This paper aims at investigating the attitude of junior and senior students of Hong Kong secondary school toward the medium of instruction. This study involved 37 senior students and 34 junior students of the same CMI secondary school. The research is quantitative in nature and data is analyzed statistically. The major findings are, firstly, both groups of students affirm with the benefits of CMI in enhancing effective learning of content subjects. However, they do not agree that CMI can effectively enhance their English ability. Second, students choose between CMI and EMI according to the status of Chinese and English in their mind, which varies with the changes of needs and challenges they face with. The results suggest that the status of Chinese is higher with the junior students. They are both strongly integratively and instrumentally orientated toward Chinese. The benefits of CMI outweigh the disadvantages it has on English learning. Therefore, junior students show a more positive attitude toward CMI. On the other hand, senior students are aware of the high demand in English at university and at work. Their needs to face the society after graduation cause them to be more instrumentally orientated toward English. Therefore, the status of English is relatively higher than Chinese among the senior students, which results in a more positive attitude toward EMI learning. / published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

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D. Tech. Education / Language is considered to be a crucial means of gaining access to knowledge and skills. It is the key to cognitive development which promotes or impedes scholastic success. Communicative or language competence refers to the capacity of persons to select, recognise and organise the language variety appropriate to the occasion, situation and subject matter at hand. Language competency assists learners to construct and integrate acquired information to one's own understanding. It is therefore pivotal to encourage education reforms through core knowledge that building a strong oral language and early development could result in future academic success. This study examined the influence of language competence on the academic achievement of Grade 12 learners in selected schools of the Capricorn District (Limpopo Province in South Africa). The purpose of this study was to establish the challenges that learners and educators experience in communicating for teaching and learning purposes. The study also investigated the language factors that influence their academic achievement.

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published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Journalism and Media Studies Centre / Master / Master of Journalism

<p> The field of research in bilingualism and second language (L2) acquisition has yielded overwhelming evidence that acquiring a second language later in life will result in less accurate production and perception of consonants and vowels in the second language. These effects, in part, are a result of interference from the already formed phonetic categories shaped by early exposure to the L1 (Iverson, 2007). Phonetic categories from the L2 will, at least initially, be mapped onto phonetic categories from the L1 (Flege, 1995). Shared storage of similar lexical items from L1 and L2 may also take place resulting in differences in processing for words with similar meanings in both languages with similar meanings. Language learners of any age are able to acquire a limitless number of new vocabulary items in their L2. Whether similarities in orthography and/or phonology of semantically similar words affect access to and comprehension of these new L2 lexical items is still unclear. Another question is whether lexical items that differ only in a non-native sound contrast are processed as good or poor exemplars of the L2 word, as a poor exemplar of the L1 word, or as allophonic variation of the L2 word. </p><p> In this dissertation neural correlates of L2 words that have or do not have L1 cognates were examined. A group of monolingual English speakers and a group of late Spanish-English bilinguals were asked to decide whether pairs of cognate and non-cognate words were produced the same or differently. Words were pronounced in Standard English or with a change in the production of the stressed vowel in the word to a vowel more similar to a Spanish phoneme. The results revealed that cognate words seemed to facilitate L2 speech discrimination as evidenced by similar responses by bilinguals and monolinguals to these words and smaller or absent responses by bilingual participants to non-cognate words. This facilitation was in the form of a positive ERP response elicited by the frontal electrodes. These results provide a better understanding of why there are mispronunciations and misperceptions of lexical items in an L2 and how shared meaning influences these processes.</p>

This study examined the role of literacy in enhancing rural people's capabilities for participation in Uganda's Plan for Modernisation of Agriculture (PMA), an intervention aimed at improving rural livelihoods through commercialising subsistence agriculture. Using Amartya Sen's capability approach, in which poverty is conceptualised to be a capability deprivation as the conceptual frame of reference, the study aimed at exploring how literacy facilitates or inhibits rural subsistence farmers' participation levels in PMA activities in Manibe Sub-County, Arua District. Using data collected from 54 research participants analysed interpretively, the study revealed that the majority of PMA activities demand a high degree of interaction with written materials, mostly in English, which created an unconducive atmosphere for the unschooled in the target group, thereby forcing them to depend on literacy mediators. It further revealed that there were more women than men participating in parish level activities which greatly decreased in favour of men at sub-county levels and above. It also found that farmers' groups were treated uniformly which negatively affects some of them in terms of access to resources and options. It further revealed that lack of supporting resources, stringent conditions for accessing Enterprise Development Funds, and difficulties in meeting farmers' co-funding requirements, were creating serious obstacles in undertaking group activities, hence making many potential participants avoid PMA activities. The main thesis in the study is that transforming rural subsistence producers into small-scale commercial farmers as a rural poverty reduction strategy, without providing them with the means to expand their basic capabilities so as to move out of capability deprivation, will not by itself increase rural incomes and reduce poverty. It is argued further that engaging the rural subsistence farmers in commercial agriculture will tend to enrich the educated few who are already better resourced. Since capability deprivation, amongst others, manifests itself through widespread illiteracy, the study recommends that efforts to eradicate rural poverty should focus on expanding the capabilities of the target group through building their literacy skills and improving their access to basic resources. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.

This study investigates ways in which English Studies at Rhodes University, the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Natal, and the University of Sydney responded to linguistic and academic literacy needs of entrance level students. Both qualitative and quantitative data from these research sites are integrated with an autobiographical narrative based on my own personal experiences of learning English and in English at secondary and tertiary levels in South Africa. Dealing with data this way made it possible for my study to examine strategies through which different English departments negotiate the challenge of enabling students to access the discourse of the Discipline. I relied on the principles underpinning Genre Theory and Grounded Theory to engage critically with participants’ responses to interview questions and documentary evidence from research sites. It appears from the study that modules designed to develop students’ linguistic and/or academic literacy skills need not maintain a pedagogic practice that is either grammatical rules or academic writing and critique based, without an attempt to integrate the two. This separation is seen as artificial, and reflects pedagogic practices that tend to mystify the discourse of the Discipline of English Studies. Given the fact that not all students posses relevant cultural capital to negotiate meanings successfully within this discourse, many of them are excluded during lectures. Literature and research findings in this study indicate that this exclusion manifests itself when such students fail to choose grammatical structures according to the purpose for which they construct texts, both in speaking and in writing. Within this context, there is a need for an alternative model to inform theory, module design, and pedagogic practices in entrance level modules. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2007.