The key postulation of the research is: learning an additional language should go together with learning its culture. Through personal experience as an EAL learner and EFL teacher, the researcher examines the interconnected system of the learner’s motivations, premising that language cognition could engage a meta-cognitive search for L, as a symbol of the researcher’s inner world, and arising from L such concepts as Language, Learning, Life, Love, and Led Zeppelin. Quest and examination of those concepts analyze sense-data, the researcher’s short literary works written in Russian and translated into English. The canvas of the author’s writing is presented in a symbolic form of literary and musical Islands with which she creates her arts-informed research of new learning-teaching interactions with the learning component as dominating in this interaction. The researcher looks for new perspectives on education as a lifelong process that takes place between I-world and They-world through internalization-externalization.

Peace processes require an opening to self and others — a willingness to confront what is and to vision beyond present challenges to a brighter future. This type of engagement is crucial for the peaceful development of healthy, functioning societies — societies such as Ukraine, a country thrust without preparation from regional Soviet status to independent country searching for democracy. Eighteen years post-Independence the Ukrainian parliament continues to flounder unsupported by citizens. Active participation in civic affairs required for democracy is unfamiliar for most Ukrainian citizens, having internalized centuries of divisive oppression under a series of authoritarian regimes. Democracy-building and peace-building require participant agency and voice; rising out of oppression, people often need support to speak about and transform their lived experiences. This study, cognizant of the centrality of gender analysis in any context, explored the roles women’s shared narrative, dialogue, and group-visioning play in the support of personal empowerment and bridge building between diverse communities. The study invited women from the European Union-focused Western region of Lviv, Ukraine and the more Soviet/Russian-identified Eastern region of Crimea, first to share their personal stories with the researcher and second, to meet in their regional groups to vision for themselves, their families, and Ukraine. The third phase of this study invited these diverse regional groups to meet in a neutral space, reflexively exploring their parallel processes, while in phase four participants reviewed their experiences of the study. Despite initial beliefs that they have little in common, women in both regions said study participation changed them. They found telling their stories “from beginning to end” allowed them to reflect upon their own values and strengths, and having connected with themselves and their roots, they were then able to reach out to others. Rather than looking for differences, participants sought ways to express a shared vision for an inclusive, functional, peace-building future for themselves, their families, and Ukraine as a whole.

Traumatic brain injury is one of the leading causes of death and disability in the North America, and can result in long-term physical and psychological consequences, which over time change brain injury from a medical problem to an issue of quality of life. Various self-care activities can significantly improve the quality of life in people living with a chronic health condition. However, research on self-care in these populations has focused on the physical aspect of self-care, often excluding other domains of functioning. There is minimal self-care research involving people who had a traumatic brain injury; however, it is important to understand how they experience and make sense of their injury and its consequences in order to develop more effective approaches to their rehabilitation and support systems. In this study, I interviewed adults with traumatic brain injury who had their injury at least two years prior to the study. Narrative analysis of their stories revealed that the participants faced the following difficulties: constructing an explanation for the injury, dealing with losses and limitations, feeling misunderstood and insignificant, and dealing with memory deficits and physical problems. The ways in which participants tried to overcome these difficulties was understood as self-care. It manifested in a variety of ways, including deliberate health-related behaviours, changes in one’s way of thinking, emotional regulation strategies, and linguistic and paralinguistic means used in the narratives. I discuss ways to understand the findings using different theoretical models, such as illness narratives, social disenfranchisement, and social disability models. The results of the study strongly suggest that our understanding of self-care should encompass both physical and psychological health.

This study explored the stories of six elderly Latino immigrant women living in Winnipeg based on their talk about identity and home. Using narrative analyses, the research focused on their life stories before and after immigrating and made use of pictures to discuss their notion of home. These women provided rich narratives of how people and places shaped their identities during their formative and pre-immigration years. At the same time, the circumstances that compelled them to emigrate, the places to which they arrived and live now, the people they met in Winnipeg and elsewhere, and the new roles they embraced in Canada have all contributed to a renegotiation of these women’s identities. These women showed that home is family, but that family is often symbolized by objects, places, and pictures that represent the memories they have of, and share with, their family members.

Infertile heterosexual couples comprise the majority of those pursuing parenthood via adoption. While research into the experience of adoptive parenthood has focused on adoptive mothers and couples, the research on either group has not fully captured the experience of adoptive fathers. The present study was aimed at understanding how men perceive adoption, and its pursuit, following failed infertility treatment. Sixteen established and prospective adoptive fathers were recruited to participate in individual semi-structured interviews. Narrative analysis was used to evaluate the men’s meaning-making process related to fatherhood. The men told stories which indicated they both believed and countered western culture’s master narrative that fatherhood is constructed via genetic reproduction. I elaborate on the implications of these narratives for understanding the experience of adoptive fatherhood in specific, and fatherhood in general. Following this, recommendations are made for infertility treatment practitioners, adoption service providers, and future researchers based on these implications.

Throughout the reading process, a narrative text produces various sensations of immediacy or distance. One important reason for this is that a narrative will in some places present situtations from a particular perspective, with which the reader is implicitly invited to identify, while in other places it will describe situations as independent of any perspective. If a perspective (that of the narrator, or that of a character in the text) is introduced, the narrative reflects an individual's (potentially fallible) perceptions, attitudes or beliefs; and this creates the impression of perspectival immediacy. If no perspective is introduced, on the other hand, the narrative pretends to relate "objective facts" within the fiction; and this creates the impression of perspectival distance. Thus the contrast between perepectivally situated and perepectivally non-situated sentences in a narrative produces perspectival refractions. The difference between both types of sentences, however, is often felt to be recalcitrant to a full linguistic analysis. For example, it is generally assumed that the perspectival status of a sentence is determined by the presence or absence of aubject-oriented elements in the sentence. But although such elements play an important role in focusing perspective, they need not occur in a sentence for the sentence to be perspectivally situated. In Chapter 1 of this dissertation, we draw attention to an observation which has received very little attention in the existing literature on perspective: per pectivally non-situated sentences typically move narrative time forward (in the sense that the order of the sentences on the page mimics temporal progression on the imaginary time line of the narrative), while perspectivally situated sentences do not convey forward movement in time. In other words, there appears to be a relationship between temporal ordering and perspective. Our aim is to specify the precise nature of this relationship. To do so, we first of all try to establish what determines the temporal relationship between consecutive sentences in narrative. We take as the starting point for our discussion some recent theories in the field of formal semantics which define this relationship in terms of the aspectual type a sentence belongs to. In Chapter 2, we explore to what extent these theories enable us to explain the apparent correlation between temporal ordering and perspective in narrative texts. In Chapters 3-5, we propose a detailed analysis of the relationship between the aspectual properties of sentences and their perspectival characteristics. Our central claim is that sentences exhibiting a state profile always introduce a perspective into a narrative. We try to make explicit why this is the case. In Chapter 6, the conclusions of this analysis are integrated into a more general theory of perspective in narrative fiction.

Today there are several generations who have grown up watching Disney’s films. Disney has become a central storyteller in our society with children and their families as their main audience. Disney's storytelling is often with the children from an early age and they get to learn about right and wrong, good and evil through the films. A picture of how the world looks and how you should and should not behave is presented in Disney's films. Our aim with this study is to analyze the villains in Disney's animated films, how the female and male villains are presented in relation to each other from a gender perspective. The study's goal is to understand if the gender roles and stereotypes are enhanced or weakened by how male and female villains communicates through Disney’s films. With support from the theories of Giddens, Foucault and Jung, as well as theories of gender and stereotypes we have through a qualitative narrative and semiotic analysis studied twelve animated Disney-films. This has led to the discovery that female and male villains are produced in a gender-stereotypical way, the female villains are presented as more passive, emotional and nurturing, and that the male villains are presented as more active, ambitious and confident. We also found that there were similarities between the two genders, especially when it comes to how the antagonists exert his or her power and the atmosphere that is presented around the antagonists.

Abstract This study investigates the impact of storytelling for children's language development in preschool from a sociocultural perspective. The purpose is to find what narrative methods teachers use to promote children's language development. I also want to examine whether the children are involved in the storytelling. To get answers to my questions which include what methods teachers use, narrative meaning and function, and their children's participation, I have used qualitative interviews with four preschool teachers at four different preschools. The results of my survey show that teachers use a variety of methods at storytelling. The most common methods were reading, rhymes and daily storytelling while eating. The teachers agreed that storytelling is very important for children's language development and that it plays an important role in the daily activities. The children are involved in various ways, including being activated during reading or sharing their experiences during meals. / Sammanfattning Den här undersökningen handlar om berättandets betydelse för barns språkutveckling i förskolan utifrån ett sociokulturellt perspektiv. Syftet med denna studie är att ta reda på vilka metoder pedagogerna använder sig av vid berättande för att främja barns språkutveckling. Jag vill också undersöka om barnen involveras i berättandet. För att få svar på mina frågeställningar som innefattar vilka metoder pedagogerna använder sig av, berättandets betydelse och funktion, samt barnens delaktighet, har jag använt mig av kvalitativa intervjuer. Jag valde att intervjua fyra olika förskollärare på fyra olika förskolor. Resultatet av min undersökning visar på att pedagogerna använder sig av en rad olika metoder vid berättandet. De vanligast förekommande metoderna är högläsning, rim och ramsor samt vardagsberättande vid matbordet. Pedagogerna var eniga om att berättandet har stor betydelse för barns språkutveckling och att den fyller en viktig funktion i förskolans dagliga verksamhet. Barnen involveras på olika sätt, bland annat genom att vara aktiva under läsning, dela med sig av sina erfarenheter vid matbordet eller välja en ramsa att lära sig.

The primary objective of this creative project was to make my artwork more appealing to a mature audience. I would use familiar imagery that I had created from characters that were initially developed for children. These characters are now not only entertaining, but also have been enhanced through the use of engaging symbolic narrative.The secondary objective was to combine my knowledge of drawing, painting and sculpture based on changes in my recent artwork. These changes were brought about through investigating contemporary artist while studying at Ball State University. The body of work includes an underlying theme: "A Journey Though life," which features Quest the foolish dog, derived from the fool card in a tarot card deck. / Department of Art

The aim with this research was to determine how cancer patients (the inner group) and non-cancer patients (the listening group) experience the listening group technique. A qualitative research design was utilised. The reasons for undertaking this research were the following: Experience has indicated that the listening group technique may be an effective method to help individuals discover alternative life stories besides the dominant stories that direct their lives. Some authors have expressed the need for therapists to do research on the listening group technique to ascertain its effectiveness as a therapeutic approach. The reason for focusing specifically on cancer patients is the high incidence of cancer and the accompanying medical and psychological effects it has for the individual. Psychological interventions appear to have positive results for cancer patients. The project was announced to cancer patients and their supporters, as well as in the postgraduate Psychology classes. Six cancer patients, five supporters and ten students participated on a voluntarily basis - twelve as members of the inner group (cancer patients and supporters) and nine as members of the listening group. Eight members of the inner group were female and four were male. Their ages varied from twenty - two to sixty - two. The listening group consisted of six female and three male students, of whom seven were honours students and two were masters students. Their ages varied from twenty - one to twenty - two. The study leader and the researcher acted as facilitators during the sessions. The process covered five evenings. After the introductory session, the first two sessions were held in the first week, while the last two sessions took place during the subsequent two weeks. Each session lasted approximately two hours. The way the participants experienced the technique was determined by means of semi-structured interviews. The following five themes came to the fore on analysing the data: other perspectives that developed and growth that took place during sessions, it was a learning experience, the participants' experience of the process, the participants' experience of the procedures and application of the technique, and suggestions that the participants made. The results indicated that the listening group technique can be applied to obtain beneficial outcomes for the participants. It can, inter aha, help them to develop new perspectives about their personal dilemmas and stimulate personal growth. / Thesis (M.A. (Clinical Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.