Typescript (photocopy) / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1980. / Bibliography: leaves 150-154. / Microfiche. / vi, 154 leaves, bound 29 cm

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 251-256). / Microfiche. / xvii, 256 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 230-240). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)-- University of Washington, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 270-281).

In this dissertation I attempt to examine “the experience of the perspective” of foreign students introduced into English classrooms in South Africa. I acknowledge the importance of focussing on the individual’s narrative, since it is “only through an unconscious synthetic activity of consciousness” that perspectives are connected together (Carspeken 1996:11), but, along with Freire, I believe that “generative themes” can only be investigated in “man-world relationships”. The researcher needs to examine the phenomenon in context of the world that it originated from, since “historical themes are never isolated , independent, disconnected or static” (Freire 1972: 73). In this dissertation I, therefore, carefully follow the classic phenomenological steps to analyse data from my respondents and then immediately contextualise it in term of literature about the learners background, the educational and political system in which they currently find themselves as well as general literature about the phenomenon of immigrants and learning of a second language. The premise underlying this research is the “taken-for-granted certainty” (Carspeken 1996:11) that there is something unique in the South African situation which results in foreign students experiencing the learning of English in a particular way within this context.

M.A. / This study wants to outline some of the errors made by the Motswana child when she/he communicates in English. I also want to look at the origin of the errors and how the errors affect cohesive writing and interpretation. This research also aims at making second language teachers aware of the influence a first language can have in the learning of a second language. Note: At school level, the student/child learns the language and does not acquire it and thus language learning skills or strategies should not be confused with language acquisition skills or strategies. Transfer has long been a controversial issue, bur recent studies support the view that crosslinguistic influences can have an important impact on second language learning. To elaborate on the above issue, the article, the pronoun and number will be looked at. I want to establish how much influence a learner's native language can have in making the learning of a new language easy or difficult. I want us to look at the following questions of which some will lead or develop into our hypotheses:- Will knowledge of the origin of errors eliminate or reduce the errors? Which errors will be eliminated and at what rate? Will the remedial lessons have an effect on the elimination or reduction of errors? Is the contrastive analysis method the best way to handle such a situation? To what extent do errors affect interpretation and connectivity? The study is conducted on the following language categories:- The pronoun (English vs Tswana) ; The article (English vs Tswana) ; Number (English vs Tswana) ; Cohesive writing (misconception/ambiguity)

Good writing is essential for business. Writing is evaluated using holistic and analytical assessment of writing samples.

Purpose of the project is to determine whether Merit Software program, "Write it right" could be effective in a whole class setting (using one computer) rather than in a computer lab. The further purpose was to identify if this strategy was more effective than the use of the traditional textbook method of grammar study in the ninth grade. Lesson plans and a software description are included.

For decades, the majority of educational research has been preoccupied with understanding as a product—as various “learning achievements” and “subject mastery” to be measured and subsequently represented as statistics or test scores. This preoccupation is also observed in the field of second language education, whose attention has focused on how the outcome of language acquisition can be improved at a curriculum or activity level. However, what is equally important, and yet largely underexplored, is understanding as a process: how understanding is achieved and facilitated in and through classroom interaction. To fill this research gap, this study respecifies understanding as a social and interactional phenomenon and investigates how it is enabled, managed, and restored in the adult ESL classroom in situ. Data comprise 27 hours of video- and audio-taped classroom interaction collected from two research sites serving adult ESL learners: an academic ESL program and a community-based ESL program located on the East Coast of the United States. Participants were two experienced teachers with over two decades of teaching experiences and 20 students with low to intermediate English proficiency. Data were analyzed within the conversation analytic framework. Findings include three teacher practices concerning understanding-in-interaction. First, teachers can facilitate students’ understanding of grammatical errors by an embodied repair practice that I called “finger syntax.” By counting syntactic elements on fingers on display, the teacher can scaffold learners’ understanding of the location of the error, the nature of the error, and even the method of repair. Finger syntax can be deployed to initiate learner self-repair or demonstrate other-corrections. Second, teachers can answer students’ language-related questions by doing more than answering or doing approximate answering. In attending to both the what and the why, doing more than answering helps learners develop a principled understanding of a grammatical item. Doing approximate answering, on the other hand, is shown to be less responsive to students’ understanding troubles. In the absence of an agreement of what an ambiguous question actually asks, the teacher’s response deviates from students’ learning concerns to varying degrees. Lastly, teachers can respond to trouble-laden learner contributions that result in a (potential) breach of intersubjectivity in a stepwise fashion. Specifically, their displays of understanding can be leveraged as a springboard for form-focused work, enabling a stepwise entry into linguistic feedback carefully aligned to meaning that a learner has struggled to articulate. Findings thus contribute to research on repair and corrections, on responses to learner questions, and on understanding-in-interaction in the context of the language classroom.

Thesis. 1976. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics. / Microfiche copy available in Archives and Humanities. / Bibliography: leaves 211-218. / Ph.D.