Miscue analysis and eye movement analysis are used to explore the reading process of first-grade beginning readers as they use pictures and print in a picture book designed for instructional purposes. Eye Movement Miscue Analysis (EMMA) is also used as a tool to gain insights into the reading strategies of the beginning readers in this study. Miscue analysis provides a psycholinguistic analysis of' unexpected oral responses in the oral texts that readers produce. Eye movement analysis provides an analysis of the visual fixations of readers in pictures and the print. Both forms of analysis are used to examine the relationship between the oral and visual aspects of the reading process. This dissertation focuses on first-grade beginning readers' use of pictures and print as they read. Patterns of eye movements relative to picture use, print use and the relationship between the two media are described, analyzed and compared. Results of the analyses are discussed in relation to existing literature within the theoretical framework that informed the study. Major findings include that beginning readers are aware that reading is a complex process of making meaning from print and pictures; they exhibit many of the same reading strategies as older more experienced readers; and they sample pictures in ways that are purposeful and know where to look for useful information. Implications for authors, illustrators, publishers, educators and reading theorists are discussed and areas for further research are delineated.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine and describe complex academic tasks undertaken by adolescents and the classroom conditions supporting them. The setting for this study was one southwestern university's Summer Institute for Writing and Thinking Across the Curriculum. With students and teachers working in collaboration, the Institute intended to provide high school students with opportunities to utilize the writing process as a tool for thinking and as a means to increase their writing proficiency. Teaching writing in classroom settings has been found to be particularly challenging, and further, sometimes the complexity of writing tasks have been sacrificed for the sake of maintaining classroom order. The Institute seemed a likely environment for engaging in complex cognitive processing and thus for examining complex tasks and noting the conditions that supported them. Participant observation and interviews were the data collection methods employed. Results of the study indicated that students engaged in complex cognitive processing, gained more control over their writing and thinking processes, and produced a variety of complex individual and group products. The Institute assessment, consisting of writing samples obtained on the first and last days of the three-week Institute, demonstrated growth in writing proficiency for 74% of the students. The features that supported the successful accomplishment of complex academic work included (a) well-designed, open-ended assignments that were scaffolded within and across tasks, (b) collaboration of students and teachers in small writing groups, (c) establishment and nurturance of writing communities, (d) the sharing of leadership, (e) availability of multiple resources, (f) instructional strategies that protected a non-threatening, non-judgmental environment, and (g) instructional strategies that fostered complex thinking and problem solving. The writing community played a key role in fostering complex cognitive processing, maintaining order, and connecting students to their academic work.

This study examines language and education policy in colonial as well as independent Mozambique. Mozambican people struggled for 500 years to free themselves from the grip of Portuguese colonialism. Independence came in 1975. A decade of intense and determined Struggle for Liberation stopped the Portuguese from further destroying the country. The review of the literature provides key concepts and principles in language planning and policy. Then the study examines language and education in selected Sub-Saharan African countries. The ideas and opinions of African writers are brought into the discussion. The main study starts by looking at language and education in colonial Mozambique starting in 1940. This period is important in the educational history of Mozambique. It was during this time that the Missionary Statute, an agreement between the Government of Portugal and the Catholic church, came into being. This agreement entrusted Portuguese Catholic missionaries with education in the colonies. Missionary education viewed Mozambican languages, culture and all things African as deficits. Missionary schools were places of unlearning all things that instilled pride in the Mozambican people. When the War of Liberation broke out in 1964, Mozambicans established their own schools in the areas liberated from the Portuguese. These schools instilled in the students the much needed Mozambican character, and personality. They became the model for independent Mozambique's New System of Education. Mozambique is a nation of many languages. During the colonial period the Portuguese proscribed the use of these languages in education. Consequently, many languages in Mozambique today have not been studied academically. This study uses historical research methods to gather and analyze data, and records the struggles of the Mozambican people as they work toward reconstructing their beautiful country. The study concludes that communities and government be involved in promoting all Mozambican languages. While this study is critical of Portuguese colonialism, it is not an attack on the Portuguese language. The paradox is that while Portuguese is the colonial language, it is also the language of liberation for Mozambicans. It is in this sense that the Portuguese language was declared the language of unity, instruction, and government.

In this study I examined my thinking and professional growth through the use of reflective journals. The study documents my understanding and use of reflective journals as a tool for learning and thinking over time. I examined my sixteen reflective journals in an effort to make sense out of what it means to be a teacher. In this study I was guided by the question: What are the ways in which I reflect and think about myself as a teacher and my teaching, as evidenced through my journals. Analysis focused in four areas. The first was on the content of the journals. This included my topics, issues, and questions which I wrote about. A second analysis examined how I used my journals to think and reflect. A third component explored how I reflected on my beliefs and practices. The fourth area identified what supported and interfered with my thinking and reflecting. Through this study I examined my learning process and the ways that I use journals to support my thinking and professional development. My findings inform other teachers to consider reflective practice and supports the use of narrative for research. This study provides implications for teacher educators and professional developers to consider participants' prior knowledge and current beliefs when implementing professional programs. Participants need to be recognized as part of the process when involved in professional development.

The purpose of this study is to create rich, descriptive portraits of the identity perceptions of three female, Mexican American adolescents, as revealed through selected texts of multiple sign systems. These portraits support the concept that identity is a continuum which is complex, dynamic, and multi-faceted. The identities of the participants encompass elements which were derived from each participant individually as well as from their relationships of connection to or opposition of others. Discussing concepts of identity with the participants exemplified that one's identity is a process which is continually evolving and transforming. This transformative process involves experiences of tension, observation, reflection, and action which encourage an individual to adjust, add, or discard particular elements of one's identity. Each participant's integrated self identity entails their individual and relational elements as well as the changes made through tension, observation, reflection, and action. The ethnographic case study design of the research facilitated an exploration of the complexities of constructing one's identity as an adolescent who must reconcile aspects of culture, gender, and class. Data collection methods included in-depth interviews, participant and non-participant observation in various data collection sites including school, home, and work, and the gathering of written, visual, and auditory artifacts such as poetry, personal writing, photographs, drawings, and music. Data were analyzed inductively and compared, and case studies reported the findings. The portraits of these three young women illustrate the importance of providing our adolescent students with classroom opportunities to explore and construct their identities through texts of multiple sign systems. By expanding the concept of text to include multiple ways of knowing, educators invite students to express themselves through a variety of sign systems with which they may feel more comfortable. They may use "conventional" literacy, such as reading and writing, and "unconventional" literacies, including music, art, and movement. The portraits of the three female adolescents emphasize the necessity to embrace and seek to understand the multiple identities of our adolescent students, rather than judging them on assumptions made based on their race, class, or gender.

The purpose of this case study is to examine the nature and uses of multiple literacies in an Opera Project as experienced by school children who attended a bilingual first grade in a culturally and linguistically diverse urban school district in the American Southwest. Thirty-one young children created and produced an opera in collaboration with an artist-in-residence, university researcher, apprentice teacher, and their classroom teacher and parents. Significant to this research is a focus on the perspectives of the participants about this in-school multiple literacy experience as well as the sociocultural contexts that influenced their experience. In addition, this study provides evidence of the processes, types, and uses of multiple literacies in young children's opera. By working at the nexus of language arts/literacy and music/arts education, this research builds on the existing theories and practices in these disciplines and informs both. A review of the literature points to the gap between a reductionist, deficit-driven paradigm in schools and children's natural learning proclivities. Culturally and linguistically diverse children are considered as less capable and further marginalized by school practices that emphasize decontextualized and verbocentric forms of literacy. This study uses ethnographic techniques and an arts-based approach to educational research to examine 24 one hour sessions of an Opera Project. New understandings were rendered in an opera libretto, constructed in the vernacular of the participants with the personal signature of the researcher. This alternative genre contributes to changing the way we think about language arts. A reconceptualization of language arts/literacy that both includes and goes beyond a skills-with-print definition requires a transformation in the way educators think about meaning making and curriculum, intelligence and knowledge, perception and expression. It requires an unpacking of one's assumptions and perspectives about what it means to have an experience and to live a literate life. For this process to be sustained, a wider audience must have access to young children's opera as (1) semiotic apprenticeship, (2) inquiry, (3) synergy, (4) an awakening to multiple literacies, and (5) survival. In this way art as conscious life is literacy for life's sake. Many ways is the way.

This study investigated the efficacy of using e-mail in the form of a class mailing list to help ESL students practice and develop academic writing skills beyond the spatial and time limits of a writing classroom. In this study, e-mail writing tasks of different purposes, audiences and task structures were integrated into a process-oriented freshman ESL writing class. The subjects of this study were 22 ESL students in a freshman composition course. In an ex post facto design (Hatch & Lazaraton, 1991), this study involved within-subject repeated measures of data collected from different e-mail writing tasks over the course of a semester. Data analysis included (1) computerized text analysis focusing on the linguistic and textual features of written discourses at the levels of syntactic complexity, lexical richness, textual cohesion and grammatical accuracy; (2) holistic and analytical assessments by ESL raters focusing on the overall rhetorical features and quality of writing. The results indicated that there were syntactic, lexical, textual and grammatical differences in ESL students' writing performance on e-mail writing tasks of different rhetorical purposes, and there was also variation between e-mail tasks involving an interactive audience and those involving an non-interactive audience, and between structured versus non-structured e-mail tasks. In particular, in e-mail tasks in which an interactive audience was present, students tended to produce texts that were linguistically more complex. Besides, students wrote with a higher level of syntactic and lexical complexity in the non-structured e-mail tasks than in the structured ones, indicating more sophisticated use of language when the student were given more freedom and control of the learning activities. The results also showed obvious tradeoff effects between linguistic complexity and accuracy, i.e. while students produced texts that were linguistically more complex, there was less attention to grammatical accuracy. Furthermore, the results suggested that motivation, attitude, and anxiety had some significant contributions to the variation in ESL students' writing performance while they composed in an electronic mode.

The purpose of this study was to explore how children in a third grade classroom came to understand the processes that helped them revalue themselves as learners. In addition, they identified the types of support structures that helped them revalue themselves as learners in an inquiry based curriculum. Qualitative research was determined to be the most suitable methodology for this study, given the research questions and their relationship to the engagements and the learning experiences in this classroom. The curricular framework dictated that the research design needed to include data that reflected the ongoing nature of learning as a process of inquiry. Data analysis was based on open coding and a method of constant comparison. Multiple data sources included daily field notes with anecdotal notes on significant events; a teacher journal of reflections; collected student responses, Sketch to Stretches, picture reflections, portfolios, and journal entries. Children described, defined, and redefined themselves as learners through the continuous building of reciprocal relationships with their peers and teacher, encouraging them to find their voice through action and reflection. Children identified the roles of their class participants, the connection they made in and across the curriculum, their personal and social inquiries, and the expectation of change, as the multiple structures that supported them in their learning. My purpose was to contribute insights into how students and teachers might better address the issue of curriculum for the purpose of allowing learners to be more self-reflective learners. Findings suggest that reflective thinking is a tool for growth as a learner and needs to be a continuous part of the curriculum. Sign systems need to be tools for expanding learning potentials so classrooms can be critical thinking communities. Learning is enhanced when relationships are reciprocal. A curriculum that emphasizes a problem-posing approach motivates students and encourages both students and teachers to engage in curricular decisions making curriculum dynamic.

The purpose of this research study is to analyze Colombian teachers' knowledge of literacy learning in Spanish and in English revealed in their narratives and in their practice through a teacher education program. The research questions addressed in this study aim to answer the following: (1) How do teachers in the literacy program perceive reading and writing as revealed through their personal literacy histories? (2) What knowledge of literacy learning in Spanish and in English do teachers in the literacy program reveal as presented in their self-selected classroom literacy project? (3) How is teachers' knowledge of literacy learning in Spanish and in English expressed in their practice? This study draws upon data collected during a year-long inquiry I conducted with public school teachers in Bogota, Colombia during March 1998 and April 1999. The 42 teachers who participated in this research project had an average of 10 years teaching. Their knowledge statements found in the data collected served as the unit of analysis from which six categories emerged. Additional information represented in classroom observation, interviews and videotapes was collected of three exemplar cases of elementary school teachers. The conclusions that I arrived at from the analysis of Colombian teachers' knowledge of literacy learning are the following: First, that writing and sharing the literacy histories contributed to transforming traditional pedagogical practices into innovative pedagogical practices of reading and writing. Second, the class sessions, readings, seminars attended, and the sharing of experiences with their peers permitted the generation of new knowledge on literacy learning by teachers. Third, the new knowledge of literacy learning generated by teachers was revealed in the innovations presented in their classroom literacy project. Finally, the conference on literacy contributed to exchanging knowledge and generating more questions for further investigation.

The purpose of this case study is to provide a working definition of effective language instruction consonant with the contemporary multicultural, university-level ESL classroom. Using a Grounded Theory methodology, it includes data from six months of teacher and student interviews, classroom observations, teacher evaluations, and questionnaires. Though attempts to categorize effective language instruction have been undertaken, previous taxonomies have been little more than altered models of teaching effectiveness from general education, offering little that is "new" or specific to the language teaching context. Furthermore, the shift from a teacher-centered to a student-centered classroom has not made great strides toward soliciting student input in the development of a contemporary definition of effectiveness. Thus, in approaching this working definition, I attempt to engage the fundamental principles of Critical Pedagogy to research by considering not only contemporary educational philosophy and the Communicative Approach to Language Teaching, but also students' needs and expectations based on their cultural and individual differences. Thus, the choice of pursuing a working definition rather than a definitive taxonomy emerges as a natural direction in the investigation. As it must be recognized that the microcontexts in the ESL classroom vary immensely in their makeup, the aim here is not to provide future second and foreign language teachers with a prescriptive formula, but rather a descriptive macroframework of domains which were abstracted and interpreted from the context of the ESL classroom. The qualitative, inductive case study approach used here enables teachers to identify elements derived from the organic data obtained in the classroom environment from its participants and apply it to their own situations. Thus, this framework can assist teachers in heightening their awareness and preparing them to participate effectively in a multicultural, university-level ESL classroom.