Thesis (M.S.)--University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 39-41).

This study, entitled “Understanding the Choice of Chinese Graduate Students’ English Learning Strategies in a Canadian Context,” explores the English learning strategies employed by six graduate students from China after their arrival in Canada, and documents and analyses changes in their learning strategies. These Chinese students encountered a change of language context because when in the unilingual Chinese environment they spoke Mandarin and upon their arrival in Canada, they were obligated to use English to communicate with Canadians and other international students. These students employed different English learning strategies in the Canadian context from what they were accustomed to in China. Thus, the researcher’s central objective in this study is to discover and document those changes in learning strategies and to investigate the factors accounting for the changes. In the process, the researcher aims to fill a gap in research exploring the learning strategies of Chinese students in foreign contexts, and create valuable new knowledge to benefit prospective Chinese international students, policy makers at the international universities, and English educators in China. The theoretical framework of this research is the qualitative co-constructivism paradigm along with narrative inquiry. Semi-structured interviews were used as the primary method of collecting data in this study, beginning with individual interviews, and followed by a focus group interview. The data collected through the interviews showed that the six participants’ reliance on the memory and cognitive strategies employed in China were abandoned in favor of utilization of compensation strategies and social strategies after moving to Canada. Furthermore, these participants were more open to making mistakes and taking risks during interactions with others in English. Moreover, these participants made these changes mainly because they desired to use the English-speaking environment in Canada to improve English proficiency. An important finding of my research is that their immersion in the English-speaking environment inspired these participants to employ different English learning strategies that led to significant improvement in their English proficiency.

Context-free tree languages play an important role in algebraic semantics and are applied in mathematical linguistics. In this thesis, we present some new results on context-free tree languages.

The low literacy levels achieved by deaf children are of ongoing concern to educators and researchers alike. The present research considered emergent literacy as one aspect to consider in the acquisition of literacy skills in deaf children. The aim of this research was to describe the home-based literacy experiences of severely to profoundly deaf pre-schoolers as provided by their hearing parents. Parents of twenty-nine pre-school deaf children from schools for the deaf were selected to complete a questionnaire. The questionnaire was developed based on the four identified literacy contexts: the physical and functional context, the language context, the affective context and the educational context. The results obtained indicate that the deaf children in this survey are exposed to literacy-rich home environments where they are able to observe literate adult role models. Limitations in the quantity and quality of text-based interaction between the deaf pre-schoolers, their hearing parents and older siblings were identified. The results also indicated that the parents who participated in this research regarded the development of language and communication as more important than the early acquisition of literacy skills. The parents assigned the greatest responsibility in teaching literacy skills to teachers. This study highlights the sensitive nature of early literacy and language learning in young deaf children. Suggestions for further research are presented. / Dissertation (M(Augmentative and Alternative Communication))--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Centre for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (CAAC) / unrestricted

This dissertation explores a family of temporal meanings pertaining to when, as it appears in When the results were negligible, Galdwin asked why; when she was 50, she left him; and Lowe took a 3-1 lead into the 5th when he finally surrendered his first home run of the season. A widely-accepted view is that when used this way functions as a generalpurpose temporal connective, with underspecified semantics reminiscent to after, during or before, which vary depending on the surrounding context. I propose a heavy revision of this particular claim; surrounding contexts do not by themselves determine the temporal interpretation of when, but they function to strengthen the basic meaning already imposed by grammatical features and lexical constraints. The present system provides accounts for several empirical problems related to corpus-based examples which are inconsistent with previous approaches to the semantics of when. A further characteristic of the present study is its cross-linguistic nature. I extend the analysis of when to toki(-ni), the Japanese counterpart to when. Comparing English and Japanese, I argue that the two languages share the fundamental semantic system but employ different sets of triggering factors for the strengthening process. Supporting evidence for my arguments comes from two manuallyculled newstext corpora prepared for this study. Chapter 1 gives an introduction to the phenomena and issues of interest. I address three distinct temporal relations holding between the when- and main clause events. Forward-sequence entails that the when- clause event occurs earlier than the main, as in when the results were negligible, Galdwin asked why. Overlap consists of two clauses that denote overlapping events, as in when she was 50, she left him. Backward-sequence entails that the when- clause event takes place after the main clause event, as in Lowe took a 3-1 lead into the fifth when he finally surrendered his first home run of the season. Discussions in later chapters assume some familiarity to temporal and discourse semantics literature. Chapter 2 has been devoted to providing such background information, including an introduction to Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and Reyle (1993)) and Two-Component Aspect Theory (Smith (1993, 1997)). For visual presentation of my ideas, I adopt Blackburn & Bos’ (2000) DRS-building scheme. In Chapter 3 I sketch previous analyses on when- sentences and address their empirical problems. I discuss two streams of approaches. Under one view, when commits to placing two eventualities temporally close to each other, without fixing their relative order (Heinëmäki (1978), Ritchie (1979) and Hinrichs (1986)). An implication of this type of proposal is that whenever a when appears, there is little restriction as to which one of the temporal meanings is chosen. Thus, for these authors when is a general-purpose temporal adverbial used without a specific temporal meaning built into it. Alternatively, scholars such as Moens and Steedman (1989) and Sändström (1993) argue that when does not order events temporally; it only adds an implication concerning event consequentiality, namely that the main clause event is a consequence of the when clause event. A major problem common to both approaches is empirical. The former entails that when is vague as to its temporal implications, when in actuality a given when sentence is usually associated with only one of the temporal meanings. The latter approach, on the other hand, is misleading in giving the impression that all when sentences bear a consequential relation: corpus examples in the present study reveal that it is not true. Chapter 4 presents English corpus data collected for this study and an analysis of when- sentences that avoids the problems surrounding the previous approaches, with emphasis on the claim that pragmatic information is fully responsible for rendering the temporal meanings associated with when. I examine this proposal critically and arrive at a hybrid system where grammatical and pragmatic or extra-linguistic informational contents work in tandem. I also discuss DRT construction rules for when and demonstrate my system for some key examples drawn from the corpus. Chapter 5 turns to a cross-linguistic consideration, focusing on Japanese. After reviewing the literature on Japanese toki-ni (“when” lit. time-at) sentences, such as that authored by Yoshimoto and Mori (2003), I discuss Japanese corpus data and argue for one salient difference between the systems in the two languages: the strengthening processes in English tend to allude to pragmatic and extra-linguistic information while those in Japanese are more directly affected by grammatical factors such as tense marking variations and particle-drop. Chapter 6 concludes the study. I mention some remaining issues, for the purpose of suggesting some future avenues of research which the achievement of this study opens up. Two appendices are included at the end of this dissertation. One explains technical details regarding the corpora used in this study. The other is a summary of miscellaneous numerical results I have obtained while I worked on the project. / text

In this thesis, three methods are investigated to express context-free tree languages by regular tree grammars. The first method is a characterization. We show restrictions to context-free tree grammars such that, for each restricted context-free tree grammar, a regular tree grammar can be constructed that induces the same tree language. The other two methods are approximations. An arbitrary context-free tree language can be approximated by a regular tree grammar with a restricted pushdown storage. Furthermore, we approximate weighted context-free tree languages, induced by weighted linear nondeleting context-free tree grammars, by showing how to approximate optimal weights for weighted regular tree grammars.

Notre projet de recherche porte sur l’enseignement/apprentissage de l’oral en FLE aux étudiants russes de deuxième – et en partie de troisième - année de la faculté de langues de l’université pédagogique. Nous sommes notamment centrés sur l’agir de l’enseignant, celui-ci étant la figure clé assurant la progression du processus de l’apprentissage organisé dans une situation exolingue, en milieu hétéroglotte. Son rôle est plurifonctionnel, ses manifestations sont variables. Les polylogues pédagogiques se trouvent au cœur de nos analyses, dont le but est d’optimiser le processus d’enseignement/apprentissage par l’intermédiaire des modifications de l’agir de l’enseignant en y appliquant notre thèse du « naturel didactique » censée créer des conditions d’expression naturelles dans une situation didactique en motivant ainsi la parole des apprenants, d’une part, et en diminuant la dissymétrie des relations enseignant-apprenants, d’autre part.Les analyses quantitatives ont permis de dégager les particularités discursives des interactions verbales en groupe de FLE de l’université pédagogique russe, notamment la manière spécifique d’agir de l’enseignant. Les éléments dégagés de cette observation permettent d’ouvrir une réflexion sur la pédagogie à concevoir en contexte de la Russie. / Our research project is concerned with the teaching/apprentiship of oral French in the « French as a Foreign Language » (FLE) program for Russian students in the second and, in part, third years in the Faculty of Languages of the teaching university of Vologda. We concentrated in particular on the action of the teacher, since the teacher is the key actor who ensures progress in the learning process in a situation using a non-native language in a foreign language context. The teacher assumes multiple functions with varying manifestations. Pedagogical polylogues are at the heart of our analyses. They aim to optimize the process of teaching/learning by modifying the action of the teacher via the application of our hypothesis of « natural didactics ». This method favors the creation of conditions allowing natural expression in a didactic situation by motivating the learners to speak on the one hand, and by reducing the asymmetry of the teacher-student relation on the other. Quantitative analyses allowed us to isolate particular aspects of verbal interaction in a FLE group within the Russian teaching university and in particular the specific action of the teacher. The results of these observations open up the possibility of a study of pedagogical methods appropriate for use in Russia.