While various studies have investigated the effectiveness of certain types of error treatment methods, there has been little linguistic research conducted to examine how actual language teachers have been dealing with L2 learners’ written errors. The current research was designed to investigate the types of written errors ESL teachers corrected and the types of error treatment methods they used to correct those errors in the context of Bond University on the Cold Coast. Moreover, it was intended to highlight the relationship between the literature and actual practice in terms of error treatment of written work. In this study, sixty-six students’ written texts corrected by nine different teachers were collected and examined. The teachers’ treatment of the learner errors found in each sample were identified and classified according to their features. The findings from both quantitative and qualitative data on the patterns of error treatment were analysed, and following this, various comparisons were made. The results of the study indicated that despite the current trend of language teaching, error treatment was frequently provided by the teachers in the ESL classrooms. Moreover, the teachers constantly corrected the deviations of local aspects of the language, which did not seriously influence the intelligibility. In addition, the results of the study also demonstrated that the teachers used both explicit types and implicit types of correction methods in a hybrid manner, and they altered their mode of correction depending on the types of errors. They tended to provide explicit correction for wrong vocabulary and sentence construction errors whereas other surface features, such as grammatical and mechanical errors were generally highlighted with implicit correction, especially with correction codes. The findings of this study suggest that increasing the use of less-time consuming error treatment methods for rule-governed lexical errors and educating learners to be able to carry out self-correction could reduce the teachers’ burden of written error treatment. Moreover, constant information exchange would allow the teachers to revise, refine and change their ways to deal with errors. Until clear effectiveness of certain patterns of error treatment is proven by further studies, these suggestions could be made in order to maximise the benefits of the teachers’ treatment of written errors.

This thesis explores how the standardization of language in China has been used, historically and contemporarily, as a means to unify the empire and restructure relations between citizens and the state through processes of identification. Looking in particular at the case of China's minzu (ethnic groups), I argue that the current trend instituted through policies at the top-level is to eliminate linguistic and cultural diversities through the promotion of Putonghua as the lingua franca and to eventually amalgamate all minzu of the multi-minzu state into a mono-minzu, Zhonghua Minzu (citizens of the Chinese nation). Beginning with an overview of the historical practices of language standardization, I show how the ideological nature of politically influenced terminologies in the Chinese language has contributed to this restructuring of identity. With identity tied closely to language, recently enacted laws in mainland China have brought the government a step closer to achieving its ultimate goal of creating a mono-minzu state.

<p>Recordings of speech play a central role in the diverse subdisciplines of linguistics. The reliance on speech recordings is especially profound in sociolinguistics, where scholars have developed a range of techniques for eliciting and analyzing natural talk. Despite the focus on naturalistic speech data, sociolinguists have rarely focused explicitly on the management (e.g. organization, storage, accessibility, and preservation) of their data, and this lack of focus has had consequences for the advancement of the field. At the same time, the interviews that sociolinguists labor so hard to obtain are often barely mined for their full potential to further our understanding of language. That is, sociolinguists often focus on a handful of phonological and/or morphosyntactic variables to the exclusion of so many other features of speech. The present work both addresses the management of sociolinguistic data and, through an innovative approach to speech data management and analysis, extends the sociolinguistic lens to include the lesser-examined realm of variation in sequential temporal patterns of talk.</p><p>The first part of this dissertation describes the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project (SLAAP), a web-based digitization and preservation initiative at North Carolina State University. SLAAP, which I principally have designed and developed, is more than an archive; it has actively sought to explicate approaches to spoken language data management and to enrich spoken language data through the development of analytic tools designed specifically for sociolinguistic analysis. This dissertation begins by situating SLAAP within the history of data management practices in the field of sociolinguistics. It then provides an overview of many of SLAAP's features, discussing in particular the transcript model that enables most of its analytic and presentational capabilities.</p><p>The second part of this dissertation takes advantage of SLAAP's data model and the extensive language data accumulated within its archive to examine variation in speech rate and silent pause duration by North American English speakers of four ethnicities in North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Washington, DC, and Newfoundland. This work brings a wide range of previous research from different areas of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and corpus linguistics to bear on an array of quantitative analyses, demonstrating that speech rate and pause exhibit meaningful variation at the social level at the same time as they are also constrained by cognitive and articulatory processes. </p><p>Specifically, pause and speech rate are shown to vary by region, ethnicity, and gender - albeit not in mono-directional ways - although other factors arise as significant, including, for speech rate, a strong effect of utterance length as well as a number of interactional or discourse-related factors, such as the gender of the interviewer and the number of participants in the speech event. A number of the examinations undertaken relate sociolinguistic conceptions of style to language production and cognitive processes, including a quantitative analysis of sequential temporal patterns as paralinguistic cues to attention to speech, performativity, and the realization of phonological and morphosyntactic variables. Through this analysis, sociolinguistic data and findings are brought to bear on a tradition of psycholinguistic investigations with the hope to benefit both, often disparate, areas of research.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis is a descriptive study of four contrastive discourse connectives in Turkish. The main aim of this study is to analyze the connectives with respect to their meaning and predicate-argument structure and lay out the similarities and differences among contrastive discourse connectives with the help of quantitative analysis. Although the study is limited with contrastive connectives, it will have implications on how to resolve discourse structure in general and illustrate how lexico-syntactic elements contribute to discourse semantics.

No description available.

<p> Graduate students in Communication Disorders were found to become enculturated in the use of a specific literacy strategy to help struggling young readers. Supervisors used four transmission modes: modeling, feedback, collaboration and humor as symbolic channels to transmit knowledge and actions (defined as mechanisms) that were needed for the enculturation process. Mechanisms included negotiating power, linking classroom to the clinic, employing reflection, planning, extending thinking, using contrastiveness, verification, affiliating, making positive acknowledgements, employing cognitive dissonance, highlighting, using recurrency, explicit contextualizing, and employing independence. Situated learning experience was also identified as a necessary aspect of enculturation. Powerful mechanisms for struggling students were identified as reflection, employing cognitive dissonance and peer sharing (employing independence). </p>

No description available.

Guided by Thomas Kuhn's theory about paradigm shift advanced in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Mao Tsetung's theory of “the new superseding the old”, this thesis briefly examines the history of translation both in the West and in China and observes three paradigm shifts in each territory. The analyses reveal that paradigm shifts in translation theory occur when the changes in the social, economic, cultural and religious environments lead to significant changes in the practice of translation and that these changes then can no longer be adequately theorised by the old paradigms of translation. This study then critically reviews current literature on globalisation and translation and attributes its lack of depth in theorisation or some of its misleading predictions to certain scholars' inadequate investigation of the phenomenon of globalisation. In order to provide an adequate interpretation, description, explanation and prediction of the impact of globalisation on the theory and practice of translation, I investigate five aspects of globalisation and their respective impact on translation practice and find that globalisation has changed the mainstream of translation practice from canonical translation to professional (i.e., non-canonical) translation. The findings of the research demonstrate that traditional translation theories based on comparative literary study or on linguistics fail to provide an objective and comprehensive theoretical framework for the mainstream practice of translation. Therefore, it is justifiable to posit a paradigm shift in Translation Studies from canonical translation to professional translation so as to meet the demand of and challenges for the translation profession and business under the impact of globalisation. As an initiation towards the establishment of a new paradigm, I posit a “value-driven” theory based on recent developments in researches on the global economy to distinguish between canonical and professional translations. Influenced by theories of the knowledge-driven economy, I further propose to establish a force of translators as knowledge workers to better serve the demand of the global economy and the global community. To follow the principle of empiricism, I use several case studies from the real world of commercial translation to support my “value-driven” theory for Translation Studies. / Subscription resource available via Digital Dissertations only.

Guided by Thomas Kuhn's theory about paradigm shift advanced in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Mao Tsetung's theory of “the new superseding the old”, this thesis briefly examines the history of translation both in the West and in China and observes three paradigm shifts in each territory. The analyses reveal that paradigm shifts in translation theory occur when the changes in the social, economic, cultural and religious environments lead to significant changes in the practice of translation and that these changes then can no longer be adequately theorised by the old paradigms of translation. This study then critically reviews current literature on globalisation and translation and attributes its lack of depth in theorisation or some of its misleading predictions to certain scholars' inadequate investigation of the phenomenon of globalisation. In order to provide an adequate interpretation, description, explanation and prediction of the impact of globalisation on the theory and practice of translation, I investigate five aspects of globalisation and their respective impact on translation practice and find that globalisation has changed the mainstream of translation practice from canonical translation to professional (i.e., non-canonical) translation. The findings of the research demonstrate that traditional translation theories based on comparative literary study or on linguistics fail to provide an objective and comprehensive theoretical framework for the mainstream practice of translation. Therefore, it is justifiable to posit a paradigm shift in Translation Studies from canonical translation to professional translation so as to meet the demand of and challenges for the translation profession and business under the impact of globalisation. As an initiation towards the establishment of a new paradigm, I posit a “value-driven” theory based on recent developments in researches on the global economy to distinguish between canonical and professional translations. Influenced by theories of the knowledge-driven economy, I further propose to establish a force of translators as knowledge workers to better serve the demand of the global economy and the global community. To follow the principle of empiricism, I use several case studies from the real world of commercial translation to support my “value-driven” theory for Translation Studies. / Subscription resource available via Digital Dissertations only.

Guided by Thomas Kuhn's theory about paradigm shift advanced in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Mao Tsetung's theory of “the new superseding the old”, this thesis briefly examines the history of translation both in the West and in China and observes three paradigm shifts in each territory. The analyses reveal that paradigm shifts in translation theory occur when the changes in the social, economic, cultural and religious environments lead to significant changes in the practice of translation and that these changes then can no longer be adequately theorised by the old paradigms of translation. This study then critically reviews current literature on globalisation and translation and attributes its lack of depth in theorisation or some of its misleading predictions to certain scholars' inadequate investigation of the phenomenon of globalisation. In order to provide an adequate interpretation, description, explanation and prediction of the impact of globalisation on the theory and practice of translation, I investigate five aspects of globalisation and their respective impact on translation practice and find that globalisation has changed the mainstream of translation practice from canonical translation to professional (i.e., non-canonical) translation. The findings of the research demonstrate that traditional translation theories based on comparative literary study or on linguistics fail to provide an objective and comprehensive theoretical framework for the mainstream practice of translation. Therefore, it is justifiable to posit a paradigm shift in Translation Studies from canonical translation to professional translation so as to meet the demand of and challenges for the translation profession and business under the impact of globalisation. As an initiation towards the establishment of a new paradigm, I posit a “value-driven” theory based on recent developments in researches on the global economy to distinguish between canonical and professional translations. Influenced by theories of the knowledge-driven economy, I further propose to establish a force of translators as knowledge workers to better serve the demand of the global economy and the global community. To follow the principle of empiricism, I use several case studies from the real world of commercial translation to support my “value-driven” theory for Translation Studies. / Subscription resource available via Digital Dissertations only.