No description available.

What child does not want to do everything possible to please his or her parents? Many times children, regardless of age, find themselves struggling to decide what is right for them and what their parents feel is right for them. Parents are not always to blame for a child's unsatisfied feeling. Children often have a hard time articulating what they are feeling on the inside. I now find myself in the same conundrum with college students who have difficulty articulating what they want in life. With writing as my medium, this thesis will use the power of both Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) and Epistolary Scholarly Personal Narrative (eSPN) to explore my personal battle with articulating what I want for myself and the world around me. With creation of a personal definition of success as my end goal, I will explore and exemplify how SPN and eSPN writing can be used in one's life to reflect upon and articulate internal desires for how we want to live our lives. With my background in engineering and mathematics, I have found writing to be a release from the straightforward answers that I have been trained to search for. All types of people, engineers or not, can use the power of SPN and eSPN to dig deeper and find what exactly they want to do with their time. Finally, using narrative writing to help others write their stories will give both the reader and their respective audiences a medium through which to connect, i.e. SPN and/or eSPN writing.

Roald Dahl does not easily fit into a category as a writer, contributing fiction and nonfiction to both children and adult audiences. Faced with this ambiguity, the literary community has mostly ignored his contributions since he is mainly viewed as a children‘s author. Late in life, Dahl created two autobiographies, Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984), and Going Solo (1986), as venues for sharing his many embellished, personal stories. This thesis focuses on Going Solo, the second of these two books which explores Dahl‘s three-year departure from England, including his enlistment in the Royal Air Force during World War II. During this same time period, he wrote 126 personal letters and telegrams to his family. He had experienced much change in his life during the nearly fifty-year gap from when the letters were written to when he crafted Going Solo for a more general audience. By comparing this personal correspondence to Going Solo, it is possible to see how memory and self-selection permitted the author to craft a personal narrative interested as much in reconstructing his public persona as recounting true events from his past. This thesis asserts that Dahl does not rely exclusively on his letters when reconstructing the narrative and instead inserts himself into a larger historical narrative. Dahl used Going Solo to point to the locations where his personal narrative collides with history and emotions. This is particularly true in the last half of the book where he comes to rely on historical touchstones. It is full of places and people which evoke memories and strong feelings for him. Dahl also relied on techniques and motifs found in folktales, features that make his work of particular interest to folklorists. The final chapter offers an examination of these techniques used in The BFG, Dahl‘s most autobiographical work of children‘s literature, written only four years prior to Going Solo. By paying closer attention to his methodology, we gain a clearer understanding of how folklore functions in the development of literary personal narrative.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The purpose of this study was to examine complexities which constitute women's narratives in a conservative Christian church context. Complexities often occur around self-perception, religious beliefs, choices and change, in regard to gender relations. A review of literature indicated that social constructions about gender influence the way individuals construct narratives and meaning about their lives, which inform them how to live. Taking into account how reality is constructed though social dialogue an emphasis was placed on understanding how individuals conform and reform knowledge. This is often accomplished through the use of language around cultural and personal narratives. / Ph. D.

Thesis advisor: Maria E. Brisk / This descriptive case study examines the role that Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory of language can play in making academic language more transparent and accessible to linguistically diverse students. In an urban fourth grade classroom composed of both bilingual and monolingual students, I incorporated key concepts of SFL into writing instruction on personal narrative and scientific explanation texts. Specifically, instruction explored the context, purpose, and tenor of each genre and scaffolded students' development of appropriate structure and useful language tools. Classroom instruction and student writing were examined using selective coding, constant comparison, and triangulation to make meaning from the data. Analysis of student writing in relation to SFL-influenced instruction revealed significant growth in areas of structure and language. In this case, SFL provided the researcher and classroom teacher with a useful theory of language and purposeful meta-language to identify and describe the functional elements of two genres to students from diverse literacy backgrounds. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

Contemporary theatre has crossed boldly into therapeutic terrain and is now the site of radical self-exposure. The recent and expanding use of people’s personal stories in the theatre has prompted the need for a robust framework for safe, ethical, flexible and intentional practice by theatre makers. Such a framework is needed due to the risks inherent in putting people’s private lives on the stage, particularly when their stories focus on unresolved difficulties and cross into therapeutic terrain. With this ethical and practical imperative in mind, and in order to create a broader spectrum of ethical risk-taking where practitioners can negotiate blurred boundaries in safe and creative ways, this study draws on relevant therapeutic theory and practice to re-connect therapy and theatre and promote best practice in the theatre of personal stories. In order to promote best practice in the theatre of personal stories (a term I will use to cover the myriad forms of theatre that make use of people’s personal stories), I describe a new framework that synthesises theory and practice from the fields of psychodrama, attachment narrative therapy, and theatre and performance studies. The benefits of this integrative framework for the theatre practitioner are that it promotes safer, more ethical and purposeful practice with personal stories, and encourages more confident and creative artistic expression. The framework provides these benefits because it offers a structured model for decision-making by theatre practitioners who work with personal stories, and suggests ways that the practitioner can explore fresh artistic possibilities with clear intentions and confidence about the boundaries and ethics of the work. The integrated framework has been developed through the grounded theory process of reflective inquiry, using in particular the models of action research, the Kolb experiential learning cycle and applied phronesis. The framework has four elements, which are explored respectively in chapters one to four: 1) History: understanding the roots of the theatre of personal stories in traditions of art, oral history, social activism, theatre and therapy; 2) Ethics: incorporating wide-ranging ethical issues inherent in staging personal stories; 3) Praxis: structuring participatory theatre processes to regulate the level of personal disclosure among participants (a model for structuring practice and regulating personal disclosure is offered — called the Drama Spiral); and 4) Intentions: working with a clear focus on specific intentions — especially bio-psycho-social integration — when working with personal stories. The study concludes, in chapter five, with a critical analysis of two exemplars of practice, examined through the lens of the Drama Spiral.

This study explores learners’ online peer review practices during a four-week second language writing project. The project was developed at the college level, in a multi-section upper-level Spanish writing course. Using theories relevant to second language acquisition and second language writing the goals of the study were multiple: (1) to identify the types of comments students used and explore peer review in terms of the givers’ and receivers’ roles, (2) to examine students’ attitudes and self-perceptions about peer review, and (3) to develop an understanding of how students’ attitudes and self-perceptions may influence their feedback-giving procedures. The three goals were addressed using different methods of inquiry, and the findings obtained in the first phase guided the analysis that took place during the second phase. In the quantitative phase, the analyses of data sources (e.g., feedback comments given and received and students’ written drafts) show that giving feedback is a better predictor of final performance than receiving feedback. This principle of learning by reviewing is most evident when students offer feedback that identifies problems, gives a justification, or explains positive elements in the peers’ text. The qualitative phase builds on the quantitative results: it zooms in to the role of the feedback giver to further explore participants’ attitudes and perceptions towards peer review. The analyses of data sources (e.g., pre-study questionnaire, participants’ interviews and peer review simulation activity, and the teacher-researcher reflective journal) show that students do self-position themselves into a specific feedback-giving role. Moreover, the study also confirms that students’ perceptions regarding their attitudes and the comments they give to peers accurately corroborate their actual peer review performance. By combining both methods of inquiry, quantitative and qualitative methods, this study further examines the specific procedures that two case study students follow when offering feedback to a peer. In particular, the procedures for offering problem identification, suggestion, and explanation of the praise comments are analyzed in detail. The results are further interpreted through the lenses of the feedback-giving roles assumed by each of the case study students. Based on the overall findings, the study suggests broadening the notion of feedback: from a unilateral perspective in which comments are addressed from feedback givers to receivers, to a multilateral perspective in which the comments offered are meant to benefit both feedback givers and feedback receivers. The study ends with pedagogical implications for second language learning, implications for the field of second language acquisition, and perspectives for future research.