A major question asked is whether literacy skills from a first language are able to be transferred to a second language that does not share the same writing features, grammar, graphic conventions or even the same type of writing system. The purpose of this study was to analyse the role of first language literacy in second language acquisition where languages are quite different. Specifically, it was designed to investigate the relationships between first language(Persian) writing skills and second language(English) writing performance. That is, it investigated the extent to which Iranian primary school children who were already literate in their first language drew upon literacy skills and concept knowledge of literacy from their first language to use in their second language. It was hypothesised that second language learning might be affected by both learners' and parents' attitudes and motivations. Subjects for the study were 70 Iranian students in grades 3, 4, and 5 who attended NSW state primary schools plus Persian School on Saturday and Sunday. Results of the study indicated that the first language Farsi writing skills specifically linguistic and holistic skills were transferred to the English language. Parents' influence on children's English writing skills were not found to be an important determinate in linguistic and holistic writing measures, although there was a relationship between the active parental influence variable and students' English writing technical skills. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The public education system in Ontario, like many other education systems worldwide, is currently undergoing drastic changes effected by globalization. The globalization of education, which can be understood as “the worldwide discussions, processes, and institutions affecting local education practices and policies” (Spring, 2009, p. 1), has led to Ontario’s curriculum being used in over 20 schools located outside the province (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2011). Because these schools grant the Ontario Secondary School Diploma (OSSD), students must satisfy the same graduation requirements as those students who attend secondary school located in Ontario. A requirement for graduation includes the successful completion of the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT), a large-scale assessment intended to measure literacy. English Language Learners (ELLs) have more difficulty passing the OSSLT than their peers who speak English as their first language (Doe, Cheng, Klinger, & Zheng, 2011; Fox & Cheng, 2007). This issue is of particular concern to educators and students at these schools. Because the majority of these schools are located in China, my study focuses on ELLs in one school in China which uses the Ontario curriculum. The purpose of my study is twofold: 1) to understand how Chinese English Language Learners perceive the news report on the OSSLT, and 2) to understand how issues of culturally embedded knowledge affect their ability to take the test (the OSSLT) successfully. I selected a qualitative research approach because the intent of this study was to understand the perspectives of Chinese ELLs. I conducted three focus groups with one class of ELLS in one secondary school in China. I also used observations and analysis of written artifacts to triangulate the collected data. The findings of this study revealed some challenges and perspectives on the OSSLT specific to Chinese ELLs. I conclude that the issue of cultural literacy is a key factor preventing Chinese ELLs from demonstrating their true level of literacy on the OSSLT. / Thesis (Master, Education) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-30 17:42:05.977

PhD thesis - School of Education - Faculty of Humanities / In an attempt to add the voices of African feminist educators to the narrative field, and to address the critique that feminist discourses have generally been couched in theoretical abstraction, this study, which was conducted with five university women educators from various parts of Southern Africa, explores the enactment of feminist pedagogies in English language classrooms. The study was guided by the principles of feminist research methodologies, which advocate sensitivity to the subjective, emotional and biographic factors that shape the researcher and researched. Drawing from a suite of data sources, which comprised autobiographical and biographical narratives, lecture observations and interviews the study explores how the social variables of race, class, gender, politics, religion, etc. have influenced the participants’ feminist and language identity formation, and by extension how these inform their teaching of English from a feminist perspective, in terms of What they teach; How they teach, and Why they teach the curriculum content that they do. Taking the view that the personal is political and potentially pedagogical, the study provides a cursory commentary on the participants’ childhood and early adulthood, with the intention of exploring the potential a retrospective gaze of their identity formation has in terms of how they frame interpersonal relations with students and colleagues, and the enactment of their teaching identities. Identifying for more nuanced investigation the study tracks the trajectories of the participants’ coming to feminist consciousness, with a special focus on their adoption of project identities which they enact through their theorizing and teaching of English from a feminist perspective. Given their subscription and investment in narratives of emancipation that subvert social injustices and repressive domination, the study explores, at length, the complexities of feminist teacher identity in relation to the themes of difference, dialogue, and epistemologies of experience, all of which invariably encompass the overarching theme of feminist teacher authority. Acknowledging the slippery terrain of teacher and student identity calibrations, the study differentiates three ways in which authority is generally conceived of in feminist pedagogy, viz. authority versus nurturance, authority as authorship, and authority as power. In discussing the authority versus nurturance I argue for unhinging the female teacher from traditional associations of her with care-giver and intellectualised mammy. Urging for recognition of the woman teacher as female but non-maternal, I argue for a recontextualised and reconceptualised understanding of the female teacher – one that foregrounds her capability of offering critical intellectual nurturance. In exploring the delineation authority as authorship, which entails the mutual sharing of teacher-student personal experience in relation to broader public and academic discourses, the study cautions against the potential for personal epistemology to circulate within the realm of the familiar, narcissistic and sentimental, in the absence of meaningful critical and contextual pedagogic and educative relevance. In this regard, I suggest the consideration of two pertinent questions: viz. i) is there a shared assumption that the personal is good and the impersonal bad? and ii) given that other discourses of the personal are operating in the feminist classroom, exactly which personal are we referring to when we seek to validate the epistemology of experience? I argue that the pedagogic and educative worth of both teacher and students’ personal disclosures need to be subject to critical, analytical, and productive reflection to assess their value as knowledge. Critiquing enclaves of feminist pedagogical scholarship that suggest divesting the classroom of teacher authority as a way of rendering it more democratic, the discussion on authority as power agitates for an unmasking of the inevitable pedagogic and educative authority that the feminist teacher wields in the classroom. Through empirical evidence it illustrates variants of teacher authority that operate in the classroom and supports Gore’s (2002), proposition to develop a theory of pedagogy and power by acknowledging that: pedagogy is the enactment of power relations between teacher, student and other significant partners; bodies are the objects of pedagogical power relations, and in pedagogy, different differences matter; the kind of knowledge produced in pedagogy interacts with the institutional site and the techniques of power employed there; and pedagogy proceeds via a limited set of specific techniques of power. The study concludes with a theoretical and methodological reflective synthesis. The theoretical synthesis presents the central lines of argument that emerged from the issues investigated. The methodological reflective synthesis presents the participants’ comments on the validity of the study and the value that accrued to them by virtue of participating in the study.

No description available.

Current scholarship in literacy education underscores the inefficacy of standardized education in public schools, particularly for minority students. At the same time, a longstanding lack of understanding between the various culture groups that live in the United States often results in minority groups that are either stereotyped, misunderstood, or viewed as Other. Both of these issues can be traced to the literature that students read in school, which focuses on "classic" literature—often synonymous with "white" literature—that excludes minority narratives. While minorities struggle more with "academic literacy" (the ability to read and write in an active, reflective manner), there is also a pressing need to educate all students in "cultural literacy," or a knowledge of and appreciation for difference in worldview, culture, and opinion. One possible solution is a more effective implementation of multiethnic young adult literature in the classroom. Careful consideration of specific cultural texts can help minority students connect positively with literature, increasing student engagement with academics. Providing educators, librarians, and parents with a framework for selecting literature that begins to address this issue is a critical first step in empowering minority students with emotional and intellectual development as well as providing mainstream students with alternative perspectives that establish common ground, develop social awareness, and reduce stereotyping across groups. This thesis examines literacy and education studies to develop criteria and rationales for selecting books that appeal not only to minorities, but to readers from outside those groups. These criteria provide useful guidelines for educators and librarians in selecting multicultural novels for young adults that (1) act as "mirrors" of relatability to boost self-esteem and foster a love of reading in minority youth, and (2) provide "windows" into other cultures that promote greater cross-cultural respect and understanding. After setting up a theoretical framework that lays out the challenges and benefits to this approach as well as criteria for selecting these novels, this paper provides analyses of several books that meet these criteria as well as a booklist of additional titles. Addressing these issues within the context of young adult literature is crucial to the development of self-assertive, productive adults who value themselves and the different individuals that they interact with on a daily basis; on the other hand, failure to address these issues early perpetuates a cycle of marginalization and distrust that is difficult to break in the adult world.

This dissertation follows career-oriented college women over the course of their education in liberal arts programs and seeks to explain why so many of them, in departure from original plans of combining work and marriage, married and became full-time mothers. Using diaries, personal correspondences, and student publications, in conjunction with works from the social sciences, philosophy, and literature, I argue that these women's experiences need to be understood in the context of cultural conflicts over the definition of class, status, and national identity. Mid twentieth-century college women, I propose, began their education at a moment when the convergence of long-contested developments turned campuses into battlegrounds over the definition of the values of an expanding middle class. Social leadership positions came within reach of new ethnic and religious groups at the same time that changes in the dating behavior of educated youth accelerated. Combined, these trends fed anxieties about a loss of cultural cohesion and national unity. In the interest of social stability, educators and public commentators tried to turn college women into brokers of cultural norms who would, as wives, socialize a heterogeneous population of men to traditional mores and values. This interest of the state to hold educated female youth accountable for the reproduction of a homogenous culture then merged with the desire of gender conservative students to legitimate their own identity in the face of challengers. In encounters with peers, women who aspired to professional careers and academic success learned that their gender performance disqualified them as members of an educated elite. Suffering severe blows to their self-esteem as a result of what I call "sex and gender baiting," they reformulated their goals for their postgraduate futures. Drawing on expressions of shame and fear in diaries and letters, I show through women's own voices the severity of the personal conflicts gender non-conformists experienced, offer insights into the relationship between historical actors and cultural discourses, and illustrate how the personal and the intimate shape the public and the political.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The genre of travel writing is widely recognised as providing useful insights into the ways that discourse is used to frame the interplay between self, place and Other. Recently, it has been suggested that these writings inform the development of global citizenry literacy because, as cultural texts, they recount an engagement in, and with, cosmopolitanism while informing readerships about the foreign. However, it is important to remember that these writings appear in context and the authors of such texts craft discourse to construct sociocultural imaginings of the self and Other – of a journey told from a particular viewpoint, in a particular time, to a particular audience. Through an analysis of the travel writings of four Western women who travelled to Iran in a particular historical moment – after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and until Iran was positioned as part of the ‘Axis of Evil’ in 2002 – this thesis examines the ways in which these authors script their gaze through discourse. The author/narrator is an aesthetic cosmopolitan figure, who casts her gaze from a particular ‘viewing platform’ informed by Western discourse and accumulated cultural capital. Attention is paid in this thesis to the ways in which these writers discursively frame their narratives according to the ‘I’ of the gendered experiencing self who focuses the ‘eye’ (or gaze) through a lens oriented by their cosmopolitical imagination or worldview. Notions of authenticity, fear, danger and threat appeared as recurring themes in each of the selected texts and operate to construct place as political, self as heroic and the journey as quest. The authors engaged aesthetic dimensions of time and space to position the liminal in their narratives and, in so doing mobilised discourses of gender and power. Notions of the liminal were employed to describe Iran����s physical and social scapes to position discursive spaces in the texts that were used to affirm traveller identity, build cultural capital and, in the process, make political comments. The texts revealed that while the authors commonly used metaphor and trope drawn from inherited Western discourses such as Orientalism, postcolonialism and imperialism to provide authority, they also drew from the currently circulating discourses of gender equity, human rights and liberal democracy; all of which foreground notions of freedom. However, these currently circulating discourses, when combined with dimensions of heroism, were found to work in the tradition of inherited Western discourse – to authorise the narrator voice and legitimise the ways that self and Other are constructed. The central argument this thesis makes is that Western travel writing is restricted in its contribution to global literacy because these texts reveal more about Western ways of seeing the world and about the author as cosmopolitan than they do about the foreign.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The genre of travel writing is widely recognised as providing useful insights into the ways that discourse is used to frame the interplay between self, place and Other. Recently, it has been suggested that these writings inform the development of global citizenry literacy because, as cultural texts, they recount an engagement in, and with, cosmopolitanism while informing readerships about the foreign. However, it is important to remember that these writings appear in context and the authors of such texts craft discourse to construct sociocultural imaginings of the self and Other – of a journey told from a particular viewpoint, in a particular time, to a particular audience. Through an analysis of the travel writings of four Western women who travelled to Iran in a particular historical moment – after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and until Iran was positioned as part of the ‘Axis of Evil’ in 2002 – this thesis examines the ways in which these authors script their gaze through discourse. The author/narrator is an aesthetic cosmopolitan figure, who casts her gaze from a particular ‘viewing platform’ informed by Western discourse and accumulated cultural capital. Attention is paid in this thesis to the ways in which these writers discursively frame their narratives according to the ‘I’ of the gendered experiencing self who focuses the ‘eye’ (or gaze) through a lens oriented by their cosmopolitical imagination or worldview. Notions of authenticity, fear, danger and threat appeared as recurring themes in each of the selected texts and operate to construct place as political, self as heroic and the journey as quest. The authors engaged aesthetic dimensions of time and space to position the liminal in their narratives and, in so doing mobilised discourses of gender and power. Notions of the liminal were employed to describe Iran����s physical and social scapes to position discursive spaces in the texts that were used to affirm traveller identity, build cultural capital and, in the process, make political comments. The texts revealed that while the authors commonly used metaphor and trope drawn from inherited Western discourses such as Orientalism, postcolonialism and imperialism to provide authority, they also drew from the currently circulating discourses of gender equity, human rights and liberal democracy; all of which foreground notions of freedom. However, these currently circulating discourses, when combined with dimensions of heroism, were found to work in the tradition of inherited Western discourse – to authorise the narrator voice and legitimise the ways that self and Other are constructed. The central argument this thesis makes is that Western travel writing is restricted in its contribution to global literacy because these texts reveal more about Western ways of seeing the world and about the author as cosmopolitan than they do about the foreign.

No description available.

This study explores information seeking behavior of second-generation Muslim immigrants utilizing factors such as critical, cultural, and religious literacy skills. The study examined the second-generation immigrants' ability to balance their parents' and grandparents' native culture and traditions with the culture and traditions of their country. The interview questions were designed using the cognitive authority theory and the figured worlds theory that provides an explanation for the mentality of those who are in environments influenced by culture or religion. An interesting main finding of the study is that participants sought more religious-based rather than culturally-based information. Participants seek information from their parents, communities, and religious leaders, but are particular with who they consider credible and reliable; if the person providing the information follows a similar lifestyle to the participants, they are more likely to hold cognitive authority. Four different themes emerged from the study. The first is "religious focus" where many participants stated that religion is rather static whereas culture can evolve and change with time, location, and events. The second theme emerged is the reliance on family members for religious literacy given the close upbringing of Muslim extended family system. The third theme indicated that although information seeking behavior relied on Google and mobile devices to locate information, in verifying religious content they depended on parents and religious cognitive authorities. The fourth theme emerged is the loss of richness going forward and the concerns about the possible decline in religious information literacy for future generations.