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Purpose. This seven-week high school English literature study purported to compare the effects of two combinations of novels and their collateral curricular treatments. DUO A combined Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with Knowles' A Separate Peace. DUO B combined the same Twain novel with Hentoff's I'm Really Dragged But Nothing Gets Me Down. A key question in the inquiry was which of the two modern works would increase the appeal and accessibility of the 19th century classic. Specifically, the study posed nine null hypotheses focusing on these areas: (1) knowledge of literary terms and figurative language; (2) literary analysis and inference or interpretation; (3) empathy and social awareness; (4) imaginative writing; (5) literary discrimination; (6) expository writing; (7) classroom discussion; (8) creative productions; and (9) student involvement and satisfaction. A tenth area was teacher reaction to the theory and implementation of the DUOS. Procedures. Extensive curricular materials for each DUO were created, (Volume II). The study was located in two high schools in two different districts; each school furnished two classes with one studying DUO A and the other DUO B. The total sample was divided in this manner: 52 students in DUO A and 50 students in DUO B. At School No. 1 a different teacher taught each DUO; at School No. 2 the same teacher taught both. The seven-week investigation included four days of pretesting and five days of posttesting in areas 1-5 above. The investigator created thirteen instruments; a fourteenth instrument was the California Achievement Test 1977. Eight analyses of covariance (ANCOVA) were employed to test the hypotheses bearing on the areas listed as 1-8. The covariates were: pretests and previous English grade (1-5); previous English only (6); previous English grade and California Achievement Test 1977 Test 2, Form C only for (7); and CAT '77 to test area (8). A factorial design implemented the inquiry making it possible to detect possible interaction effects between treatment, school, and sex. To test for area (9), 17 chi square analyses were used. Finally, a tally was computed of the responses on the twenty-seven-item questionnaire and content analyses were devised for the student and teacher self-reports. Findings. The latter instruments revealed that the teachers appreciated the curricular materials and grew professionally through using them. For the most part, the students enjoyed the curricula. The only two objections to the DUOs were the number of tests and the shortness of time. A noticeable reaction was the interest in the creative productions. Of the nine null hypotheses tested, six were rejected and three retained. DUO B made higher significant mean gains than DUO A in: knowledge of literary terms and figurative language, literary analysis, empathy and social awareness, creative productions, and classroom discussion. It appeared that the pairing of a non-literary and a 19th century classic was the more effective combination. All the students preferred Huck Finn over the modern works. Recommendations. It is recommended that this Literary DUOS study be replicated. The following are certain conditions which should be provided for: (1) increase the time from seven to nine weeks and administer the pre- and post-tests before and after this nine-week treatment period; (2) allow at least one hour for Pre- and Post-tests II, III, IV, and V, and one-half hour for Pre- and Post-test I; (3) allow a teacher to teach only one DUO due to the heavy requirements of the research aspects; (4) include more academically talented students among the subjects; (5) encourage the schools to purchase the books; (6) allow for pre-service training of the teachers in both the research and curricular aspects; (7) encourage the teachers to begin emphasizing the creative opportunities right at the start; (8) acquaint the school counselors with the research constraints.

This study is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the social dynamics of Chinese English teacher education and the process of its change as viewed from the perspective of teacher education faculty. Chinese English teacher education is a product of diverse and conflicting socio-cultural influences, among which Marxism, Confucianism, Russian linguistics, and Western teaching practices feature prominently. Chinese English teacher training is adopting a more modern approach in response to a burgeoning population of English students, economic demand, technological advances, increased focus on the communicative aspects of language learning, and international exchange. The principal research was conducted as a case study at China's largest teacher training university, Hebei Teachers' University, from 1997 to 1999. The study presents the results of 54 in-depth phenomenological interviews with 20 English teacher education faculty. The analysis of data from the faculty interviews reveals recurrent themes about the process of English teacher education. Among the dominant influences on English teacher training are an academic culture favoring theory above practice; a default teacher training strategy of learning by imitation; a cultural ethic mandating harmony in collegial relations; and the bureaucratic structure of the university, which inhibits innovation. The process and prospects of modernizing teacher education are explored and presented. Among the influences of modernization effecting faculty are increased exposure to alternative teacher training strategies, study abroad, international professional development, university recruitment practices, foreign teachers, and the growing availability of teaching technology. For historical perspective, the study explores the history of English teacher education in China from the beginning of the missionary era up to the modern period in which the study was conducted (1664–1997), suggesting cultural, institutional and political precursors to the context of the study. The study also explores a philosophical foundation for the faculty perspectives with a discussion of phenomenology as it relates to the exploration of meaning in individual undertaking. Making meaning is a process that takes place within a landscape of one's own personal, social and cultural experience, which in turn serves as a constant referent. The study offers recommendations for modernizing teacher education as a response to the faculty perspectives.

According to Deborah Britzman, a queer pedagogy enables a destabilization of identity, a destabilization of various socio-cultural and economic norms, and recognition that language reflects current dominant socio-cultural ideologies. While queer pedagogies have been applied to courses in various disciplines and queer texts and readings have been presented within a range of literature courses, the role of a queer text in the composition classroom bears further examination. To answer the question, "What purposes can be served by using a queer text in a composition course?" I conducted qualitative research, using interviews, observations, and textual analysis in three first-year composition classes as three teachers and nine students read, discussed and wrote about Eli Clare's text, "The Mountain," for the first time. The language and style of the text disrupted assumptions about how texts should function and exposed students to stylistic techniques they challenged, critiqued or used to achieve specific rhetorical effects of their own. Students had a stronger sense that authors make specific choices and that those choices affect how an audience reads a text. However, students' and teachers' enactment and understanding of academic norms may contradict the possibilities presented by a queer text like Clare's. Understandings of academic discourse based upon an ethos of certainty tend to work against the destabilization of identity and the questioning and uncertainty Clare's text fosters. While queer scholars claim that certain pedagogical approaches to texts reflect and encourage a queered understanding of identity norms and knowledge, critics of queer theory express skepticism about its applicability with undergraduate students. This study illustrated that a queer text can enable composition teachers (even those unfamiliar with queer pedagogical techniques) to enact goals those of us who teach and study composition value, including: reading texts for multiple purposes; extensive use of revision; experimentation with substance, style and audience. Yet, the study also demonstrated that we need a better understanding of how and why a queer text works (and how to communicate that to students), a better understanding of what constitutes academic writing and more self-reflection about how identities shape and are shaped by socio-cultural and discursive ideologies and material reality.

In this dissertation I make a case for multigenre essays to be made more available to students in all disciplines, but especially to students in freshman composition classes. I also present the results of a case study where I acted as teacher/researcher investigating how students experience the writing and reading of multigenre essays. By multigenre essays I mean essays that include creative elements such as lists, letters, and interviews, in addition to traditional academic prose. By combining creative elements with academic prose I propose that writers will be able to express more of what they want to say in an essay by using both analytical and associative ways of thinking. The benefits of having students write multigenre essays are three-fold: (1) when students are given the option of including such things as dialogs, poems, and vignettes in addition to standard academic prose, they gain in rhetorical flexibility---experimenting with and finding the right genres and combination of genres that best fits what they want to say; (2) they also gain in their ability to take a more personal stance on an issue by having more options for positioning themselves in reference to a given topic; and (3) they gain in their ability to push at the perceived boundaries of a discourse. In this dissertation I discuss how eight students in an experimental writing class responded to the writing and reading of multigenre essays, to what extent they found them worthwhile and/or pleasurable, their thoughts in reference to audience and subject matter, how they used multigenre essays for cognitive travel, and how writing multigenre essays gave them a way to push against the perceived boundaries of their discipline. My data come from four essays the students wrote, reader response assignments, reflection letters, and from interviews with five of the students. Overall students found the writing and reading of multigenre essays more difficult but more satisfying than that of standard academic prose. In some cases multigenre essays made them think in new ways about audience and subject matter; for almost all students, multigenre essays made them think differently about an essay's form and how a change in form allowed them to position themselves differently within their discipline.

This dissertation investigates the change in the internal syntactic structure of the Determiner Phrase (DP) of the adult learner who is studying Spanish as a second language, henceforth L2, and whose mother tongue (L1) is English. The focus within the DP structure will be on whether or not L2 learners are able to acquire feature categories within their DP as well as gender features on nouns, adjectives and determiners that are intrinsic in the target language they are studying, yet void in their L1 (Curzan, 2003; Gess & Herschensohn, 2001; Schwartz and Sprouse 1996). The accomplishment of this task would signify that the Parameters of the L1 have been reset and by extension giving evidence in favor that Universal Grammar (UG) is being accessed by post puberty adult learners (Chomsky 1981, 1986, 1995; White 1985, 2001, 2003). If this were indeed possible then we could say that ultimate attainment is possible for adults learning a second language (Birdsong, 1992). However, some contend that errors that persist in this area is evidence that parameters are not being reset but that the L2 learner is utilizing some other strategy to compensate for the inability of parameter reset (Hawkins 2001, Smith and Tsimpli 1995). Under the premise of the Minimalist Program, Chomsky (Chomsky 1993, 1995), adopts, in essence, a linear model of word formation (WF), suggesting that the output of this WF component produces fully formed words with its feature bundles, and inserts them into the syntax fully inflected (Borer 1998). I suggest that it is here, prior the output of the WF component, where the errors, or incorrect tagging occur in L2 learners. As a result, when the words are introduced into syntax, there is no discrimination between correct or erroneous gender features on the word by the syntax, but that it simply checks the features that are assigned the formed word. As a result, the L2 speaker might demonstrate concord within the DP though the gender is incorrect. Through this dissertation I suggest that a Number category as well as the corresponding features present in the L1 speaker's DP are transferred to his or her L2 (Schwartz and Sprouse 1996), followed by the acquisition of a gender category and gender features through a four stage process of parameter reset. The review of previous as well as more recent studies along with my testing of adult L2 learners and subsequent finds will suggest that ultimate attainment is possible for L2 learners beyond the sensitive age. If this is indeed the case, it would suggest that L2 learners are accessing UG, and are able to reset their parameters; contrary to what some claim within the field of adult second language acquisition (Bley-Vroman 1990; Smith and Tsimpli 1995).

Grounded in my interests in the possibilities presented by digital distribution and composition's focus on the public turn, this project questions what a move to the public means for writing students. Building on the work of compositionists, such as Bruce Horner, John Trimbur, and Amy Lee, who question the ways in which teaching practices and contexts position our students, I examine the public turn to better understand the implications of the assumption that going public itself leads students to value their texts more highly. To this end, I conducted a teacher-research project to study the relationships among student texts, valuation, and distribution through the lens of circulation--an understanding of the interconnected nature of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption grounded in Marxist thought. Circulation stresses not only the ways student texts move, but also how such movement shapes the ways student writers approach the act of composing and the relationships they establish with their labor. Only by investigating such relationships can we truly assess what kind of "value" accrues in writing that "goes public" for both the writer and the larger textual economies in which she is working. Although my findings support the publication of student writing, they also show that assuming value comes with publishing alone is problematic. Instead, I argue that a move to the public must be grounded by students' active decision making as well as a materialist view of the classroom. That is, a pedagogical approach grounded in the notion of circulation--an approach that invited students to consider the significance of distribution and to make their own decisions about how and why their texts might be made public--positioned students as decision makers who frequently "felt like writers" as they questioned the ways in which their texts are valued and the relationships they form with their labor. "Going public" alone does not, as a practice, necessarily lead students to revalue their writing. Instead, I argue that it is only the meta-critical awareness of circulation, audience, and distribution (and their effects on one's writing) that lead to such a rethinking of value.

For almost two decades, literature, which had played an essential role in foreign language teaching in many countries for many years, has been excluded in language classrooms. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among scholars and educators, in both China and the West, in reviving literature as a means of acquiring language proficiency. But, this revival has been rather slanted towards the linguistic and literary elements of literature, while the inherent socio-cultural value of literature has been little discussed or explored. This dissertation seeks to analyze the relationship between culture and literature in second language acquisition and to provide, through illustrations of literary texts, a theoretical framework for teaching literature with the aim of acquiring crosscultural understanding.

This study was undertaken in order to explore the writing experiences of poor and working-class, non-professional women writers and the issues of power, self-esteem, and social class. The study was focused on this population because their writing experiences had not been investigated. The study was qualitative, having a naturalistic inquiry perspective and employing in-depth, phenomenological interviewing as a method of data collection. The population for the study were five white and five Black working-class and poor women, ages twenty to seventy-five. The data were collected in a series of three audio-taped interviews. Profiles of each woman were made from the transcripts of their interviews, and these were analyzed for emerging patterns. Issues of trustworthiness were addressed in order to avoid bias. The women exhibited powerful personal voices when writing journals and letters where they were able to express their emotions as well as get things done for family members or other people in like circumstances. They experienced self-esteem when writing personal letters, fiction, and poetry. When they first tried to share their public voice in school it was an overwhelming experience of powerlessness. However, they did report success with writing on the job, and their self-esteem was generally good when they talked about their advocacy writing. One group, members of an advocacy group for the elderly, was able to make significant changes in health care for the elderly. However, all of the women still had conflicting feelings about their experiences with public voice. One function of social class was that most of the women did not finish school. The wishes and dreams they had for their lives were not realized. The writing of poor and working-class women centered around the events in their daily lives, such as: letters to teachers, politicians, those in the health care system; journaling about events in their daily lives and writing poetry. Poor and working class women should write on topics connected with their life experiences. In order to overcome problems with writing, they need the support of each other collectively, both privately and publicly.