This research project was primarily a qualitative investigation, the purpose of which was not to test a particular set of hypotheses, but rather to develop an exploratory analysis of the disjunction between spoken and written English among pupils at St Charles High School. In light of the lack of empirical and exploratory research on the use of English as a second language in Lesotho, the study aimed to investigate pupils' and teachers' perceptions on the use of English as a subject and medium of instruction. Chapter 1 presents an introduction of English and the formal type of education in Lesotho by missionaries just before the middle of the nineteenth century. Although English is regarded as the 'language of power' nevertheless the teaching and learning of the language has its own problems and teachers and pupils' experiences with second language learning in different local and international contexts are discussed in Chapter 2. The study used both qualitative and quantitative methods to gather and analyse data. A case study approach was employed using a range of instruments to collect data relevant to the aim of this project. The findings show that although pupils are generally proficient in spoken English and appear to understand the spoken language fairly well, assessment of their written exercises and during lesson observations indicates that their fluency in English is not related to their performance in written English. Therefore, fluency in English language does not necessarily form a sufficient basis to describe pupils as competent in English (L2). This does explain the possible difference between spoken and written English. The thesis does not offer tips for teachers nor are methods prescribed about how to teach English as a second language. Although limited to a particular high school (the detail and context of which are described in Chapter 3), much of what was found and the subsequent recommendations may be of value to improve the teaching and learning of English. I hope that this study, which was very much a pilot in nature, will help to highlight issues that might be addressed in more detailed studies in the field of second language learning. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Natal, 2002.

The end of the apartheid era in the history of South Africa resulted in many black pupils being admitted to schools which were previously used exclusively by either coloureds, Indians or white pupils. However, the newly admitted black pupils spoke English as a second language in schools where the medium of instruction was English. Consequently, the black pupils' inability to cope with English as a first language meant that they were at risk of failing at school. In an attempt to reduce the risk of the black pupils failing, Eastwood Secondary School introduced the Language Integration Programme. The school hoped that the programme would accelerate the black pupils acquisition of the English while simultaneously making academic progress in their other subjects. The aim of this study was to gain insights into the results of the Language Integration Programme. The research questions focused on the views of the parents of the pupils who were in the programme, the teachers at the school, the pupils who were in the Language Integration Programme, as well as the principal and deputy principal of the school. Both closed and open-ended types of questions were used in the questionnaires that were administered to the parents, teachers and pupils, as well as in the interviews that were conducted with the principal and deputy principal. The findings from the questionnaires and interviews were supplemented by information that was obtained from the school's VRE-52 academic records. The findings of the study revealed that there was an improvement in the Language Integration Programme pupils' English language and communication skills. The findings also showed that there was a positive relationship between the pupils' performance in English and their performance in their other subjects while they were in the Language Integration Programme. Recommendations that arose from the study of the Language Integration Programme were that there is a need for placement tests to identify the background knowledge of the pupils so that the material in future programmes is not too easy for the pupils in the programme. The study also revealed that the class size in programmes similar to the Language Integration Programme should be kept as small as possible if the programme was to achieve maximum effectiveness because weaker pupils generally need more attention. / Thesis (M.Ed.) - University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1996.

The study aimed to investigate the reading life histories of two educators, focusing on how they were taught to read and came to understand reading, and how this understanding has shaped their teaching of reading in the classroom. Two language educators teaching English in the Intermediate and Senior Phase in a rural primary school in KwaZulu-Natal were chosen for this research. A life history approach was undertaken to gather rich data which was analysed and presented in a life history narrative. The research revealed that the participants’ educational development was severely affected by poverty, violence and the repercussions of apartheid, which all had a negative impact on their education. In spite of this, the participants’ were taught to value reading from an early age by concerned adults in their lives. These adults, although not highly educated themselves, actively instilled early reading habits in the participants, and tried to ensure that they were given the opportunity to be educated so that they could aspire to a better life. The participants’ experiences of learning to read and reading in primary school and high school gave them only a limited understanding of reading and reading practices. The tertiary institutions where they trained as teachers failed to equip them with adequate skills and strategies to teach reading well in their own classrooms. As a result, although both educators believe that they were well trained, they lack adequate strategies for truly effective development of reading in their classrooms. Consequently, they fail to facilitate sound reading skills in their learners, yet are not fully aware of the shortcomings in their own practice. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013.

This research is a replication and expansion of Lightbown and Spada (2000) which investigated the metalinguistic awareness of 11--12 year-old francophone learners of English as second language (ESL). Their research examined whether young L2 learners were able to make explicit L1 rules influencing their L2 performance. The present research builds on Lightbown and Spada (2000) by comparing their findings to those of older and more proficient francophone ESL learners (12--16 years old) in secondary school. As observed with the younger learners in Lightbown and Spada (2000), the interlanguage of the older learners revealed a clear influence of transfer of French even though they were more accurate in their overall performance. The results also indicated that the older learners were capable of considerable metalinguistic awareness regarding the target features (question formation and adverb placement). This contrasts sharply with Lightbown and Spada's (2000) in which there was no evidence of metalinguistic awareness on the part of the younger learners.

This study explores the nature of teachers' understandings of theoretical orientation to reading and the relationships between theoretical orientations to reading and instructional practice. The participants were eleven Grade Five classroom teachers, seven female and four male, in one particular school board in Southern Ontario. A series of three in-depth, phenomenological interviews were conducted with each teacher-participant. Utilizing the concept of theoretical orientation to reading, understandings of and relationships between, theoretical orientation to reading and instructional practice were identified and described by the teachers in this study, from an 'emic' (insider) perspective. The themes of teachers' knowledge and beliefs, personal experiences, and constructivist approaches to teaching and learning emerged as highly influential in determining the kinds of instructional decisions made by the teacher participants. The data illustrate how teachers with a skills orientation to reading instruction supported a focus on explicit skills instruction within balanced, eclectic approaches to reading instruction. The results provide a multi-voice construction, showing how the teacher participants' knowledge, beliefs, personal and professional experiences were reflected not only in their efforts to articulate understandings of theoretical orientations to reading, but also in the characteristics of relationships between their theoretical orientation to reading and instructional practices. Patterns and themes in the data also indicate the need for improved pre-service teacher education, and relevant in-service professional development, to better meet the needs of contemporary teachers of reading at the junior division level.

Read-aloud editing aims to engage both the reader and the writer to negotiate meaning and negotiate form with the aim to self- and peer-repair. This study was divided into a three-fold focus: (1) examining feedback types, (2) examining categories of repair and (3) examining patterns of dyadic interaction (Storch, 2002). Two read-aloud editing sessions of 15 intermediate-level adult English as a second language learners (ESL) were audio-recorded and transcribed for quantitative and qualitative analysis. The results reveal that reformulations as a feedback type led to more learner repairs, whereas prompts led to more "metatalk" (Swain, 1998). Peer readers initiated and repaired more than writers and errors pertaining to incorrect grammar form tended to be repaired over other types of errors. Social relationships between the peers changed depending on how learners assumed their roles in the pairs. The findings suggest that read-aloud editing helps learners notice incongruities in their writing and find solutions by talking about writing (Nystrand, 1986).

This thesis explores the experience of dialect speakers of Indigenous English in the Standard English School. Indigenous English is a dialect of English spoken by many Aboriginal people in Canada; it is especially discernable in the Prairie Provinces, yet it is not widely recognized by the majority of the population. This classroom study was conducted in a semi-urban community in East Central Saskatchewan. The focus of the research was six children in a Grade 3 classroom, four of whom are First Nations and Indigenous English Speakers. The remaining two children are White and speakers of Standard English. The results of this study indicate that the First Nations children of this study speak a dialect of English that differs phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, and lexically from the Standard English spoken in Saskatchewan. These children are all below grade level in Language Arts and follow modified programs. They experience difficulty in phonics and spelling and are receiving additional support from classroom assistants, resource room teachers and speech pathologists. It would also appear that these children are experiencing institutional racism in a number of forms. Possible resolutions to the problems faced by these students may include teacher training and dialect awareness classes. This field has not been adequately explored and further research is needed to discover viable solutions to the issues experienced by dialect speakers of Indigenous English in the Standard English classroom.

This thesis looks at the potential use of computer simulation games in the ESL classroom. Simulation games, if educational as well as entertaining, come under the field of Computer Aided Instruction (CAI). CAI is expensive, both for computers and programs; programs are difficult to create and often specialized; and computer hardware is made differently, so software is difficult to transfer between computers. Yet, the advantages far out-weigh the disadvantages. With CAI, the student receives instant feedback and individualized instruction. The student can work at his/her own pace, and the computer can devote full attention to the student. It has not been fully determined whether students learn better or faster with CAI as compared to traditional classroom instruction.The major portion of this thesis is a computer simulation game written to instruct in the directions: right, left, straight, and back-up. With this program and support from in-class instruction, the student should learn directions quickly.

There is an urgent necessity for good ESP textbooks. There are not too many around, and the few in existence appear very inadequate. Most of the time, ESL textbook writers feel that they should provide a basic framework and expect the classroom teacher to build lesson plans around it while adapting the material to suit the needs of a particular class. Writing a good textbook is a formidable and time consuming task. This creative project is a descrption of an ESP textbook. It sets out to provide a set of methodological guidelines and a number of teaching techniques to be used by the classroom teacher in dealing with a lesson. It discusses the four basic activities of language learning: listening, speaking, reading and writing and how to approach them as a way to stress oral and written communication in the target language. Communicative competence is taken to be the objective of language teaching: the preparation of speakers competent to communicate in the target language. Communicative competence includes not only the linguistic forms of a language, but also the knowledge of when, how and to whom it is appropriate to use these forms. With this premise in mind this work sets out to discuss how to teach dialogues, structural patterns, pronunciation, reading and writing, all basic components of a typical language lesson. To wrap up the project, a typical ESP lesson on Tourism is included. Its organization is consistent with the methodological guidelines discusses earlier, it uses the techniques discussed in the main body of the work and represents a sensible approach to language learning.

The purpose of this study was to investigate aspects of cognitive styles in relationship to the academic orientation of Arab ESL students. More specifically, this study attempted to answer the following questions:1- What are the different cognitive styles Arab students use in their learning of English as a second language?2- To what degree do Arab students who possess different cognitive styles perform differently on the Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency?3- Are students' academic majors related to their proficiency in English as a second language?The subjects of this study were 82 students representing 11 Arab countries enrolled in ESL programs in four American universities. The Inventory of Learning Processes (Schmeck, Ribich, & Ramanaiah, 1977), was used to measure the students' cognitive styles and the Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency (MTELP) was used to measure their performance on English as a second language.Results of this study indicated that Arab students fall on a continuum of four different cognitive styles with Elaborative Processing being the most dominant cognitive style among Arab students (44% of students). Deep Processing and Fact Retention were the next two cognitive styles Arab students possessed (26%, 21 % of students respectively). Only 10% of students possessed the Study Methods cognitive style. There was no significant relationship between students' cognitive styles and their performance on English as a second language except for the weak positive relationship that existed between the cognitive style of Elaborative Processing and proficiency in English as a second language. It was also found that students' academic majors played a major role in their performance on MTELP. Literature majors performed significantly better than science majors in English as a second language.It was recommended that ESL instructors at American universities identify Arab students' cognitive styles by using ILP prior to their enrollment in ESL courses. It was also recommended that ESL instructors vary their teaching strategies and resources so that individual student's needs regarding cognitive style are met. Further research is needed to investigate the interaction between students' academic majors, their cognitive styles and their proficiency in English as a second language. It is also important to further explore the relationship between the Elaborative Processing scale and students' proficiency in English as a second language. / Department of Secondary, Higher, and Foundations of Education