Electronic mail has become a widely used medium of communication in academia, government, and business. It is unique as a communication medium because it makes conversations across time, space, and organizational levels possible. The ability of electronic mail to "forward" a message allows for the creation of chains that preserve the entire conversation for each participant. This appears to be a new linguistic form in which the interactive features of spoken conversation are realized using electronically transmitted text. The purpose of the present study was to determine the extent of the similarities and differences between spoken conversation and electronic mail exchanges. The research questions addressed were 1) What techniques that occur in spoken conversations also occur in electronic mail exchanges?, and 2) How are the techniques used in spoken conversations modified or different in electronic mail exchanges? The data used in this study consisted of electronic mail text collected by the author in the course of her daily work in the data processing division of a large financial institution. The authors were computer technicians and middle managers with a wide diversity of educational backgrounds. Sixteen samples of message "chains" that contained at least three individual messages were selected for in-depth analysis. These samples were analyzed for conversational openings and closings, tum-taking mechanisms, adjacency pairs, and repetition. Of the structural features studied, repetition was used in ways most similar to its uses in spoken conversation. The feature having the most differences from spoken interaction was the tum-taking system. In the electronic mail exchanges there was more variation in the sender's selection of the next sender, including the option for multiple simultaneous replies. Openings and closings took many forms, some of them the same as in spoken conversation. Among the forms that differed were openings that resembled the salutation in a letter and closings that followed each individual message in a "chain." Adjacency pairs such as questions and closings were paired as in spoken conversation, while openings, thanks, and apologies occurred as single utterances.

This study examined the attitudes of English as a second or other language (ESOL) students who used computers/word processors to develop skills in writing English. Two primary questions were investigated: what are students' attitudes toward using computers to write English and what are students' attitudes toward learning computer and word processing skills? The subjects were 40 ESOL students enrolled at South Seattle Community College (SSCC) in technical programs and were required to complete a transitional English class that included business and technical writing . Students received 10 weeks of writing instruction on word processors. A 38-item attitude inventory created by Neu and Scarcella (1991) was used to measure students' attitudes toward ComputerAssisted Writing (CAW). An additional 13 questions helped identify subjects' native language, computer experience, and amount of time spent studying English. ChiSquare and t-test were used to examine the data. South Seattle Community College students' responses are reported and compared to Neu and Scarcella's ( 1991) results. The results of this study indicated that students' attitudes were significantly positive toward the writing process when using word processors. Foremost, students acknowledged that using a computer helped them develop confidence about their ability to write in English and they would recommend that other international students learn to use word processing for writing their papers. In addition, students' perceptions toward learning and developing personal computer (PC) skills were significantly positive. When SSCC data was compared to Neu and Scarcella's (1991) data, four statistically significant differences with respect to general attitudes towards writing emerged. Students stated that computers helped develop confidence in their ability to write (item I 0), helped them pay more attention to grammar (item 3 ), punctuation (item 33), and spelling (item 21). There were no statistical significant difference with respect to attitudes towards PC's: although SSCC students generally felt less positive about learning PC skills than their California counterparts.

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I decided to write this thesis many years ago and in the process of ‘becoming’ a Palawa man I finally understood the global agenda between black and white Australians and the direct actions required to attain a traditional form of Aboriginal democracy. I share in this understanding in this thesis. Mind you I share with trepidation because the options are very existential to the prevailing discourse. However a doctoral thesis will add to the body of knowledge not simply to confirm existing theoretical discourse or to leave this discourse un-challenged. Therefore this thesis is about the critical mass of cultural variables pertaining to teaching of Australian Indigenous peoples and the conduct of meaningful research. Its primary intent is to offer an alternative to the inappropriate methodologies that currently apply in the generic areas of pedagogy and research (in their broadest sense). In my opinion at present both these areas are pathologically dominated by Western thought. The idea of change and alternative paradigms is addressed in the introduction and this thesis is not intended to achieve anything more than a hearing of these options. This is why the discourse of this knowledge terrain in this thesis is so diverse and so demanding of the reader. The core notion of this discourse is the Japanangka Teaching and Research Paradigm.The Japanangka Teaching and Research Paradigm has as its core the articulation of eight dimensions or sub-paradigms. These are the quality of life dimensions: Cultural, Spiritual, Secular, and the other five: Intellectual, Political, Practical, Personal and Public dimensions. These eight constitute the sum of human experience relevant to the daily lives of Aborigines and as such are key categories to the unravelling of the seemingly imponderable mystery of “learning journey paths” so critical to the success of our students in formal Western education activities.

<p>This essay is about schools in Belize and how they handle the variety of cultures and languages. The study is based on observations and interviews made in four different schools. We spent one week in each school and every school represent one specific ethnic group. These ethnic groups are Creole, Maya, Garifuna and Mestiso. The interviews treat the different ethnic groups, their view of school and their relationship to the other ethnic groups living in Belize. To give an understanding about Belize we also present some common facts about the country which we have got from various books.</p>

<p>The aim of this study was to investigate, illuminate and discuss teacher’s and multilingual student’s view on the connection between their mother tongue and their learning of other languages. This qualitative study is based on interviews with eight students in the 8th grade and two language-teachers from the same school, as well as ethnographic observations during English and Swedish lessons. With the help of some relevant theories, the empirical study is compared, analyzed and interpreted. The results show that the theories and informant’s view on the connection between the mother tongue and other languages are similar, which is that the mother tongue must be fully established before a new language can be taken in.</p>

This study was designed to examine how the teacher education program impacts preservice teacher candidates' knowledge of culturally responsive teaching and the implementation of these practices in their classroom. For the purposes of this study, a sequential explanatory mixed methods approach was utilized to collect and analyze data through semi-structured interviews, focus groups and surveys. The participants in this study were (n=82) elementary preservice teachers and (n=11) teacher educators who taught a professional education course or supervised field or clinical experiences. This mixed method study was fourfold. First, this study sought to examine preservice teacher candidates' perceptions of the teacher education program in developing culturally responsive teachers. Second, it sought to examine if preservice teacher candidates perceptions about culturally responsive teaching change as a result of their student teaching experiences. Third, it was designed to examine how teacher educators prepare preservice teachers to teach culturally diverse student populations? Finally, how are teacher educators preparing elementary preservice teacher candidates to work in urban educational settings? / The study revealed several key findings: (a) preservice teacher candidates' professional preparation has an effect on their preparedness to teach culturally diverse student populations; (b) preservice teachers believed that more diverse field experiences is one factor that has the potential to increase participant preparedness to teach in a diverse educational setting; (c) teacher educators prepared teacher candidates to differentiate instruction for diverse learners; and (d) teacher educators preparation of preservice teacher candidates to teach in a diverse educational setting is limited because of the locale of the university. / Keywords: preservice teacher candidate, culturally responsive teaching, diversity, multicultural education, critical race theory

This thesis explores the development of parallel treebanks, collections of language data consisting of texts and their translations, with syntactic annotation and alignment, linking words, phrases, and sentences to show translation equivalence. We describe the semi-manual annotation of the SMULTRON parallel treebank, consisting of 1,000 sentences in English, German and Swedish. This description is the starting point for answering the first of two questions in this thesis. What issues need to be considered to achieve a high-quality, consistent,parallel treebank? The units of annotation and the choice of annotation schemes are crucial for quality, and some automated processing is necessary to increase the size. Automatic quality checks and evaluation are essential, but manual quality control is still needed to achieve high quality. Additionally, we explore improving the automatically created annotation for one language, using information available from the annotation of the other languages. This leads us to the second of the two questions in this thesis. Can we improve automatic annotation by projecting information available in the other languages? Experiments with automatic alignment, which is projected from two language pairs, L1–L2 and L1–L3, onto the third pair, L2–L3, show an improvement in precision, in particular if the projected alignment is intersected with the system alignment. We also construct a test collection for experiments on annotation projection to resolve prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities. While majority vote projection improves the annotation, compared to the basic automatic annotation, using linguistic clues to correct the annotation before majority vote projection is even better, although more laborious. However, some structural errors cannot be corrected by projection at all, as different languages have different wording, and thus different structures. / I denna doktorsavhandling utforskas skapandet av parallella trädbanker. Dessa är språkliga data som består av texter och deras översättningar, som har märkts upp med syntaktisk information samt länkar mellan ord, fraser och meningar som motsvarar varandra i översättningarna. Vi beskriver den delvis manuella uppmärkningen av den parallella trädbanken SMULTRON, med 1.000 engelska, tyska och svenska meningar. Denna beskrivning är utgångspunkt för att besvara den första av två frågor i avhandlingen. Vilka frågor måste beaktas för att skapa en högkvalitativ parallell trädbank? De enheter som märks upp samt valet av uppmärkningssystemet är viktiga för kvaliteten, och en viss andel automatisk bearbetning är nödvändig för att utöka storleken. Automatiska kvalitetskontroller och automatisk utvärdering är av vikt, men viss manuell granskning är nödvändig för att uppnå hög kvalitet. Vidare utforskar vi att använda information som finns i uppmärkningen, för att förbättra den automatiskt skapade uppmärkningen för ett annat språk. Detta leder oss till den andra av de två frågorna i avhandlingen. Kan vi förbättra automatisk uppmärkning genom att överföra information som finns i de andra språken? Experimenten visar att automatisk länkning som överförs från två språkpar, L1–L2 och L1–L3, till det tredje språkparet, L2–L3, får förbättrad precision, framför allt för skärningspunkten mellan den överförda länkningen och den automatiska länkningen. Vi skapar även en testsamling för experiment med överföring av uppmärkning för att lösa upp strukturella flertydigheter hos prepositionsfraser. Överföring enligt majoritetsprincipen förbättrar uppmärkningen, jämfört med den grundläggande automatiska uppmärkningen, men att använda språkliga ledtrådar för att korrigera uppmärkningen innan majoritetsöverföring är ännu bättre, om än mer arbetskrävande. Vissa felaktiga strukturer kan dock inte korrigeras med hjälp av överföring, eftersom de olika språken använder olika formuleringar, och därmed har olika strukturer.

Alla barn har i förskolan rätt att utveckla sitt modersmål. I denna studie utgör fenomenet modersmålsstöd fallet, vilket undersökts utifrån: Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur två förskollärare, två modersmålslärare och två förskolechefer uppfattar modersmålsstöd. Vilket görs utifrån följande frågor: Vilken betydelse ges modersmålstöd för flerspråkiga barn, enligt respondenternas be-skrivning? Hur organiseras modersmålsstöd enligt respondenternas beskrivning? Fallstudien är av kvalitativ art och inspireras av fenomenografin. Valet av datainsamlingsmetod är intervjuer, som genomfördes med två förskollärare, två modersmålslärare och två förskolechefer som alla arbetar inom förskoleverksamheter där majoriteten av barnen är flerspråkiga. Materialet analyserades vilket resulterade i fem uppfattningar som presenteras som beskrivningskategorier. Uppfattningarna som framkom gällande modersmålstödets betydelse är: Ges stor betydelse och Ges underordnad betydelse. Uppfattningarna som framkom gällande modersmålsstödets organisering är: Integreras i förskolans ordinarie verksamhet, Styrs centralt och Med hjälp av föräldrarna. Resultatet visar att modersmålsstöd ges underordnad betydelse i förhållande till svenska språket. Respondenterna visar samtidigt på en medvetenhet gällande modersmålsstödets betydelse för flerspråkiga barns språkutveckling, identitetsutveckling samt tillhörighet både i förskolan och i hemmets kultur, samt att modersmålsstöd organiseras på olika sätt.

This essay is about schools in Belize and how they handle the variety of cultures and languages. The study is based on observations and interviews made in four different schools. We spent one week in each school and every school represent one specific ethnic group. These ethnic groups are Creole, Maya, Garifuna and Mestiso. The interviews treat the different ethnic groups, their view of school and their relationship to the other ethnic groups living in Belize. To give an understanding about Belize we also present some common facts about the country which we have got from various books.