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Thesis (M.A. (English Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2022 / Although several interventions have been in place to address the writing difficulties of students, research reveals that student writing is still one of the major challenges experienced by English Second Language (ESL) students worldwide; specifically, in the context of higher education institutions. As such, writing centres have been deemed as facilitators that are paramount for the transition of first-year students’ high school literacies to the academic writing conventions of higher learning. The primary purpose of this study was to examine the efficiency of the Reading and Writing Centre (RWC) as a supporting structure of the University of Limpopo (UL) through a case study of services rendered to first entering dietetics students. The study was guided by Vygostsky’ zone of proximal development and scaffolding theories to determine how the knowledgeable other can support the less knowledgeable students in developing their academic writing skills. An analysis of students’ assignments for the first semester and the second semester was conducted. The study also used semi-structured interviews to allow the current researcher to gain a detailed description on the challenges confronted by the dietetics students, and whether RWC is efficient in improving the academic writing skills of the dietetics students. The research established that academic writing appeared to be difficult for first-year entering dietetics students in the first semester prior to the assistance from RWC, and relied on the centre for the transition of the academic writing demands of higher learning. The study further discovered that although the students still committed slight grammatical mistakes, they showed improvement from the assistance they obtained from the feedback received from the RWC, ultimately signifying that the centre played a pivotal in scaffolding first-year students who came to higher learning underprepared for the academic writing conventions.

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Adolescent perspectives on health and the social and literate values of their health related behaviours require exploration and examination in health literacy, as knowledge gaps related to the constituents of health literate practices, and the functions and acquisition of health literacy exist in the literature. Research addressing this was approached based on socio-cultural and socio-ecological principles using a collective instrumental case design. Participants were new adolescent mother aged 15-18 recruited from 4 different community/education programs around Victoria, BC. Data was collected over a four month period, and consisted of individual and focus group interviews, journals, and researchers’ observations and field notes. Findings show that participants’ health behaviours changed significantly in tandem with their identities, the groups they associated with, and the social contexts they moved within. Findings indicate that identity, informal social environments, and unconscious cognitive process and psychosocial needs play a role in adolescents health literacy and literate practices.

With the dominance of the Web in education and English language learning, new literacies have emerged. This thesis is motivated by the assumption that these literacies need to be integrated into the Egyptian pre-service EFL teacher education programmes so that EFL student teachers can cope with the new reality of language teaching/learning. Therefore, the main objective of the present study is to develop a theoretical understanding of the relationship between Web-based new literacies and the teaching of TESOL in a way that supports the possibility of expanding Egyptian pre-service EFL student teachers’ language-related literacy practices by integrating some Web-based new literacies into their education programme, with specific reference to the context of Assiut University College of Education (AUCOE). This requires accomplishing minor objectives represented in: (1) identifying the range of those Web-based new literacies that Egyptian EFL student teachers need in this ICT-dominated age; (2) identifying those Web-based facilities beneficial to them, and why and how they can be beneficial; and (3) generating framework for EFL curriculum design based on both literature and empirical data. To accomplish this, a design-based research (DBR) methodology drawing on a pragmatic epistemology is developed and employed as the main research paradigm informing this design study. Thus, the research design involves a flexible three-stage research framework: (1) the preliminary phase, which acts as a theoretical and empirical foundation for the whole study, and informs a preliminary design framework; it involves reviewing relevant literature and obtaining empirical data through documentary analysis (100 documents), online questionnaire (n=50), and semi-structured interviews (n=19); (2) the prototyping phase that involves two iterations (36 participants in the first iteration, and 30 in the second) conducted in the Egyptian context to test the proposed design framework. Each iteration acts as a micro-cycle of the whole design study, and thus involves its own objectives, learning design, research methodology and procedures (in line with the main DBR methodology), and results; (3) the assessment/reflective phase which, based on the prototyping phase results, presents a final design framework for expanding EFL student teachers’ language-related literacy practices. This has implications for the EFL curriculum design process within the Egyptian context in general, and AUCOE in particular. Results indicate that throughout the two iterations, it has become evident that the process of expanding EFL student teachers’ language-related literacy practices by integrating some Web-based new literacies into the AUCOE pre-service programme is quite feasible once some design principles are considered. Some significant conclusions and educational implications are provided, along with some main contributions to knowledge in TESOL/TEFL, language-learning theory, research methodology, and educational practice as far as the Egyptian context of pre-service EFL teacher education is concerned.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T14:32:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Flaminio de Oliveira Rangel.pdf: 1976884 bytes, checksum: b3ae10f963cbea60638c19fdd5219904 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-05-15 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Pedagogical mediation in distance education is addressed within the context of increasing use of digital technologies in education, either as a support for onsite education at all levels, or as a support for online learning environments for undergraduate courses, including continuing education for teachers, which is the focus of this research. The research was carried out between 2005 and 2007 as part of a graduate course entitled Contemporary Reading and Writing Practices offered online for technical-pedagogical assistants (ATPs), learning supervisors, coordinators and teacher of Secondary and High schools of the São Paulo, Brazil, state school system. The aim of the study was to show that the arrhythmia among mediation, learning and literacies, perceived as lack of time, had its origin in non-systemic, fragmented conceptual theories that became an important factor of exclusion in relation to social practices for knowledge production, as reflected in the significant dropout rate (61.5%) of in practice mediators. The methodology used was based on action-research. Data was registered in a digital field journal that became a set of digital documents that stored the emerging observations as the course unfolded. Results showed that online mediation, learning and different types of literacies actually constitute a single, complex process, which, if not considered as a systemic relation among its components, can produce an arrhythmia among its elements, leading to drop-outs/exclusion. Hence the arrhythmia among mediation, learning and literacies appears as an important analytical category to measure the quality of social practices in distance education / Este trabalho tem como tema a mediação pedagógica em educação a distância e insere-se no contexto de uso crescente das tecnologias digitais na educação, seja como suporte ao ensino presencial, em qualquer nível, seja passando pela graduação a distância e se estendendo à formação continuada dos educadores, foco desta investigação. A pesquisa foi desenvolvida entre os anos de 2005 e 2007 como parte do curso de aperfeiçoamento Práticas de Leitura e Escrita na Contemporaneidade, oferecido a distância para assistentes técnico-pedagógicos (ATPs), supervisores de ensino, professores coordenadores e professores de Ensino Fundamental II e do Ensino Médio da rede pública estadual de São Paulo. Ela teve como objetivo mostrar que o processo de arritmia entre a mediação, a aprendizagem e os letramentos, apontado pelo sintoma da falta de tempo, foi originado por concepções teóricas fragmentadas e não sistêmicas, e constituiu em um importante fator de exclusão em relação às práticas sociais de produção do conhecimento, fato ocorrido no curso quando uma parcela significativa dos mediadores em formação (61,5%) abandou suas turmas. O referencial metodológico baseou-se na pesquisa-ação, e os dados foram registrados no diário digital de campo que se constituiu em um conjunto de documentos digitais que armazenavam as observações emergentes no desenvolvimento do curso. Com os resultados obtidos foi possível verificar que a mediação on-line, aprendizagem e letramentos se constituem, de fato, como um único e complexo processo e que, por não ser considerado globalmente enquanto relações sistêmicas entre seus componentes, pode introduzir elementos de arritmia e levar à desistência/exclusão. Assim, a arritmia entre mediação, aprendizagem e letramentos surge como uma categoria de análise importante para se aferir a qualidade das práticas sociais de educação a distância