Between 2015 and 2018 Cape Town was affected by a drought more severe than any on record. When it became clear that Cape Town might actually run out of water, thousands of its citizens flocked to the historical springs that flow from Table Mountain's groundwater, which for many of whom it was their first time collecting spring water. However, at the height of the water crisis, the municipality cemented over one of these vital springs after numerous complaints of disturbance by residents. Piped to a newly constructed water collection site enclosed by fences a kilometer away, the water was made accessible to the public through 16 industrial taps. While this action from the municipality may have been the only viable solution, it was experienced as a huge loss to the people of Cape Town. This study investigates why the design of the current spring water collection point became the source of such criticism. It compares the re-designed site with two of Cape Town's southern springs that still flow freely, investigating the meaning and influence of unrestricted flowing spring water through public engagement on site, asking what draws people to collect spring water. Key themes that emerged include health and wellbeing; and connection with other humans, with history, with nature and with a greater spirit. Springs are powerful agents for an ethic of care, the study finds, and water a powerful medium of connection. Yet, the city's water policies are shaped by the kind of thinking that sees water only as a commodity, reflected in an urban design that further alienates people from water and nature. In this era of the Anthropocene, itself a condition of this alienation of people from the earth, the paper concludes and proposes biophilic design principles that foster the sensibilities of connection and interdependence as a vital part of urban design for a shared future where people come to know what it means to be human as participants within a living world.

Within instructed second language acquisition (SLA), Processing Instruction (PI) has enjoyed a rigorous research agenda for more than 15 years. Research comparing PI (with or without explicit information about a target linguistic structure) with either traditional, production-based instruction (e.g., Cadierno, 1995; VanPatten & Cadierno, 1993) or meaning-based output instruction (e.g., Farley, 2000; Morgan-Short & Bowden, 2006) has shown that PI activities are as good as, if not more effective than, other types of instruction. The effectiveness of PI has been attributed to the way in which PI seeks to alter learners' non-optimal input processing strategies via structured input (SI) activities for the creation of richer intake data (Sanz & Morgan-Short, 2004; VanPatten, 2004; Wong, 2004). However, to date no studies have compared SI with other types of input-based treatments to determine whether the effectiveness of SI is due to (a) altering learners' processing strategies, or (b) simply providing learners with meaning-bearing input. Therefore, this dissertation compares the effects of various input-based treatments (input flood, input flood + text enhancement, focused input, and structured input), along with a control group, on the interpretation and production of Spanish 3rd person accusative clitics. Participants included 290 adult learners enrolled in an intermediate Spanish course. Learners completed a pretest, a computer-based treatment, an immediate posttest, delayed posttest (3 weeks after treatment) and an extended delayed posttest (6 weeks after treatment). Assessment tasks measured both interpretation and production of accusative clitics. Results for the interpretation task revealed that although all treatment groups (except the control group) showed significant gains over time, only the SI group significantly outperformed the control group at the second delayed posttest. On the production measures, all input-based groups (except the control group) showed improvement; however, no significant differences emerged among the four input-based treatments. The findings for the production measures are not so straight forward; however all groups significantly improved or approached significance. The theoretical, methodological and pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed, along with limitations to the study and avenues for future research. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2008. / Date of Defense: May 19, 2008. / Input Flood, Processing Instruction, Input Processing, Second Language Acquisition, Linguistics, Text Enhancement / Includes bibliographical references. / Michael J. Leeser, Professor Directing Dissertation; Michael Kaschak, Outside Committee Member; Lara Reglero, Committee Member; Gretchen Sunderman, Committee Member.

This work explores the life of the Afro-German writer May Ayim by analyzing her writings as well as by discussing the social circumstances in which she lived. Chapter 1 provides a look at the Ayim's life, with special emphasis on major factors influencing her childhood. The effects of the personal as well as social pressures that Ayim dealt with as a child and young adult are also discussed. Chapter 2 focuses on the history of Afro-German children born shortly after World War II. Chapter 3 includes an explanation of Minor Literature and an examination of May Ayim as an author of such literature. Her importance as such is established. Due to Ayim's position outside the mainstream of German society social factors that greatly affected her life as a result of this situation are discussed in Chapter 4. These factors are: identity, culture, and ethnicity. In Chapter 5 Ayim's attempts to incorporate both the white and black aspects of herself despite the deeply rooted history of racism in Germany also discussed. Chapter 6 includes an examination of the toll that Ayim's familial and social experiences played on her feelings of romantic love, especially toward another Afro-German. In Chapter 7 there is an examination of the exhaustion that Ayim felt toward the end of her life. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2005. / April 1, 2005. / Blacks in Germany, Afro-deutsche, Afro-Germans, May Ayim, May Opitz / Includes bibliographical references. / Birgit Maier-Katkin, Professor Directing Thesis; Winnifred Adolph, Committee Member; John Simons, Committee Member.

Minority religious communities, like the Sabbateans, have often been labelled and marginalised by mainstream religions. At times, their leaders have been labelled as ‘false messiahs’ by society or the state. To what extent do states play a role in facilitating the integration of diverse groupings? This question is particularly topical in the 21st century context of cross-border migrations, but also a perennial question facing society, as minority religious movements developed throughout history. The study focuses on one of the minority movements in Abrahamic religions, Sabbateanism. It analyses the development of the Sabbateanism by controversial Jewish Rabbi, Shabbetai Tzvi in the Ottoman Empire. Tvzi attracted many followers, but also received criticism from orthodox Jews and others, especially when he converted to Islam. The thesis analyses how the movement evolved during Tzvi’s life, and after his death, and what may have urged his followers to hide their religious identities. It then compares this movement with other controversial minority movements, such as Crypto-Christianity and the Ahmadiyya movement in Islam. This comparison offers insight into the minority groups’ challenges, and into the reasons that they have been labelled as ‘heretical’ in Islamic, Christian and Jewish societies. In terms of methodology, the study draws on unique archival materials from Turkey and Israel, dating back to the 17th century. The thesis traces Turkish-Jewish relations prevailing in Asia from the 7th century onwards, to contextualise the Ottoman state’s approach towards Tzvi and his religious movement. It then analyses the State policies towards Sabbateanism and other minority groups. The study critically examines these instances in world history when minorities have been labelled as heratical and some are still labeled as such, even though “tolerance” and “respect” are considered the hallmark of modernization. The study shows that Ottoman rulers developed an elaborate system to accommodate non-Muslim (Dhimmi) societies within the Islamic state. This is perhaps what inspired Toynbee, who was otherwise critical of the Ottoman Empire, to describe it as close to ‘Plato’s ideal state’. This said, the research findings prompt critical reflections on the role of state policies in Ottoman times and beyond, and the effects of religious and national identities on the assertion and flourishing of minority groups.

No description available.

This thesis presents, in a critical edition, the poems contained 1n Grey Ms. 7.b.5 of the South African Library in Cape Town. It is the fruit of the first serious investigation to be undertaken of this manuscript and of its contents. Before a reconstruction of the text could.be attempted, problems of authorship, provenance and dating of the manuscript itself as well as of the poems containing verifiable historical allusions required to be resolved. The results of these investigations may be summarized as follows: The Grey manuscript contains an anthology of fourteenth and fifteenth century poems originating, for the most part, in the areas of Emilia, Romagna and the Marches. This collection was compiled by an otherwise unknown courtier and rhymester, Giovanni de' Mantelli di Canobio, nicknamed Tartaglia, between 1473 and 1483. Of the 150 poems it contains, 145 are unique to the Grey Ms.

No description available.

Institutional language teaching is built on the assumption that languages exist as homogeneous entities and is aimed at the mastery of standardised codes. In this view, English teaching in South African township schools is failing. Learners (and teachers) underperform in standardised English tests and are repeatedly described – by stakeholders in schooling and by scholars of language in education – as ‘ cut off’ from standard linguistic norms needed for success beyond the township. But is linguistic deficit all we can find in township English classrooms, given that the day-to-day language practices in these settings are known to be heterogeneous, flexible and creative? I begin here by taking this local linguistic heterogeneity seriously, asking: What does language education in Khayelitsha look like through a lens that is not a priori structured by separate, homogenised languages? In the first part of this thesis I develop such an analytical lens. I begin by committing not to use some key linguistic terms that imply a view of languages as discrete, homogeneous entities. I then engage with (trans)languaging literature and the inchoative sociolinguistic notion of ‘spatial repertoires’, conceptualising ‘languaging’ for my purposes as a spatial practice, with which speakers draw on and transform elements of spatial repertoires. This spatial perspective doesn’t allow for surface-level categorisation of linguistic phenomena. It demands instead fine-grained, situated analyses that I conduct with tools from Bantu linguistics, conversation analysis and ethnography, on data from participant observation, recorded classroom talk, a learners’ writing task and teacher interviews. Rather than training the spotlight on the alleged lack of Standard English, I show the Khayelitshan English classroom to be a space of specific linguistic possibilities, ordered by teachers through a linguistic sorting practice I call relanguaging. This practice instantiates teachers’ negotiations of Khayelitshan heterogeneous linguistic realities, and the demands of a centralised curriculum and testing system, in the classroom. Learners are also shown to be ‘relanguagers’, who display complex linguistic sorting processes in their writing, juggling what I find to be an oversupply rather than an undersupply of standard linguistic norms. My empirical findings and my conceptualisation of relanguaging, which develops and complexifies throughout this thesis, allow me to systematically unsettle a construction of linguistic hetero- and homogeneity as mutually exclusive. This comes with a theoretical critique of ‘translanguaging’ as a linguistic descriptor that, in my view, reifies a dichotomy between fluid languaging and fixed standard languages. As a result, it makes us overlook the relationality in practice regarding these two dimensions of language and the complexities that result therefrom. With the dichotomy between languaging and languages dissolved, I end by proposing ways of testing for Standard English beyond its own confines, i.e. to test for increasingly sophisticated linguistic sorting skills instantiated in emergent englishing.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (p 335-371). / The assumption underpinning the thesis is that the current teaching of French at South African universities caters imperfectly for learner needs and fails to reflect pedagogical practice and learning theories appropriate to the twenty-first century. Firstly, so as to contextualise that teaching, the Western European legacy of secondand foreign-language teaching is examined briefly from earliest times to the latter part of the twentieth century. Particular attention is given to changes in practice and learning theories over time with the aim of understanding the roots of the teaching of French while detecting possible lasting influences on that teaching. Secondly, current practice (curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment) at fourteen South African universities offering undergraduate courses in French is analysed critically against the backdrop of more recent learning theories; these are found to have little resonance in current practice. The analysis informs the model which is then proposed for the teaching of tertiary-level French at South African institutions. The starting point for the model is the acknowledgement that in South Africa French is a foreign language and must be taught as such. Consideration is given to the learning environment, as well as to ideology and constraints which exert influence on the teaching of French. With the proposed model a certain concept of language, society and learning/teaching strategies is advocated, while the roles of the learner, teacher, didactic material, and the mother tongue are clearly positioned within that concept. The model proposes a pedagogy and curriculum, which are learner-centred, taskarticulated and outcomes-based and which are anchored in constructivism and democratising ideology. Finally, reasons are given as to why the adoption of such a model would add value to the teaching of French at South African universities.

The purpose of this study was to compare the levels of semantic complexity in children’s oral and written narrative language. This study focused on the narratives produced by students in the fourth grade (N=35) due to the high demand of narrative comprehension and production in the fourth grade curriculum. At the present time, the relevant literature is lacking a combined measure for the development of semantic complexity, with consideration of both vocabulary breadth and depth and performance in both communication modalities (oral and written narratives). I examined whether the oral and written narratives of fourth grade students varied in lexical diversity (number of different words) lexical tiers (number of content words across tiers) and lexical maturity (number of metacognitive verbs). Levels of lexical diversity, and lexical maturity were similar across oral and written narrative tasks. Results showed there was a significant difference between modalities for lexical tiering, wherein more Tier 3 words were in written narratives than in oral narratives. Further analyses revealed children used a greater number of Tier 2 (domain general) words in their oral than in written narratives. These differences in vocabulary used across narrative modalities suggest fourth graders are able to differentiate lexical forms based on the language task, and can incorporate a range of domain general and domain specific vocabulary words within their narrative language production. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Communication Science and Disorders in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. / Summer Semester 2016. / June 24, 2016. / Literacy, Narrative Language, Oral Language, Semantics / Includes bibliographical references. / Shannon Hall-Mills, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; Carla Wood, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; Hugh Catts, Committee Member; Toby Macrae, Committee Member.