In this qualitative research, I hoped to get some impression of ways teachers and learners in five Cape Town schools deal with the process of making sense of a violent past. I offered five teachers material on the Trojan Horse Incident, partly generated by the TRC, and pondered the questions what for them and their learners is politically sensitive and how they position the people involved in the incident and how they position themselves. I understand by 'politically sensitive issues', issues centering on political and social divisions of the past and their ramifications in the present in this country. Applying a 'Foucaultian' approach to discourse analysis, I used the concepts 'indescribable' and 'undiscussable' as structuring categories, next to a differentiation between the discourse of classroom talk, and informal discourses outside the classroom situation. I also differentiated between the sense making processes of teachers, being part of a generation that lived through Apartheid, and of learners, the 'new' generation who didn't have that experience. The results of this research are: Firstly, teachers and learners in the five schools positioned themselves, the people involved in the incident and the researcher through dynamic practices of in- and excluding (shifting between 'us' and 'them') and of past and present framing (shifting between past and present tenses). Both groups seem to prefer to position themselves as 'observers'. In most classes, most of the time was spent on how exactly the Trojan Horse Incident took place (when, where, which tactics the policemen used, consequences,). Moral questions ('why' questions) were left for the end of the period or left implicit. Secondly, there was not a lot of space during classroom interactions for emotions and personal stories. The power/knowledge structure of the discourse of schooling seemed to be very strong, although it was also a matter of personal choices by teachers and learners. An 'official' image of Apartheid, with clear differentiations between victims and perpetrators prevailed. Personal stories were only situated in formal discourses of schooling before or after the actual lesson (learners speaking with the teacher about their personal experiences of or reactions to violence) or when 'others' were present, be it learners from 'another' community than the majority of learners and the teacher, or be it the researcher. Thirdly, a discourse of reconstructing personal histories and identities had more space in informal discourses (for example learners talking to one another during breaks) and during interviews with me. South African youth might have (similar to German and Irish youth) a 'fatigue' towards 'official', 'consensus' knowledge of the past and they might not to be able or not want to make sense of the 'wall' of silenced personal stories of those who have experienced the conflicts in the past. Fourthly, 'sensitive issues' were mostly expressed outside the classroom interactions. These were violence in past and present; moral stances towards violence and responsibility; schooling (teaching but also disciplining); and stereotypes people have of 'other' South Africans and the separate lives they have.

Educational success and attainment, and individual sustainability depend on reading ability. School leaders, especially at the elementary and primary level, have great responsibility ensuring student success in learning to read. In this era of standards-based curriculum and high stakes testing and accountability, school leaders must be certain the programs employed to grow student reading ability are successful. This program evaluation analyzes the effects implementing a scripted, direct instruction reading program has had at a rural, primary school. Specifically, this study investigated the correlation between the Scholastic Reading Inventory and the Virginia Third Grade Reading Standards of Learning Assessment, analyzed the extent student achievement changed on the two assessments from implementing the Reading Mastery initiative, and determined the extent the practice of regrouping students for instructional alignment was utilized and the effect it had on student achievement. Findings indicate a moderate correlation between the Scholastic Reading Inventory and the Third Grade Reading Standards of Learning Assessment, a significant increase in Lexile when comparing beginning and end of year scores, a significant decline in Standards of Learning Assessment scores when comparing three years pre-Reading Mastery implementation to three years post implementation, and found that students remaining in their original program placement demonstrated greater Lexile and grade level equivalency growth than students regrouped to a lower level or accelerated. If program goals, increasing reading ability and increasing Standards of Learning pass rates are to be obtained, Reading Mastery initiative implementation will require modifications. Recommendations for policy, practice, and future studies are included.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 78-82). / The investigation seeks to establish whether vital information is lost or not communicated properly due to differences in language between medical practitioners and patients. In particular the thesis is concerned with English-speaking doctors and their Xhosa-speaking patients in Cape Town. This thesis studies interactions between ten Xhosa patients and five English-speaking doctors at the Red Cross hospital in Cape Town. It examines terminological issues, especially the names for illness as understood by doctors and patients. It also examines communication difficulties pertaining to a lack of complete fluency in the respective second languages. Culture-bound assumptions about illness and communication of important information are also studied. The thesis contends that vital information does tend to be minimised or even lost and examines the consequences of this loss, and makes recommendations in order to minimise miscommunication and enhance communication.

Young children who are learning to read are exposed to digital technology from a very young age and many contemporary families have access to a range of digital devices. This project investigates the reading practices, both digital and print-based, of six middle-class suburban children in Cape Town and how the children and their mothers conceptualise reading. By analysing reading practices and associated discourses, this study aims to ascertain how the dominant discourses of the mothers influence the children's reading practices. This research project is a case study using a qualitative approach, with ethnographic data generating techniques. These included observations, interviews with the six children and their mothers and a questionnaire. Analysis of the data showed that middle-class pre-school children engage in many emergent literacy practices, both digital and print-based, in their homes. Both mothers and children conceptualise reading as being the decoding of print, thus not recognising the multimodal meaning-making strategies to access and read screen texts as being part of the children's emergent literacy practices. A critical discourse analysis of the mothers' answers to the interview and questionnaire revealed that their dominant discourses are ‘literacy is a skill' and ‘being a good parent'. This resulted in the mothers in my study all exposing their children to digital technology, but also restricting the amount of time that their children spend engaging with it. The mothers failed to acknowledge the emergent literacy practices present in their children's digital activities and viewed online and offline literacy practices as separate, not acknowledging the relationship between the use of digital technologies and print-based decoding, seeing their digital practices as ‘other' to what they needed to achieve. This serves to marginalise these digital literacy practices in the children's ‘coming to literacy'. In trying to be a good parent, they feel conflicted by the need to expose their children to digital technology and the need to protect them and thus limit their access by imposing restrictions. Thus, discourse shapes which literacy practices are valued and which are restricted. Regimes of truth about what reading is and the need to restrict access to digital technology reinforce the suburban middle-class ideas and ways of becoming literate and being a good parent. Discourse is thus shaping literacy practices in suburban homes and constituting knowledge, marginalising particular ways of being and doing and, thus failing to recognise the child's potential to contribute to their own learning and full participation in their emergent literacy practices. This project concluded that despite literacies changing as a function of social, cultural and technological changes, how people view reading has not changed since the 1950s. If people regard the contribution that the digital is making towards a child's emergent literacy, the ‘formal' literacy learning that occurs in schools and other institutions may improve.

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No description available.

Following recent trends in lexical studies to focus more on multiword rather than single-word vocabulary, this descriptive study examines fixed expressions and idioms (FEI) in spoken and written corpora of academic language. In this research, FEIs are operationalized as phrases that are conventionalized to a certain degree, have flexibility in word sequences, and have unclarity of interpretation (Fernando, 1996). With these three criteria, a new list of 652 target FEIs was culled from lists from eight previous corpus studies (Biber et al., 1999; Gardner & Davies, 2007; Garnier & Schmitt, 2015; Grant, 2007; Liu, 2003, 2012; Miller, 2020; Simpson & Mendis, 2003). To identify the most common academic FEIs, a search for these 652 FEIs was conducted in two existing academic corpora, the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and the Michigan Corpus of University Student Papers (MICUSP). The end result of this corpus study is the Academic Fixed Expressions and Idioms List (AFEIL), which consists of 123 unique items, with 66 from the spoken corpus and 87 from the written corpus. To select FEIs for the AFEIL, this study followed Liu's (2003) guidelines of a minimum frequency of two times per million words and a minimum range of three out of five academic divisions within MICASE and three out of four academic divisions within MICUSP. While we expect individual academic words to differ from individual general words, this study found that academic FEIs do not consist of academic lexical items. In fact, 100% of the words that make up the 66 academic FEIs from MICASE and almost 97% of the words that make up the 87 FEIs from MICUSP are from the first 2,000 words of the General Service List (GSL). Surprisingly, only six academic words form any part of the academic FEIs. Although knowledge of general vocabulary may be important in learning academic FEIs, the high number of FEIs with restricted variation may cause learning difficulties due to their high degree of non-compositionality. While numerous academic lists exist for single words (e.g., Academic Word List [Coxhead, 2000], Academic Vocabulary List [Gardner & Davies, 2013]), the AFEIL may be of particular interest to teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) because it is an academic corpus-based list that goes beyond single words. Formulaic language and multiword vocabulary are very common in academic registers (Biber et al., 2007) and should therefore receive more attention in EAP classroom teaching through tools and materials like the AFEIL that portray English vocabulary accurately based on real language use rather than human intuition.

Despite being an emotionally charged profession, there is a paucity of research on the roles of emotions and emotional labor in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (Khong & Saito, 2014; Kocabas¸-Gedik & Hart, 2021; Schutz & Lee, 2014; Zembylas & Schutz, 2009). Furthermore, these concepts and their link to identity formation in nonnative English-speaking teachers (NNEST) have rarely been investigated in local contexts (Song, 2018; Zhang & Zhu, 2008). In order to help fill this gap in literature, this exploratory qualitative study was conducted in Korea with three NNESTs of English employed in private after-school academies. Semi-structured interviews elicited narratives from the participants. The findings suggested that institutional, systematic, and cultural power structures influenced the emotions, emotional labor, and identities of the participants. The emotions felt by participants were heavily instrumented by their institutions when they felt the need to conform to their institution's image of a teacher, when they were forced to engage in duties they believed were distanced from education, and when their professionality was questioned. Emotional labor was found to be a necessary skill for participants as they had to suppress and conjure certain emotions both inside and outside the classroom. Their use of emotional labor was found to be critical to their job satisfaction as it assisted the participants in aligning themselves as professionals. Moreover, EFL teachers may merge or divide their professional and personal identities in reference to these power structures to protect, strengthen, or develop their identities. Further research is needed in local contexts, particularly those in private for-profit institutions in ultra-capitalist societies to examine the power structures involved and their influence on teacher emotions, emotional labor, and identity.

The purpose of this mixed study was to determine the impact of a growth mindset intervention on adult ESOL learners' growth mindset, self-efficacy, and learning behaviors at a technical college. This study adopted paired samples t test to analyze quantitative component part of the study, including pre and post Growth Mindset Surveys and Self-Efficacy Surveys. For the qualitative component of the study, participants' interview responses were recorded and analyzed to explore their perspectives on the quantitative part of the study. Quantitatively, the findings of the study showed that there was no significant difference between growth mindset intervention and adult ESOL students' growth mindset and self-efficacy scores. However, qualitatively, students conceptualized the growth mindset messages according to participants' interview responses. Students reflected they modified their learning behavior, and some had improved their attendance after the growth mindset intervention. Overall, a growth mindset intervention and the implications for growth mindset, efficacy, and learning behavior provided meaningful insight about how to address both academic and social needs.

The education system in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is given a great deal of attention by the government as it is keen to provide an educational system that caters to teacher and student needs. Because English has the potential to provide access to resources that may facilitate advancement in science and technology, it is difficult to deny or underestimate the importance of the English language in Saudi Arabia. Despite the history of EFL teaching and resources allocated to the teaching of English in Arabia, the quality of Saudi students' English language skills has raised many concerns. Saudi students currently study English as a foreign language for 12 years and yet reach high school with limited English proficiency, unable to write a passage or carry a simple conversation in English. Shedding light on the perceptions of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in the context of English education in primary and secondary schools has become crucial. Three Saudi EFL teachers' perspectives of English language instruction in Saudi Arabian primary and secondary schools were examined using a case study methodology. Using Zoom semi-structured interviews, respondents provided a comprehensive image of English classrooms and curriculum in Saudi Arabian schools, as well as the challenges associated with the classes.