Este trabalho estuda a implantação do ensino de japonês nas escolas públicas do estado de São Paulo, através do Centro de Estudos de Línguas (CEL), cuja criação, em 1987, objetivava implantar o ensino de espanhol na rede pública paulista de ensino fundamental e médio, com interesses que visavam os acordos políticos entre os países latino-americanos e a intenção de estreitar as relações econômicas entre esses a partir da criação do Mercosul. Para a nossa pesquisa, investigamos documentos oficiais publicados pelo Estado como Decretos e Resoluções, como também fizemos entrevistas semiestruturadas com professores, diretores e funcionários que participaram no processo da implantação ocorrido em 1989. Para a nossa análise, baseamo-nos em estudos concernentes à Política Linguística e Planejamento Linguístico (CALVET, 2007; OLIVEIRA 2013; RICENTO, 2006; WRIGHT, 2007). / The purpose of this study is to analyze the implementation of japanese language teaching in public schools in the state of São Paulo, through The Foreign Language Study Center (Centro de Estudos de Línguas CEL, in portuguese), whose creation in 1987 aimed to implant the teaching of spanish language in the public network of primary and secondary education in São Paulo with interests that aimed at the political agreements between the Latin American countries and the intention to strengthen the economic relations between them from the creation of Mercosul. For our research, we investigated official documents published by the State as Decrees and Resolutions, as well as semi-structured interviews with teachers, directors and employees who participated in the implementation process that took place in 1989. For our analysis, we are based on studies concerning Language Policy and Language Planning (CALVET, 2007, OLIVEIRA 2013, RICENTO, 2006, WRIGHT, 2007).

Purpose: The present thesis aims to gain insight into parents’ perceptions of their children’s agentic role while raising them in Greek-bilingual families. The study was conducted within the field of family language policy and family bilingualism. Methods: A small-scale, qualitative study was designed, which included semi-structured interviews with parents of bilingual preschoolers, residing in Patras, Greece. Six participants were interviewed and audio-recorded. Then, the transcriptions were translated into English and finally analysed using thematic analysis. Parents were interviewed regarding their children’s use of languages concerning to the possibility to influence changes in their everyday lives as bilingual families. Results: According to the findings of this study, parents within Greek-bilingual families argue that their children negotiate their own language acquisition and the language use of the adults around them. Specifically, parents think that their children a) influence parents’ confidence in the chosen language policy, b) resist to inconsistent language use, and c) influence the parents’ language use. Conclusions: The present thesis highlights what parents within Greek-bilingual families think about their children’s agentic role regarding influencing changes in the family language policy and the socialization of members of the family. The small-scaled study entails that the results give the readers an insightful account, instead of absolute truth. Results of the study motivate further research on the agentic role of children in Greek families and its implementation on how childhood is experienced.

Magister Artium - MA / At the dawn of democracy, Higher Education in South Africa was in dire need of change. One of the essential initiatives in response to transformation in Higher Education was the mandate from the Ministry of Education for each university to develop a language policy. Along with other initiatives, the language policies were intended to address issues of access and success in Higher Education, especially given the unequal opportunities people of colour had been given to access Higher Education in the country’s apartheid past. Although there is widespread acknowledgement of the barrier which language poses to epistemological access, and concern that in Higher Education the linguistic dimensions of transformation are yet to be institutionalised, the explanation commonly offered hinges on the non-implementation of university language policies. The relevant discourse presupposes that existing language policy instruments are otherwise adequate to transform language practices in the country’s universities. As a consequence, there has been relatively little research problematizing the texts of university language policies from the standpoint of policy design and those interests which conceivably make language transformation difficult. Against this backdrop, this thesis draws on work in policy analysis and critical discourse analysis to analyse the language policies of Stellenbosch University and of the University of the Western Cape. The detailed textual analysis to which both language policy documents are subjected draws on experiential analysis, demodalisation, activation, the use/non-use of conditional clauses and modality. The analysis reveals that even though the policies express unequivocal commitment to the country’s multilingual heritage and to the promotion of Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa, they betray a pattern of differential commitment to English versus Afrikaans and isiXhosa. Together with the key informant interviews, the analysis suggests that many of the concerns regularly expressed around a transformation of language practices are issues of policy design which have their origin in both the discourses around the language policy texts, and the policy texts themselves.

Hong Kong's language policy has come under close scrutiny since the creation of the region as a colony of Great Britain in 1843. Throughout Hong Kong's time as a colony of Great Britain, and post-1997 as a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, language use and the policy that aims to dictate this use has told us a great deal about Hong Kong's hierarchy of socioeconomic power and the languages used by those in 'high' and 'low' positions on this hierarchy. Previous research into language policy in Hong Kong makes note of the ways in which the colonial and postcolonial governments have enacted policies aimed at directing the people of Hong Kong towards specific patterns of language use. Since the transfer of sovereignty in 1997, the role of Putonghua in contemporary Hong Kong has been an issue of debate, both within the public domain and within the Hong Kong Legislative Council. As the official language of the People's Republic of China, the role of Putonghua in contemporary Hong Kong requires closer analysis. Current policy places Putonghua within a linguistic trichotomy alongside English and Cantonese - the 'three languages' of Hong Kong. The ways in which Putonghua is treated in the Legislative Council, in the education system, and in the daily lives of Hong Kong's citizens requires further exploration. In order to explore the nature of the role of Putonghua in contemporary Hong Kong society, this thesis makes use of two complementary methodologies that explore the use of Putonghua in different domains. The first of these methodologies is rooted in the tradition of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The second of these methodologies is based on corpus linguistic methods, through the creation of and subsequent analysis of a corpus of job advertisements, and an analysis of the position of Putonghua in these job adverts - its necessity or lack thereof. This thesis comprises four papers in total, three research papers and one review article, that collaboratively shed light on the status of Putonghua in contemporary Hong Kong.

This study is a qualitative evaluation of how one state school interprets and makes a decision on the language medium to use as guided by the Language in Education Policy [LiEP] that advocates multilingualism in schools. The study asks how the LiEP ideal informs the language policy in the school, and establishes reasons parents give for choosing English as medium of instruction to be used in classrooms. Following Parlett and Hamilton‟s (1976) evaluation as illumination framework, this study outlines the language medium ideal expressed in LiEP and describes the actual Language Policy of the School in practice and how it accords with LiEP in guiding the medium of instruction. Data collection methods in this report included document analysis, classroom observations, interviews and questionnaires. The key findings from the data illuminate; parents of the learners in the school view the national language policy in a positive light that it is inclusive despite the challenges it presents to implementation. The findings reflected the decision makers‟ endeavour to strengthen their case that by choosing English as medium of instruction is not to contravene the policy, but a democratic right to benefit their children. Findings in the report suggest that the national language policy in South Africa is regarded a valuable document to guide the selection on the medium of instruction in schools, but raises issues that need to be addressed to make it play a more effective role in educational contexts.

Thesis (M. Ed. (Language Education)) --University of Limpopo, 2018 / Assessment is a crucial component in the learning and teaching environment. Many educators often go about assessment design by emulating their own teachers or predecessors. Gronlund (1993:1) argues that “despite the widespread use of achievement testing and the important role it plays in instructional programmes, many teachers receive little or no instruction on how to construct good achievement test.” Gronlund (1993) posits that the result is that there is no innovation towards good tests construction because many educators do not study the principles that guide effective test construction. Carey (1994:1) says that “effective teachers must also be proficient in testing, and proficiency in testing requires the synthesis of many different skills.” In Limpopo Province, especially in the under-resourced regions, the actual on-site practices by educators suggest that there are problems with the implementation of school based assessment tasks as prescribed by the National Curriculum Statement (NCS) through the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS). This problem is further echoed in the sentiments of some academics that are skeptical about the authenticity of marks generated by educators and schools. This loss of confidence in the assessment practices impacts negatively on the worth of the education of the learners and their readiness to take their place in the academic and vocational spheres. The purpose of this study is to find the degree of success and failure in the implementation and management of school based assessment (SBA) in English Additional First Language in Grade 10 classes. Grade 10 is a crucial level of entry into the Further Education and Training (FET) Phase in schools because it lays the foundation for focused, rigorous and careeroriented high school learning in South Africa.

My dissertation explores how authoritarian governments use language policy to impact public political trust. Based on a comprehensive examination through survey analyses, experiments, and large-scale text analyses, my research demonstrates that authoritarian governments, such as in China, can use language policy as a political tool to influence citizens’ political attitudes. In particular, language policy empowers the official language used by government representatives, such as street-level bureaucrats, reinforcing their political identities and enhancing citizens' trust in them. Using an original randomized experiment in China based on a new sociolinguistic technique, my research finds robust evidence that listeners hold significantly more trust in bureaucrats who speak the official language than in those who speak dialects, even if the respondent and government representative share the same dialect. Furthermore, my research shows that language not only influences citizens' political trust but also their understanding of political concepts. Using a computer-assisted text analysis of over one million articles from the official newspaper of the dominant party of China from 1946-2003, I indicate a refocusing strategy by which the official discourse about democracy manipulates the meaning of democracy in the Chinese political language without contradicting with the Western democratic values, while simultaneously preserving the authoritarian regime. Drawing on multiple waves of nationally representative surveys from China, my dissertation also identifies distinctive effects of improving listening, speaking, and relative proficiencies of Putonghua on Chinese citizens' political interest, efficacy, pursuit, and institutional-based political trust. This study contributes to political science, and even the entire social science by justifying the important role of language in human social and political lives and turning the research focus from language content to language context.

Much of how Florida and other states across the country justify the practice of mainstreaming English language learners into regular content classrooms rests on the premise that with the guidance of state officials, local school districts adequately train content teachers to work with English language learners. Yet little to no research exists that can help identify and analyze the overall efficacy of these programs. Consequently, this study has attempted to determine whether district training sessions in Florida are sufficiently covering the state-mandated content areas that teachers are required to learn and to what extent in-service teachers agree or disagree that they received the appropriate amount of instruction that would prepare them to instruct English language learners. Training sessions in three large Florida school districts with high proportions of English language learners were studied using a mixed-methods approach that gathered quantitative and qualitative data from observations, surveys and in-depth interviews. Among other things, the findings revealed a pattern of districts overemphasizing cross-cultural awareness issues to the detriment of other critical areas teachers need to know such as methods and curriculum. In addition, there was a general consensus on the part of participants that the trainings lacked specificity and were both impractical and redundant. A number of specific recommendations are offered such as ways to modify the focus of the curriculum, provide incentives to teachers, and create more accountability and oversight of the training sessions themselves. Policymakers are strongly urged to prioritize these types of programs by providing training sessions with more resources and attaching to them a larger sense of importance.

Thesis (M.ED.) --University of Limpopo, 2009 / The study looks at the attitudes of students towards the use of their source languages at the Turfloop campus, University of Limpopo. The study is aimed at finding out the reasons why students have attitudes towards their source languages, whether these attitudes are negative or positive. More specifically, the research focuses on, among other things, the students‟ attitudes towards their mother tongue as compared to English and their options and beliefs about the use of importance of English is outlined. The survey methods used are questionnaire survey as well as follow-up interview, supplemented by on campus observation. The results are first analysed as a whole, and then split into different according to as set of background variables (gender, year of study, subject studied etc). This analysis indicates that, while English is recognised as the dominant language in South Africa and, more specifically, in the domain of education, some categories of respondents acknowledge the usefulness of their source languages. This is part of a growing set of surveys on the attitudes of university students towards the use of African languages in education, and can be fruitfully compared with similar research at other institutions. Moreover, the results of the present research can be used to inform future decisions regarding language policy in the University of Limpopo.

Thesis ( M.A. (African languages)) --University of Limpopo, 2013 / The study discovered that above mentioned situation has hardly changed English in the in the school under review is fill medium of instruction of the majority of learners,power of Afrikaans. A major recommendation of the study is that African languages should be introduced as medium of infraction for African language speakers in all former model school