Thesis advisor: Maria Estela Brisk / This mixed methods research study examined the impact of an intervention designed to prepare mainstream secondary teacher candidates to identify and teach features of Academic English. The intervention was intended to develop Disciplinary Linguistic Knowledge (Turkan, deOliveira, Phelps, and Lee, 2014) through engagement in several tasks for preparing linguistically responsive teachers (Lucas and Villegas, 2013). Pre-tests, post-tests, and artifacts created by teacher candidates in their fieldwork placements, as well as observations of a small group of teacher candidates teaching in their placement classrooms and interviews with these participants, were collected in order to analyze the effect that the intervention had on the teacher candidates’ identification of features of AE and their planning and implementation of instruction in these features. While the teacher candidates accurately identified features of AE on the post-tests and in the artifacts, only a small number of participants planned or implemented instruction in features of AE in their lessons. The experiences of the participants in the small group illustrated that teacher candidates need, in addition to the ability to identify features of Academic English, knowledge about how to teach these features, a commitment to teaching language in their lessons, and the support of supervisors and cooperating teachers who possess the same knowledge and commitment. The findings suggest that teacher education programs should engage both teacher candidates and the individuals who guide the planning and teaching of lessons in their pre-practicum experiences in developing the essential knowledge of and commitment to teaching Academic English in mainstream content area classrooms. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

Academic scientific language is characterized by an impersonal and objective style. Due to this and the typical high information density of academic language, this style typically contains a high rate of noun phrases and passive structures. This is also true for the German scientific study Gefühlte Opfer, Illusionen der Vergangenheitsbewältigung by Ulrike Jureit and Christian Schneider. The first aim of this essay was to translate one chapter from the aforementioned book into Swedish and adapt the target language to culturally match a reader who would appreciate a text on German post-war history and sociology. The second aim was to quantify and analyse all occurrences of passive voice and similar structures. More specifically, the following research questions were investigated: How is the passive formed in the source and target language respectively? How often is a corresponding passive used in the translation? How often is a passive sentence translated into an active structure? There are many different ways of expressing the passive in German: the so-called Vorgangspassiv featuring the auxiliary werden, the so-called Zustandspassiv with sein, and finally passive-like constructions. There are corresponding ways to form the passive in Swedish, that is, structures with the auxiliaries bli and vara, but the more common way to express the passive voice is the morphological s-passive. Passive-like constructions can be found in Swedish as well. The most common passive structure in the source text, the werden-passive, was in most cases translated into the typical Swedish s-passive. The sein-passive was more often translated into a similar structure in the target text. All in all, almost a third of the passive voice sentences were translated into active structures. Keywords: translation, passive voice, academic language

Thesis advisor: Ana Martínez-Alemán / The past thirty years have seen an unprecedented expansion of access to higher education among traditionally disadvantaged groups. Along with increased opportunity, this access brings new challenges, including student preparation and social and academic integration of college campuses (Pascarella, Pierson, Wolniak, & Terenzini, 2004). One area of academic integration that requires further examination is how first-generation students acquire the written academic language they will need to succeed in college courses. Because language is closely tied to identity, acquiring academic language can have personal and social effects (White & Lowenthal, 2011). In addition to the struggles that these students have in acquiring academic language, they also bring alternate forms of cultural capital (Yosso, 2005) that are not captured in traditional assessment. This qualitative study considered the academic language acquisition of ten first-generation college students who completed a transitional bridge program. Writing samples from four different time points were assessed with an operationalized definition of academic language to capture how these skills were acquired during the first year. The samples were then analyzed using Critical Discourse Analysis to identify alternate forms of cultural capital. Finally, the same ten students were interviewed about their experiences of academic language during their first year of college. The results of this study show that students benefitted from direct instruction of academic conventions and other assumed expectations of academic discourse, and they were most successful with assignments that drew on lived experience. The writing samples also revealed critical forms of alternate cultural capital that must be recognized and leveraged in academic settings. Finally, students saw the process of academic language acquisition as voluntary, conscious, and ultimately worthwhile. Understanding the challenges these students face, as well as their unique strengths, is vital to their full inclusion within the university and for meaningful diversity in higher education. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

Page | 5 Abstract The MA thesis explores finite progressive forms in the academic spoken and written monologue. The English progressive forms generally appear much less frequently than the simple forms do. In academic spoken language 90 per cent of the finite verb forms consist of simple forms and the representation of simple forms is even higher in academic written language with 95 per cent of the finite verb forms being simple. The reasons for this distribution are related on the one hand to the specific meaning of the progressive forms, and on the other hand to the restricted compatibility of the progressive forms and some semantic verb classes. The present study considers both of these aspects in the attempt to describe the progressive forms in the academic spoken monologue (university lectures) and in the academic written language (advanced students' papers). The material is excerpted from two British academic English corpora, namely BASE (spoken language) and BAWE (written texts), 100 examples from each corpus. The material is analyzed at the formal, functional and discourse levels. The formal analysis deals with the distribution of tense forms, negation, the subject (person and animacy) and clause types. The functional criteria involve the semantic features of the verb and subject, as well as the...

Faculty of Arts School of Human and Community Development 0000613a Tel: 011 849 3853 / South African Speech-Language Pathologists are assessing and treating many adolescents with varying speech and language difficulties. This task is complicated by the fact that it is currently largely unknown what the language abilities of mainstream adolescents are. Some research has suggested declining language abilities, as well as significant effects of grade, gender and language background on cognitive academic language skills. As individuals grow older, the demands of the classroom environment become greater, forcing adolescents to use complex language skills in order to learn. This research paper aimed to assess the complex sentence comprehension abilities of a sample of South African adolescents, through the use of the Grammar/Listening subtest of the Test of Adolescent Language, developed by Hammill, Brown, Larsen, and Wiederholt (1980). Additionally, the effects of grade, gender, language, time spent reading for school and recreationally each week, number of television programmes watched per week, length of time spent playing computer or video games per day, preferred learning styles (group/alone and auditory/visual/both), most recent English and school report marks, and use of cellular telephones, were used to determine related factors and educational variables which might be linked to each other. Additionally, a working memory measure was included, in order to ascertain that this factor was not having a negative effect upon the comprehension scores. It was found that gender was an over-riding factor throughout the study. Females tended to do better on the complex sentence comprehension test, and also spent more time reading for school each week, obtained better English and school report marks, preferred to learn alone, and sent more sms’s. Males were only inclined to play more computer or video games per week. In opposition to the initial hypothesis that these learners would perform poorly on the TOAL subtest, it was found that participants generally performed within the average limits of the test. Correlations, one-way ANOVA’s, chi squared analyses and t-tests were performed for the secondary aims, in order to determine any relationships between the variables. Overall, though, gender was the key variable in the study, which is in line with other literature in the field. Home language and educational level had minimal effects. Further research has been recommended.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-144).

Are you confused by Academic Language? Are your students struggling? The purpose of this session is to demystify the Academic Language component of the edTPA® so that faculty can improve their own understanding of what is required by rubrics 4 and 14. The session leader will take the participants through an interactive lesson where meanings of the terms function, discourse, syntax and supports are learned contextually. This instructional method has been successfully used to help teacher candidates analyze the academic language of their lessons. Using a sample lesson, participants will engage in a group activity that will help them discover the language product. They will then be guided in classifying the product as either syntax or discourse. Next participants will identify the language function and the vocabulary that must be used to create the product. Participants will then brainstorm general, targeted, and individual supports. At this point, a closer look at the prompts associated with rubrics 4 and 14 will guide our discussion of ways to improve the performance of our teacher candidates.

The construct of academic language—while of great interest, in part, because of recently adopted or revised content and English-language development (ELD) standards that explicitly focus on academic language—and its role in the academic success of all students, including young learners and English learners (ELs), is far from clearly understood. Nowhere is the issue of the construct of academic language more contested than in the locus where many students are formally introduced to schooling in the United States; that is, in kindergarten classrooms. Kindergarten is many students’ formal introduction to public education in the United States, and this includes ELs, who represent a growing percentage of students in U.S. schools. Indeed, about 16% of kindergarteners in the country are classified as ELs (U.S. Department of Education, 2019a). Beginning at the kindergarten level, academic language is a primary focus of College and Career Readiness (CCR) standards, such as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which require students to engage in cognitively and linguistically complex academic practices (van Lier & Walqui, 2012). Similarly, ELD standards in the U.S. have recently been written anew or revised to correspond to the ambitious CCR standards, and, therefore, English language proficiency (ELP) expectations inherent in the ELD standards have become more rigorous as well. A hallmark of both ELD standards and CCR standards is a predominant focus on academic language. Yet consensus is lacking on what academic language is, exactly, and how it is operationalized in classrooms; some researchers argue that the construct of academic language may not even exist as it is currently conceptualized (e.g., Bunch, 2014; Gutiérrez et al., 2011; Valdés, 2004). In this study, I provide a description of classroom language usage in formal literacy contexts in kindergarten, inclusive of ELs, through a qualitative analysis of language use at the lexical, syntactic, and discoursal levels in academic literacy events. Additionally, I investigate whether students’ degree of exposure to academic language in kindergarten, language status, prior exposure to formal classroom contexts, gender, and age are related to academic language proficiency at the end of one academic year and when controlling for beginning-of-year academic language knowledge. Qualitative analyses illustrated that, while classroom discourse contained a relatively small percentage of lexically and syntactically complex language, students were exposed to a wide range of language during formal literacy events, from high-frequency to low-frequency (sophisticated) words, and from syntactically simple to complex utterances, across a variety of language functions aligned with the state’s literacy standards, both within and across classrooms. Greater amounts of sophisticated words and syntactically complex structures were present during shared reading activities specifically and, to a lesser degree, during foundational literacy activities. Exemplars from qualitative analyses illustrated that common, high-frequency words and simple syntactic structures were, at times, employed to present and discuss academic language and concepts and also employed, at times, as an instructional support for some ELs. Lessons that featured language functions related to the reading strand of the literacy standards and, to a lesser degree, the foundational literacy skills strand, afforded opportunities for sophisticated vocabulary and complex syntax. At this formative grade, then, the use of common, high-frequency words and simple syntax in service of teaching academic vocabulary and academic concepts during shared reading and other literacy activities was characteristic of the classrooms observed. Quantitative analyses indicated a significant relationship between academic language proficiency, as measured by a standardized language proficiency assessment, and language status, gender, and academic language exposure. However, when controlling for students’ beginning-of-year academic language proficiency (operationalized as their pretest scores), the relationship between academic language proficiency and academic language exposure in the classroom was no longer significant. In consideration of both qualitative and quantitative results, then, minimal exposure to academic language may not be sufficient to promote academic language proficiency. I recommend that literacy instruction could be enhanced to maximize exposure to and productive use of sophisticated words and syntactically complex language, as appropriate for kindergarten ELs and EOs, and in consideration of their developing language proficiency. Findings contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the language used in academic literacy contexts as instantiated in kindergarten classrooms, and begin to explore under what linguistic conditions all students, ELs and EOs, can more readily develop academic language proficiency in the earliest of elementary grades. / Applied Linguistics

Thesis (MPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Traditionally educational interpreting refers to educational interpreting for deaf students using Sign Language. Research that has been done in South Africa in spoken language educational interpreting represents pioneering work in this emerging discipline. One of the most important issues that interests policy makers and educators is the effectiveness of educational interpreting for teaching and learning purposes. This study investigates this issue with reference to contemporary ideas from academic literacy studies. Concepts such as affect, identity, accessibility and participation are investigated in order to describe possible relationships between educational interpreting and teaching and learning. The research is done against a discussion of pertinent concepts in interpreting theory, namely role, quality and professionalism. During a four week period educational interpreting was tested by way of a trial in two modules in the Law Faculty of the Stellenbosch University and with reference to three basic questions, namely: • Do students understand subject content better as a result of educational interpreting? • Do students identify better with the classroom situation because of educational interpreting? • Does educational interpreting help students to save time in the learning process? Data were gathered by way of action research and questionnaires, a focus group discussion, interviews and field observation. The research methodology included both qualitative and quantitative components. The results of the study lead to certain conclusions about the experience of educational interpreting in classrooms in the research context and whether educational interpreting can enhance teaching and learning in this context. Recommendations are made regarding the implementation of educational interpreting and further research in the field of Interpreting Studies. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Tradisioneel verwys opvoedkundige tolking na tolking vir dowe studente deur middel van gebaretaal. Navorsing in gesproke opvoedkundige tolking is egter onlangs in Suid-Afrika begin; dit verteenwoordig pionierswerk in hierdie ontluikende studieveld. Een van die belangrikste kwessies waarin beleidmakers en opvoeders belangstel, is die effektiwiteit van opvoedkundige tolking vir onderrig en leer. In hierdie studie word ’n ondersoek na hierdie vraagstuk onderneem, met verwysing na kontemporêre idees uit akademiese geletterdheidstudies. Konsepte soos affek, identiteit, toeganklikheid en deelname word verken om uiteindelik moontlike verbande tussen opvoedkundige tolking en onderrig en leer te ondersoek en te beskryf. Die navorsing word gegrond op ’n verkenning van belangrike tolkteoretiese konsepte, naamlik rol, kwaliteit en professionaliteit. Opvoedkundige tolking is deur ’n proefneming binne die Fakulteit Regsgeleerdheid (US) in twee modules oor ’n tydperk van vier weke in klasse getoets met verwysing na drie basiese vrae, naamlik: Tradisioneel verwys opvoedkundige tolking na tolking vir dowe studente deur middel van gebaretaal. Navorsing in gesproke opvoedkundige tolking is egter onlangs in Suid-Afrika begin; dit verteenwoordig pionierswerk in hierdie ontluikende studieveld. Een van die belangrikste kwessies waarin beleidmakers en opvoeders belangstel, is die effektiwiteit van opvoedkundige tolking vir onderrig en leer. In hierdie studie word ’n ondersoek na hierdie vraagstuk onderneem, met verwysing na kontemporêre idees uit akademiese geletterdheidstudies. Konsepte soos affek, identiteit, toeganklikheid en deelname word verken om uiteindelik moontlike verbande tussen opvoedkundige tolking en onderrig en leer te ondersoek en te beskryf. Die navorsing word gegrond op ’n verkenning van belangrike tolkteoretiese konsepte, naamlik rol, kwaliteit en professionaliteit. Opvoedkundige tolking is deur ’n proefneming binne die Fakulteit Regsgeleerdheid (US) in twee modules oor ’n tydperk van vier weke in klasse getoets met verwysing na drie basiese vrae, naamlik:Tradisioneel verwys opvoedkundige tolking na tolking vir dowe studente deur middel van gebaretaal. Navorsing in gesproke opvoedkundige tolking is egter onlangs in Suid-Afrika begin; dit verteenwoordig pionierswerk in hierdie ontluikende studieveld. Een van die belangrikste kwessies waarin beleidmakers en opvoeders belangstel, is die effektiwiteit van opvoedkundige tolking vir onderrig en leer. In hierdie studie word ’n ondersoek na hierdie vraagstuk onderneem, met verwysing na kontemporêre idees uit akademiese geletterdheidstudies. Konsepte soos affek, identiteit, toeganklikheid en deelname word verken om uiteindelik moontlike verbande tussen opvoedkundige tolking en onderrig en leer te ondersoek en te beskryf. Die navorsing word gegrond op ’n verkenning van belangrike tolkteoretiese konsepte, naamlik rol, kwaliteit en professionaliteit. Opvoedkundige tolking is deur ’n proefneming binne die Fakulteit Regsgeleerdheid (US) in twee modules oor ’n tydperk van vier weke in klasse getoets met verwysing na drie basiese vrae, naamlik: • Kan tolking in klasse studente help om vakinhoud beter te verstaan? • Kan studente hierdeur beter met die klaskamersituasie identifiseer? • Word tyd sodoende in die leerproses bespaar? Deur ’n proses van deelnemende aksienavorsing is data ingewin deur middel van vraelyste, ’n fokusgroepbespreking, onderhoude en waarneming. As navorsingsmetodologie het die navorser van beide kwalitatiewe en kwantitatiewe metodes gebruik gemaak. Na aanleiding van die resultate word afleidings gemaak oor die ervaring van opvoedkundige tolking in klaskamers binne die navorsingskonteks en of opvoedkundige tolking onderrig en leer binne hierdie konteks kan bevorder. Ten slotte word aanbevelings vir die implementering van opvoedkundige tolking en verdere navorsing in Tolkstudie gemaak.

Thesis advisor: Audrey A. Friedman / English learners (ELs) in US K-12 classrooms are falling behind their peers as they struggle to develop the proficiency needed to succeed in an academic setting (NCELA, 2012). The majority of teacher preparation programs are not preparing teacher candidates (TCs) with the skills needed to help recently mainstreamed ELs succeed in their content area classrooms (Bunch, 2011). This study examined how one undergraduate, secondary education teacher candidates who had participated in supplemental trainings developed their ability to recognize linguistic demand, shelter instruction, and promote academic language proficiency. Using a Sequential Mixed Design (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2006), this longitudinal study examined the journals and lesson plans submitted by 31 undergraduate, secondary education TCs as they progressed through their prepractica. Six of these TCs were followed as case studies, with observations and interviews collected during their full practica. Collective data analysis indicates that TCs scored higher on all measures when they were in a linguistically diverse classroom. Furthermore, recognition of linguistic demand precedes ability to plan instruction: many TCs were able to recognize linguistic demand in lessons they observed, but few were adept at describing or designing sheltered instruction that could promote academic language development. For many participants, the attention to linguistic demand was focused largely on content-specific vocabulary that is challenging for all learners. However, a small number of TCs were able to attend to the morphological and lexical aspects of their content areas that would be especially difficult for ELs. In classroom observations a few participants were able to plan instruction that sheltered content and promoted academic language. Findings also indicate that supplemental trainings and infusions into methods courses helped TCs to realize the linguistic challenges of their respective content areas. Most importantly, the findings suggest that TCs are better able to focus on the language of instruction when they witness instruction that is focused on language. Therefore, TCs learn best how to support ELs when they observe and teach in linguistically diverse classrooms with knowledgeable mentoring teachers and field supervisors. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.