Esta dissertação versa sobre a comunicação. Para tanto, partimos da consideração do fenômeno da comunicação no campo da linguística, através dos aportes de Ferdinand de Saussure, Émile Benveniste e Roman Jakobson. No entanto, como tal fenômeno extrapola o terreno da linguística, buscou-se as contribuições de Bronislaw Malinowski, no campo da antropologia, e de Dany-Robert Dufour, de Adriana Cavarero e de Giorgio Agamben, no campo da filosofia. Esse percurso, que parte da pergunta sobre o lugar da comunicação nos estudos sobre a língua, acaba por colocar foco no lugar da comunicação na vida do homem, homem enquanto produtor e efeito de sentidos. / This dissertation aims at talking about communication. In order to do this, we started by considering the communication phenomenon within the field of linguistics, reading Ferdinand de Saussure, Émile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson. Nevertheless, as this phenomenon surpasses the field of linguistics, we have searched for the contributions of Bronislaw Malinowski, in the anthropological field, and Dany-Robert Dufour, Adriana Cavarero, and Giorgio Agamben, in the field of philosophy. This course, which originates from the question about the place communication has in the studies of language, ends up focusing on the place communication has in our lives, the lives of men as producer and effect of senses.

M.Ed. (Language Teaching) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

This study is an investigation of instances of conversational failure in interaction as evidenced by speakers of Black South African English (BSAE) , with a particular focus on the role of prosody in conversational (a)synchrony. The data analysed consist of six conversations, one SAE-SAE (South African English) encounter, four BSAE- SAE encounters and one BSAE- BSAE encounter. After a theoretical framework is set up, the analysis is conducted by means of two triangulation research processes based on Ethnomethodology. The analysis consists of an investigation into selected extracts which participants and informants alike perceived as 'stressful'. An attempt is made to isolate the sources of each instance of pragmatic failure. Prosodic features are found to be important in establishing and maintaining theme and conversational synchrony. But other factors are also involved. The analysis reveals two major influences of asynchrony: deviance in the use of (in order of importance) prosodic, lexical and syntactic cues to discourse functions; and a mismatch in the application of socio-cultural principles guiding conversational behaviour. The study leads into a brief outline of aims, objectives and conversational competence at a tertiary level and concludes with suggestions for further research.

South African education has been going through a process of transformation: from a traditional, transmission system to one of a more progressive nature. In the new curriculum, Curriculum 2005 anchored on Outcomes-based Education (OBE), focus is laid on critical reflection, innovation and creativity by classroom participants. Learning situations are expected to promote flexibility, co-operation and relevance of teaching/learning materials. This research looks at these aspects in the English Second Language (ESL) situation where print media articles are used as resource. Other than being a rich resource for language, print media texts have been found to be appropriate for this exploration because of their potential to offer opportunities for critical reflection and interaction with authentic issues. Unlike uncritical reliance on textbooks, the proper use of media articles can give the teachers and learners the space to select relevant and exciting materials for their situations. In this study, the research was done through action research where I (the researcher) actually taught the lessons in collaboration with the English teacher. The teaching method was influenced by the Freirean style of Iiberatory teaching where critical reflection, socio-political relevance and co-operation are crucial elements. The action research was done in two cycles. Experiences in the first cycle pointed to, among other aspects, the fact that the learners could not work in a co-operative way as they were not used to it. Addressing this problem consequently became the basis of the second cycle where the skills of co-operative learning were taught before the learners engaged in further lessons. The conclusions drawn from this research point to the importance of the teacher as an agent in the learning process if the demands of progressive and liberatory teaching are to be met. It has thus been concluded that elements such as critical thinking, creativity, flexibility and selection/development of relevant materials presuppose the existence of a well-trained teacher who is skilled and able to make these possible. In the light of my findings, my major recommendation is that teacher development needs to be strengthened so that more emphasis is placed on enhancing the teacher's ability to critique texts and improve his or her own practice, acquiring the skills to teach in a critical way and achieving the learning competencies.

This thesis analyses the way in which placement testing is being interpreted in Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET). The thesis examines whether the placement tests used in the case study were valid in terms of whether their contents were relevant and authentic with regard to what English second language speakers could reasonably be expected to know. Adult learners have differing English second language knowledge depending on the different contexts in which they have learned their second language. This thesis investigates the implications of the different contexts and different language needs of adult learners for the testing of English as a second language for placement purposes in ABET programmes. The thesis examined two placement tests to determine how the recognition of prior second language learning was being interpreted and how the interpretation affected the validity of the tests. Learners= perceptions of the assessment process and test content were elicited in order to determine whether a policy of transparency had been followed in the implementation of the assessment. It was also established what the goals of the organisation were in implementing an ABET programme. This research suggests that placement testing should be viewed holistically; in other words, the goals of the organisation and the level of transparency affect the validity of the placement test. The conclusions were that the placement tests were inauthentic since their contents excluded certain vital aspects of real life performance, namely, that related to the work context. The research revealed that if the placement testing process and the ABET programme are integrated into the culture of the organisation and if employees are remunerated when they have passed the different levels in the programme, the programme is likely to achieve a fair measure of success. Recommendations are that literacy should be viewed as based on a variety of contexts and uses and that therefore tests should be tailored to suit each particular organisation and should contain workrelated content. Furthermore, multiple methods of assessment should be considered.

This thesis examines variation in clitic placement among neofalantes—a speech community of urban, L2 speakers of Galician, in a bilingual region in Northwestern Spain (Dubert 2005; Freixeiro Mato 2014; O’Rourke & Ramallo 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015). Galician has a complex system of pronominal clitics that can be either proclitic or enclitic depending on a range of grammatical factors (e.g. finiteness, sentence type, triggering particles). Among neofalantes, clitic placement is variable, sometimes following the rules of traditional Galician, and sometimes not. Non-traditional clitic placement has been criticized as one of the most salient “errors” in neofalante speech, both by speakers and by linguists (Dubert 2005; González-González 2008). Due to language contact, the bilingual nature of the region and the genetic proximity of Galician and Spanish, most research has argued that non-traditional clitic use results from Spanish influence (e.g. Kabatek 1997; Dubert 2005). However, to date, no empirical research has targeted neofalante clitic usage to test this assertion. To probe possible contact effects, this thesis is based on accountable variationist analysis of pronominal clitics (N = 3,736) in the vernacular of 15 neofalantes. Overall results reveal that the vast majority of tokens follow traditional Galician grammar, suggesting that neofalantes are relatively good at mastering Galician clitic placement. However, variation is not evenly distributed. Where proclitic placement follows traditional grammar at a rate that approaches categoricity (98.6%, N = 2,036), nearly 40% of enclitic tokens conflict with traditional grammar (39.2%, N = 1,700). Logistic regression suggests that variation is largely isolated to those contexts where Galician and Spanish differ (e.g. finiteness (+/-), where finite verbs favour non-traditional placement), lending support to previous claims. However, social predictors are also relevant, with speakers who have Galician parents and who were born after the implementation of bilingual education favouring non-traditional placement as well. These results suggest that other sociolinguistic factors, such as the need to assert one’s Galician identity, can also impact clitic placement. / Graduate / 2018-07-31

M.A. / The movement of former township learners to suburban schools has resulted in more non-native learners taking English as a Home Language (EHL). In some suburban schools, the former township learners are now in the majority, with implications for the conceptualization of EHL as a curriculum option. EHL classrooms in suburban schools with a majority non-native English learner population were investigated for their communicativeness. It might be expected that such classrooms will exhibit an affinity with English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms. Therefore, ESL classrooms, which have attracted a lot of attention from researchers, were used as a tool in understanding the nature of the said EHL classrooms. Once the data on the communicative orientation of the EHL classrooms were obtained, they were compared to the data from ESL classrooms. There were few significant differences between the EHL classrooms and the ESL ones. The conclusion was that non-native EHL has a lot in common with ESL. The most important difference from the standpoint of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) was found to be in the learning content selection, with the EHL settings using more literary works, and so focusing less on the direct teaching of grammatical forms. However, a disturbing pattern was the inability of the learners in the EHL settings and the ESL settings to take full advantage of CLT, which suggests that CLT might not be suitable for learners with rudimentary language skills.

M.A. / Since the 1960s, teaching has become ever-more learner-centred, with the results that drastic changes have been wrought to the theory of language learners' problems. In the present study, - the emphasis falls on linguists' realisation that knowledge of the language-learner's native language (L1) is vital. The principle aim of this study is, therefore, to launch an investigation into the linguistic aspects of the difficulties against which the experimental group has come up. The various schools of thought that have been developing on theoretical linguistics since the 1960s are directional for the approaches to language-learners' problems. In this way the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis has originated within the framework of Structuralism and is based on the premise that the learner's LI has a strong influence on the target language. The standpoint is that the most effective learning materials are those that are based on a scientific description of the language to be acquired, carefully compared with a parallel description of the native language of the learner. Language acquisition was, in line with the Structuralists' Behaviorist view, considered to comprise the overcoming of the effects of L1, which interfere with L2. The latter process of interference or negative transfer had to be unlearned by means of pattern drills and memorisation. With the advent of the Chomskian view of the creative aspects of the language user's competence, in terms of which language users are purported to dispose of language rules for the generation of language utterances, strong criticism was, however, levelled at the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis. Despite this, contrastive studies are still being undertaken. Thanks to the Error Analysis Theory, which has propounded in reaction to the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis, language learners' errors are viewed more positively. The Error Analysis Theory, in turn, gave rise to the interlanguage theory, in terms of which errors constitute a diagnostic tool that could be used to determine the interlanguage stage that the learner has reached on his or her way to acquiring the target language. Learners construct their own set of rules according to which they can try and restore order in the mass of stimuli with which they are being bombarded in terms of this theory, L1 is also considered to be a handy tool in the acquisition of the target language. For the purposes of this study, a contrastive error analysis was performed on the interlanguage used by Northern Sotho speaking teacher students who are going to teach Afrikaans. The data was collected from their written work. Special attention was devoted to general syntactic, morphological, semantic and lexical problems. Structural variances between Afrikaans and Northern Sotho were indicated. Further it was shown that English, in its capacity as the other secondary language, may also be exerting a measure of influence on the structures of the target language, and that other difficulties may also crop up that could not be imputed to interference.

No description available.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The purpose of this study was to investigate the views of students and lecturers at the University of Namibia about teaching and learning. The study specifically determined the views of students and lectures in relation to language, teaching, learning and assessment as well as what we might learn from analysis of these views to assist in improving teaching, learning and assessment. / South Africa