Digital storytelling, the practice of combining personal narrative with multimedia to produce a short autobiographical movie, continues to expand its creative uses in classrooms around the world. However, teaching the actual story process within digital storytelling presents several challenges for teachers as it demands a combination of creative writing, basic film conventions, visual and media literacy, as well as the technical facility with the technology. Digital storytelling presents a unique opportunity for students to acquire much more than new technology skills. It enables them to represent their voices in a manner rarely addressed by state and district curriculum while practicing the digital literacy skills that will be important to their 21st century futures. Storytelling and multimedia production have rarely been taught, if at all, while the development of students narrative skills has rested on the shoulders of English teachers. This pedagogical disconnect between story literacy and technology literacy is at the heart of the multiliteracies debate. Elliot W. Eisner writes in The Kind of Schools We Need, What we ought to be developing in our schools is not simply a narrow array of literacy skills limited to a restrictive range of meaning systems, but a spectrum of literacies...We need a conception of multiple literacies to serve as a vision of what our schools should seek to achieve (2002). An effective implementation of digital storytelling in schools is a model of the metaliteracy Eisner suggests.

This thesis poses the following question: are post-apartheid racialised identities constructed relationally? More specifically, this thesis investigates the co-construction of black and white racialised identities within the realm of South African public discourse. To this aim, it draws on editorials and letters to the editor which appeared in the City Press and the Sunday Times newspapers from 1994 to 2011. Informed by Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, the analysis focuses on the relationality between blackness and whiteness through a consideration of two major discourses. These discourses, labelled Bold New Blackness and Enduring Whiteness, are presented as templates for post-apartheid racialised identity construction. The analysis is comprised of three interrelated parts. The first part demonstrates that the respective templates construct racialised identities in terms of oppositional views regarding the apartheid past and the emerging post-apartheid future. Nevertheless, as each template contains references to the racialised other, it is suggested that racialised identity is co-constructed independently within each template. The second part shows that the way in which blacks and whites are positioned is constructed through constant reference across the two oppositional templates. In turn, it is suggested that racialised identity is co-constructed interdependently between the templates via an endless cycle of opposition. The third part delves into black and white subjectivities, revealing that the templates are neither wholly independent nor wholly interdependent. Instead, it is suggested that racialised identity is co-constructed through a set of entanglements, disentanglements and re-entanglements between blackness and whiteness. In this way, the thesis elucidates the post-apartheid tensions and complexities that exist around black and white racialised identity co-construction. Moreover, given that the vast majority of existing studies have presented black and white racialised identities as independent constructions to be examined separately within the respective fields of blackness and whiteness studies, this thesis highlights the fruitfulness of simultaneously utilising these otherwise disparate fields of study.

A post-structuralist framework (Foucault, 1976; Weedon, 1997) is used to explore language acquisition and identity construction in the life histories of four multilingual white South African men, who became fluent in the African language of isiXhosa in the racially-divided world of Apartheid South Africa, at a time when law and policy made fluency in an African language unusual for whites. Theories used within the 'social turn' in Second Language Acquisition (Block, 2003; Norton, 2000), as well as the social learning theory of Lave and Wenger (1991), support an exploration of how the men acquired this language on the farms in the Eastern Cape where they spent their early years. The identity implications of the men's multilingualism are examined using post-colonial studies of race, 'whiteness' and hybridity (Bhabha, 1994; Frankenberg, 1993; Hall, 1992a). The study was undertaken using Life History methodology (Hatch & Wisniewsky, 1995) and biographic interviewing methods developed within the Social Sciences (Wengraf, 2001). Poststructuralist discourse analysis (Wetherell & Potter, 1992), together with aspects of narrative analysis (Brockmeier, 2000), were used to analyse the data. The study contributes to research into naturalistic language acquisition, using theories from the 'social turn', and analysing a bilingual context in which language, power, race and identity interact in unique ways. The findings endorse the importance of a post-structuralist framing for the Communities of Practice model (Wenger, 1998), and show that participation in target-language communities requires investment by learners in identities which ameliorate the inequities of power relations. The study shows that isiXhosa can become linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1991) for white South Africans, depending on context and the isiXhosa register they use. It demonstrates that Apartheid discourse ascribes to the men an identity which is indisputably white, but that early experiences shared with isiXhosa-speakers shape their lives and form a potentially antihegemonic facet of their identities.

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The aim of this thesis is to examine family wineries’ wine tourism diversification decisions in terms of wine producers’ self-constructions. The focus lies on understanding which motives drive family businesses’ decisions to engage in diversification. A case study approach is adopted, using the Italian wine region of Langhe in Piedmont. The dominant debates within the current literature have primarily concentrated on the economic-social dichotomy in relation to diversification decisions. It has been argued that diversification decisions are predominantly economically driven, highlighting the importance of profit maximisation and risk reduction. This thesis highlights the limitations of the economic-social dichotomy approach and argues for the need to take the social context into account when examining the decision-making process. An interpretivist approach to research is adopted in order to extend current understandings of family businesses and their motives underlying diversification decisions. In line with the interpretivist perspective, this thesis uses discourse analysis (DA) as a methodological approach for analysing and interpreting wine producers’ accounts. The findings reveal that by engaging in discourse about wine tourism diversification, wine producers construct a distinctive, coherent and desired sense of self, which in turn influences family wineries’ decisions to diversification. In this instance, the concept of identity formation plays a central role in explaining family wineries’ motives for diversification. Linking wine producers’ motives for diversification to their self-constructions provides a new insight into how family businesses engage in decision-making. Wine producers’ discourses reveal that their decision-making processes are inextricably linked to sustaining a positive sense of self. Decisions are not only taken to achieve economic goals, but are likely to be influenced by deeper motives, notably wine producers’ identity constructions. The main contribution of this thesis is that it advances understanding of family businesses’ decisionmaking processes by developing a multi-layered conceptual framework to go beyond the economic-social dichotomy in order to reveal wine producers’ semi-conscious and unconscious motives for diversification.

AN ABSTRACT ON THE THESIS OF TOMMIE LEE WILLIAMS, for the Master of Arts Degree in APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND TEACHING ENGLISH TO SPEAKERS OF OTHER LANGUAGES, presented on NOVEMBER, 5, 2013 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION ON FACEBOOK MAJOR PROFESSORS: Dr. Laura Halliday and Dr. Janet Fuller In contrast to early utopian theories about life on the internet, research revealed that the internet does not exist in a gender, class and racial vacuum (Kendall, 1998, Zhao et al, 2005). Identity issues that exist in the real world are mirrored in online presentations (Turkle, 1995). A previous study on Ethno Racial displays on Facebook examined whether different ethnic and racial groups used different identity strategies to construct their online identities on the Facebook social media network. The findings from that study and others were instrumental in the development of this research. The study conducted Face book profile page analyses for over 150 students from five distinct ethnic groups, African American, Vietnamese, White American, Hispanics and Indian. Their methodology included a coding system and instrument that revealed that the five ethnic racial groups did employ different strategies in the construction of their profile page identities. The object of this study is to exclusively study African American identity construction on Facebook. The goal of the study is to add to scholarship and body of research in this area. The research involves analyzing the Facebook profile of twenty former employees of a southwestern call center that closed the same year Facebook was founded. The employees vowed to keep in touch with each other through the new social network. A decision to employ a multiple methodology approach to the study was primarily driven by the small sample size and complicated nature of the information. A quantitative study was conducted first followed by a qualitative case study of the individual profile pages of four of the subject. The choice of the case studies selected was driven by results of the quantitative analysis which revealed outlier categories and cases. The findings from the two studies were then calculated, analyzed and reported. The early report of the quantitative study revealed that in comparative analysis that there were no significant differences between the two independent variables labeled Ethnicgroup White and Ethnic group African American. The secondary report from another statistical analysis discovered differences as a result of outliers in the data. The identified outliers were used to choose the subjects for the qualitative study. The results from the qualitative case study revealed that the African Americans in the study used different identity construction strategies. The strategies, however, did not show congruence on racial or ethnic lines. The data suggested the subjects chose identities that adhered to established socio-cultural archetypes rather than exclusively afro centric models. Triangulation of the data also suggested support for the original quantitative report of no significance.

Forming an identity or a national identity is a long process every country in the world has gone through. The purpose of this research paper is to investigate how the Finnish identity has been portrayed in media between the years 1836-1893. The aim is to uncover how the Finnish epic, the Kalevala has influenced the creation of a Finnish national identity, which will be done through discourse analysis of five newspaper articles published over a timespan of about 60 years. The results showed that there were some changes over time in how the Finnish are portrayed in relation to the Kalevala. However, this difference was not applicable to all the studied categories. In conclusion, identity is something individual and through the individuality a common identity could be formed in Finland in the 1800s.

This study aims to discover how Korean English language teachers navigate and negotiate their professional identities as they were immersed in the U.S. TESOL program. They would ultimately end up teaching English in Korea upon completing the U.S. TESOL program. For this purpose, this study examines the following research questions: (1) How did their experiences influence their teaching identities? (2) How do they come to reconstruct their teachers’ identities as a result of being matriculated in the U.S. Ph.D. TESOL program? And (3) how would they imagine their professional identities as Korean NNES professionals for their future teaching in Korea? In order to explore Korean NNES professionals’ identity changes, I used critical theory, as an epistemological consideration and narrative inquiry, as a methodological tool. I integrated the qualitative methods for the substantial investigation of different aspects of language ideologies through multiple sources: (1) casual conversation, (2) autobiographical accounts, (3) virtual discussions through blog entries, (4) in-depth interviews, and (5) E-interviews. I used a hermeneutic process to analyze data of the Korean NNES professionals’ identity constructions. From K-12 through graduate program, English was one of the gatekeepers and a form of capital for the participants in Korean society. The implementation of English-only classes led the participants, as NNES professionals, to be marginalized from English language education in Korea due to their lack of proficiency in English. The participants ended up enrolling in a U.S. TESOL program to gain U.S. degrees, to increase their oral proficiency of English, and to understand the theoretical background of TESOL. As the participants engaged in community of practice, they became members in an academic community, transformed their perceptions of English and of their teaching, and had constructed their hybrid teacher identities. The findings provide insights into experiences that would affect NNES professionals’ identity construction, paying attention to processes of ideological influences upon their beliefs and attitudes toward English language education in Korea and in the U.S. This study has implications for restructuring curricula in TESOL programs because its findings inform educators about NNES teacher candidates’ experiences and perspectives on English language education. / Gloria Park, Ph.D. Jeannine M. Fontaine, Ph.D. Lisya Seloni, Ph.D.

The following research and subsequent study look at identity construction and intergroup differences during computer-mediated communication (CMC) across two platforms with varying degrees of anonymity: Twitter and Yik Yak. A review of research conducted mainly within the framework of the social identity model of deindividuation (SIDE) demonstrates that, counter to popular beliefs heralding the individual freedoms of anonymity, anonymous environments act to strengthen salient social identities and perpetuate group norms. In a medium with such variability and flexibility, drawing comparisons across platforms based solely on content can lead to error. In an attempt to circumvent this difficultly, a linguistics analysis of function words was conducted in each condition. Statistical tests point to changes in usage frequencies of i, impersonal pronouns, you, and they as distinctive between the individuating environment of Twitter and anonymous Yik Yak, while an almost identical underlying proportional framework seen in both platforms brings new context to understanding the role of societal norms in language construction.

The purpose of this study was to investigate constructions of choir identity among high school choir students in the United States public school classroom setting. The research questions were (a) what are the processes involved in construction of choir identity and (b) how are the processes related to the group identity of the choir. The data were collected through participant observations in one selected choir classroom and semi-structured interviews with students from the choir class. The results included six processes of identity construction as well as identification of the ways in which each process was related to the choir group’s identity. The processes and their links to the overall choir group identity provided further insight into the ways in which high school choir students construct their identities, and they also supported methods of teaching commonly used in high school choir settings.