Essa pesquisa foi desenvolvida no período de 2013 e 2014 por meio do Programa de Pós Graduação da Universidade Federal do Tocantins - PPGL-UFT e da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – CAPES através do projeto do Observatório da Educação - OBEDUC em desenvolvimento com a Escola Indígena 19 de Abril do povo Krahô da Aldeia Manoel Alves, localizada entre os municípios de Goiatins e Itacajá, na região noroeste do Estado do Tocantins. Nossa pesquisa objetivou identificar e refletir sobre as práticas educativas realizadas pela Escola Indígena 19 de Abril no processo de ensino e aprendizagem da Língua Portuguesa – L2, com o intuito de compreender de que forma as políticas públicas e linguísticas voltadas para os povos indígenas brasileiros refletem no contexto dos Krahô da referida aldeia. Fundamentamo-nos em leituras sobre Educação Escolar Indígena (ALBUQUERQUE, 2013; CAVALCANTI & MAHER, 2005; LUCIANO, 2006; D’ANGELIS, 2012), políticas públicas e políticas linguísticas (PALADINO & ALMEIDA, 2012; ALBUQUERQUE, 2011; GRUPIONI, 2006; OLIVEIRA, 2006; MONSERRAT, 2006; ALTENHOFEN, 2013; MAHER, 3013) voltadas para os grupos minoritários brasileiros (CAVALCANTI, 1999), especificamente as voltadas para os povos indígenas, em leituras sobre bilinguismo (GROSJEAN,1989; MAHER, 2007) e interculturalidade (CANDAU, 2012; LOPEZ, 2013; COLLET, 2006; FLEURI, 2001), mobilizamos também discussões acerca da transculturalidade (COX & ASSIS-PETERSON 2013; DAMAS, 2009) e transdisciplinaridade (D’AMBRÓSIO, 1997; NICOLESCU, 1999; SUANNO, 2014; ALBUQUERQUE, 2009). Nossa pesquisa é do tipo etnográfico com observação participante e vincula-se a abordagem qualitativa, utilizamos como técnicas para a obtenção dos dados a observação participante, o diário de campo e a entrevista semiestruturada. Para o seu desenvolvimento realizamos entrevistas com alunos e professores indígenas, participamos das atividades culturais do povo Krahô, das atividades realizadas na escola, do processo de elaboração de livros didáticos referentes ao projeto do OBEDUC e realizamos o Estágio docente com a disciplina Língua Portuguesa como Segunda Língua para as Escolas Indígenas nas turmas do 7º Ano do Ensino Fundamental ao 3º Ano do Ensino Médio da Escola Indígena 19 de Abril. A vivência com o povo Krahô e a análise do corpus gerado revelam a importância do protagonismo indígena na construção de seus próprios processos de ensino e da política linguística adotada pela comunidade com relação ao ensino de línguas na escola presente na aldeia. / This research was developed in the period from 2013 to 2014 through the post-Graduate Program of the Universidade Federal do Tocantins - UFT-PPGL and of the Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel - CAPES through the project named Observatório da Educação - OBEDUC in developing with the indigenous School 19 de Abril of the Kraho people of the village Manoel Alves, located between the towns of Goiatins and Itacajá in the northwest of the state of Tocantins. Our research aimed to identify and reflect on educational practices undertaken by the Indigenous School19 de abril in the teaching and learning process of the Portuguese Language - L2 in order to understand how the public and language policies for the Brazilian indigenous peoples reflect Kraho in the context of the tribe Krahô of the refered village. We base ourselves in readings about Indigenous school Education (Albuquerque, 2013; Cavalcanti & MAHER, 2005; LUCIANO, 2006; D'ANGELIS 2012), public policy and language policies (PALADINO & ALMEIDA, 2012; ALBUQUERQUE, 2011; GRUPIONI, 2006; OLIVEIRA, 2006; MONSERRAT, 2006; ALTENHOFEN, 2013; MAHER, 2013) focused on the Brazilian minority groups (Cavalcanti, 1999), focused specifically on the indigenous peoples in readings about bilingualism (GROSJEAN 1989; MAHER, 2007) and interculturalism (CANDAU, 2012; LOPEZ, 2013; COLLET, 2006; FLEURI, 2001), we also mobilized discussions about transculturality (COX & ASSIS-PETERSON 2013; DAMAS, 2009) and transdisciplinarity (D'AMBROSIO, 1997; NICOLESCU, 1999; SUANNO 2014; ALBUQUERQUE, 2009). Our research is of the ethnographic type with participant observation and binds itself to the qualitative approach, as used as technique to obtain the data, the participant observation, field diary and the semistructured interview. For its development we conducted interviews with indigenous students and teachers, we participated of the cultural activities of the Kraho people of the activities carried out in school, of the process of preparation of the textbooks related to the OBEDUC and we accomplished the teaching Internship with the subject of Portuguese language as Second Language for the Indigenous Schools in the classes of the 7th year of elementary school to the 3rd year of high school in Indigenous School 19 de Abril. Living with the Kraho people and the analyzing of the corpus generated reveal the importance of the indigenous leadership in the construction of their own processes of teaching and of the language policy adopted by the community in relation to the language teaching at this school in the current village.

Propomos o estudo da realização do objeto direto no Português Brasileiro (PB) na referência ao interlocutor, a partir de um corpus formado essencialmente por textos produzidos por alunos do Ensino Fundamental II de uma escola particular da cidade de São Paulo. Estes textos consistem em uma proposta de redação direcionada à produção do objeto direto na referência ao interlocutor, orientados aos registros formal e informal da língua. Objetivamos identificar o tipo de complemento produzido pelos alunos nos dois registros. Interessa-nos investigar, sobretudo, as formas pronominais acusativas de 2a pessoa bem como a posição dos clíticos para estabelecer diálogo com os trabalhos que tratam das formas pronominais acusativas de 3a pessoa. Para isto, utilizamos o método variacionista de análise quantitativa, conforme estabelecido por Labov, e já consagrado em inúmeros estudos. Os resultados obtidos serão norteados pelas hipóteses descritas ao longo da introdução deste estudo, e a partir da confirmação de algumas e descarte de outras, buscaremos estabelecer uma adequação descritiva suficiente para comprovar o desaparecimento do clítico acusativo de 3a pessoa aplicado em referência ao interlocutor (Ramos 1999), substituído pela forma \"te\", ou para realinhar o clítico \"o\" no sistema pronominal da variedade paulistana do português brasileiro. / The aim of this study of the effectiveness of the direct object in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) at the interlocutor\'s reference, from a corpus essentially made by texts produced by students from a private school at São Paulo city. These texts consist in a request for composition directed to the production of the direct object at the interlocutor\'s reference, guided to the formal and informal registers of the language. The objective defined here is identifying the kind of complement that is produced by the students at the formal and informal registers. The main intention is investigate the second person accusatives pronominal forms as well as the clitics position, to establish connection with studies that work with the third person accusatives pronominal forms. In this sense, it was used the quantitative method of analysis, as establish by Labov, and already considerate in many studies. The results will be guided by the hypotheses described at the introduction of this study and from the confirmation of some hypotheses and the discard of others there will be establish a suit descriptive sufficient to corroborate the useless of the third person accusative clitic applied at the interlocutor\'s reference (Ramos 1999), replaced by the form \"te\" or to align the clitic \"o\" at the pronominal system of varieties of the Brazilian Portuguese from São Paulo.

Internationally, female L2 learners of English are believed to outperform males in all areas including writing. However, in the context of Sweden, the gender gap has been reducing in recent decades. A body of literature focusing on gender differences and syntactic complexity of Swedish high school L2 learners of English using the Uppsala Learner English Corpus (ULEC) has not provided strong evidence to suggest female students outperform male students. Furthermore, the analyses of most of these studies do not take into consideration other important control variables, lack thorough statistical testing and use small datasets. This study uses linear regression analysis to test the hypothesis of whether females outperform males. It uses the ratio of dependent clauses to total clauses (DC/C) as a proxy of syntactic complexity which is estimated using the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (L2SCA). A total of 663 essays written by year one and year two senior high school L2 learners taken from the ULEC dataset are used in the analysis. The results clearly reject the hypothesis that females outperform males. An inconclusive yet interesting insight which requires further investigation is some evidence from the results which suggests that males may, in fact, outperform females when programme fixed effects are considered.

This thesis focuses on two important aspects of non-native reading comprehension: text readability assessment, which estimates the reading difficulty of a given text for L2 learners, and learner summarisation assessment, which evaluates the quality of learner summaries to assess their reading comprehension. We approach both tasks as supervised machine learning problems and present automated assessment systems that achieve state-of-the-art performance. We first address the task of text readability assessment for L2 learners. One of the major challenges for a data-driven approach to text readability assessment is the lack of significantly-sized level-annotated data aimed at L2 learners. We present a dataset of CEFR-graded texts tailored for L2 learners and look into a range of linguistic features affecting text readability. We compare the text readability measures for native and L2 learners and explore methods that make use of the more plentiful data aimed at native readers to help improve L2 readability assessment. We then present a summarisation task for evaluating non-native reading comprehension and demonstrate an automated summarisation assessment system aimed at evaluating the quality of learner summaries. We propose three novel machine learning approaches to assessing learner summaries. In the first approach, we examine using several NLP techniques to extract features to measure the content similarity between the reading passage and the summary. In the second approach, we calculate a similarity matrix and apply a convolutional neural network (CNN) model to assess the summary quality using the similarity matrix. In the third approach, we build an end-to-end summarisation assessment model using recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Further, we combine the three approaches to a single system using a parallel ensemble modelling technique. We show that our models outperform traditional approaches that rely on exact word match on the task and that our best model produces quality assessments close to professional examiners.

This study conceptualises Chinese language-major undergraduates' motivation to learn a third language (L3) from a self perspective. Two overarching aims were adopted to guide the research: how learners' L3 motivation was formulated and reformulated over the course of one year of learning an L3 and whether classroom intervention could help learners to construct their L3 motivation. This research adopted a longitudinal case study design and was situated in a state university in China. Students who had chosen to learn an L3 as their major and English majors who were required to learn an L3 participated in the research. To achieve the two principal research aims, the data collection process was divided into two phases. The goal of the first phase was to explore the development of my participants' L3 motivation without any intervention. Qualitative research methods were employed during this phase and data were gathered from open questionnaires, interviews, class observation and written journals. In the second phase, an intervention was carried out to explore how to construct my participants' ideal L3 selves. A quasi-experimental design was employed and mixed methods were adopted. Analysis was primarily guided by the L2 Motivational Self System and was carried out at both at class level and individual level. At a class level, findings suggest that both L3 majors' and English majors' L3 motivation was mainly constituted on the basis of their ideal L3 selves, ought-to L3 selves and L3 learning experiences, which were constantly constructed and reconstructed over the course of learning. Notably, learners' motivational trajectories did not display a homogenous pattern at the group level. In total, six different motivational patterns were identified, three from English majors and three from L3 majors. It was also interesting to identify that a few learners developed a type of multilingually oriented motivation during their L3 learning. Data collected at the second phase of fieldwork revealed that the intervention was effective in helping English majors to construct their ideal L3 selves but less useful in the case of L3 majors. At the individual level, six cases were analysed in depth to investigate how the trajectories identified at the group level developed temporally and contextually. The analysis shows that the construction of these learners' L3 motivation involved a complex interplay between their future L3 selves and current L3 learning experience. It was through this process that learners explored the relationship between the L3 and their self-identification, and attempted to develop their personal meaning of learning an L3. On the basis of the empirical evidence, this thesis argues that the construction of learners' L3 motivation hinges on exploration of the position of the L3 in their self-identification, and that class intervention might help learners to realise the importance of learning an L3 by helping them to develop their ideal L3 selves, at least in the case of non-L3-major students. Moreover, this study suggests that it is crucial for L3 learners in China to recognise the value of being multilingual, which plays an essential role in constructing their L3 selves and sustaining their L3 motivation.

This study employed the L2 Motivational Self-System (Dörnyei, 2005) as a framework to compare differences in the types of motivation reported by Chinese learners of English in a foreign language context (China) and a second language context (USA). It followed up on studies by Taguchi, Magid, and Papi (2009) and You and Dörnyei (2016). The participants consisted of 61 current students at an American university who come from Mainland China. This study adopted a mixed-method approach, using an internet-based questionnaire followed by an individual interview. The investigation aimed to explore what types of English learning motivation Chinese students have in different contexts, as well as to compare the shift in Chinese students' motivation when they move from an EFL (China) to an ESL (USA) context. A recent study conducted by You & Dörnyei (2016), provided a solid empirical description of the main features of language learning motivation in China. The detailed information presented in You & Dörnyei's study serves as a baseline to further explore the differences in English learner motivation in different settings. The findings of this study can be used as a reference to align English language learners' motivational self-system with their own pattern of development.

When learning a second language, there are elements of a learner's native language that can transfer and are exhibited during production in the second language. This can extend not only to the way things are said but even to gestures that are language- and speech-act-specific. However, there is evidence that the same can occur backwards, that is to say that elements of a second language can be exhibited during production of one's native language (Pavlenko and Jarvis, 2002). This study focuses on English L1 learners of Japanese who have spent significant time both in country and learning the language to see if they exhibit Japanese tendencies when performing apologies in their native English. Comparisons between those with no Japanese experience were made with those who had extensive Japanese experience. Through video recordings of 45 participants engaging in six apology-induced scenarios (non-Japanese, n=24; Japanese, n=21), the participants showed that backward transfer occurs with repetition of IFIDs and nonverbal cues. Further research through different methods can be more telling.

Reading strategies are consciously controlled actions learners execute in order to aid comprehension. The effectiveness of strategies is increased with metacognitive awareness. Researchers have created instruments to raise metacognitive awareness targeted for native and highly proficient L2 readers. This article outlines the creation of a new survey, the Contextualized Inventory of Metacognitive Awareness for novice to low-intermediate L2 readers. Unlike other instruments, this survey contextualizes pre-, during-, and post-reading strategy deployment with the use of simplified, narrative reading passages. The survey was piloted at an Intensive English Program with 88 subjects. The overall readability of the survey had a Lexile score of 350L and a Coh-Metrix score of 35. The initial reliability of the survey was .69. Pedagogical uses and academic implications of the new survey are discussed.

Although it is known that the Spanish current Educative System promotes using the Communicate Approach to teach foreign languages in schools, other recently designed approaches are also used to help students improve their skills when communicating in a foreign language. One of these approaches is Content and Language Integrated Learning, also known as CLIL, which is used to teach content courses using the English language as the language of instruction. This approach improves the students’ skills in English as the same time as they learn content from other areas. The goal of this thesis is to present a research project carried out at the University of Alicante during the academic year 2011-2012. With this research we obtained results that provide quantitative and qualitative data which explains how the use of the CLIL methodology affects the English level of students in the “Didactics of the English Language in Preschool Education” course in Preschool Education Teacher Undergraduate Program as students acquire the contents of the course.

Complaining happens in all cultures, and offers a unique insight into the values, taboos, and communicative practices of a given society. The ways in which complaining is viewed and performed vary drastically not only cross-culturally, but across smaller communal groups and between individuals, too. This dissertation approaches complaining from a multilateral perspective to investigate how individuals in three different language groups – monolingual French speakers, monolingual English speakers, and native English speakers enrolled in upper-division university French courses – perceive and produce complaints as well as the influential role played by social context. In the perception study, the researcher explores how individuals within the examined language groups identify the presence of complaints and perceive their naturalness when presented with contextualized scenarios involving native speakers. In the production study, the researcher examines both the frequency with which individuals complain and the strategies they employ to perform a complaint in various social situations. Additionally, within the production study the researcher examines the frequency with which participants opt out from complaining and their provided rationale for doing so. This dissertation not only identifies a variety of universal linguistic and sociocultural features of complaints, it also uncovers several aspects distinctive to the individual language groups. At the core of this dissertation is the argument that to best understand complaint behavior, researchers should acknowledge the essential influence of social context on both the perception and production of complaints. Above all, future research must consider the complex and dynamic interplay that exists between cross-cultural complaint behaviors and social norms of politeness.