Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

The focus of this research is on gendered discourse in fairy tales with particular reference to identity formation in very young readers. Both the modern culture industry of adult consumption and children’s culture constantly take up and recycle fairy tale themes in visual entertainment, literature and merchandising. Without being overly deterministic it is credible to claim that fairy tales exert an influence on the collective consciousness in many societies. Moreover since fairy tales frequently from the backbone of early reader schemes in both first- and second-language programmes, it is important to study the language used to define the relationship between children and culture. Critical Discourse Analysis serves as the best approach to investigate how gender is constructed through language in my analysis of current renditions of three popular princess fairy tales. This linguistic analysis examines character action and character description through a transitivity analysis, an appraisal of attitudinal lexis and an investigation of stylistic markers. The findings from this research provide evidence of three gendered discourses, identified as ‘The Passive Princess’, ‘Women beware women’ and ‘The Beauty Contest’. An examination of how these discourses operate to align the reader indicates that they are potentially damaging to women, men, girls and boys and gender relations. The main conclusion drawn from this study is that the three prevailing discourses position children and they may enjoy or resist this subject positioning in part or total. This dissertation recommends that Critical Literacy strategies be adopted in school in order to prevent gender privileging when using fairy tales. / published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

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Extensive reviews of phonetic and phonological investigations into sex-related differences reveal a mottled history. The investigations suffer from methodological and theoretical deficits: the most serious being the misrepresentation of the interaction between variables, a lack of homogeneous data and its misinterpretation, and the widespread neglect of women's speech. Existing phonetic databases are shown to be inadequate and poorly-controlled, admitting too many unwanted variables. A very tightly-controlled database, constructed for this research, contains data for eighty female and male speakers of two accents of British English. This contribution is regarded as important per se. Digital acoustic analysis of the data permits quantification of the phonetic divergence shown by the sexes in British English. Previous attempts to normalize the acoustic effects of speaker-sex on vowels have been largely unsuccessful. Here, the application of an innovative auditory normalization procedure reflects how perceptual normalization may be achieved. It further demonstrates that male/female phonetic differences remain after normalisation, which cannot be accounted for by anatomy, but are accountable by social-role conditioning (i.e. learned). These differences are statistically significant. Speaker-sex and gender are thus shown to interact at the phonetic level. Extending this technique to five other languages/dialects corroborates the central hypothesis that the degree to which the sexes diverge phonetically will vary from speech-community to speech-community. Exploration of the possibility that contoids will reveal similar systematicity shows this to be unlikely across languages. The examination of suprasegmental sex-associated differences, however, merits further pursuit. Implications of these experimental findings are discussed for 'inter alia' speech technology, language-planning and medical aids. Using sex-linked differential voice quality as a springboard, it is suggested that sex-appropriate norms are required in speech pathology. The need for socio- phonetics to be recognized as an important new discipline is thus underlined.

published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

This research project explored how modern media and the theme of Bedroom Culture could be used to enhance second language learning of preadolescent girls. Most of the girls who participated in this project are first language English speakers. Therefore it is a challenge for them to learn isiZulu. Thus, to kindle an interest an obvious entry point to working with these pre-adolescent girls in a participatory way in terms of language learning, was to capitalize on their interest and expertise. The theme ‘My Bedroom’ was used because girls spend much of their out-of-school time in their bedroom and this is considered a critical interest space for them. This approach focused on using photographs taken by the girls themselves, on digital cameras, of various aspects and spaces in their bedroom. Thereafter a Power Point presentation was created by each girl, using these photographs. The presentations were then carried out by the girls in front of the class and the teacher. Making use of modern technologies and media, and what is familiar to them allowed the girls to work with different modes from the purely written/verbal linguistic mode which has dominated language learning and teaching for some time. These modes of meaning included the visual, audio and gestural. Incorporated into the research were the Multimodal approach together with the idea of Multiliteracies. These Multiliteracies include the understanding and control of meaning-making forms, which are becoming increasingly important in the communications environment, and which lead to a new direction in language learning during the second language lessons. The approach of this work builds on the popular Communicative/Task-Based Approach in language learning. This research showed that allowing the girls to use photographs of their bedrooms, empowered them to take ownership of their project, enabling them to confidently carry out the presentation using modern technology with which they are familiar as well as, using a subject with which they are familiar. At the same time they were able to extend their own knowledge to learn isiZulu. It also revealed much about their Bedroom Culture, Girlhood Studies, Children as Cultural Producers and Children and Visual Studies. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, 2007.

published_or_final_version / Curriculum Studies / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Do men and women write differently and if so, do these stylistic differences represent differing world \iews and/or do they indicate divergent decisions that are made by the gendered individual with respect to the positioning inherent in the interactive communicative process? In this thesis I consider how men and women write and interact, as well as the topics of their conversations, by examining the postings that characterize a specific semiotic Internet site: Anthro- L@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu. Created solely by and through language, a net community is the ideal environment in which to conduct a field study which examines the use of gendered language. In cyber 'public' space, where social interaction in largely stripped of bodily cues, net participants rely on the power of discourse to convey the 'self. I shall show that men and women make different choices as to how they will represent themselves in net public space, and that these choices are conveyed through the preference of specific styles of writing. Although conceptualizations of public space, academic praxis, and individual socialization all contribute to stylistic differentials, I illustrate through my methodology that Gender is the master status that primarily informs communicative decisions. 'Legitimate' language in our culture is constructed on the rational paradigm which characterizes public institutions; this paradigm is the fundamental principle which informs our system of [male] Langue. Posting acts on Anthro-L offer evidence that those who do not 'speak', or choose not to speak within the framework of this model, are conceived as 'other1, and are silenced through desertion, by - play and trivialization. / 29 cm.

This dissertation presents a critical examination of men's and women's discourse practices in directive-response speech sequences (DRSS), on the basis of data obtained from teacher-student interactions during groupwork in two secondary schools in Kwa-Zulu Natal. Following West (1990), the broad purpose of this study is to explore the similarities and the differences in the DRSS between educators of different gender and their students. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, particularly the work of Fairclough (1989,1992,1995), this study then critically examines the social relations of power implicit in these instances of discourse. The findings of this study indicate that both similarities and differences exist in male and female educators' linguistic choices for issuing directives. There is some evidence that female educators made more attempts than male educators to reduce asymmetrical relations of power in their directive choices. However, the critical discourse analysis revealed that the linguistic choices of all educators in my study were mostly informed by the language functions they wished to perform at a particular stage of their lesson. I conclude that it is crucial that educators, both male and female, make more effort to employ discourse practices (especially during groupwork) that are more democratic rather than those that emphasise asymmetrical relations. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2003.

Abstract not available. / Thesis (M.A.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.