The purpose of this study was to explore the development of students' understanding through writing while immersed in an environment where there was a strong emphasis on a language-based argument inquiry approach. Additionally, this study explored students' spoken discourse to gain a better understanding of what role(s) talking plays in the development of understanding through writing. Finally, the study proposed a new concept of Discourse Space, which enabled researchers to improve their understanding of the characteristics of the development of student cognition through writing, and of the roles talking plays in cognitive development through writing. This study was guided by the research question: What patterns of the development of fifth grade students' cognition over time emerge in their private and public negotiations under a teacher who is ranked as a low-level implementer of the SWH approach? This question was divided into two sub-questions: (a) Throughout a unit, Ecosystems, what patterns emerge regarding the development of six fifth grade students' understanding through writing, and b) What patterns of the development of Discourse Space emerge through talking in three different contexts. In order to answer these questions, this qualitative research employed a generic qualitative study. Twenty-one fifth grade students participated in this study, and six students were purposefully selected through which to further investigate the development of an understanding of science through private negotiation while immersed in a language-based argument inquiry approach. Major data sources included students' writing samples, informal conversations with the teacher, researcher's field notes, and classroom videos. Additionally, the teacher's modified RTOP scores and semi-structured interviews were used to deepen the contextual understanding of the learning environment and the teacher's instructional performance. The data analysis was conducted by utilizing discourse analysis of writing and talking. The results showed (1) students' low level of engagement in evaluation impacted their reasoning and use of sources for making meanings, as well as their understanding of the topic. Compared to the results of a previous study, students' complexity of reasoning was relatively less developed, and similarly students' use of reflective sources was generally observed relatively less often. (2) The teacher and students in this study engaged in limited public negotiation, which focused more on articulating than on evaluating ideas. The limited public negotiation that was represented by the dialogical patterns in this study cannot support the development of understanding through writing or the practice of the roles of constructor and critiquer, which play a core function in the comprehension of scientific practice. This study has several implications for teacher education and research. Teacher education needs to be centered more on how to encourage students' engagement in the process of evaluation, since this plays an important function not only in the development of understanding, but also in providing opportunities to perform the roles of both constructor and critiquer. Teachers can use writing as an argumentative activity to encourage or foster students' engagement in the process of evaluation or critique. Additionally, this study provides insight into the importance of the learning environment in which the teacher and students create and develop; this learning environment needs to provide not only opportunities but also demands for students to engage in both constructing and critiquing ideas.

Using Foucault’s notion of a dispositif or social apparatus, this thesis charts the pedagogical relations established in contemporary literacy discourse in terms of a space of visibility and a form of sayability, and analyses them as operating within power-knowledge. It furthers this analysis by conceptualising the space of literacy as a normative heterotopia and as a recent mutation of bio-power, the government of the developing body. Such analysis problematises the discourse of literacy, from the term’s systematic indefiniteness to its real effectivity in producing subjects, spaces and disciplinary techniques. Literacy combines and interrelates a nineteenth-century establishment and a twentieth-century rearrangement of pedagogical space. The national language, the developing child, as well as the world of demands and national progress: all emerge as part of the nineteenth-century educational state, forming a set of disciplinary procedures, a structure of perception and a desire to recognise and utilise language development. Literacy discourse appropriates these knowledges and multiplies the sites in which they operate. It articulates the recognition and enablement of non-standard literacies with the governmental project of intensifying and directing the powers of a population. The pedagogical relations operationalised in literacy discourse project a continuous disciplinary power over a general social space. Thus, literacy has become both a common and much theorised social concern, and a term which structures lives, spaces, discourse and power. / Beginning with a close analysis of a recent education policy document, this thesis looks at the deployment of literacy as a way of organising experience through discourse and as a means of modulating the relations between three historically constituted terms: the student, the text, and the world. Schooling and literacy thus insert themselves into a machinery of social production and into the production of everyday concerns and processes. Consequently, literacy enters into our most material and non-linguistic moments through a teleological arrangement of time and space, a pedagogisation which is at the same time a textualisation of existence.

The thesis provides an in-depth analysis of motion event descriptions of two Australian indigenous languages. Jaminjung is a highly endangered non Pama-Nyungan language with approximately 50 remaining speakers. Kriol, an English-lexified Creole, is spoken by about 20.000 people in different varieties across northern Australia. While the languages are typologically very different, occupancy of the same linguistic and cultural area provides an intriguing opportunity to examine the effects of culture and language contact on conceptual components and distribution patterns in discourse. This investigation also applies and tests a number of existing frameworks and typologies regarding the linguistic encoding of motion and space in general. The thesis first provides an overview of the encoding of motion event descriptions in Jaminjung and Kriol. It becomes clear that, concerning overt marking of case, ground-encodings follow a systematic semantic pattern with no or rare case-marking for deictic terms, optional marking for toponyms and mandatory marking for all other types of landmarks. Furthermore, the structure and semantics of the motion verb phrase is investigated. Particularly noteworthy here is a study of asymmetrical serial verb constructions in Kriol which revealed a number of previously undescribed types. Following this, various proposals for a typology of Frames of Reference are applied. The notion of ‘anchor’ is at the centre of the analysis. The investigation shows that contextual restrictions for the use of Jaminjung’s absolute terms can be accounted for by a restriction on egocentric anchoring and ‘Orientation’ settings only. Furthermore, absolute Frame of Reference is realised differently in Roper and Westside Kriol respectively, suggesting an ongoing influence of the traditional languages spoken by the respective communities rather than the lexifier English. Jaminjung and Kriol, additionally, prefer the use of absolute over relative Frame of Reference. The following chapter investigates how lexicalisation patterns influence the distribution of path and manner encodings in discourse. After concluding that Jaminjung might best be described as following an equipollently-framed pattern and Kriol as satellite-framed, path and manner salience is investigated in different types of discourse using a dataset of motion event encodings in a Frog Story collection and a general corpus of various discourse environments. It is concluded that while the two languages behave very differently with regards to frequency patterns of ground- and other path-encodings, they show remarkable similarities in distributing path and manner over larger chunks of discourse. These findings suggest that cultural influences may sometimes override structural typological constraints. Finally, motion event encodings in specific types of discourse are analysed. Regarding route descriptions, speakers show a clear preference for dynamic over static modes of presentation. This includes encoding ‘fictive motion’ events for which a figure- and ground-based distinction is introduced. Additionally, concerning the use of deictics in a comparative analysis of different types of corpora for both languages, it was shown that the distribution of absolute terms remains stable across discourse environments while deictic usage differs drastically. Lastly, the concept of ‘motion’ is abstracted and described as a kind of structuring device in narratives. It is shown that the ‘journey’ within the story world is used by speakers of both languages to bridge episodes sometimes even overriding a temporal in favour of a spatial order of events.