Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:26:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2010-08-12Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T18:55:17Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 paiva_clb_me_arafcl.pdf: 1108146 bytes, checksum: f3b2431f89cd0cd5a63911859f334564 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Esta pesquisa investiga a construção textual do chat educacional – uma conversação síncrona por escrito mediada por computador voltada para a esfera educacional – a partir de análises de sessões de chat de duas turmas de um curso de espanhol com fins específicos para estudantes brasileiros, intitulado “Español para Turismo”, ministrado a distância. Este trabalho teve como objetivos i) descrever o gênero digital chat educacional a partir da análise da construção composicional, dos conteúdos temáticos e da função de acordo com a teoria bakhtiniana de gêneros discursivos (Bakhtin (2003), Marcuschi (2005; 2008), Fiorin (2006); ii) descrever, com base nos postulados teórico-metodológicos da perspectiva textual-interativa (JUBRAN, 2006a, 2007), as estratégias de construção textual que se inscrevem na materialidade linguística do texto, a partir das regularidades dos procedimentos de construção textual (Koch (2006), Marcuschi (2006a, 2006b), Jubran (2006a, 2006b), Fávero, Andrade & Aquino (2006a, 2006b), Travaglia (2006), Risso, Oliveira & Urbano (2006) e Urbano (2006)). Com este fim, foram analisadas as seguintes estratégias: repetição lexical, frasal e de letras, correção, parentetização, hesitação, pontuação (reticências, pontos de exclamação e de interrogação), maiúscula, onomatopéia, turnos, fragmentação da linguagem, vocativos, marcadores discursivos, emoticons, abreviações, segmentação de palavras e par dialógico (pergunta-resposta). A descrição das estratégias de construção textual dos chats educacionais permitiu identificar que há estratégias que atendem à adequação à norma padrão (escrita) da língua espanhola; outras que reproduzem as características da fala; e ainda outras que reelaboram o sentido ortográfico convencional de recursos típicos da escrita. Além do uso da variante padrão e da reelaboração... / This research investigates the textual construction in educational chat – a synchronous written conversation mediated by computer, with the focus on education – based on the analysis of chat sessions of two classes of Spanish for Specific Purposes course, taught to Brazilian students. It was an online course entitled “Español for Tourism”. This study aimed at i) describing the digital gender of educational chat based on the compositional construction analysis, on the theme content and on its function, according to the Bakhtinian theory for speech genre (Bakhtin (2003), Marcuschi (2005, 2008), Fiorin (2006), ii) describing, based on the theory and methodology of textual-interactive perspective (JUBRAN, 2006a, 2007), the textual-construction strategies that fall under the linguistic materiality of the text, based on the regularities of textual construction procedures (Koch (2006), Marcuschi (2006a, 2006b), Jubran (2006a, 2006b), Fávero, Andrade and Aquino (2006a, 2006b), Travaglia (2006), Risso, Oliveira & Urban (2006) and Urban (2006)). Based on these theories, we analyzed the following strategies: lexical, sentence and letter repetition, correction, bracketing, hesitation, punctuation (ellipses, exclamation points and question marks), capitalization, onomatopoeia, shifts, language fragmentation, vocative, discourse markers, emoticons, abbreviations, word segmentation and dialogic pair. The description of the textual construction strategies of educational chats enabled us to identify that there are strategies that meet the adequacy of standard (written) Spanish, as well as others, which reproduce the characteristics of speech, and a third kind, that reelaborates the conventional sense of spelling of typical written resources. Besides the use of standard and variant features of redevelopment of writing, there was also the use of strategies for textual construction which... (Complete abstract click electronic access below)

This thesis examinest he use of silence by Japanese learners of English in cross-cultural communication. It also considers how cross-cultural misunderstandings can be avoided in a pedagogic context. To this end, an analysis is made of a contrastive study of the use of silence by Japanese students learning English, and by Western students learning Japanese. The study draws on insights from the ethnographic approach. The study consists of three parts. The first part, Chapters 1-4, investigates the theoretical background to the study. Chapter 1 examines various definitions of the word 'culture' and investigates the role of Pragmatics in cross-cultural communication. Chapter 2 surveys studies of silence in various socio-cultural contexts. Chapter 3 more specifically explores the use of silence in the Japanese context and its relation to Japanese cultural values and sociocultural norms. Then, Chapter 4 shifts attention to examine differences of communicative styles between Japanese and Westerners, and several important features in interaction. In part two, Chapters 5-8, the ethnographic approach takes the lead in the interpretation of the interview and observational material. Chapter 5 offers an overview of the study and carefully considers the principles of ethnography guiding this investigation. Chapter 6 considers the research design in relation to the context and purposes of the investigation. The data is analysed in Chapters 7 and 8 interpreting the use of silence from a socio-cultural perspective. Chapter 7 discusses the results of the questionnaires. Chapter 8 concentrates on the analysis of the video-recorded data. The last Chapter, Chapter 9, concludes with suggestions of possible pedagogic approaches tackling cross-cultural misunderstanding in foreign language learning.

The thesis Problems of Pronunciation Practice When Teaching Czech as a Foreign Language to German Speakers characterizes the phonetic systems of the Czech and German languages. The work establishes the mutual and distinguishing features in the pronunciation of both languages and on their basis defines the main problematic aspects, their cause and ways to rectify them. It deals with the differences between graphic and phonological attributes. Furthermore, it focuses on the methodology of pronunciation practice in Czech as a foreign language. In the practical part there are work sheets targeting the problematic aspects established in the theoretical part.

<p> Understanding mathematics is an essential part of everyday life and can range from simple tasks such as using basic math skills to more complex tasks. Success in mathematics is a requirement for success in today&rsquo;s modern world. A gap in developing mathematical skills can create complications and interfere with job opportunities. Another basic essential for success in society is reading. There are important problems associated with students who cannot read successfully, such as higher dropout rates. Studies have shown that learning a foreign language during elementary school increases a child&rsquo;s ability to develop cognitive skills, and research has shown that proper development of cognitive skills improves a student&rsquo;s ability to read and perform mathematical skills successfully. Research studies involving dual-language/two-way immersion schools suggest that students at these schools obtain higher scores on achievement tests in both mathematics and reading. This study is a meta-analysis of studies involving dual-language/two-way immersion schools in an effort to confirm the hypotheses that (1) there are differences in student performance when comparing students who learn foreign language in elementary school versus those who don&rsquo;t, and (2) students score higher in reading, vocabulary, and/or mathematics if they learn foreign language in elementary school when compared to those who don&rsquo;t. The meta-analysis began with 51 quantitative research studies but was narrowed down to 17 after categorizing the studies. Using weighted effect sizes and Cohen&rsquo;s <i>d</i>, the results for the <i>d</i> values were .64 (medium) for vocabulary, .22 (small) for reading, and .11 for mathematics. Only homogeneity tests were calculated in each category. The Q values indicated homogeneity for the category of mathematics only. Therefore, additional research is suggested, beginning with heterogeneity testing.</p><p>

<p> Promoting global awareness is commonly cited as a main benefit of early foreign language education; however, little research backs this claim. This study explores a partial Spanish immersion preschool and how it shapes young children&rsquo;s global awareness and knowledge of foreign languages and cultures. The study used a series of games, activities, and interviews to address the following three aspects of the classroom: (1) foreign language activities and language use, (2) how global awareness was portrayed by students and teachers, and (3) the beliefs, goals, and motivations of parents who chose to enroll their children there. The frameworks of translingualism and global education informed analysis of classroom observations, activities with children, and interviews with parents and teachers.</p><p> Findings indicated that children did show signs of early learning related to global awareness, though language and culture were not always the primary goals for parents and teachers at the school. Children&rsquo;s literature and games allowed children to express their views and understanding about their learning about Spanish and other cultures in the classroom. They were able to talk about speaking Spanish in school and knew some words and phrases learned through exposure from the teachers in the classroom. Parents and members of the staff expressed their beliefs in the value of early second language exposure; however, primary needs of the children such as keeping them safe and developing a nurturing environment were always the priority. The findings will inform future development of language immersion programs for young children and give directors of such programs insights into what parents may hope for their children to learn regarding language and other cultural instruction.</p><p>

This project is a proof-of-concept. It aims to demonstrate the feasibility of an approach to Computer-Assisted Assessment of free-text material in the domain of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL). The underlying theory places the project within given pedagogic constraints, just as a Language Tutoring System should. The constraints call for the project to be addressed to the intermediate-advanced student of French-as-a-Second-Language, and be oriented toward the autonomous enhancement of text comprehension skills, following a previous project in CALL at the University of Ottawa, DidaLect. This type of learning activity requires a student to answer questions related to informative texts. The goal of this work has been to build a framework to assess the correctness of the student's sentence' s grammar on the one hand, and on the other hand to ensure that the answer's content matches the reference. In order to achieve this, the research has gone in two different directions. First, we used Natural-Language-Processing (NLP) to find means of language error detection and correction (form), as well as means for semantic comparison (content). Content comparison amounts to performing deep analysis of the student's answer in order to guarantee that no material in the student's answer is irrelevant to the actual answer. We used a symbolic approach to the problem, because statistical methods can only provide approximations of content similarity, which is dangerous in a CALL context because the student can be error-prone. The fact that this work is the first of its kind, at least in what concerns Text Comprehension and French-as-a-Second-Language, has been another reason to opt for symbolic processing: in the absence of any comparable system, a symbolic approach might constitute a better baseline, to be challenged in the future by statistical methods. Finally, error detection is syntax-based in language technologies. As well, a symbolic approach permits to use the same structure for the assessment of form and content. Second, we worked in the direction of didactics to frame the work within relevant theoretical grounds in terms of the relation from questions to text, especially in order to limit the impact of the knowledge gap between machine and humans (students) -- a general consequence of the work-in-progress state of semantic analysis in NLP. The questions are controlled through a formal categorization that restricts the scope of the questions to answering material actually present in the text -- no world-knowledge is a priori needed. The system has been tested on a set of 273 student's answers gathered in class. The evaluation gave a result of 62% of answers correctly assessed as correct or incorrect. Due to the conservativeness of the system, precision on the assessment of correct answers is 100%, which satisfies the requirements of Second-Language Learning and CALL. The implemented program is a contribution in itself because no comparable system exists, while there is a real demand from the world of CALL for such a tool. The project also makes a contribution to NLP through a new approach to paraphrase recognition. This uses previous work in computational linguistics (the Meaning-Text Theory) to provide a rule-based model of syntactic paraphrase which, although limited to syntax, actually constitutes the only generic model of paraphrase to our knowledge, and should be easily adapted to other languages.

Teaching about culture at the college level is always a challenge with regards to the heterogeneous reality of Spanish. The debatable status of the language within the United States is not always reflected in the language and literature departments of institutions of higher education. Moreover, standardization has been continuously favored in the context of Spanish teaching and learning. From this perspective, it is challenging for the students coming from the mainstream culture of the United States to approach the culture of everyday life in the Spanish speaking communities inside and outside the country. At the same time, literature has mostly been used a pedagogical tool to promote accuracy in the foreign language. However, in my study, I argue the use of literature as a fundamental teaching / learning tool to expose students to the different aspects of cultural learning. Literature becomes a window to understand the nuances of living in Spanish with a critical look. In this process, cultural learning becomes a dialogic process through which the learners of a foreign language and literature incorporate and readjust their values, perceptions, and practices in a redefined internally persuasive discourse. In this journey, the role of the teacher seems fundamental to connect and dialogize the first culture of the students and the foreign one that progressively gets incorporated as their own in a sort of new space.

Framed within a Sociocultural Theory of Mind (SCT) in the field of Second Language Acquisition (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006), this dissertation explores the role of verbalizing in the internalization of grammatical categories through the use of Concept-based Instruction (henceforth CBI) in the second language (L2) classroom. Using Vygotsky's (1986) distinction between scientific and spontaneous or everyday concepts applied to L2 development (Negueruela, 2008), this study focuses on the teaching and potential development of the grammatical concept of aspect in the Spanish L2 classroom, and the role of verbalizing in its internalization. It is proposed that verbalizing mediates between the learners' initial understandings of the grammatical concept of aspect, the development of conscious conceptualizations, and students' written and oral production of preterite and imperfect grammatical forms. This study presents and analyzes data from one of the thirty-two adult college students enrolled in an advanced Spanish conversation course. Data is analyzed through a clinical analytic approach, which has its roots in Vygotsky's (1978) genetic method of analysis. The study was carried out over a 12-week period and collected multiple sets of developmental data, including learners' definition of the grammatical concept of aspect, written performance protocols, and verbalization data recorded during two oral interviews. The study interprets learner performance in these three complementary, and dialectically connected types of L2 conceptual data. A close analysis of this participant's data provides critical insights to understand the role of verbalizing in L2 conceptual development. Findings confirm that learners' verbalizations are key factors to ascertain L2 conceptual development, as well as a mediational tool that fosters learners' internalization of the grammatical concept of aspect. It is proposed that verbalizing notably contributes to research on L2 development. Not only does it allow the researcher to have a more comprehensive picture of L2 development, but it also helps learners develop a more sophisticated semantic understanding of the grammatical concept of aspect and fosters their ability to understand and control relevant grammatical features in L2 communication.

In this current era of postmodernity, globalization, and new technological and social conditions, new approaches to literacy teaching are being introduced and examined. Studies that explore complexities of language teaching and learning in discourses of postmodernity as they relate to college contexts are significant for educators, researchers, and policy makers. This study employs a critical ethnographic lens to examine Arabic teaching and learning practices in one college campus in the United States post 9/11. It explores the dialogic construction of critical literacy events in the Arabic classroom where modern and postmodern discourses collide. Three questions guide the research: who are the students of Arabic and what are their investments in learning Arabic, how do uses of the Arabic language textbook shape curriculum instruction in the Arabic foreign language classroom in contexts of late modernity, and how can teachers of Arabic instantiate critical dialogues and allow a space for negotiated interpretations of modern textbooks in late modern classrooms. To address these issues, the study draws on post structural and sociocultural theories of language. To analyze ethnographic classroom data, the study adopts broad analytic strategies from interdisciplinary critical language approaches (Dyson, 1993; Fairclough, 2001; Janks, 2010; Rampton, 2006). Analysis of the data shows that the Arabic language learners relate to the social world through a mosaic of identities and investments influenced by contexts of postmodernity. The data also points to the role of the teacher in opening a space for the construction of plural voices of language learners that disrupts traditional perspectives of schooling. Implications of the study point towards a need for a new pedagogy that embraces new literacy practices informed by contexts of postmodernity. With new channels of multimodal communications, heterogeneous multicultural societies, and contexts of globalization, foreign language teaching and learning at the college level is in need for vital update that meets the new challenges (Byrnes, 2010; Kramsch, 2009; New London Group, 1996).

The study applied behavior analytic principles to foreign language instruction in a college classroom. Two study methods, vocabulary banks and scripts, were compared by assessing the effects on Italian language acquisition, retention, and generalization. Results indicate that students without prior exposure to Italian engaged in more exchanges and emitted more words in script tests compared to vocabulary bank tests. Participants with at least two classes in Italian prior to the study engaged in more exchanges and emitted more words during vocabulary bank tests. Data suggest that different teaching strategies may work for different learners. More research is needed to determine efficient teaching methods and how to ascertain which approaches work best for learners with different histories.