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No description available.

No description available.

The purpose of this work is to explore the roles of education and language in the creation of Japanese cultural identity. Education means first "schooling," but it also expands to include all cultural learning. In the attempt to unravel the inter-relationships of abstract concepts such as education, culture, identity, language and Japan, our understandings are necessarily influenced by our own education. Attempts by the educated elite of one culture to understand other cultures constitutes an intellectual conflict of interest that questions academic conventions, such as objectivity. In this work, I interweave expository and narrative chapters in an attempt to create a new "methodology" or "approach" to the study of culture, which I call cultural hermeneutics. The autobiographical chapters present an ongoing self-reflection upon my developing understanding of Japan. I have studied and taught in Japan for many years, and my increasing familiarity with things Japanese has gradually moved me beyond the boundaries of previous identities, and into spaces that once separated me from Japanese culture, involving me in the formation of new hybrid cultural identities. After an introductory chapter, the dissertation is split into three parts. The first part deals with the challenges of cultural hermeneutics as a methodology. The second part examines how the languages of Japan and foreign language education in Japan influence the formation of Japanese cultural identities. The third part explores how ideological debates, such as those about education, nationalism and internationalization, play a role in forming cultural identities. I conclude that identities are constantly contested by voices from both within and without the "imagined communities" of cultures. This contest is in progress even before we come to study "Culture." Because change is inherent to living cultures, and because lived experience is so abundant and complex, the knowledge we inherit about cultures is always incomplete, and full of prejudice and misunderstandings. We can never arrive at final understandings of cultures, not even our own. Nevertheless, it is important to continue conversations about cultures because they can lead us to form deepened understandings, and because these conversations ultimately contribute to greater self-understanding.

The purpose of this study was to describe and analyze policies and practices that facilitate and hinder international student admission to English as a Second Language (ESL) programs at public and private post-secondary institutions in British Columbia, from the perspective of institutions themselves. Since 1986, a proliferation of ESL programs for international students have emerged in public and private post-secondary institutions in B.C. and numbers of international students in the non-university sector of education in Canada have grown. The governments of B.C. and Canada recognize that English language training is a growing business in Canada and the world. Admissions procedures are but one factor of many that influence a student's decision to apply. This study assumes that streamlined admission to ESL programs will make Canada more attractive, and therefore increase its numbers of international students, a goal that exists for public and private institutions, for internationalization and economic purposes. The research question was: What facilitates and what hinders international student admission to ESL programs in public and private post-secondary institutions in British Columbia? Secondary questions were: How can admissions policies and procedures be more effective and more efficient? What are the implications for change at the institutional, provincial, and national levels? Over a six-week period in 1999, the author interviewed admissions personnel at forty post-secondary institutions in B.C. (sixteen public and twenty-four private), comprising 60% of those that met the selection criteria of providing year-round ESL to international students and having been in operation for three years. The interviews were transcribed and the data were analyzed with data from a questionnaire and written institutional material. The study finds and presents some institutional factors relating to documents, personnel, communication, fee payment and other issues that facilitate and hinder international student admission to ESL programs. However, the study also identifies areas beyond the control of institutions that, from the perspective of admissions personnel, may have a greater effect on international student admission to ESL programs and therefore on increasing the number of international students in Canada. The author makes ten recommendations for institutions and concludes with seven questions for future research.

The purposes of this abstract is to mirror the origin of the research, its contents, the key research findings, what and how the research was conducted. The research on Equitable Criteria for Funding and Financial Management for the PELT Resource Centres in Mozambique was born out of the desire to establish an even, fair distribution of wealth in a manner that is principled and ethically acceptable in a society of ever-growing demands and unforeseeable irregular supplies of already scarce resources. In the report, 'equitable' is used to mean the balancing in accord with local and/ or relative needs. The goal of the research is to establish equitable criteria for funding or resourcing, user-friendly but user-responsible ways/mechanisms of financial planning, controlling and reporting and sources of funding or resourcing. The contents have been organised into five chapters. They consist of methods, a brief description of the research title, statement of purpose, critical questions and core hypotheses. Other contents include a literature review, conceptual and theoretical framework, data treatment, general discussion of the research findings and references. The research findings fall under two main categories: the decision making and resource allocation process, and financial management. The research findings show that the decision making and resource allocation process hosts problems such as resource allocation imbalances, exclusion of resource managers in key decision making and resource allocation processes, lack of equitable criteria for funding, managers' attitudes which blockade resource allocation, refusing resources to certain areas because of assumptions that they do not have the ability and resources to manage resources, etc. With regard to financial management, there are some small scale irregularities in principle which are very significant. These include delays in financial transactions, lack of sound financial accounting knowledge and skills and efficient communication. These problems are genuine and legitimate, and they should be resolved. Thus, some solutions have been suggested herein. The following are the main areas of solution interventions: devolution of powers and authorities to local level management, involvement of lower management in the policy, decision making and resource allocation process, negotiated decentralised financial management, and use of identified criteria for funding and criteria for procurement. Other areas encompass effective communication, financial accounting training and negotiating funding with provincial and national education authorities. The research involved twenty lower and senior managers from the in-service training of teachers of English in ten provinces in Mozambique. They all responded to the questionnaires, some participated in the interview schedule and others in the focus group. The last two methods were designed to reinforce the questionnaire data collection, validity and reliability of the research. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Natal, 2000.

A discrepancy appears to exist between the value placed on reflective journal writing by the writers of journals and the value seen by educators of that same journal writing. In this study, I explored the journal writing of six tutors working in a learning centre at a two-year community college in western Canada. I examined: (1) tutors' perspectives on the journal writing task; (2) the content and reflectivity of tutors' journals; and, (3) the accuracy of the journals in representing tutor thinking initiated by the journal writing task. The initial data collection for the study included observation of weekly in-service training sessions and examination of tutor journal entries. Tutors were interviewed about their perceptions of journal writing and their thinking around issues they wrote about in their journals. The tutor trainer was interviewed about his expectations of tutor journal writing, his reactions to tutors' journals and his perceptions of the journal writing task. After the initial data collection, the participants were given summaries of data collected in the initial phase. Tutors read the summaries and as a group discussed issues raised by the data. I interviewed the trainer about insights he had gained from the summaries. Content choices and levels of reflectivity in the tutors' journals varied widely. Factors affecting the content and levels of reflection in the tutors' journals were affected by tutors’ understanding of the journal writing task, their motivation for journal writing, their feelings of vunerability, their personal histories, their tutoring experience, their preference for writing as a mode of learning, and their purposes for writing journals. Most tutors perceived their journals as useful to them, but the tutor trainer regarded the journals as less useful. This difference in perception of the benefits of journal writing can be attributed, at least in part, to the differing levels of access of the trainer and the tutors to the benefits of journal writing. The trainer based his understanding of the benefits of journal writing on the journals themselves whereas the tutors were aware of benefits that were not apparent from studying the journals. Interviews with the tutors showed that tutors reflected more as a result of the journal writing task than was evident from their journals. The trainer’s view of the reflection initiated by the journal writing task was obscured in tutors’ journals due to the fact, that tutors reported prior reflection, provided incomplete representation of their reflective thinking, made rhetorical choices which masked their levels of reflection, and continued to reflect after completion of journal entries. Implications of the study for educators include the importance of a process approach to journal writing, the risks of assuming that journals provide an accurate picture of the reflection the task initiates, and factors for consideration in the construction of the prompt for journal writing. Implications for researchers focus on the risks of assuming that journals provide an accurate measure of the benefits of the journal writing task. Collaboration with journal writers is seen as essential for any such measure to be achieved.

This study evaluated the effects of input enhancement techniques and metalinguistic/collaborative awareness on the acquisition of the plural -s morpheme. Additionally, the durability of these interventions on the target linguistic feature was examined. The two treatment groups and the comparison group consisted of 101 grade 5 students enrolled in a French-language school board in the Montreal area. A pretest-posttest design was used to assess participants before and after the treatments. A series of 8 oral and written treatment activities focusing on plural -s were specifically created for the study, which lasted 4 weeks. The findings demonstrate that both groups showed durable, definite intervention effects for written production. The metalinguistic/collaborative group significantly outperformed the input enhancement group in oral production, indicating that input enhancement in conjunction with metalinguistic awareness is effective. Nonetheless, the learning effect for oral production was found to be robust for both groups, 5 months after the end of the treatment period, as well as for a small subsample selected from each group 10 months later.

Abstract not available.

The purpose of this study was to investigate changes in the pronunciation and intelligibility of instructed and uninstructed second language (L2) learners over time, and to identify instructional, environmental, and methodological factors playing a role in pronunciation and intelligibility. / Seventeen L2 graduate students at an English-medium university recorded three personal anecdotes over five months. The students also regularly logged their exposure to and use of English. Nine of the students (instructed group) were concurrently taking an oral communication course focussing on suprasegmental pronunciation. Classroom instruction was regularly observed and recorded. All 17 students were interviewed at the end of the study. / L1 listeners heard anecdotes from three instructed and three uninstructed students, matched for length of residence and first language (L1). Listeners also heard anecdotes from four L1 English speakers. One group of listeners retold each anecdote after hearing it (discourse-level task). The other group paused the recording of each anecdote whenever a word was unclear (word-level task). Each group of listeners also rated excerpts for accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency. / Results of quantitative and qualitative analyses showed that: (a) no unambiguous changes in the pronunciation or intelligibility of either L2 learner group occurred over time; (b) word-level intelligibility measures more consistently differentiated L1 and L2 groups, and the instructed and uninstructed L2 groups; (c) compared to the instructed group, the uninstructed group logged relatively more English exposure/use for academic activities and relatively less for interactive social activities; (d) many instructed L2 learners did not believe that their pronunciation had noticeably improved, but almost all expressed satisfaction with their ability to communicate in English; (e) at the end of the study, many uninstructed learners reported persistent difficulties in communicating in English. / The results suggest that instruction in suprasegmental aspects of pronunciation sometimes may not lead to improved intelligibility or pronunciation. In addition, some L2 learners can be as intelligible as L1 speakers, depending on the listening task. Finally, results suggest that L2 learners' perceptions of their communicative ability and their patterns of L2 exposure/use are related. Implications for university preparation and support programs for L2 graduate students are discussed.