry into what Burke called the "scenic" or contextual, cultural dimensions of communication. To establish a context for my work, my Introduction traces parallel tensions in both composition and theatre about the nature of agency and identity, represented in the works of Peter Elbow, David Bartholomae, Bertolt Brecht, and Constantin Stanislavski. Chapter One seeks a solution to these tensions in contemporary community theatre and solo performance art, which provide both metaphors of transactional agency and dialogic identity, and actual practices adaptable to a college writing context. My remaining chapters explore in more detail various teaching approaches predicated upon my introductory, theoretical material. In Chapter Two, I narrate and analyze three classroom events of role- and voice-play, and conclude with a larger view of composition, role-play, and student and teacher roles. Chapter Three considers the social and interpersonal dynamics of a dialogue written by two students, analyzed according to the "interpretive theme" of adversarial and non-adversarial argument. In Chapter Four, I try to maintain a productive tension between expressive and social dimensions of one student's writing by sharing ideas about voice with her in a tutorial setting, especially Bakhtinian ideas about dissonance and negotiation. And finally my Conclusion attempts to enact or "perform" the very tensions I have explored throughout the dissertation, through a playful, multi-voiced dialgoue on dialogue. In effect, this dissertation tries to open a conversation between theory and practice, and between composition and theatre disciplines. My main thesis, which I explore through practice, is that college writers can benefit from highly contextualized, expressive play.

The 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act promotes the reorganization of curricula in several disciplines. This study examines World Languages curricula in selected Massachusetts school systems and ways in which schools are implementing change in that discipline. The research contributes to the literature available for educators and planners, informing them of the challenging and changing goals of state language curricula and of ways that educators in local communities are planning revisions. Data collection methods included surveys of World Languages program administrators and interviews of individuals who plan and operate the programs. Written surveys and individual interviews contribute to explanations of the fundamental organization of World Languages programs and the practices schools are using to reform them. Three communities in central Massachusetts with similar socio-economic status and demographic characteristics were the focus of the study. The participating communities have large percentages of Hispanic students, pupils who cannot perform ordinary classwork in English, and learners whose first language is not English. Results from the study show that the communities share similar problems in developing K–12 World Languages programs. Low funding, a need for technology, the shortage of qualified and certified instructors, insufficient training for practicing teachers, and inadequate program coordination and support were the primary deterrents to the expansion of programs. Despite the hindrances facing the school systems, educators have updated their curricula in several ways in order to prepare students for active involvement in their community. Teachers in the selected school districts realize the importance of helping students achieve a greater understanding of others and improve their second language proficiency to help them live and work with others in increasingly diverse communities. Schools need several more years to fulfill the goal of offering every student continuous K–12 second language study. Most schools in Massachusetts lack elementary World Languages programs, and despite the high numbers of native language speakers of the target languages taught in schools, not all systems fully view them as a resource. Most World Languages departments do not collaborate with Bilingual or English as a Second Language programs, offer courses designed for native speakers, or have procedures for properly placing these students in existing courses. The most effective strategies used by schools to improve programs are ones that encourage stronger community support and involvement and those that promote greater program organization.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study concerning language maintenance efforts at a Chinese heritage language school in a North American community. This research employs the construct of language ideology—members' common sense notions about language and language learning—to explore important aspects of what it means to speak, act, think, and feel like a member of the community. It is argued that the heritage language school is the center of a moral project helping to mediate cross-cultural experience so that children maintain positive social identities. Methodology involves discourse analysis and ethnographic observation. Interviews and texts are transcribed and analyzed to suggest structure and pattern. The analysis finds evidence to support the conclusion that notions of language and language learning reflect traditional patterns of Chinese thought and culture but that these are reconfigured to suit American circumstances. It is suggested that the subject position of Overseas Chinese helps members maintain stable notions of self as Chinese.

This dissertation documents the implementation of new writing curriculum and the development of a Writers' Workshop in a multicultural/urban fourth and fifth grade classroom. It is my personal account of how I as teacher-researcher worked to raise the expectations of my children by creating a positive climate in which to learn and a classroom that haled writing as part of the original curriculum. The study began with a writing party for three hundred, fifty third, fourth and fifth grade students, their parents and family members after which they received writing bags to take home. The Writers' Workshop described in this dissertation is a one-classroom initiative and progression of change. There are seven conclusions that I have drawn through the implementation of the Writers' Workshop in the classroom. First, it is essential that teachers have high expectations for the success of their students. Second, children's writing displayed for everyone to see builds a positive classroom climate for both teacher and students. Classroom climate and management influence students' sense of belonging to the classroom. Third, children need the right tools and materials to help them to be creative. Fourth, children need opportunities to explore many genres, forms and purposes for writing within a writing process model. Fifth, the writers' workshop model defines every child as a writer right now. Children need to know that all writers go through the same steps for creating a good writing piece as they do. They experience the same frustrations when trying to find the right words to phrase a line in a poetry piece or to make a message clear in a writing piece. Sixth, opportunities for cross-curriculum writing are essential to help children expand their writing ideas and topics for writing. Math comic strips helped my students to create word problems pertaining to everyday situations. Seventh, technology is essential in support of writing and publishing. Five computers were available in the classroom for use by the children. Use of the computers and access to the Internet increased the volume of published work by the children as well as their knowledge of how to operate the software.

Over the past decade, politicians, businesspersons, and educators have pushed for “higher,” “tougher,” and “world-class” standards for K–12 students. This standards movement includes state standardized, curriculum-based tests. Massachusetts recently developed the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). MCAS is considered a high-stakes test because a passing score determines graduation for students, and sanctions and rewards for teachers and schools. The experiences of 16 Massachusetts English teachers in teaching under the MCAS high-stakes testing requirement were explored using a qualitative research method known as in-depth interviewing from a phenomenological perspective (Seidman, 1998). These participants taught a variety of students in a range of Massachusetts public schools. Over the course of three 90-minute interviews, each participant established context through life histories, detailed their current teaching experiences, and made meaning of these experiences. Using an inductive process of analysis, data were reduced and coded; essential features, relationships, and patterns were explored. The findings were organized into three major themes. This study found that teachers narrowed their curriculum, changed instruction, and designed classroom assessments to match the content and skills that MCAS tests. Teachers associated both gains and losses with these changes. Moreover, this high-stakes test both enhanced and undermined their professional identities. MCAS and related professional activities empowered teachers; MCAS also disempowered teachers by imposing policies that controlled curriculum and instruction, threatened sanctions, and damaged reputations. Teachers voiced their socio-political analysis of the theories that underpin this high-stakes testing movement, the motives behind MCAS, and the current state of education. The findings reveal that the line between educational reform and improved education is neither unidirectional nor linear. Rather, it is a complex web of influences, motives, and actions. How policy winds its way into practice depends on the varied contexts in which teachers perceive and experience reform. This study suggests implications for policymakers, politicians, teachers, teacher educators, and researchers. Among other things, it makes a plea to policymakers and legislators to define what they mean by standards, re-examine the narrow content of the test, and include teachers as legitimate participants in making policy decisions that affect them and their students.