L'évaluation d'un objet est intrinsèquement liée à la définition que l'on pose de celui-ci. Si à un certain niveau de généralité, ce qu'est comprendre un texte semble aller de soi, une recension des travaux en psychologie cognitive, du développement, en didactique, en sociolinguistique, montre au contraire le caractère polymorphe de cet objet qu'on peine à définir. Dès lors, comment évaluer ce que l'on peine à circonscrire, même par exclusion ? Toujours dans le but de cerner ce qu'on entend par compréhension, nous avons mené quatre enquêtes. La première repose sur des entretiens avec des enseignants autour d'une épreuve (texte + questions), en vue de décrire leur manière de se représenter la compréhension et ses difficultés. La deuxième, centrée sur l'analyse des questions repose sur la constitution et une première analyse d'un corpus d'environ 200 questions proposées lors d'évaluations nationales sur la compréhension de textes narratifs. Analyser les questions ne pouvant se faire sans prendre en compte l'activité de réponse, nous avons proposé ensuite deux expériences. La première procède d'une sorte de raisonnement par « l'absurde »: peut-on répondre à des questionnaires de compréhension sans le texte y afférant ? La seconde a pour but de cerner les spécificités des épreuves, en proposant aux mêmes élèves quatre tâches (rappel, reconnaissance, jugement d'importance et QCM) sur deux textes différents. Ces analyses convergent pour montrer que chaque tâche donne un portrait différent de la compréhension et que l'on passe parfois rapidement d'une compréhension d'un texte à la compréhension de textes. / The evaluation of an object is intrinsically linked to the way one defines it. In seeking to define narrative texts comprehension, we have educed multiple facets of this process: cognitiv psychology, psychology of development, didactics, sociolinguistics, which each in their way clarifies an aspect of texts comprehension. This being the case, how can an object so polymorphous be evaluated? To properly understand the functioning of MCQs, the most common method for evaluating texts comprehension, we have undertaken four separate investigations. The first was based on interviews with teachers about a given examination (text plus questions), with the aim of being able to formulate how one depicts texts comprehension and its difficulties. The second investigation, centered on the analysis of questions, was based on the constitution of a corpus of about 200 questions used in nationwide tests of narrative texts comprehension , and a first-level analysis. Analyzing questions necessitates taking into consideration the activity of replying to questions, so we developed two further experiments. The first proceeded from a sort of "reasoning by the absurd": can one reply to questions without cognizance of the corresponding text? The second aimed to identify the specificities of tests, by proposing to the same students four tasks (recall, recognition, relative importance judgments and QMCs) for two different texts. These analyses converge to demonstrate that each kind of task generates a specific profile view of texts comprehension, and that sometimes one passes rapidly from the comprehension of a given text to the general texts comprehension reading competencies.

Popular and consumer cultures share a similar trajectory in the United States with spectacle and money being key ingredients in the construction of both. This is most apparent in the sports industry in America with billions of dollars in revenue generated every year. During the first half of the twentieth century sports like baseball and boxing commanded a significant amount of cultural and economic capital. It was not unheard of for sports teams, talented athletes and even a few select coaches to ascend to a legendary or even mythical status. The spectacle and revenue generating capacity of amateur and professional sports was considerable during this time, but it was not until the early 1960s that the true potential for an American sports was constructed. The introduction of television in the development of the National Football Leagues spectacle redefined what sports in the United States means to popular and consumer cultures. The enormity of the National Football Leagues premier annual spectacle, the Super Bowl, is a testament to the sports dominance of American popular and consumer cultures. By analyzing the National Football Leagues formative years during the 1960s and 1970s, it is my intention to demonstrate how the NFL was able to reframe its cultural product, and achieve an unprecedented social and economic status in American culture. I will employ an organization set analysis of cultural industry systems proposed by Paul M. Hirsch in conjunction with Clifford Geertz and Jerome Bruners studies on the cultural power and significance of the narrative form to trace the trajectory of the NFLs social and economic success. Popular fiction will also be included to demonstrate how thoroughly professional football infiltrated popular and consumer cultures and changed how Americans viewed televised sports. American sports have undergone amazing changes over the last century, but it was the National Football League and television that changed what the sports industry means to American culture.

In this study I investigated the process drama convention of tableau to mediate for the representation of main ideas in science information texts. My pedagogical goal was to focus on the body as a tool for engaging with information texts and my rationale for this goal was the belief that the body is neglected in classroom learning. The task of creating caused the students to be active and to think of their own and other bodies as signifiers of meaning. The methodology was based on a formative experiment that allowed for changes and modifications to be made in response to the intervention of tableau. Formative and design experiments recognize that classrooms are ecologically complex research sites that are situated in particular cultural and historical contexts. Theories related to cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), expansive and embodied learning frame this research as paradigms that recognize the dialectics between activity and culture and the body in and of the world. In the study tableau is framed as an innovative learning method that disrupts the traditional and historical methods for identifying main idea, such as the annotation of text. Through the disruption of tableau came opportunities to expand notions of literacy and comprehension as well as the traditional associations of drama with fiction texts. The study shows that tableau is a flexible mediating tool that can be applied to the current focus on informational texts and close reading.

The articles in this portfolio provide a detailed account of how educational drama enhances language and literacy development, and in particular the reading of narrative texts, in a range of Australian Primary (K-6) classroom settings. The research for this portfolio was positioned within the interpretive research paradigm. A combination of both action research and case study methodology was used to investigate how the researcher's teaching practice influenced children's language and literacy development, and how the student's responses during drama sessions influenced the researcher's subsequent practice. The theoretical underpinning for these investigations was based on socio-psycholinguistic theory and critical reading theory. Both theories explain why literature as opposed to basal readers is a better resource for the development of critical reading practices and both maintain the need for teaching/learning activities that attend to the distinctive features of narrative texts. As a collection, these articles illustrate how drama strategies and/or forms such as still image, questioning in role, parallel improvisation, teacher in role, Reader's Theatre and play-building enable participants to interpret and reconstruct the meaning of a text. Furthermore, and through the process of metaxis, children reflect upon universal themes and issues through the enactment of their own stories within a fictional context. Educational drama is thus positioned as a pedagogically appropriate teaching/learning methodology for enhancing language and literacy development in primary classrooms. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis is concerned with explicating the role of language in mobilising action through management emails. Situated within the context of organisational change in a globalised manufacturing business, the project is framed by behavioural observations from management scholars Palmer and Hardy (2000) of mobilisation strategies that utilise linguistic resources since they: (a) involve a sense of obligation or inclination in directives; (b) show how co-operation will produce mutual benefits; (c) construct desired actions as legitimate, beneficial or inevitable; and (d) use past or anticipated meanings, for or against certain actions. Systemic Functional Linguistics is the underlying framework employed to provide a theoretically principled account of the intuitively derived observations from Palmer and Hardy (2000) which are applied to a sample of twenty-seven email texts, through corpus- and text-based analysis. A major finding is that the representation of action is enacted interpersonally through the verbal group. This view complements experientially dominated accounts of the verbal group which focus on the tense system. Further, action is found to be motivated through the negotiation of evaluative stance. By relating the grammar of the verbal group as well as other resources to the discourse semantics of Appraisal, modulation (of obligation or inclination) is found to be enabled by both negative as well as positive judgements of capacity. Specifically, judgements of capacity are re-interpreted as invocations of high obligation as managers seek to mobilise (further) positive performance. The analysis demonstrates that elements in the verbal group (complex) and Appraisal co-opt action through enabling positioning of the writer, in terms of assessing and grading categorical meanings, manipulating interpersonal time, or foregrounding solidarity. A significant contribution to the thesis is an extension of the system of GRADUATION: FOCUS (Hood, 2004a) through the demonstration of how resources of the verbal group negotiate expectations of appearances and achievements. This study has also extended the resources of GRADUATION: FORCE by applying it to the management context. The practical contribution of the study is that these insights may more explicitly inform management training and enable managers to participate more effectively within their community of practice.

This thesis investigates the practice of set text study as it is encountered within the English curriculum of a Victorian secondary school. The study evolved from a range of concerns to do with the researcher’s own teaching and the attitudes being expressed in her school community. It developed into an investigation of the student experience of reading, and of studying the required texts in subject, English This research aims to: • provide understanding of the development of set text study and to consider whether this construct is meeting the goals of contemporary English teaching examine both the beliefs which underpin the practices and the practices themselves provide greater understanding of the way students experience this aspect of their school learning consider how notions of transformation, insight and emerging identity through literature study fit with student experience Five guiding research questions address the issues which gave rise to the study. These questions provide a focus and structure throughout the research process. The questions address issues of: students’ school and non-school reading practices, enjoyment, beliefs about learning, ideology and specifically, the potential influence of textual representations of suicide and adult characters on a teenage student’s emerging sense of self. An overview of key theoretical positions on the act of reading situates the attitudinal and theoretical aspects of this research. The practical orientation of this study is situated alongside research on the experience of reading and of teaching literature, both from Australia and overseas. This thesis adopts a phenomenological approach within a constructivist framework. A qualitative methodology using a case-study approach, allows for the prolonged engagement necessary to explore the research questions and develop the sort of relationship necessary to facilitate the in-depth and reflective responses being sought. In-depth interviews (both face-to-face interviews and on-line chat sessions) are the primary data-gathering tool. In reporting the findings, the student voice is privileged. Practical and theoretical notions of communication and language are explored. The processes used to undertake this research are reflected upon and some possibilities for incorporating some of these methods into a school learning context are considered. While the focus of the study is to increase understanding of individual experience, some clear findings emerge. Although reading played an important part in the non-school lives of most of these students, the school experience of reading was more often than not, disappointing. Key factors which students perceived as contributing to their lack of enjoyment and satisfaction included: text choice, lack of challenge in lesson content, the sameness of the associated tasks, the behaviour of peers and lack of opportunity for having their opinions heard. Almost conversely, the students who gained greatest satisfaction reported on: particular texts, the creativity and scope for individual input of required tasks, teacher involvement, more positive class interaction and specific modelling by teachers of required tasks. The thesis concludes with recommendations for structural support (both whole school and classroom) to enable the positive shared reading experiences to become the experience of more students. It challenges the sanctity of the set text and offers a range of alternatives. In calls on teachers to consider the implications of entering a continuing story of students’ reading and to work at developing better ways of incorporating components of effective non-school reading practices into school reading practices. The concerns regarding the potential negative influence of set texts on a student’s identity were not validated in this research. However new concerns for students’ well being did emerge. The research indicates that set texts can make a difference to the quality of students’ lives. By incorporating a range of texts and class activities, by knowing students as well as possible, and by fully engaging as co-readers, teachers are in a better position to minimise student distress and to attend to the work of creating democratic reading environments with the greatest potential for reading success for everyone.

This study aims at comparing English and Vietnamese cohesion with the hope that it may contribute to the teaching and learning of English in Vietnam. It is hoped that the results of the study may help the teacher and student to become more aware of cohesive devices in English texts and thus make better use of them in the teaching and learning of the English language. The study reveals that the two languages have several similar features in cohesion. It also points out the differences of cohesion in texts of the two languages. The first chapter is an introductory part in which background to the study, the aim of the study, the source of information, and the objectives and content of the study are presented. Chapter 2 deals with the theoretical background related to the study. Concepts such as text and cohesion are presented. Chapter 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 discuss the five cohesive relations in English and Vietnamese; that is. reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. In chapter 8. a comparison of English and Vietnamese cohesion based on the analysis in chapters 3. 4. 5, 6 and 7 is made. As well as this, it looks at common errors in the use of cohesive devices made in the English writing of Vietnamese students at the University of Canberra. In the last section, the conclusion, the author tries to offer some implications based on the results of the previous sections and on the author's experience of teaching and learning foreign languages. It is hoped that the implications may be of significance to Vietnamese teachers and students of English. And furthermore, that the analysis of cohesion in Vietnamese may be beneficial to foreign students learning Vietnamese as a foreign language.

<p>This investigation explores and analyzes speeches by John McCain and Barack Obama, who were the candidates of the United States Presidential election 2008. Ten speeches by each speaker are in a non-biased way selected from the year 2007 from their official websites when they were senators of Arizona and Illinois respectively. The analyses of the speeches concern cohesive measures and are not about what they say in their political occupation. This approach was selected to see if there are any comparisons and/or contrasts in terms of cohesion between the speakers or within their own set of speeches. The website Coh-Metrix has been used and out of it nine measures have been selected and analyzed in detail. This study looks at the average words per sentence, the average syllables per word, the Flesch Reading Ease score, the average concreteness for content words, the average minimum concreteness for content words, the mean number of higher level constituents, the type-token ratio, the syntactic structure similarity, and the average number of negations. The two speakers had overall very similar results except for a few standard deviations as in for example the average concreteness and average minimum concreteness for content words results. However, eight out of the nine measurement numbers were non-significant according to a t-test for non-matched observations and/or a chi-square goodness-of-fit test. One measurement, the average number of negation expressions per 1000 words, was nonetheless highly significant according to a t-test and chi-square test, as Obama used about twice as many negations in comparison to McCain. This study shows that the speakers’ twenty speeches are similar in terms of structure and cohesion except for the fact that Obama uses more negation expressions compared to McCain. These results do not, however, necessarily say anything else about the speakers and/or speeches.</p><p>Keywords: cohesion, cohesion markers, cohesion measures/measurements, Coh-Metrix, speeches, texts</p>

<p>This essay analysed how gender is established in students’ texts. The aim of the study was to find out if the students in a class in an upper secondary school were able to produce texts where female and male subjects were not influenced by prevailing gender roles. The analysis was based on Halliday’s Functional Grammar Theory. Furthermore, the results are interpreted in the light of the guidelines of the Curriculum and the Education Act. To fulfil the aim of this essay 32 texts were analysed from the extra linguistic factor of gender.</p><p>                      The linguistic factors examined were verbs (dynamic/stative, transitive/intransitive), if the subjects function as actors or not were the factors used to establish if there is a difference between how females and males are represented in the texts. Furthermore the use of adjectives, nouns and predicatives modifying the grammatical subjects were also taken in consideration in the analysis. The hypothesis was based on a previous study made on the teaching book <em>Blueprint A </em>and the results from this current study were compared to the results from that study. The study finds that in the texts examined females are established as more stative than males and because of that it is possible to draw conclusions that the teaching book can influence the student in their writing but also that school not always uphold the goals of the Curriculum and the Education Act in the issue regarding gender equality.  </p><p><strong> </strong></p><p> </p>

<p>This thesis deals with idioms taken from contemporary newspapers. The purpose is to find out which idioms are known and used by native speakers of different ages and also to what extent the entries in the dictionaries offer accurate descriptions to the meaning of these idioms. We already know that idioms which have been modified, as often is the case in newspapers, are often more difficult to understand than others.</p><p>The study has been conducted by means of questionnaires answered by native speakers in Germany. In order to assess the ability that German native speakers have to understand and use these idioms, I have chosen informants from three age groups; the first two groups of informants are grammar school students at a German Gymnasium, in the 7 and the 10 form respectively and the last group consists of adult speakers in Germany with university education. This last group conforms to the final phase of language acquisition.</p><p>The results clearly show that younger generations - and to a certain extent older students and indeed educated adults - are less likely to understand idioms which have complex explanations in the dictionaries and/or whose meanings have been modified. Similarly, all age groups are more likely to understand idioms with simple explanations, those which appear frequently on the Internet and those whose meanings have not been modified, though there is a higher degree of “tolerance” when it comes to complex idioms among the adults.</p><p>It is also clear that the meaning of an idiom cannot always be fully explained out of context. In most cases dictionaries offer an explanation that functions in most contexts, yet it is not uncommon for the meaning of an idiom to be complex and to vary more or less depending on the context. As a way to find out how frequent the idioms are, I have compared their frequency in www.Google.de and found that there is a clear correlation between high frequency in Google and the knowledge displayed by the informants.</p>