A readability survey was carried out on a wide selection of history books, using a computer program, ASTRA 3, developed for the study. The results showed that although the mean readability levels of textbooks provided for 12-14 year olds were appropriate to their readership, there were very large and seemingly random internal fluctuations. This, coupled with an observed lack of scalar correspondence between formulae, has implications for current practices in readability assessment. The responses of readers to readability fluctuations were next investigated, using one subjective measure and three behavioural measures, namely, children's subjective ratings, cloze procedure, reading rate, and stress reaction (Skin Conductance Response). Relatively low cost microcomputer based apparatus was developed for studying the latter two measures. It was found that average 12-14 year old readers were able to perceive variation in difficulty in adjacent passages and these subjective ratings proved to be relatively good predictors of fluctuations in cloze procedure scores. A measure of redundancy based on cloze responses was also shown to be strongly related to children's subjective ratings of contextualised passages. No statistical relationship was found, however, between textual cohesion and either the subjective or the objective indices. These findings raise a number of questions of concern to writers and publishers of school text books. According to the cloze test, all the passages were at frustration level, although this is contrary to what would have been expected from the range of readability indices. Reading rate tended to increase, rather than decrease with difficulty, though in absolute terms the variation was slight. SCR responses tended to be labile and snowed substantial individual. differences. This part of the study opens up a number of questions about the appropriateness of different ways of examining the response of readers to specific 'text features that contribute to readability. In general, the findings in this interrelated series of studies show that a great deal of readability assessment is based on assumptions of dubious validity concerning the distribution of difficulty within texts, the nature of relationships between different readability measures, and the ways in which readers actually respond to hypothesized difficulties.

This thesis is an analytic study of specific patterns of religious thought in early south India as found in the earliest extant literary texts in Tamil, one of the classical languages of India and one of the oldest living languages of the world. commonly known in the Tamil tradition as the cankaa literature, this corpus of poetry is generally assigned to the early centuries of the Comaon Era, and is thought of as constituting the classical heritage of Taail culture. There has not been a major attempt to investigate the importance of this reaarkable body of literature to the development of religious thought in south India, a region which is widely acknowledged as the birthplace of a number of religious movements including the great devotional govement of the early medieval ties, called the bhaktl religion. The reluctance on the part of historians of Indian religious thought to take up the study of classical Tamil texts was partly due to a perception that the classical Tamil texts were essentially 'secular', and, therefore, of not much interest to a historian of religious thought. I had, therefore, to begin the thesis with a historiographical critique showing how limited and limiting that perception was and suggesting that, whatever unique features that classical Tamil texts may have, they are not unyielding to the queries of a student of religion. In addition to other types of poems, there are a few explicitly religious poems which are regarded by tradition as part of the classical corpus. Taking my initial cues from those poems, I have isolated three central themes in the literature, namely space, hero, and gift around which the religious thought of the culture can be discerned. By a careful and selective analysis of the so-called 'secular' poems in the corpus, and through an analysis of sections of the major grammatical treatise of the classical period, have shown that the thought underlying these three themes was integral to classical Tamil culture. The thesis has in the end a dual purpose. Its stated purpose is to assess the importance of the period of the classical Tamil texts in religious history, but it also indirectly demonstrates the need for a fresh approach to the study of early Tamil literature. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

In the present study, I have analysed changes in writing and genre in grade 9 during the period 1992–2013. My hypothesis requires more informal language and thus poorer adjustment to the right genre. I use a language theory (Teleman 1985) and theories that highlight the chang-es in school and rest of the community. The study material is taken from the years 1992, 2003 and 2013, and consists of 64 essays. The quantitative analysis of student texts reported in study 1 is based on word variation (OVIX), nominal quota value (NQ), percentage of long words, the average graphic sentence length, noun phrases longer than one word and the number of words in student texts. Sub-study 2 is a qualitative genre analysis of six selected essays, in which two from each year were analysed. The selected essays are the closest to and farthest from the prose style genre normally used in society. The analysis showed the following results. OVIX, nominal quota and noun phrases show a negative change in students’ discursive language over time. The differences between the stu-dents declined between 1992 and 2003, but increased during the period 2003–2013. Long words, the average sentence length and the number of words increased between 1992 and 2013. Study 2 showed a result that did not differ much over time. Questions in the texts increased in 2013. The students who wrote mainly in genre-adapted style are also capable of writing about the stances they take on various topics.

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Re-reading Rousseau, using cognate works by de Man, Althusser and Derrida, this thesis hopes to destabilise the convention of reading 'confessional' texts in terms of authorial intention. Chapter One undermines critical responses to Rousseau's work, tracing a tradition of reading which rejects his oeuvre, not due to a rigorous reading of his texts, but through an ad hominem attack. We establish de Man, Althusser and Derrida as writers who lie outside this tradition. Chapter Two examines the intellectual debate surrounding the revelation of Paul de Man's wartime journalism, concentrating on this journalism's power to contaminate his oeuvre. We unsettle the terms of this debate, revealing its reliance upon a cryptobiographical reading of the author irito the text. We account for the problematic nature of de Man's deconstructive stance differently when we read de Man's texts as a conscious type or copy of Rousseau's texts. Chapter Three studies the anti-Althusserian polemic which attacked"his 'theoretical' Marxism with reference to insanity and murder. Again, a reading which might have located a resistance to theory within theory itself instead favours a reductive, biographical reading. We trace a reading of Rousseau in Althusser's work in order to destabilise this debate. Chapter Four looks at the concepts of scandal and slander and their current usage in both legal and literary contexts. Our aim here is to unite our authors in the shared aim of re-synonimising the two terms so as to reveal biography as necessarily fictional. Rousseau's Confessions is re-read as an instance where the concepts of slander and scandal are equated. Chapter Five upsets a traditional theory of the archive when it reads Althusser's autobiography as a deliberate copy of Rousseau's Confessions. Finally, Chapter Six unites all our writers in a discussion of the necessarily fictive nature of a re-iterable autobiography.

Students’ attitudes to reading and the texts they choose to read impact on literacy achievement and willingness to engage with literacy-related activities in the primary years of schooling. This study was conducted in an urban Catholic school in Queensland in Years 1 to 7. Students’ developing attitudes to reading and the perceptions of these attitudes held by their teachers were examined. An adapted version of the Elementary Reading Attitude Survey (McKenna & Kear, 1990) and Teacher Checklist (Young, 2003) was utilized. Results from the study indicate older students’ attitudes towards recreational reading (in primary school) are not significantly different to younger students’ attitudes. Female students however, show more positive attitudes to recreational reading than male students. Older students’ attitudes towards academic reading are more negative overall and female students showed significantly more positive attitudes than their male peers. Students’ choice of texts varied across the year levels with the most preferred reading materials being chapter books, children’s magazines and comics. Teachers’ perceptions of students’ enjoyment of reading in class correlated significantly with students’ own perceived level of reading achievement. Teachers perceive that as students’ level of reading enjoyment increases, their level of academic reading achievement also increases. Five recommendations are made from the findings of this study. First, recreational reading engagement needs to be publicly promoted and positively celebrated within the school community. It was found that for students to be motivated and see the value of engaging in reading they must be immersed in a school classroom environment that offers a range of recreational activities and opportunities. Second, a structured approach to literacy sessions (literacy block) needs to be established and implemented with students across all primary year levels. This enables students to be scaffolded in their literacy learning and so develop positive attitudes towards themselves as academic readers. Third, it is recommended that guided reading occur as a key instructional approach to the teaching of reading across all primary year levels. This may serve to increase students’ motivation and interest in reading a range of text types and may provide a source of information for the teacher in relation to students’ engagement with reading. Fourth, a range of text types need to be purchased and made available for students to read independently and for teachers to use in class shared reading activities across all primary year levels. Students should be exposed to various text types throughout their primary years of schooling. Finally, the teaching of reading needs to be ‘data-driven’ rather than based on teachers’ perceptions of students’ reading needs. Periodic assessments of students’ reading achievement should occur to provide these data for teachers. The recommendations from this study align with priorities and recommendations included in current Commonwealth and State documents. Directions for future research also are suggested especially for qualitative data collection. This methodology, if included, would glean more in-depth data concerning students’ attitudes to reading and the perceptions held by their teachers. Investigating students’ attitude towards and use of digital literacies also would provide a greater understanding of primary-age students’ attitudes towards reading in the 21st century.

This thesis considers late thirteenth and early fourteenth century insular history writing in the vernaculars in its multilingual, codicological, and historical contexts. It seeks to explicate the changes in insular historiography after the conquest of Wales and amidst the ongoing Scottish wars. The dominant mode of history writing during this period shifted: the texts examined in the thesis are 'derivative texts', complex assemblages of translations from numerous source texts, compiled and combined into unique, original works. Revising current notions of scribal competency, and arguing for a wider consideration of scribal authorship are fundamental aims of the thesis. By demonstrating the diverse and sophisticated textual lexicons of the authors of derivative texts, the thesis exposes vernacular historiographies as learned productions, written for learned audiences, engaged in intertextual dialogue with more 'authoritative' Latin historiography. Medieval translation is explored throughout, in an attempt to broaden an understanding of the term to include textual and ideological transposition, and overwrite 'compilation' as an acceptable description of these sophisticated and politically engaged texts. Chapter 1 examines the Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle as a derivative text, situating the work in its historical context of Edward I's appeals to historiography on the Scottish question at the end of the thirteenth century. Chapter 2 is a detailed study of the chronicles of Robert Mannyng and Pierre Langtoft, arguing for the sophistication of the texts, and complexifying previously monolithic ideas of ethnicity and 'Englishness' in the chronicles. Chapter 3 focuses on the Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, providing a comprehensive introduction to the text, and offering readings of the ideological agenda of its derivative methodology. Chapter 4 investigates London, College of Arms, MS Arundel 58, a mid-fifteenth century manuscript of Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle with unique and substantive prose interpolations, considering the physical processes by which derivative texts were written.

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