This thesis evaluates the first three years of the Canadian Farmworkers Union ESL Crusade and the Freire-based philosophy which inspired it. Based on the author's three years of participant-observation, it pursues the following question: In the context of the union, is it possible to operate an ESL program which will both teach basic ESL and further the union's goal of organizing Punjabi farmworkers? The thesis begins by summarizing Freire's educational/ political philosophy, and continues by examining the program's context: conditions of farmwork in British Columbia, the role of CFU in improving them, and the dynamics of the Punjabi community which affect this process. This is followed by a detailed description and evaluation of the Crusade: its objectives, recruiting and training of volunteer tutors, teaching methods and materials, curriculum topics, organizing strategies, results in terms of both teaching ESL and organizing, and finally analysis of the program's limitations. The following section re-evaluates Freire's philosophy in view of three years experience in a North American setting. Key issues include the relationship between students' concerns and the union's agenda, dialogue versus banking, the complex nature of oppression for North American immigrants, the distinction between a realistic and idealistic frame of reference in operating and evaluating a program, and the importance of organizers reflecting on their own vested interests. All these issues proved salient to the daily operation of the program and have ramifications for other programs. In the course of three years, the Crusade was able to develop methods and materials which had good potential both for ESL instruction and organizing, and which approached the Freirian ideal. However, a number of limitations prevented the program from fulfilling this potential. Some of these could be overcome with changes in the Crusade's format, such as using full-time Punjabi tutors rather than Anglo volunteers. The study concludes by outlining these changes plus directions for further research. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

Twenty-five ESL students who were identified by teachers as "academically successful", i.e. with at least a C average in their regular courses, were interviewed, using an open ended conversational approach. Informants shared their own perspectives on their ESL and regular classroom experiences, their perceptions about themselves as students and their strategies for success. They compared experiences in Canada and their native countries, and talked about their home background. They were encouraged to identify both strengths and problems in their education experiences, and to suggest changes in the schools to help themselves as well as less successful students. Data concluded that informants showed additive bilingualism, many use L1 to learn their academic work, and overwhelmingly they support ESL classes which they credit with fulfilling both academic and affective needs. Academic work in the home country transfers to subjects such as Math, but they express frustration with written assignments and essay questions in subjects with heavy language requirements. In general there is little involvement with native-speaking peers. Informants were found to be highly disciplined, with high future aspirations. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

This study introduces a different kind of collaborative research whereby two researchers co-design and co-conduct the research and draw their own conclusions from the shared data. The data, gathered using qualitative tools such as surveys, questionnaires, and interviews, was further enriched as a result of having two individuals from different backgrounds interpreting the data. The data collected from 14 university students who were once identified as ESL students in British Columbia, Canada, were transcribed then analyzed using NUD*IST qualitative computer software. The focus was on their perceptions of ESL programs, immigration process, and socio-cultural factors that contributed to their academic and social integration success. Participants' own words centered mostly on their relationships with families, friends, and ESL teachers as major factors contributing to their success. ESL programs served as their safety nets as the majority suggested that their journey into social and academic mainstreams had undesirable effects on their experiences. Three major factors were identified as having both helped and hindered their adaptation and integration into Canadian school and society: family influence, bicultural identities, and segregation. Results from this study suggest a number of theoretical and practical implications. First, this study need to be replicated in different contexts using a longitudinal approach to document how immigrant ESL students construct their experiences within and outside of school overtime. Secondly, research need to aim at understanding the tension between students' home and school cultures and encourage involvement and collaboration between ESL students, parents, and teachers. In addition, examining how ESL students interact with their mainstream counterparts may provide helpful guidelines for schools to foster an environment whereby unity and support exist between the two groups. This study concludes with both researchers' reflection on each other's thesis. This step led to a critical reexamination of their interpretation. Differences and similarities emerged from this process. The similarities both researchers shared provided a greater degree of validity and reliability to this project. On the other hand, the differences that emerged served to enrich the data by providing two perspectives to the same problem. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

The following is a case study of grade 12 English as a Second Language (ESL) students enrolled in a British Columbia secondary school during the 2001-2002 academic year. The principal objective of this research was to uncover the following: 1) if ESL students made course choices at grade 12 which differed from those of non-ESL student choice patterns at grade 12; 2) the role of familial preferences, cultural influences and prior learning styles which predispose student choice for post secondary concentrations. This research examined the academic transcripts of 238 (94 ESL, 144 non-ESL) students, analyzed the responses of 145 (65 ESL, 80 non-ESL) student questionnaires, and considered interviews with 26 ESL students and 12 school staff (4 counselors, 8 teachers). The findings suggest that a significant difference exists in the academic courses in which ESL grade 12 students enroll compared to non-ESL students. Cultural and familial influences were found to affect both the types of senior courses ESL students chose and their aims about future educational and career aspirations. The findings suggest that secondary schools examine critically their policies regarding broadening the exposure of ESL students to more expressive courses in Arts to extend equality of opportunity in determining their career choice directions. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

The first study examined the development of reading, spelling and syntactic skills in English speakers (L1) and children with English as a Second language (ESL) from kindergarten to grade 3. This longitudinal study also investigated procedures for identifying reading difficulties in the early grades of elementary school for both English speakers and children with ESL. Reading, spelling, phonological processing, syntax, lexical access and working memory skills were assessed in kindergarten. Additional tasks were incorporated into the battery to assess cognitive and reading processes in grade 3. By the end of grade 3, the L1 and ESL normally achieving readers performed in similar ways on all tasks except on the spelling, arithmetic and syntactic awareness tasks. The ESL normally achieving readers performed better than the L1 on spelling and arithmetic tasks, however the L1 normally achieving readers performed better than the ESL on the syntactic awareness task. Similar cognitive and reading components predicted word reading and reading comprehension in grade 3 for both language groups. The results show that learning English as a second language is not an impediment to successful literacy learning, and may even be an advantage. In the second part of this study we examine whether the first language of children with ESL affected the reading, spelling and syntactic awareness in English. Seven language groups, Chinese, Farsi, Slavic, Japanese, Romance, Tagalog, and native English speakers groups, were compared in a cross sectional study. This study included all the children with ESL in kindergarten and grades 1, 2 and 3. The results demonstrated positive as well as negative effects in spelling and syntactic skills, resulting from the transfer to English for members of different language groups. Differences across language groups reflect the nature of the native language. Specifically, a positive transfer occurred when the L1 grammar system was more complex than the L2 grammar system. When investigating second language it is necessary to consider the native language and effect on the acquisition of a second language. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

This thesis investigates referential communication strategies using the theoretical framework of Levelt's (1989) model of speech production and its application to second language speech production (de Bot, 1992). The investigation focuses on utterances of adult speakers who solve a referential communication task in their first language (English) and their second language (German). Two different groups participate in the study. The first group consists of students from a large West Canadian University who learn German in a foreign language classroom, whereas the second group consists of native speakers of English who work in Germany and acquire German in a second language environment. All participants describe abstract shapes while their utterances are being recorded and later transcribed for analysis. Quantitative and qualitative methods measuring the time and words reflect the strategies used to describe the shapes. The analysis of the data reveals that the participants in Germany are more accurate in their descriptions and solve the referential problems more successfully than the participants from the West Canadian University do. The direct contact these participants have with the German language and culture proves to be beneficial to the process of generating a comprehensible message in referential communication. The study concludes with suggestions for the teaching of German as a second language and recommendations are made for future research on language acquisition the learning environment. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

Following a review of the literature on French immersion, this thesis considers the implications of the systematic transcription of oral texts for linguistic analysis. In transcribing a corpus of spoken French by children attending a French immersion school and a corpus of children from Quebec (both from tape recordings and included in the appendice), the transcription conventions proposed by the Groupe Aixois de Recherche en Syntaxe were applied. In chapter III, some of the most common deviations from the norm that occur in the French immersion corpus are discussed, and for the most part these aberrations reflect the results of previous error analyses done on second language learners. In chapters IV and V, a study of "slip-ups" is undertaken. Slip-ups are repetitions or self-corrections, referred to as "rates" in this thesis. They occur frequently both in the Francophone and French immersion corpus. The purpose of this study is to analyse the intrinsic structure of these hesitations (that were previously brushed off as un-grammatical) and to discover whether the repetitions or self-corrections produced by the French immersion speakers share characteristics with or differ from the slip-ups identified in the Francophone corpus. Whereas an enumeration of grammatical errors will almost always show that the French spoken by French immersion pupils is not as "good" as that spoken by Francophone children, the analysis of slip-ups is a more objective endeavor. And indeed, the study reveals some unpredicted results. On certain parts of the sentence, such as the predicate, French native speakers surprisingly slip up more often than French immersion children, while the latter tend to hesitate more often on subjects and indirect objects. Further analysis reveals that native French speakers almost always repeat (or correct) entire word groups, or syntagms, although they don't always complete such groups. The French immersion children, on the other hand, do not always repeat the entire word group when they slip up, but they do seem to finish their construction (or sentence), once it has started. Finally, the situation (formal or informal) appeared to only affect the speakers in the Francophone corpus: they hesitated slightly more often in a formal setting, whereas the situation did not seem to affect the results for the French immersion speakers. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

Does peer tutoring using computer-based hypermedia resources help ESL students generate academic discourse in L2? This relates issues of SL learning and the computer in education. I observed 10 upper elementary ESL students research the topic “Earth and the Solar System”, build a HyperCard stack (“Our World”) to record their results, and peer tutor the stack to younger classmates. Some peer tutored the stack again to ex-ESL Grade 5 students. I recorded both peer tutoring sessions (PT(1) and PT(2)) and analyzed discourse transcripts by quantitative variables, pedagogical objectives, cognitive functions and tutoring style; linked our discourse analysis to Krashen’s (1985) Input Hypothesis, Cummins (1991) concepts of conversational and academic language proficiency, and Halliday’s (1985) model of language socialization distinguishing interpersonal, ideational and textual components; and followed Staab (1986), in dividing the ideational component into “Informing” and “Reasoning”. In PT( 1) students spent more time talking (56%) in computer-based peer tutoring than in any other activity (10-16%). Informing was high (65%) but Reasoning was low (22%). Tutors used predominantly the traditional I-R-E knowledge-transmission teaching model, speaking 2½ times as much as tutees. In PT(2) tutors were given as aids 1) a Tutorial stack with knowledge-structure-based computer graphics to represent each topic and 2) training in moving from I-R-E to more equal dialogue exchanges with tutees. I compared a selected pair in PT(2) with a selected pair in PT(1). In PT(2). tutors produced 27% and tutees 19% more language; Reasoning increased from 22% to 39% overall and to 46% in the Tutor Explanation tutoring mode; and I-R-E discourse dropped from 62% to 13%. These changes marked a move from traditional knowledge-transmission towards a knowledge-construction paradigm. I conclude that 1) peer tutoring holds great promise for development of academic discourse in the L2; 2) but without training, tutors are likely to fall back on I-R-E teacher dominated discourse with a low proportion of Reasoning; 3) interactively using the computer facilitates a shift from traditional knowledge-transmission to cooperative knowledge construction learning; 4) the students’ use of elementary multimedia technology provides a window to a future shift from print to electronic technology and towards a knowledge construction paradigm. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

Written in the form of a narrative, this thesis explores the phenomenon of voice in writing, and what the development of an awareness of the multiplicity voices while writing and reading can mean for language learners. This thesis is also a personal reflection of depression, and a recollection of individual, family and life events. One chapter takes the form of a unified narrative, while another presents anecdotal recollections. It is, in this sense, an exploration of voices through an analysis of available academic and public writing, and a personal inquiry into how the concept of voices in writing has affected my development as an individual and as a writer. The first section reviews some of the academic and public literature on writing and voice, and reveals that early writing on the issue of voice reflected a monolistic theory of voice. That is, that there is one voice that as writers we must find within ourselves, or there is a voice of the author that we must seek out. However, views of the multiplicity of voices in writing are increasingly common. While philosophical tradition since Plato has mistrusted writing and viewed it as secondary to speech, philosophy has nevertheless employed writing to further its own inquiries. Re/viewing the issue of voice in writing may be one way to deal with this long-standing schism between speech and writing. There is a need to further problematize the field of writing, not searching for ways to simplify the process but seeking ways to celebrate the inherent complexity, ambiguity, and paradoxical nature of writing. The thesis concludes with a reflection on the need to seriously consider the significance of voices in writing in first and second language instruction. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

Research on project-based instruction is common in mainstream education. It conceives the activity broadly, but omits language. It is rare in English as a Second Language (ESL) education, and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory conceives it narrowly, omitting a functional view of language. The present study examines the implementation of project-based instruction in ESL classes in a Canadian secondary school through interviews with Canadian ESL teachers and Chinese ESL students, observations of two projects in action, and examination of students' written work, and school, school board and Ministry of Education documents. Results indicate that the teachers held and implemented a broad, integrated conception of project-based instruction that includes a functional view of language. They have many more goals than those stressed for project-based instruction in the SLA literature, and have goals that are not included even in the mainstream literature. The teachers evaluated project-based instruction positively, and the researcher's observations support the teachers' evaluations. However, despite teacher's and students' successes, a number of students evaluated project-based instruction negatively. This discrepancy is discussed using three explanatory models (philosophical, cultural, and linguistic) that the participants may have been using when interpreting project-based instruction. The study points to the need to develop a rationale which adequately addresses project-based instruction as a functional language learning activity in the context of academic subject matter learning. It identifies problems of cross-cultural interpretation of and communication about projects, and notes difficulties of resolving them. It points out the necessity for an examination of the processes of project-based instruction, noting places of difficulty and success, and considering promising strategies. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate