Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-77).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-77). Also available in print.

The number of learners of Japanese as a second or other language has increased rapidly worldwide over the past several decades. The objectives of their study have largely changed from pursuing purely academic research interests to acquiring the communicative skills needed for business or leisure purposes. There are five language competency skills needed to master foreign languages: reading, writing, listening, speaking and intercultural competence. Students, particularly those studying outside Japan, depend more on textbooks for learning how to speak than their peers in Japan; and speaking is studied formally through analysis of model discourses in selected textbooks. In particular, if the learner’s first language is very different from Japanese, which in fact almost all other languages are, the complexity of the spoken language, including gender difference and respect forms, presents most learners with certain challenges that require adequate explanation to be comprehended. Likewise, the larger the cultural gap between learner and target language, the greater are the challenges for acquiring intercultural competence, which is closely interrelated with the production of ‘natural speech’. It is, therefore, crucial for learners from other cultures who have little opportunity to speak in Japanese to learn from a textbook of good quality which provides appropriate explanation of the social and cultural context of the model dialogues they employ as exemplars. The present study aims to analyse and evaluate the appropriateness of model dialogues contained in intermediate level textbooks for learners of Japanese as a second or other language. The findings suggest that none of the selected textbooks included satisfactory explanation about the model discourses, so there seems to be much room for improvement in this regard. It is anticipated that the results of this study will contribute to the design concept of foreign language textbooks in future.

The diploma thesis deals with e-learning in the sense of using online tools, programmes and websites in the English language teaching. In the current modern society we use internet and electronic devices on daily bases and it is only natural that such trend is infiltrating also the field of education. The aim of this thesis is to provide the teachers, who would like to use e- learning in their lessons, with theoretical background and inspiration. The thesis is divided into two parts - a theoretical part and a practical part. The theoretical part is divided into several chapters, each of them focuses on some theoretical aspect of e-learning. The term can be seen from more points of view, this thesis understands e-learning as any programme, tool, platform or website that needs to be used online - using an internet connection. The next chapters of the theoretical part deal with the advantages and limits that are connected with using e-learning, itsʼ history or place in the Framework Educational Programme. To put together the practical part, which is supposed to be something like a catalogue of the particular e-learning programmes, I decided to use a questionnaire as the main source of the programmes. Apart from the questionnaire my sources were literature on given topic or my own internet search....

Orientador: Suzi Marques Spatti Cavalari / Resumo: Este estudo tem por objetivo investigar o que dizem os professores de inglês a respeito da utilização de tecnologias nas escolas públicas de uma cidade do interior de São Paulo. A discussão teórica se embasa nos pressupostos da Teoria da Atividade (ENGESTRÖM, 1999; 2001), nos documentos oficiais que orientam a educação básica no Brasil (PCN, PCNEM, LDB, OCEM, BNCC, PME), nas Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais para Formação Inicial e Continuada em Nível Superior de Profissionais do Magistério para a Educação Básica (BRASIL, 2002; 2015) e nos fatores que influenciam a utilização de tecnologias no contexto escolar (RODRIGUES, 2010; ALVARENGA; AZZI, 2013; ROSA; AZENHA, 2015; MAYRINK; COSTA, 2017). Trata-se de um estudo misto (quantitativo e qualitativo) do tipo survey cujos dados foram gerados por meio de um questionário composto por questões abertas e fechadas realizado com 16 professores de inglês atuantes nas escolas públicas da cidade focal. Além disso, adotou-se como fonte de dados complementar a tomada de notas feita pelo pesquisador em visita a cada uma instituições pesquisadas, totalizando dez escolas estaduais e uma municipal. Os dados apontaram que há utilização de tecnologias, contudo, apenas em alguns momentos da prática pedagógica dos docentes, conforme afirmaram os professores. Os tipos de atividade predominantes foram de pesquisa, escuta, pronúncia e vocabulário e as mídias mais utilizadas foram músicas, filmes, vídeos e jogos. Em relação aos objetivos, os docentes ... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: This study aims at researching what English teachers say about the use of technologies in classroom in the context of public schools in a city in the countryside of São Paulo State. The theoretical discussion sets its bases on the principles of the Activity Theory (ENGESTRÖM, 1999; 2001), on the official documents which orient the Brazilian basic education (PCN, PCNEM, LDB, BNCC, PME), on the National Curricular Guidelines to Higher and In-service education for basic education teaching professionals (BRASIL, 2002; 2015) and on the factors that influence the use of technologies in a public school context (RODRIGUES, 2010; ALVARENGA; AZZI, 2013; ROSA; AZENHA, 2015; MAYRINK; COSTA, 2017). This study employs quantitative and qualitative approaches and it is characterized as a survey type work. A questionnaire composed by closed and open-ended questions and answered by 16 public school English teachers is adopted as the main source of data. As a secondary data collection instrument, the researcher employed note taking about the schools’ infrastructure while visiting them. In total, ten state schools and one municipal school were visited. The data pointed out that the use of technology in this context exists, however, only in some moments of the teachers’ pedagogical practice. The predominant kinds of activity were research, listening, pronunciation, and vocabulary exercises done through songs, movies, videos, and games. Concerning the objectives, the teachers claimed to use the te... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre

Education plays a vital role in shaping social structures and influencing social mobility in a society, and thus educational equality is a concern for many societies. Considering the compulsory status of English from basic to higher education in China and its symbolic meaning in Chinese society, this study regards it as a window to explore educational inequality and its association with social structures. This study investigates the roles played by family, geographic divide, and institution, and the way in which the three interplay in structuring the educational pathways of individuals and shaping educational inequality. This study describes a qualitative case study of 36 students of different social milieus in an elite university. Data from the case interviews is complemented by classroom observation of three secondary schools within the educational system hierarchy, classroom observation of the elite university, teacher interviews from the four educational institutions, and collected documents. I draw on Bourdieu's conceptual tools of different types of capital, field, and habitus in order to understand the complexity of educational inequality in China. The data present striking differences in the educational trajectories between social groups. The success of higher-SES students is partly ascribed to the richer volume and types of their families' cultural capital, and the inclination for their families to transfer abundant economic capital to their children's embodied cultural capital. The interview data suggest that disadvantaged students rely heavily on formal education and are inscribed with institutional habitus due to the scarcity of educational resources obtained from family. More importantly, for advantaged students, their family, secondary schools (previous field) and the elite university (current field) work together in a consistent way, resulting in a positive momentum that contributes to a sense of belonging and fitting-in to the elite university. On the contrary, for marginalised students, contradictions and disconnections are found between secondary schools and the current elite field in terms of institutional habitus and practices, which to a large extent can be ascribed to the stratified school system and geographic divides. This situation leads to a negative momentum for them, which causes feelings of alienation and a sense of disorientation when encountering the elite field. This academic disorientation is evident in their transitional period. Their habitus is identified by a transformative tendency with easier access to dominant cultural capital and habitus. However, the transformation is circumscribed by their huge efforts made in overcoming the initial difficulties and their families' lack of capital. Some special cases in my study suggest a more equal admission policy and the critical role that institutions play in compensating for a family's lack of capital. This thesis concludes with suggestions for more inclusive practices for institutions and policy makers in China to achieve a more equal educational context.

In the field of world language education, it has long been affirmed that language and culture are inseparable. It has also often been asked how teaching language and culture in an inseparable way is to be accomplished. One solution that has been proposed is ethnographic interviews. Other studies have demonstrated that interviewing native cultural informants is beneficial for language students. This study examined whether such interviews are also beneficial to the native informants. The participants in this project, sixteen native speakers of Spanish, were each interviewed three times by a pair of Spanish students who employed ethnographic techniques as a part of the interview process. The native speakers answered two brief questionnaires, one before and one after the interviews, and many of them participated in one-on-one interviews with me, the primary researcher, to follow-up on their answers to those questionnaires and their experiences with the interviews. I found that the participants perceived the project as beneficial in multiple areas including, but not limited to, the chance it gave them to talk about their culture, the interest they perceived in their culture and their viewpoints, and the opportunity it gave them to confirm, modify, or strengthen conclusions they had made from previous cultural experience. A small percentage of the native speakers either did not understand or appreciate the ethnographic techniques that were employed. However, after initial interviews, I gave the students of Spanish feedback on how to better make use of those techniques in order to improve the students' and native speakers' experiences with the interviews and a large majority of the native speakers observed how the subsequent interviews improved. Therefore, similar projects might benefit from making use of this information. Specifically, it might be useful to explain ethnographic techniques not just to interviewers, but also to interviewees, so that both groups might better understand and appreciate the purpose of those techniques. It might also be useful to give feedback to those who use ethnographic techniques to interview native culture informants.

This study describes an interview survey of college instructors of foreign and programming languages as well as a content analysis of textbooks from these fields. Seven interviews were conducted with instructors in Romance Languages and Computer Science at five colleges in central North Carolina. The purpose of the interviews was to determine how instructors of foreign and programming languages view their teaching methodology and how this relates to the textbooks they choose. Based on the information gathered at the interviews and a subsequent content analysis of six textbooks, this study explored the possibilities that exchanging teaching ideas between foreign and programming language texts might afford if these were applied creatively across these two curricula.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how a group of Chinese students made meaning of their collaborative learning experiences as they engaged in creating a supportive dialogical environment in an Intensive English Reading class. The class utilized dialogue as inquiry along with activities that facilitated communication to approach the learning process. These activities included: pre-class writing, in-class presentations, after-class reflections, and small group online discussions. Students and teacher engaged one another in questioning and responding that implemented a process of reflective dialogue about texts and knowledge of language. Thirty sophomore English major students participated in this study, ten of whom were randomly selected for final participation. Data sources consisted of transcriptions from phenomenological interviews, student weekly and final written reflections, and researcher’s field notes. Analysis of these data yielded four themes: relationship, confidence, engagement, and change. That the four themes overlap suggests that they mutually reinforce one another to make students’ learning experiences collaborative. Results indicate that creating a socially, affectively, and pedagogically-supported dialogical environment promotes students’ communication with others as well as creative and reflective doing and thinking. The results have implications for foreign language teachers, educators, and researchers interested in performing action research in their practice.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T20:25:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 4043.pdf: 14570142 bytes, checksum: dcc375f29cce434a27c74e47902511f8 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-08-26 / This research intends to approach the language teaching and learning from an enunciative perspective based on the Theory of Predicative and Enunciative Operations from Antoine Culioli. Our theoretical option is due to the fact we take into consideration the relevance of working with the articulation between grammatical marks and text production/understanding. With the purpose of this achievement, we study the notion of qualification conveyed by different grammatical marks for which this role is traditionally ascribed. It is included, for example, adjectives, adjective locutions and adjective sentences. We are mainly interested in the processes of predication that involves this notion as we aim to show that these processes are evidences for intersubjectivity marks which uphold these productions of meaning. We also propose to demonstrate that this teaching approach for grammatical marks articulated with the semantic and discursive notions is a way to promote the linguistic and cognitive development in students. / Este estudo pretende abordar o ensino/aprendizagem de língua sob a ótica enunciativa, com base na Teoria das Operações Predicativas e Enunciativas de Antoine Culioli. A nossa opção teórica justifica-se à medida que consideramos a relevância de se trabalhar a articulação entre marcas gramaticais e produção/interpretação de texto. Para isso, estudamos a noção de qualificação veiculada por diferentes marcas gramaticais às quais, tradicionalmente, atribui-se esse papel. Incluem-se, por exemplo, os adjetivos, as locuções adjetivas, as orações adjetivas. Interessam-nos os processos de predicação que envolvem essa noção, uma vez que objetivamos mostrar que tais processos traduzem marcas de intersubjetividade que sustentam tais produções de significação. Pretende-se, ao mesmo tempo, mostrar que, a abordagem, no ensino, desses marcadores gramaticais articulados à noção semânticodiscursiva que veiculam é um caminho para se promover o desenvolvimento linguísticocognitivo nos alunos.