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There is no abstract available for this dissertation.

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This study will explore my own perception of my personal and professional roles as a language teacher in Nunavik and in Japan. In this qualitative study, I attempt to understand the negotiation of language and culture both in and out of the classroom. Using the autobiographical narrative method, I investigate questions about language and identity through my own personal lens and voice. My inquiry comprises two elements; it examines and interprets key episodes in my life as a learner and teacher, and as a researcher, I link these topics to theoretical and empirical knowledge. My narrative begins with the early years of my life as a Francophone immersed in an English neighbourhood in Montreal, grounding it in the particular experiences of my own learning and teaching. The study also includes a comparative analysis of my teaching experiences in Northern Quebec and in Japan. The journals I kept throughout my teaching assignments provide material for analysis which contributes a unique perspective to the body of literature addressing the relationship between culture, values, language and identity. I close the discussion with recommendations for the improvement of second language teaching and teacher development in intercultural contexts.

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Includes lesson plans. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This thesis considers the problem of how to bring foreign language students with a limited vocabulary knowledge, consisting mainly of high-frequency words, to the point where they are able to adequately comprehend authentic texts in a target domain or genre. It proposes bridging the vocabulary gap by first determining which word families account for 95% of the target domain's running words, and then having students learn these word families by reading texts in an order that allows for the incremental introduction of target vocabulary. This is made possible by a recently developed computer program that sorts through a collection of texts and (a) finds texts with a suitably high proportion of target words, (b) ensures that over the course of these texts, most or all target words are encountered five or more times, and (c) creates an order for reading these texts, such that each new text contains a reasonably small number of new target words and a maximum number of familiar words. A computer-based study, involving the sorting of 293 news texts, resulted in the finding that all three of these conditions could be met for the majority of texts tested, provided two key changes were first made to the sorting algorithm. A potential problem with the computerized approach is also addressed. The approach takes for granted that a reader must be familiar with 95% of a text's tokens in order to adequately comprehend the text, but a recently published study challenges this assumption by claiming that 98% is a more accurate figure. A close analysis of the study, however, points out a serious methodological flaw which undermines this result.

This thesis deals with the curricular development of modern languages in the schools of England between 1864 and 1918. At the beginning of the period, modern languages were fringe curricular subjects; by the end of the period, they had achieved full curricular status in the secondary schools. The vehicles for investigating the curricular development of modern languages are the reports of the Royal Commissions and Board of Education. This thesis shows that modern languages became an integral part of the liberal curriculum and hence were taught chiefly in the secondary schools as instruments of cultural and mental formation for the upper and middle classes. Their definition as secondary school subjects was due largely to their promotion as liberal subjects by the Royal Commisions and Board of Education. The elitist views expressed in these reports were highly influential in determining the curricular status of modern languages, and the aims, methods, and content of their teaching.