The growth of multicultural and multilingual student populations in community colleges has presented difficulties for instructors who teach academic writing. This study was motivated by the desire to understand the challenges faced by novice writers from diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds, African-American, Haitian, and Hispanic, in a South Florida community college as they grappled with the register features which defined academic writing. One major challenge has been the tendency to transfer the register feature of clause structure typical of speech into academic texts. An analysis of clause structures using writing samples collected from 45 community-college students, 15 from African-American, Haitian and Hispanic students respectively, showed the degree to which the students relied on their speech by using hypotactic and paratactic clauses instead of the main and embedded clauses characteristic of the written academic register The study has expanded on previous research which had focused on native versus nonnative English speakers (ESL) in English-language programs, by including African American students who are speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and, therefore, speak English as a second dialect (ESD) as well as Generation 1.5 students (Haitian and Hispanic), who have command of conversational English, come to the U.S. as first or second generation immigrants, and graduated from U.S. high schools, but they lack the written academic skills to perform at the college level. A challenge faced by African American AAVE speakers is that the dialect occurs predominantly in spoken discourse, and students may go to school without any exposure to written discourse in their home language. On the other hand, many Generation 1.5 students such as Haitians and Hispanics speak native languages, which have standardized orthographies, and these students may go to school having been exposed to register features of written discourse in Haitian Creole (or French) and Spanish.

<p><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"> <p align="left">This thesis is a discourse analysis of five testimonies from South Africa&rsquo / s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The aim of the analysis is to explore the ways in which the testifiers perform their identities, construe their experiences of life under apartheid, and position themselves and their audiences in relation to these experiences. The shaping role of context &ndash / both local and historical &ndash / is also considered.</p> </font></font></p>

This work focuses on the socio-technical aspects of artificial intelligence, namely how (specific types of) intelligent systems function in human workplace environments. The goal is first to get a better understanding of human needs and expectations when it comes to interaction with intelligent systems, and then to make use of the understanding gained in the process of designing and implementing such systems. The work presented focusses on a specific problem in developing intelligent systems, namely how the artefacts to be developed can fit smoothly into existing socio-cultural settings. To achieve this, we make use of theories from the fields of organisational psychology, sociology, and linguistics. This is in line with approaches commonly found in AI. However, most of the existing work deals with individual aspects, like how to mimic the behaviour or emulate methods of reasoning found in humans, whereas our work centers around the social aspect. Therefore, we base our work on theories that have not yet gained much attention in intelligent systems design. To be able to make them fruitful for intelligent systems research and development, we have to adapt them to the specific settings, and we have to transform them to suit the practical problems at hand. The specific theoretical frameworks we draw on are first and foremost activity theory and to a lesser degree semiotics. Activity theory builds on the works of Leont'ev. It is a descriptive tool to help understand the unity of consciousness and activity. Its focus lies on individual and collective work practise. One of its strengths, and the primary reason for its value in AI development, is the ability to identify the role of material artefacts in the work process. Halliday's systemic functional theory of language (SFL) is a social semiotic theory that sets out from the assumption that humans are social beings that are inclined to interact and that this interaction is inherently multimodal. We interact not just with each other, but with our own constructions and with our natural world. These are all different forms of interaction, but they are all sign processes. Due to the obvious time and spatial constraints, we cannot address all of the challenges that we face when building intelligent artefacts. In reducing the scope of the thesis, we have focused on the problem of explanation, and here in particular the problem of explanation from a user perspective. By putting social theories to work in the field of artificial intelligence, we show that results from other fields can be beneficial in understanding what explanatory capabilities are needed for a given intelligent system, and to ascertain in which situations an explanation should be delivered. Besides lessons learned in knowledge based system development, the most important input comes from activity theory. The second focus is the challenge of contextualisation. Here we show that work in other scientific fields can be put to use in the development of context aware or ambient intelligent systems. Again, we draw on results from activity theory and combine this with insights from semiotics. Explanations are themselves contextual, so the third challenge is to explore the space spanned by the two dimensions ability to explain and contextualisation. Again, activity theory is beneficial in resolving this issue. The different theoretical considerations have also led to some practical approaches. Working with activity theory helps to better understand what the relevant contextual aspects of a given application are and helps to develop models of context which are both grounded in the tradition of context aware systems design and are plausible from a cognitive point of view. Insights from an analysis of research in the knowledge based system area and activity theory have further lead to the amendment of a toolbox for requirements engineering, so called problem frames. New problem frames that target explanation aware ambient intelligent systems are presented. This is supplemented with work looking at the design of an actual system after the requirements have been elicited and specified. Thus, the socio-technical perspective on explanations is coupled with work that addresses knowledge representation issues, namely how to model sufficient knowledge to be able to deliver explanations.

In recent years, US elementary and secondary education has put more emphasis on advancing students’ academic literacy. To address this need, many teachers have looked to systemic functional linguistics (SFL) theory to frame writing instruction. Drawing from this literature, this report identifies major pedagogical principles relevant for an English as a foreign language (EFL) instructional context, delineates the linguistic markers characteristic of academic registers, and expands on the existing literature in regards to feedback and error correction. SFL-informed literacy instruction can benefit English language instruction in countries such as South Korea, where learners’ writing development has traditionally been neglected. The report begins with a brief overview of systemic functional linguistics, and follows with a review of the literature on SFL-based writing pedagogy. Implications for EFL educational settings are discussed. / text

<p><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"> <p align="left">This thesis is a discourse analysis of five testimonies from South Africa&rsquo / s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The aim of the analysis is to explore the ways in which the testifiers perform their identities, construe their experiences of life under apartheid, and position themselves and their audiences in relation to these experiences. The shaping role of context &ndash / both local and historical &ndash / is also considered.</p> </font></font></p>

This thesis is concerned with explicating the role of language in mobilising action through management emails. Situated within the context of organisational change in a globalised manufacturing business, the project is framed by behavioural observations from management scholars Palmer and Hardy (2000) of mobilisation strategies that utilise linguistic resources since they: (a) involve a sense of obligation or inclination in directives; (b) show how co-operation will produce mutual benefits; (c) construct desired actions as legitimate, beneficial or inevitable; and (d) use past or anticipated meanings, for or against certain actions. Systemic Functional Linguistics is the underlying framework employed to provide a theoretically principled account of the intuitively derived observations from Palmer and Hardy (2000) which are applied to a sample of twenty-seven email texts, through corpus- and text-based analysis. A major finding is that the representation of action is enacted interpersonally through the verbal group. This view complements experientially dominated accounts of the verbal group which focus on the tense system. Further, action is found to be motivated through the negotiation of evaluative stance. By relating the grammar of the verbal group as well as other resources to the discourse semantics of Appraisal, modulation (of obligation or inclination) is found to be enabled by both negative as well as positive judgements of capacity. Specifically, judgements of capacity are re-interpreted as invocations of high obligation as managers seek to mobilise (further) positive performance. The analysis demonstrates that elements in the verbal group (complex) and Appraisal co-opt action through enabling positioning of the writer, in terms of assessing and grading categorical meanings, manipulating interpersonal time, or foregrounding solidarity. A significant contribution to the thesis is an extension of the system of GRADUATION: FOCUS (Hood, 2004a) through the demonstration of how resources of the verbal group negotiate expectations of appearances and achievements. This study has also extended the resources of GRADUATION: FORCE by applying it to the management context. The practical contribution of the study is that these insights may more explicitly inform management training and enable managers to participate more effectively within their community of practice.

Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis is concerned with the realm of the interpersonal: broadly, those linguistic phenomena involved in the negotiation of social relations and the expression of personal attitudes and feelings. The initial contention is that this realm has been consistently marginalised not only within linguistic theory, but more broadly within western culture, for cultural and ideological reasons whose implications extend into the bases of classical linguistic theory. Chapter 1 spells out the grounds for this contention and is followed by two further chapters, constituting Part I: Language and Social Relations. Chapter 2 identifies and critiques the range of ways in which the interpersonal has been conventionally interpreted: as style, as formality, as politeness, as power and solidarity, as the expressive, etc. This chapter concludes with an argument for the need for a stratified model of language in order to deal adequately with these phenomena. Chapter 3 proposes such a model, based on the systemic-functional approach to language as social semiotic. The register category tenor within this model is extended to provide a model of social relations as a semiotic system. The basis for the identification of the three tenor dimensions, power, distance and affect, is the identification of three modes of deployment or realisation of the interpersonal resources of English in everyday discourse: reciprocity, proliferation and amplification. Parts II and III turn their attention to one significant issue in the negotiation of social relations: address. The focus is explicitly on Australian English, but there is considerable evidence that most if not all of the forms discussed in Part II occur in other varieties of English, especially British and American, and that some at least of the practices discussed in Part III involve the same patterns of social relations with respect to the tenor dimensions of power, distance and affect. Because most varieties of contemporary English do not have a set of options for second-person pronominal address, as is the case in many of the world's languages, English speakers use names and other nominal forms which need to be described. Part II is descriptive in orientation, providing an account of the grammar of VOCATION in English, including a detailed description of the nominal forms used. Chapter 4 investigates the identification and functions of vocatives, and includes empirical investigations of vocative position in clauses and vocative incidence in relation to speech function or speech act choices. Chapter 5 presents an account of the grammar of English name forms, organised as a paradigmatic system. This chapter incorporates an account of the processes used to produce the various name-forms used in address, including truncation, reduplication and suffixation. Chapter 6 consists of an account of non-name forms of address, organised in terms of the systemic-functional account of nominal group structure. This chapter deals with single-word non-name forms of address and the range of nominal group structures used particularly to communicate attitude, both positive and negative. Part III is ethnographic in orientation. It describes some aspects of the use of the forms described in Part II in contemporary address practice in Australia and interprets such practice using the model of social relations as semiotic system presented in Part I. The major focuses of attention is on address practice in relation to the negotiation of gender relations, with some comment on generational relations of adults with children, on class relations and on ethnic relations in nation with a diverse population officially committed to a policy of a multiculturalism. Part III functions simultaneously as a coda for this thesis, and a prologue for the kind of ethnographic study that the project was originally intended to be, but which could not be conducted in the absence of an adequate linguistically-based model of social relations and an adequate description of the resources available for address in English.

"November 2001". / Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Linguistics and Psychology, Dept. of Linguistics, 2002. / Bibliography: p. 285-291. / Introduction -- Language from a systemic functional perspective -- Social networks: a review of literature relevant to the Scotland Island study -- Methodology -- Analysing relational ties: a social network perspective -- A systemic functional approach to analysing social reality -- Discussion and conclusion. / This research is concerned with the study of language and the social order. Working within the systemic functional theory of language, and utilising the concept of a social network to model the social order, the primary aim is to put on display the relationship between the linguistic system and social order, between language and culture. Systemic functional grammar (Halliday, 1995; Halliday and Hasasn, 1985/9; Halliday and Matthiesen, 1997; Eggins and Slade 1997), with its emphasis on language as a social semiotic, is used to analyse the language used by a group of four women engaged in casual conversation in a small Australian island community. Here the analysis reveals how the women negotiate their social reality when speaking to each other. It shows how their social relations are shaped within a text (Hasan, 1996), and explores the notion that, despite the seemingly trivial, unconscious nature of casual interactions, power and solidarity are continually being negotiated by the participants (Halliday, 1994; Eggins and Slade, 1997). More specifically, this research examines the notion that through lexico-grammatical and semantic selections participants are able to negotiate dominant positions in interaction. Social Network analysis has been used to examine the relationship between the individual and the group. It offers a quantifiable analytical tool for describing the character of an individual's everyday social relationships (Milroy, 1987). A social network analysis is used in the present study to map the social relationships in the tight-knit network, or speech fellowship, of these women (creating a map of the context of situation in SFL terminology). Change in the social relationships and language choices is modeled by revisiting the participants 15 months later in a contextually similar environment and re-analysing the network and linguistic options. Systemic functional linguistics is then used to highlight the interdependency of language and social order. Through systematic accounts of language and the context in which it is embedded this reciprocal nature is displayed and language and social order can be seen, not as two distinct entities, but rather as one phenomena seen from two different perspectives (Halliday, 1978; Mathiessen, 1993). / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / v, 291 p. ill

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Questions continue to be raised about the language abilities of children who have a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Recent conceptualisations of ADHD and also of language difficulties have acknowledged that aspects of context may contribute to the manifestations of these complex conditions. In the past, investigations of the language of children who had a diagnosis of ADHD appear to have been hampered by reliance on models of language impairment that emphasised formally measured language abilities and largely disregarded the role of context. This thesis describes a study designed to test the hypothesis that important differences in language use exist between children who have a diagnosis of ADHD and their non-ADHD peers, when specific language impairment has been excluded. A second goal of the study was to investigate the impact of aspects of context, specifically text type and mode of expression, on the language use of these children. The study was community-based. Attempts were made to match the children for age (eight to twelve years), gender, level of education, and socio-economic status. Two standardised language tests were administered to each child, and only children who had achieved results within the normal range were accepted into the study. The sample group consisted of eleven children who had a previous diagnosis of ADHD, and eleven control children. Discourse analysis based on a Systemic Functional Linguistics approach was used to describe spoken and written samples from three different examples of text type that were created by each child. Comparisons were made for multiple variables, and any observed differences were examined using a combination of quantitative and descriptive techniques. The results showed differences between the groups for clause structure, thematic structure, macro textual organisation, lexico-grammar, behaviours surrounding spoken language, and conventions of written language. There were differences noted in the way the text type and the mode of expression appeared to affect the outcomes. The differences were discussed and interpreted as evidence of a greater degree of difficulty shown by the children with ADHD with regard to the organisation and complexity of their texts. Clinical implications suggest that careful linguistic analysis of spoken as well as written language of children with ADHD may be warranted even in the absence of the diagnosis of specific language impairment. Such analyses may not only identify potentially problematic areas with respect to language use within everyday contexts, but may also highlight areas where particular intervention may be beneficial.

abstract: Students may use the technical engineering terms without knowing what these words mean. This creates a language barrier in engineering that influences student learning. Previous research has been conducted to characterize the difference between colloquial and scientific language. Since this research had not yet been applied explicitly to engineering, conclusions from the area of science education were used instead. Various researchers outlined strategies for helping students acquire scientific language. However, few examined and quantified the relationship it had on student learning. A systemic functional linguistics framework was adopted for this dissertation which is a framework that has not previously been used in engineering education research. This study investigated how engineering language proficiency influenced conceptual understanding of introductory materials science and engineering concepts. To answer the research questions about engineering language proficiency, a convenience sample of forty-one undergraduate students in an introductory materials science and engineering course was used. All data collected was integrated with the course. Measures included the Materials Concept Inventory, a written engineering design task, and group observations. Both systemic functional linguistics and mental models frameworks were utilized to interpret data and guide analysis. A series of regression analyses were conducted to determine if engineering language proficiency predicts group engineering term use, if conceptual understanding predicts group engineering term use, and if conceptual understanding predicts engineering language proficiency. Engineering academic language proficiency was found to be strongly linked to conceptual understanding in the context of introductory materials engineering courses. As the semester progressed, this relationship became even stronger. The more engineering concepts students are expected to learn, the more important it is that they are proficient in engineering language. However, exposure to engineering terms did not influence engineering language proficiency. These results stress the importance of engineering language proficiency for learning, but warn that simply exposing students to engineering terms does not promote engineering language proficiency. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction 2012