French Immersion teachers are constantly frustrated by both the amount of and skill level of their students when using French in informal situations. My research attempts to answer: How can informal language be taught in the French Immersion context? Will teaching informal language in a systematic way in a Classroom Community of Practice improve the frequency of second language (L2) use by FI students in peer-to-peer interactions? Can we teach students to actually speak French – to spontaneously communicate in informal situations? Informal language is the language used in conversations and interactions beyond academic topics or class time such as conversations between students during group work, on field trips and during games and play time. Is it through pedagogical approaches or by developing a clearer understanding of the community of practice necessary for a successful language classroom? This study is an action research study conducted in Victoria, British Columbia with a team of 5 teachers, including the researcher as co-participant. Grounded theory was used to analyze the findings and the themes of ‘spaces’ are presented using creative nonfiction to recount the participants’ stories. The study concludes that it is the importance of the teacher as member of both the classroom community and as member of a community of educators that is critical to success. / Graduate

v anglickém jazyce "The language of Spanish Insults" The objective of the present paper was to explore, as the title indicates, the rich variety of the Spanish insults. We centered mainly on the comparison of the Spanish insults to the Czech insults and observed the diferences and specific characteristics of Spanish insults. We began the first part with the definition of formal and informal language and its sociolects, because we believe that it helps to understand the properties of the insults, since they have many common characteristics with the sociolects. Afterwards, we tried to describe the historical and cultural backgrounds, because due to different evolutions in each country, the habits to use insults and curses are different, especially concerning the curses, which are still very common in Spain. In Czech Republic the curses fell into oblivion during the last century, while the people were becoming more atheistic. The role of taboo is also very important, because in each society, taboo is what's influencing the usage and the importance of every insult. Neverthless, the insults don't serve only for attacking somebody or to show disappointment, but they also have other functions, such as identifying with the members of the group or to address someone in a friendly way. In the practical part,...

This is a qualitative research that draws Gee‟s Discourse analysis to understand how learners communicate their mathematical reasoning in a multilingual classroom in South Africa. The study involved a Grade 11 class of 25 learners in a township school East of Johannesburg. The research method used was a case study. Data was collected using classroom observations, and document analysis. The study has shown that learners communicate their mathematics reasoning up to a certain level. The way learners communicated their mathematical reasoning depended on the activities that were given by the textbook being used in the classroom, and the questions which the teacher asked during the lessons. From the findings of the study, recommendations were made: the assessment of how learners communicate their mathematical reasoning should have a basis, say the curriculum. If the curriculum states the level of mathematical reasoning which the learners at Grade 11 must reach, then the teacher will have to probe the learners for higher reasoning; mathematics classroom textbooks should be designed to enable learners communicate their mathematical reasoning. The teacher should ask learners questions that require learners to communicate their mathematical reasoning.

Denna studie berör lärares uppfattningar om nyanlända elevers matematiska svårigheter i årskurs 1–3. Flera nyanlända elever börjar i den svenska skolan, vissa av dem har skolbakgrund och vissa saknar det. Oavsett vilket är det skolans och lärarens plikt att handleda och stötta eleverna i deras studier. Tidigare forskning visar att de nyanlända eleverna ofta presterar sämre än andra elever i matematikundervisningen, speciellt när de stöter på textbaserade uppgifter. Det har framkommit tydligt att de nyanlända elevernas matematiska svårigheter uppstår på grund av att de saknar det svenska språket. I denna studie kommer det att presenteras vilka svårigheter några lärare upplever att nyanlända elever har i matematikundervisning och på vilket sätt lärarna stödjer dessa elever i matematikundervisningen. Denna studie är en kvalitativ studie där semistrukturerade intervjuer har utförts för att besvara forskningsfrågorna. Tre matematiklärare och tre SvA-lärare har deltagit och bidragit med sina tankar och resonerat kring studiens valda problemområde. Studien tar avstamp från det interkulturella perspektivet. Det framkommer i resultatet från de sex respondenterna att språket spelar en stor roll för de nyanlända elevernas lärande i ämnet matematik. I resultatet framkommer att lärarna hade liknande resonemang och tankar kring hur de ska uttala sig vid genomgångar och tydliggöra olika matematiska begrepp, termer och symboler. Studiens slutsats är att användning av studiehandledning, modersmål samt formellt och informellt språk är olika sätt att underlätta för nyanlända elever i matematikundervisningen. Vidare framkom att de modersmål som de nyanlända eleverna har kan utnyttjas för att öka elevernas förståelse för begrepp, termer och symboler i matematikundervisningen. Detta betyder att språket kan spela en stor roll i de nyanlända elevernas kunskapsutveckling. / This study deals with teachers’ views of mathematical difficulties for newly arrived students in Grades 1-3. Several newly arrived students have started in the Swedish schools, some of them have a school background and some do not. Either way, it is the duty of the school and the teacher to manage and support the students in their education. Previous research show that newly arrived pupils often perform worse than other pupils in mathematics education, especially when the instruction relies on text-based assignments. It has become clear that the newly arrived pupils’ mathematical difficulties arise partly because they lack the Swedish language. This study will present what difficulties some teachers of newly arrived students have in mathematics instruction and in what way they support newly arrived students in their mathematics teaching. This study is a qualitative study where semi-structured interviews have been done to answer the research questions. Three mathematics teachers and three Swedish as second language teachers have participated and contributed with their thoughts and reasoned about the study's chosen problem. The study has taken off from the intercultural perspective. The results from the six respondents clearly show that language plays a significant role in the newly arrived students' learning abilities in mathematics. The result shows that the teachers had similar thoughts and opinions about how they should express themselves during lectures and how to clarify different mathematical concepts, terms and symbols. The study's conclusion is that study guidance, mother tongue as well as formal and informal language is strategies to advance mathematics teaching for the newly arrived students. In addition, it was found that the native languages that the newly arrived students have can be appointed to increase the students' understanding of concepts, terms and symbols in mathematics education. This means that language plays an important role in the newly arrived students' development of knowledge.

Thesis (M. Sc. (Computer Science)) --University of Limpopo, 2019 / A Text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system is a software system that receives text as input and produces speech as output. A TTS synthesis system can be used for, amongst others, language learning, and reading out text for people living with different disabilities, i.e., physically challenged, visually impaired, etc., by native and non-native speakers of the target language. Most people relate easily to a second language spoken by a non-native speaker they share a native language with. Most online English TTS synthesis systems are usually developed using native speakers of English. This research study focuses on developing accented English synthetic voices as spoken by non-native speakers in the Limpopo province of South Africa. The Modular Architecture for Research on speech sYnthesis (MARY) TTS engine is used in developing the synthetic voices. The Hidden Markov Model (HMM) method was used to train the synthetic voices. Secondary training text corpus is used to develop the training speech corpus by recording six speakers reading the text corpus. The quality of developed synthetic voices is measured in terms of their intelligibility, similarity and naturalness using a listening test. The results in the research study are classified based on evaluators’ occupation and gender and the overall results. The subjective listening test indicates that the developed synthetic voices have a high level of acceptance in terms of similarity and intelligibility. A speech analysis software is used to compare the recorded synthesised speech and the human recordings. There is no significant difference in the voice pitch of the speakers and the synthetic voices except for one synthetic voice.

In recent years, Facebook has become a tool for practicing English. Language educators have been trying to integrate the social context of a community of practice into formal teaching, as a complement to classroom-based learning. However, social media platforms are used independently outside of the school context. For example, many English-language learners use the application Facebook Groups to choose a community of practice that shares the same purpose of language learning. With the aim of contributing to the understanding of English-language learners’ independent use of Facebook, this paper seeks to explore their online practices through non-participant observation and a qualitative analysis of the content shared and commented on the group wall. 858 posts (and related comments) shared by the members of an English language-learning group, open to the public, were analysed with the purpose of finding out which aspects of foreign language learning seem to be particularly relevant for the group and which of the four basic language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) are they trying to develop. Another important aspect is whether the interactions in the group are conducted in English as expected. The results show that reading skills tend to be promoted to a greater extent than the other skills. It was then observed that the group members use the English language consistently, with very few exceptions. In general, therefore, this study shows that the Facebook Groups contribution to learning English through participation in an English-language learning community such as the one observed here is rather limited and unbalanced.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-04T18:27:59Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Beatriz Bereche Servilga 3.pdf: 887734 bytes, checksum: ea81c0513ecdf22c0835a82e352619c4 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005-10-20 / Many researchers have been investigating the linguistic maturity on the communication process; they established that the conversion from informal language code to formal occurs in the beginning of adolescence. On this period, the language presents it-self, adequate to many communication situations; the language construction will be based on the listener, the subject, the objective, and the environment. The mature language presents several structural formats to express the same communication intention. Third grade elementary school students are able to identify an inadequate linguistic structure, although they are not able to correct it. Students will be able to detect and correct inadequate linguistic structures on sixth grade second middle school. The aim of this research was to compare the oral speech with written production of the students. The subjects of this research were, thirteen students of the fifth grade of fundamental education of a private school. Each student made two productions: one oral (recorded and transcribed) and another one written, both productions based on two different pictures. These productions were analyzed in order to investigate syntactic structure, cohesive elements, and the linguistic structure. Both, oral and written productions, made by boys and grils, were less than what was expected: The results show that girls written productions are longer than boys written productions. However, boys oral productions are longer than girls oral productions. On oral productions, boys (63,08%) and girls (65,48%) prioritize the use of coordination. On written production boys (40,80%) and girls (66,07%) presented a predilection for coordination use; This result was beneath expected for the school level. According to the syntactic complexity, oral and written productions are classified on level one; this level is present in the production of both groups; mainly in the girls group (55,5% written production and 66,6% oral production). On the boys group, half presented level one oral productions, and 25% presented level one written productions. From the boys group half presented level two written productions. Regarding cohesive elements and syntactic analyses, only coordinate and subordinate conjunctions were present; the use of coordinate conjunctions was more frequent. This performance can be explained with some hypotheses: these students were in a transition phase; few speech strategies were taught in school; parents and school provide few stimulation during the oral and written language development. / Muitos pesquisadores t?m investigado a maturidade ling??stica no processo de comunica??o e verificaram que a transi??o do c?digo de linguagem informal para o formal ocorre no in?cio da adolesc?ncia. Neste per?odo a linguagem apresenta-se adequada ?s diferentes situa??es de comunica??o e a constru??o do discurso depende do ouvinte, do t?pico, do objetivo e do ambiente. A linguagem matura apresenta diferentes formas estruturais para expressar uma mesma inten??o comunicativa.O estudante do terceiro grau do ensino fundamental j? ? capaz de identificar uma linguagem n?o adequada embora n?o possa ainda corrigi-la, o que somente ocorrer? a partir da sexta s?rie. Visando conhecer o est?gio de maturidade ling??stica do adolescente, este trabalho teve como objetivo descrever o discurso oral e o discurso escrito dos estudantes do ensino fundamental. Foram sujeitos da pesquisa treze estudantes que cursavam a 5? s?rie de uma escola particular. O material analisado foi constitu?do de uma produ??o oral, gravada e transcrita, e uma produ??o escrita, obtidas a partir de figuras. Na an?lise dessas produ??es foram consideradas a estrutura sint?tica, os elementos coesivos e a estrutura do discurso. De acordo com os resultados, observou-se que a produ??o escrita das meninas apresentou uma extens?o maior que a dos meninos. J? na comunica??o oral, o discurso dos meninos foi mais longo. No discurso oral, as meninas priorizaram o uso da coordena??o (65,48%) assim como os meninos (63,08%). A elabora??o escrita, tanto dos meninos (40,80% ) como das meninas (66,07%) foi constru?da com predomin?ncia de uso de coordena??o, sendo significante esta concentra??o, para os dois grupos, o que est? aqu?m do esperado para o n?vel de escolaridade dos estudantes. Segundo a complexidade sint?tica, as produ??es analisadas, tanto oral quanto escrita, podem ser classificadas no n?vel 1, n?vel esse encontrado no discurso da maioria dos estudantes de ambos os grupos,principalmente no grupo das meninas ( 55,5% no discurso escrito e 66,6% no discurso oral). Metade dos sujeitos do sexo masculino apresentou esse n?vel no discurso oral e 25% no discurso escrito. A metade desse grupo apresentou n?vel 2 no discurso escrito. Quanto aos elementos coesivos, assim como na an?lise sint?tica, houve o uso de conjun??es somente coordenativas e subordinativas, com predomin?ncia das primeiras. Este desempenho pode ser explicado por algumas hip?teses, como a fase de transi??o em que os estudantes se encontram, falta de estrat?gias fornecidas pela escola para a produ??o de discursos e falta de estimula??o tanto dos pais quanto da escola durante a fase do desenvolvimento da linguagem e processo de aprendizagem da leitura-escrita.

Cette recherche a pour objet l’usage du numérique dans les apprentissages des lycéens-adolescents en contexte socioéducatif malien. Elle vise à comprendre comment ceux-ci utilisent les outils du numérique dans la réalisation de leurs activités didactiques en classe de français langue seconde et hors la classe et s’interroge sur le rôle de ces outils dans l’apprentissage informel des langues inscrites à leur programme scolaire. Une enquête ethnographique a permis d’observer un échantillon de lycéens-adolescents, repartis entre quatre lycées de Bamako, dans les différents espaces sociaux qu’ils parcourent au quotidien : le lycée et ses différents espaces, le domicile familial et le « grin ». Le « grin » est un vocable du bambara (première langue nationale du Mali) qui désigne à la fois un groupe d’amis du même âge et les différents lieux où ceux-ci se rencontrent. La recherche s’appuie sur des entretiens, des journaux de bord et l’observation de situations d’utilisation d’outils numériques pendant laquelle des photographies ont été prises afin de saisir comment chaque lycéen-adolescent bricole des ressources pour ses apprentissages à partir des outils dont il dispose dans chaque contexte. Le positionnement épistémologique relève de la pensée par cas, qui a permis de reconstruire des portraits de lycéens à partir de situations d’utilisation d’outils numériques. Chaque situation décrite est appréhendée comme inscrite dans une configuration sociale particulière où sont en jeu des identités, des relations d’interdépendance afin de rendre compte de quelles façons l’actualisation des usages se fait selon les lieux. Le téléphone ayant été identifié dès le seuil de l’enquête comme le principal outil de médiation des pratiques numériques des lycéens évoluant dans le contexte socioéconomique malien, il s’est aussi agi d’envisager son importation en classe en tant que phénomène scolaire, et donc d’interroger la forme scolaire de la relation pédagogique à la lumière des usages identifiés auprès des lycéens lors de l’interaction didactique. Ainsi, des entretiens ont été conduits auprès d’enseignants de français suivis pendant leurs cours et de responsables de l’administration scolaire afin de déterminer comment ces derniers s’emparent de ce phénomène, quelles significations ils lui attribuent et quelles en sont les incidences sur les rapports au pouvoir et au savoir qui sont au fondement de la relation éducative scolaire. Ces entretiens ont été analysés dans la perspective de l’Analyse Critique du Discours. Les résultats mettent au jour des tensions qui se nouent autour des usages pédagogiques du téléphone entre d’une part l’enseignant et ses élèves et d’autre part l’enseignant et l’administration scolaire. A la lumière de ces tensions, des pistes pédagogiques sont proposées afin que les enseignants puissent se réapproprier les outils numériques nomades importés en classe par les élèves. / This study focuses on the use of digital technology for learning amongst adolescent high school students in the Malian socio-educational context. It seeks to understand how these learners use digital tools to carry out pedagogical activities inside and outside French as a second language classes and it questions the role of the tools in informal language learning within their school curriculum. An ethnographic study enabled us to observe a sample of adolescent high school students in four Bamako high schools, in the different social spaces in which they move on a daily basis: the high school and its different spaces, the family home and the “grin”. The “grin” is a word from Bambara (first national language in Mali), which describes both a group of friends of the same age and the different places where they meet one another. The study uses interviews, logbooks and the observation of situations in which digital tools are used, during which photographs were taken, to capture how each adolescent high school student puts together learning resources from the tools available in each context. The epistemological position comes from case thinking, which enabled us to reconstruct portraits of high school students from the situations in which they use digital tools. Each situation described is seen as being set in a particular social configuration where identities and interdependence relations are at stake. Thus we report how uses evolve according to place.The mobile phone was identified at the start of the study as being the main mediation tool for high school students’ digital practices in the Malian socio-economic context. The goal then was to consider how the mobile phone was imported into the classroom as a school phenomenon and thus to examine the school form of the pedagogical relationship, in light of the high school students’ uses identified during didactic interaction. Thus, interviews were conducted with French teachers during their lessons and with senior school authority members in order to determine how they appropriate this phenomenon, what significance they attribute to it and how it impacts on the power and knowledge relations, which are at the foundation of the school educational relationship. The interviews were analysed from the standpoint of Critical Discourse Analysis. The results reveal tensions which emerge around the pedagogical uses of the mobile phone between, on the one hand, the teacher and his/her students and, on the other hand, between the teacher and the school authority. In view of these tensions, pedagogical suggestions are offered so that teachers can re-appropriate mobile digital tools brought into the classroom by students.