The purpose of this study was first and foremost to investigate the storying process used by six middle school students, their teacher, the school administrator and the researcher as they moved through their classroom/school lives. Second, I sought to incorporate the storying process within the larger context of a literate, learning centered classroom community in which storying is integrated with transaction, democracy, culture, and inquiry. Third, I wanted to examine the process of storying from a critical perspective in order to suggest ways to transform educational practices from a reproductionist to a social reconstructionist approach. This interpretive ethnography included the data collection strategies of individual and group interviews and field notes. A theoretical framework for storying was developed using a modified analytic induction method. The categories were constructed and coded using a constant comparative method. The major finding of this study was that storying is a distinct participatory/dialogic process which makes use of narrative elements. This process incorporates the speech mechanisms of mini-monologue, dialogue, and multilogue. Stories are initiated when someone starts to share spontaneously or when invited by a listener. The responses of listener(s) and/or speaker(s) fall into the categories of intermittent responses, ignoring a story starter, listener's tangential comments, popcorn stories, and sustaining a story through extraneous interruptions. The four major purposes for storying are to reflect on and understand experience, to negotiate and evaluate experience, to develop and sustain relationships, and to construct and reinforce knowledge. Storying is a powerful resource which can be employed in curriculum planning and practice to build community, engage in critical thinking, and construct knowledge. Storying is also a research tool for university and teacher researchers to both gather and analyze data through examining current theory and practice so that these can be imagined and structured in new ways.

This study examines a cross-disciplinary curriculum that uses guided imagery and writing warm-ups to enhance student awareness of sensory properties in the teaching of printmaking, book making and memoir writing. I questioned whether implementation of such a course could: (1) increase student motivation? (2) show improvement in student writing? (3) show student comprehension and application of basic printmaking and book making techniques? (4) show evidence of experimentation in student artwork that results from an awareness of the sensory properties? The curriculum was taught to two courses of middle school students during the University of Arizona's SEEK (Summer Education Enrichment for Kids) program. Each course was two weeks' duration for two hours a day. Quantitative and qualitative results indicate an improvement in student writing and a comprehension and application of printmaking and book making techniques, in addition to experimentation in art as a result of awareness of the sensory properties. Evidence also suggests that both subjects enhance one another when taught together.

This study proposes an adaptation of Hunt's (1965) Terminal Miminal Syntactic Unit (T-Unit) to measure syntactic complexity in American Sign Language (ASL) syntax. Criterion for determining an American Sign Language T-Unit is based upon research into the linguistic structure and development of ASL. Nine deaf elementary aged students watched a non-verbal film and retold the story in ASL on videotape (Newport et al., in press). The stories were then transcribed into the Vista Glossing System (Smith, Lentz & Mikos, 1988). Transcriptions were segmented into T-Units and further analyzed for syntactic complexity. Results reveal an increase in ASL T-Units for all children from the fall to the spring. An increase in ASL T-Units translates to greater syntactic complexity. Results from the study suggest that an ASL T-unit analysis is an effective measure of ASL proficiency.

<p> Argumentation should be approached as a practice that is woven into the larger instructional practices across the core educational disciplines. With the advent of The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the ability to analyze and write an argument is now a predominant skill students are required to repeatedly demonstrate. As student achievement is now being used to reflect the larger portion of teacher accountability, it is essential that educators better understand how to make argumentation a disciplinary practice. I suggest that students should first be able to examine, identify, and understand the necessary function of evidence as a primary element of argumentation in order to more effectively construct a meaningful, sustainable argument. Through the categorization and analysis of explicit and implicit evidence, students are able to establish more meaningful claims. While this procedure elicits more student engagement and requires educators to reorient their instructional considerations, it also provides a practical starting point for all stakeholders when dealing with emerging argumentation in the classroom.</p>

<p> The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of linguistic knowledge in spelling by analyzing spelling errors made by 220 students in the fourth, fifth, and seventh grades. A 25-word researcher-designed spelling test with considerations of word frequency, word familiarity, and word type (based on morphological complexity) was administered. An error coding system was established based on the Triple Word Form theory. Each misspelling was coded based on its linguistic features and scored cumulatively in 3 categories: Phonological Representation, Orthographic Legality, and Morphological Legality. The error coding system revealed the linguistic profiles of misspellings and allowed the comparisons among subgroups matched on grades, reading, and spelling ability levels. </p><p> The results of profile analyses supported the Overlapping Waves Model, which advocates that spellers use their phonological, orthographic, and morphological knowledge in spelling simultaneously regardless of age, reading, or spelling levels. On the other hand, the study did not find evidence supporting the stage-specific theory, which defines each stage by observations of the consistent use of one strategy in spelling. The linguistic profiles revealed the competition between Phonological Representation and Orthographic Legality, which provided little evidence supporting the specific phonological deficit hypothesis. On the contrary, the researcher found that the key to becoming an average speller is to be able to effectively apply sufficient phonological knowledge in spelling. For students with poor reading ability, they do not just suffer from limited phonological knowledge but also from the lack of other linguistic knowledge. For any two students with average reading ability, it is the one who can apply sufficient phonological knowledge that benefit in spelling and perform at the level that matches his or her reading ability. Educational implications are discussed.</p>

This study addresses the need for research which examines collaborative writing using computers. Its purpose was to identify, through observation and description, distinctive features of collaborative composing with a computer. The study examines how three writers collaborated in writing using a personal computer. The group's writing sessions were recorded on audio tapes that were then transcribed for analysis. The analysis consisted of examining the data for patterns that might account for certain aspects of collaborative composition including how the group made decisions and negotiated their individual writing styles and strategies, and how the computer affected their writing processes. The analysis of the data identified variables specific to collaborative writing at the computer. The addition of these variables created new relationships among factors already found in individual composition. Further research is needed to determine more precisely how these factors interact. Suggestions for such research are included.

Transfer, or native language interference in the acquisition of a second language, is studied in the developing Spanish interlanguage of English-speaking students enrolled in first-year college Spanish. The study focuses on English language interference in the development of Spanish syntax, lexicon, morphology and orthography. Student compositions are analyzed and transfer errors are identified and categorized by type. The inventory of transfer errors includes all errors found in the student compositions which can be attributed to transfer and explains the interference mechanism involved in the error. Additionally, the frequency of transfer errors is compared horizontally over a four-month period to measure increase or decrease in transfer as the students' language capabilities develop. The study also reviews previous research in transfer, a field which has enjoyed renewed interest among linguists within recent years.

This study analyzes the role of Transfer, or native language interference in the written interlanguage of fourteen English-speaking students during the second semester of the third year of Spanish at Rice University. English language interference is studied in the development of Spanish lexicon, syntax, morphology and orthography. Errors from translation exercises as well as from written compositions were analyzed and categorized by type. A list of all the English transfer errors found in this project is preceded by an explanation of the interference mechanism involved. At two data collection points, evenly spaced toward the beginning and the end of the semester, a horizontal comparison of transfer errors was carried out in order to observe changes in transfer errors. A review of previous literature in language transfer precedes the findings specific to this study.

This thesis studies the principal work of Angel Rama, La ciudad letrada (1984), as a focal point in the field of Latin American Cultural Studies. The analysis is carried out by first creating a close reading of the text, wherein the central concepts of the work are established and unpacked. This operation is important because the contributions and limits of the work have not been submitted to an extensive analysis in the critical literature. The theory of the Lettered City is then related to Rama's intellectual trajectory and to the critical assessments of selected authors. Finally, both the theory and its critics are analyzed from the present, in hindsight, in order to reach a critical balance of the contributions of both La ciudad letrada and its critics. We conclude that both have suffered from a certain silence on the voices of women, sexual minorities and other popular voices.

<p> This qualitative study analyzed the meaning-making practices of urban adolescents participating in a college preparatory program featuring philosophical inquiry into cosmopolitanism and the creation of multimodal texts. In contrast to studies of composing that focus on individual outcomes, this dissertation traced group meaning making. The study was grounded in sociocultural perspectives that theorize literacy as diverse, socially constructed, meaning-making practices that emerge in particular cultural and social contexts, and include multiple modes of communication. Data included interviews, observations, and artifacts. To analyze the data, a music-inspired analytic system was devised to examine the collaborative nature of composing. </p><p> The study demonstrated, first, that composing in this setting was a collaborative process exceeding customary understandings of collaborative composing. Uncovered after examining complex patterns of interactions over varied timescales, collaboration at the group level occurred while community members created individual products. Second, the study revealed that improvisation was an important strategy for shaping the content of this collaborative process. During informal jam sessions, participants creatively explored options for representing content. They actively built upon ideas offered by other participants in the moment, in order to read, interpret, select, and design the content of their multimodal texts. Last, facilitated by the complex patterns of interaction and shaped by the improvised frames for representing content, this study revealed the ways in which participants constructed a shared meaning of the concept of cosmopolitanism at the group level. Utilizing an image-afforded exploration of juxtaposition, this shared understanding evolved from early conceptions of cosmopolitanism as represented in juxtaposed images to an understanding of cosmopolitanism as the act of creating and interpreting juxtaposition between varying perspectives. </p><p> This study contributes to growing empirical research on meaning making through multimodal text design. It extends socio-cultural explanations of what counts as `social' in educational contexts, illustrating that composing is not just influenced by social interaction but rather <i>is</i> social. Finally, in an age of standards, testing, and accountability that can narrow what constitutes valued literacy practices, this study provides an example of the varied interactional paths and diverse compositional strategies and products that can engage learners and expand opportunities for meaning making.</p>