This exploratory study uses Westheimer and Kahne's (2004) conceptual model of the three planes of 'good' citizenship activity to consider the civic contribution of youth graffiti writers in the community of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Through seven qualitative case studies of youth and young adults, it examines young graffiti artists' perceptions of their participation in their communities and their views on graffiti writing and its place in their lives. The results show that contrary to public opinion, the youth interviewed who participate in graffiti writing in its most artistic form, "piecing", are not focused on vandalism but have carefully considered their relationships with their community and their art. The use of a Youth Research Assist ant in five of the interviews demonstrates that youth themselves, given specific roles in the research process, can add to the richness of data collected. Drawing on literature in graffiti, Hip-Hop cultural studies and community and youth engagement, this study adds to the growing body of research that focuses on youth 'assets' (the existing strengths that youth bring to their involvement in societal affairs) (Benson, 1997; Scales & Laffert, 1999; Ungar, 2005). The research and findings offer an alternate perspective on youth voice, civic identity, citizenship and rule breaking in Canadian democratic society.

This dissertation examines teacher implementation of an adolescent literacy intervention with a coaching component, guided by questions about fidelity of implementation (FoI) and curriculum adaptation. In the first of two studies, I used data from observations of teachers (n=17) in nine schools during the 2013-14 school year to conduct a nuanced descriptive analysis of FoI. I also analyzed weekly logs completed by literacy coaches (n=3) to examine variation in quantity and intensity of coaching. I then compared variation in coaching with variation in FoI, and finally compared FoI to outcomes for students (n=287). FoI at observation 1 was found to predict coaching time, and FoI across both observations predicted student outcomes. This emphasizes the critical role of investigating implementation in order to better understand the results of intervention research. In the second study, I used qualitative methodology to analyze adaptations made by four experienced teachers in one school that sustained implementation of this curriculum after the intervention trial had ended. Six focal adaptations were identified, three each from two teachers, and analyzed for productivity using criteria from Debarger and colleagues (Debarger, Choppin, Beauvineau, & Moorthy, 2013). Of the six, only two met criteria for productivity. This suggests that making productive adaptations is difficult, and that teachers should be supported to do so through educative curriculum materials and effective professional development. In addition, an account of teaching practice methodology was used to define each teacher’s orientation toward the curriculum (Simon & Tzur, 1999), and then to determine whether this orientation demonstrated assimilation or accommodation to intervention principles (Coburn, 2004). I found that the vast majority of time spent implementing the curriculum included adaptations, and that each teacher’s adaptations were different. Although one teacher demonstrated assimilation and accommodation to intervention principles, the other three primarily demonstrated assimilation. These findings suggest the importance of understanding teachers’ orientations toward curriculum in order to provide more tailored professional development which may help teachers accommodate to the most critical pedagogical features of a curriculum.

Abstract not available.

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.

Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Amy L. Hubbell / This portfolio presents demonstrably proven effective guidelines for classroom activities in accordance with the widely accepted, communicative approach to teaching foreign languages. Stemming from the author's own personal experience with eighth-grade French students, these examples are based on the standard principles of Communicative Language Teaching. As graphically and comprehensively illustrated in this portfolio with student-friendly, image- and table-enhanced templates, the author identifies and explains how structured input and output activities might be developed to encompass the four components of teaching a language: namely, listening; reading; writing; and speaking. Beyond the objective of showing the usefulness of this teaching/learning method through examples of structured activities, the author augments the portfolio with valuable associated teacher's materials including a current professional teaching CV, a philosophy of teaching statement, a working syllabus, a classroom management plan, and a rationale for the activities included -- all of which are applicable to typical classroom environment situations. These carefully constructed worksheets and visuals are amply and appropriately interspersed throughout the sectional contents of the portfolio, thereby adding to the understanding of the textual descriptions of recommended teacher and student activities. In this manner, the author has documented a tested and practical set of working materials designed to promote the facility, ease and enthusiasm of learning languages from both the teacher and student points-of-view and needs. The compartmentalized contents of this portfolio, organized into 13 sections as listed in the table of contents, comprise a wide range of actual classroom activities that evolved from the author's daily teaching experiences. The portfolio instructions and examples also incorporate the well-founded and well-known teaching techniques documented in the professional literature as cited throughout the narrative text. For this purpose then, this portfolio delivers a complete and thorough description of possible teacher and student activities in various foreign language classroom scenarios.

Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Douglas K. Benson / Este trabajo está diseñado para que los estudiantes aprendan cultura al mismo tiempo que utilizan el idioma. Además contiene un programa pedagógico que incluye la historia, las metas y los modelos conformes con los National Standard for Foreign Language Learning para enseñar una lengua extranjera. También incluye el modelo teórico del Krashen, su metodología y su aplicación dentro de este reporte, dándole un gran énfasis al Input Comprensible, para que los estudiantes tengan éxito en la adquisición de un idioma. Dentro de este trabajo los estudiantes tendrán diferentes formas de input como son la auditiva y de lectura. Contiene una sección teórica y practica de cultura que incluye modelos de enseñanza tanto como la historia de las posadas, los cuales le servirán al maestro para su aplicación. Tiene una sección específica de estrategias acerca de cómo enseñar cultura y la importancia que tiene que el estudiante la aprenda dentro de un salón de clases. El maestro conocerá el proceso de la aculturación que experimenta el estudiante para comprender su papel fundamental en la fase de adquisición de un idioma. Incluye una sección de gramática estructurada según la teoría de Lee and Van Patten y su aplicación dentro de la clase, con actividades tanto escritas como comunicativas que ayudaran a los estudiantes para su práctica El maestro utilizará el modelo de circunlocución para la enseñanza del vocabulario, el cual tiene actividades dinámicas con toda la clase y en grupos, que les ayudará a los estudiantes en su comprensión. En la parte final y como resultado de este reporte, el estudiante tendrá la oportunidad de escenificar las posadas navideñas para toda la escuela, además de adquirir conocimiento cultural. Los posibles resultados académicos de este trabajo para los estudiantes se reportarán a modo de conclusiones.