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This study is concerned with the impact of two simultaneous trends in American business. The first is that work teams have become increasingly popular in the workplace (Miller, 1991). The second is that increasing cultural diversity is a demographic fact in the current and future workforce (Johnston and Packer, 1987). On the basis of these trends, this study presumes that work teams are becoming more culturally diverse and that research is needed on how work group dynamics may be affected by cultural differences. The specific goal of this study is twofold. First, to determine whether members of a culturally diverse work group felt that others in the group treated them differently because of their cultural background. The second object is to determine if those people in question felt that cultural differences (in a group or as a whole) interfered with the group's ability to work together. To achieve this goal, I interviewed five white men, three African American men, four Latino men and four white women from four different types of work groups. Past research has suggested that cooperative teamwork minimizes cultural tensions within a culturally diverse group. However, despite participants perceiving their teams as cooperative, the men of color in their twenties and thirties and all the white women experienced ongoing harassment and exclusion because of their culture. These participants perceived a relationship between their cultural group membership and their work group's dynamics. The two older men of color (over age forty-five) did not claim to have experienced harassment or exclusion.

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The objective of this dissertation is to determine how and to what extent the factors involved in primary stress assignment in nouns interact in the Spanish and English interlanguages. Both transfer and developmental factors are studied. The former include: L1 stress rule application in the L2 and L1 cognate stress transfer to the L2. The developmental factors considered are: L2 stress rule application and knowledge of the L2 marked stress. The analysis is based on Harris and Hayes's theoretical descriptions for the Spanish and English stress systems, respectively, and on Dresher and Kaye's parametric model. The sample consisted of 58 University of Massachusetts' students of Spanish: 30 beginners and 28 from the intermediate level; and 64 Simón Bolívar University's students of English: 32 from each level. The general hypothesis, according to which in the Spanish and English interlanguages' stress assignment of nouns, transfer and developmental factors interact in such a way that the former are more decisive at the beginning levels and the latter, at the intermediate, was proven. It was also found that in the first stages, learners rely on phonological rather than morphological information in finding out the second language stress system. In the light of the Theory of Principles and Parameters, the results of this study show that L2 learners can reset their parameter values: from the unmarked to the marked setting and vice versa. Finally, it is concluded that language idiosyncratic properties which lie outside the core grammar, such as: language specific conditions, prespecified metrical information in the lexicon, morphological considerations, etc. require systematic and intensive instruction and practice, since they constitute the main sources of error.

This qualitative dissertation is an investigation of the experiences of four middle grade teachers, three female and one male, three Caucasian and one African American who use multicultural literature in their language arts classrooms and the responses of the students of color they teach. The teaching experience of the teacher participants ranged from nine to twenty-five years. This bounded case study was investigated through the interpretivist paradigm over a seven-month period during the 2009-2010 school year. The teaching of six texts defined by the school as multicultural (one of the texts would not be viewed as multicultural by other definitions), Esperanza Rising and Journey to the River Sea were the fifth grade texts, Roll of Thunder Hear my Cry was the sixth grade text, The House on Mango Street and To Kill a Mockingbird were the seventh grade texts and A Raisin in the Sun was the eighth grade text. Through the lens of multiculturalism, specifically Banks' (1994) dimensions of multicultural education and Groban's (2007) tenets of critical multiculturalism, and the participant teachers, enactments were explored. The data gathered over the seven-month investigation included audiotaped classroom observations, focus groups, and two types of teacher interviews, faculty interviews, observational field notes, and teacher pedagogical artifacts. The interpretivist paradigm was utilized to coded and analyzed the data using modified analytic induction, descriptive activity codes (Bogdan & Bilken, 2003), and cross case analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1994). Enactments of multiculturalism, relationship between philosophy and pedagogy, and experiences of the teaching of multicultural literature were the three groups of thematic findings related to the teachers. The thematic findings related to the students of color who participated include: pondering pedagogy, multicultural literature mindsets, and dealing with diversity. This investigation concludes that teacher pedagogy, peer response, and literature discussion appear to influence the student participants' cultural understandings. Implications for practice and further research are included. / CITE/Language Arts

This dissertation reports findings from a sociolinguistic ethnography that examined relationships between literacy practices and personhood. The study involved the formulation of a writing club at an urban middle school, involving a multiracial group of women from the lowest academic track; two were described as special education students. They researched and wrote about their communities, investigating questions of personal concern about issues of racism and sexism. Students interviewed community members, including artists, organizers, neighbors, and peers. Students wrote up and published their findings. I collected data on the writing project, including forty-five hours of taped data. Analysis involved thematic and textual analyses of the students' written artifacts, and microanalysis of videotaped events. A microethnographic analysis examined sociolinguistic processes that research suggested is important. Attention was paid to the social construction of intertextuality during writing activities. The findings show that the nature of literacy practices and personhood is such that they are continuously and inherently constructed within particular fields of intertextual semantic potentials. These intertextual potentials are described along five dimensions: (1) ways students' definitions of personhood changed over the course of the project, (2) strategies students, community members, and myself used to position students, (3) how the project's structure positioned students, (4) community literacy practices and how they positioned people, (5) how students used community literacy practices to position themselves and others. The student's definitions of personhood changed. The established field of intertextual semantic potentials was influenced by changes in literacy practices that led to changes in literacy practices that led to changes in the students' definitions of writing, their views about themselves and life in the community. Literacy practices established in the writing project built on ones students encountered as they researched their communities. Community members shared ways of acting for social justice, including the importance of reclaiming cultural heritage, learning history from the community's perspective, analyzing multiple forms of oppression. Students' ethnographic research helped them reflect on their communities by enhancing their understanding of the cultural dynamics in which they live. Students recreated methods and theoretical frameworks to address the issue of personhood as students, as community members, and as ethnographers of their own communities.

Most Haitians in the U.S. area have immigrated over the past three decades, with the largest number of arrival coming in the late 1970's through the mid 1980's. Boston has one of the largest Haitian student populations in the U.S. following Miami and New York City. The purpose of this study was to determine the status of English language development among Haitian immigrant ninth graders participating in Boston's transitional bilingual education. Two major research questions guided this study: (1) What is the effectiveness of oral English language-use among ninth grade Haitian immigrant students in selected bilingual classrooms? (2) What is the effectiveness of English reading among ninth grade Haitian immigrant students in selected bilingual classrooms? Three High schools with transitional bilingual education programs totalling ninety-one Haitian ninth grade students participated in the study. Twenty five students were randomly selected as subjects for the study. A pre- and post-test comparison and an analysis of students' oral and reading scores were done to obtain a preliminary quantifiable impression of the students' growth in English language development over a period of time. Using Halliday's (1973) seven functions of language, classroom observations of students oral English language-use were recorded and analyzed to determine the students' ability to communicate effectively in different classroom contexts. Miscue analyses through a series of reading activities were performed to provide valuable insights into the nature of the reading process and gain appreciation for readers' strengths as well as weaknesses. Over three hundred and fifty hours of classroom observations and reading miscue activities with (N = 25) Haitian immigrant ninth graders reveal that subjects do not differ markedly in their oral and reading effectiveness in English. Although individual differences among subjects in oral and reading effectiveness existed; however, only a minority of students (N = 5/25) in (oral language) and (N = 1/4) in reading did not show positive gains in language effectiveness. Overall, many of the subjects show positive gains in English. Thus, they have the ability to use oral and reading English effectively to succeed academically.