Students in Sweden are exposed to English education in the classroom from a very young age. This paper sets out to see whether bilingual or multilingual students perform better than monolingual students when acquiring English as a second or third language in Sweden. The research questions look at whether or not complex noun phrase structures can be connected to the language background of the students. The Dynamic Model of Multilingualism along with Second Language Acquisition theories suggest that students who have already acquired a second language have achieved a multilingual competence that monolingual speakers do not have, and that this multilingual competence can benefit a learner in acquiring additional languages. 64 students submitted language background surveys and essays. 12 essays were chosen to represent three different language categories: monolingual, bilingual and multilingual. The method of comparing the essays was based on the use of complex noun phrases. Two analyses were carried out: 1) on the modification of noun phrases at phrase level, and 2) on the embedding and modification of embedded noun phrases at the clause level. The results of the study are not statistically significant, but they may indicate that bilingual students create the most complex noun phrases, though the monolingual students were not far behind. The multilingual students used the least modification and also the least embedded noun phrases. Further research in this area is warranted based on the results found here.

<p> With the increasing number of Chinese international students coming to the United States every year, a more in-depth understanding of these international students' acculturation is necessary and urgent. Given the fact that past researches mostly describe Chinese immigrants, migrates or international students as oppressed cultural adaptors, who cannot avoid being marginalized; who suffer from various adjusting problems; and who have to make use of acculturative strategies to adapt to the new country, this thesis takes the factor of wealth and its relation with class, status and power into account during Chinese international students' acculturation under the globalized context. Instead of sticking to the stereotypical view of regarding Chinese International students as simply marginalized group, this thesis explores the possibility of these students as power negotiators in their everydayness of life by using the methodological tool of interview.</p>

This research adopts a sociocultural framework (Vygotsky, 1978) to investigate how multilingual children express their mathematical reasoning during collaborative problem solving. The topic is important because North America is becoming increasingly multicultural, and according to mathematics teachers this has complicated the challenges of teaching and learning mathematics. Many educators assume that children should be competent in the language of instruction before they engage with mathematical content (Civil, 2008; Gorgorió & Planas, 2001). A review of recent research in this area challenges the idea that multilingual students need to have mastered the official language of instruction prior to learning mathematics (Barwell, 2005; Civil, 2008; Moschkovich, 2007). These researchers demonstrate that the knowledge of the language of instruction is only one aspect of becoming competent in mathematics. My research was designed to build on the findings of the current research on multilingual children’s reasoning in order to more fully understand how multilingual children express their mathematical understanding and reasoning. For this study, two multilingual families, each with 3 children between the ages of 8 and 12, participated in a mathematical problem-solving activity. Findings show the children’s mathematical reasoning was evidence-based drawing on mathematical knowledge and world knowledge.

<p> This dissertation investigates the normative construction of a politics of language and community in north-west Wales (United Kingdom). It is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted primarily between January 2007 and April 2008, with central participant-observation settings in primary-level state schools and in the teaching-spaces and hallways of a university. Its primary finding is an account of the gap between the national visibility and the cultural (in)visibility communities of speakers of the indigenous language of Wales (Cymraeg, or &ldquo;Welsh&rdquo;). With one exception, no public discourse has yet emerged in Wales that provides an explicit framework or vocabulary for describing the cultural community that is anchored in Cymraeg. One has to live those meanings even to know about them. The range of social categories for living those meanings tends to be constructed in ordinary conversations as some form of <i>nationalism,</i> whether political, cultural, or language <i>nationalism.</i> Further, the negatively valenced category of nationalism current in English-speaking Britain is in tension with the positively valenced category of nationalism current among many who move within Cymraeg-speaking communities. Thus, the very politics of identity are themselves political since the line between what is political and what is not, is itself subject to controversy. The result is what I call the &ldquo;submergence&rdquo; of Cymraeg-oriented cultural communities: People who would say Cymraeg is an essential part of their personality and communities mark out cultural space for their sense of continuity (to the past, to others) in ways that do not require <i>or enable</i> them to make any substantive cultural claims. </p><p> Within these settings of a modalized Welsh culture&mdash;always only partially expressed&mdash; indigeneity and ethnic difference are symbolized by the emblematic and lived importance of Cymraeg, while the significance of Cymraeg tends to be implicitly conveyed by means of overt references to &ldquo;Welshness&rdquo;. </p><p> This cultural submergence of the resources for Cymraeg-centered identity seems motivated and sustained by the fact that it produces a haven from holiday-goers and English patriots who do not value Welsh cultural features as highly as do those who take pride in the Cymraeg-centered cultural community. In light of these features of local life, I suggest several terms of art&mdash;including &ldquo;language demesne&rdquo; and &ldquo;language corridor&rdquo;&mdash;because they are more fitting of local politics than is the idea of a (global) language community. </p><p> This dissertation also contributes a theoretical basis for examining the pragmatics of language communities, which requires differentiating phenomenal-level semiotic analyses from investigations of the dynamics of cultural discourse. The &ldquo;obvious&rdquo; empirical situation in Wales&mdash;as analyzed using a Peircean-phenomenological semiotics&mdash;runs contrary to the relatively opaque and counter-empirical cultural dynamics in Wales. As a result, this account of the tensions between semiotic descriptions and cultural dynamics signals a wrinkle in received theories of metapragmatics. Conventionally, metapragmatics makes sense of the text&ndash;discourse relation, but not the relations between discourse and consciousness because theories of metapragmatics apply only to the former. Unless the relationship of text-and-discourse to consciousness is explicated at the epistemological level of analysis, ethnographic descriptions of locales within language communities&mdash;particularly those rife with language politics&mdash;can take on the appearance of an ontology of human kinds. Given this condition, any broad account of the cultural dynamics of language and community must take an analytic position regarding the relationship between the surface-level of semiotics and the historical and cultural processes of community constitution. </p><p> My approach engages directly with the neglected conflict between the strategy of primordialist essentialism and that of constructivism. The analytic strategy and theoretical perspective of this dissertation avoids the scholarly tendency to treat certain local conceptions as misconstruals of sociocultural life. Instead, they are treated as locally valid and proper constitutings of divisible community. Academics would be no less inclined to reject analogous conceptual entailments in their cultural worlds despite their commitment to the view that sociocultural realities are constructed. The position adopted here underwrites an account that denaturalizes without denaturing the essentializing claims (e.g., of language activists) in north-west Wales. </p><p> In engaging with current analytic strategies in linguistic anthropology, my &ldquo;inferentialist&rdquo; and pragmatistic strategy frames the politicizing of language and community in north-west Wales using an alternative to linguistic indexes or icons, which are grounded in an empirical sense of necessity. The framework adopted here envisions an empirical field organized not only by <i>necessary</i> principles of Welsh belonging that are practiced or not, but by tensions among many different &ldquo;modal&rdquo; types of constraints&mdash;normative principles that are inferable from community-specific ways of enacting belonging to a particular sociocultural imaginary that owes its coherence to language affinity. Consequently, this dissertation treats languages themselves as inhabitable and provides a theoretical justification for doing so.</p>

<p> Grounded in the transformative paradigm (p. 35), this study asked, &ldquo;In what ways might a group of non-Natives be individually and socially transformed by encountering the Bear River Massacre from within Indigenous Worldviews?&rdquo; The methodology incorporated Indigenous Worldviews and ceremonial processes (Wilson, 2008) into Queensland University&rsquo;s Indigenous Australian Studies&rsquo; model (Mackinlay &amp; Barney, 2010), interweaving transformative learning processes with Indigenous elements such as a traditional Shoshone sweat lodge, visiting a massacre site, and listening to a Shoshone elder. During ceremonially centered mini retreats data was collected via individual journals, group email and process notes, art-based expressions, videotaping, individual and group written evaluations and surveys, and follow up interviews. Findings established &ldquo;perspective transformation&rdquo; (King, 2009) in 80% of participants within the dimensions of better understanding the Bear River Massacre, the Shoshone people, the colonization process, and the loss of their own Indigenous roots. Follow-up interviews revealed that 87.5% of respondents believed that the integration of Indigenous elements into the project impacted their learning experience &ldquo;a great deal.&rdquo; 87.5% reported sustained behavioral x change in relation to the topic and 71% stated they wanted to get to know Native people and culture better. In addition, 43% stated they were interested in obtaining a public Presidential apology to Native people. Unconscious shadow transference material (Romanyshyn, 2007) emerged and was discussed from a depth psychology perspective. Limitations to this study include sample size and lack of funding. The theoretical development of ceremonial research potentially expands this method into other areas of inquiry.</p>

<p> This ethnography reconceptualizes the paradigm of cultural competence used within the literature on teacher education to describe the multicultural learning of White teacher candidates. Within the cultural competence framework, White learning is problematic, dichotomously defined, and fixed. The binary of competence/incompetence established by this paradigm has recently been questioned within the literature as deficit-based and in conflict with postmodern, critical theories of learning and teaching espoused by multicultural education espouses. </p><p> This study of the researcher's multicultural education class at a private, religious, four-year undergraduate college on the East Coast of the United States used co-constructed pedagogical practices&mdash;including a co-constructed community engagement experience, dialogic critical reflection, student-led inquiry-based seminars, and student-teacher email dialogues&mdash;to reconceptualize White multicultural learning as a dynamic process involving both teacher candidates and the teacher educator. As such, this work is co-ethnographic because it analyzed the learning of both the researcher and her students. </p><p> The study found that antiracist White learning within multiple, co-constructed approaches on a public/private spectrum is related to learners' placeling identities; multicultural learning was a migration and re-negotiation of the histories of White learners' homes and geographies. This re-negotiation&mdash;called de-/reterritorialization&mdash;occurred within a dialectic of Whiteness as space and Whiteness as places; both universal characteristics and local expressions of Whiteness were important in the learning of this classroom. White placeling de-/reterritorialization was also found to be unique to each learner, thereby reconceptualizing White learners as diverse. In addition, White placeling de-/reterritorialization was incremental and agentic, extending previous studies' findings that White learners are disinterested and resistant within multicultural teacher education classrooms. </p><p> Within this study, patterns of de-/reterritorialization emerged as particular learning dynamics between the researcher and the teacher candidates; these dynamics included guarding and stagnating, pushing/pulling, and inviting. These patterns, their uniqueness within the encountering of placeling identities' borders, and the attempts at antiracist learning that were made by the White teacher candidates in this classroom offer a reconceptualization of cultural competence that is geographic and complex. Placeling de-/reterritorialization resists the flattening of White identities too often found in the multicultural literature, situates place as the site of antiracist inquiry when working with White learners, and offers a new paradigm for teaching and researching with White teacher candidates.</p>

Aujourd’hui, l’apprentissage des langues assisté par ordinateur est de plus en plus répandu, dans les institutions publiques et privées. Cependant, il est encore loin des attentes des enseignants et des apprenants et ne répond pas encore à leurs besoins. Les systèmes d’apprentissage des langues assisté par ordinateur (ALAO) actuels sont plutôt des environnements de tests des connaissances de l'apprenant et ressemblent plus à un support d’apprentissage traditionnel. De plus, le feedback proposé par ces systèmes reste basique et ne peut pas être adapté pour un apprentissage autonome, car, il devrait être en mesure de diagnostiquer les problèmes d'un apprenant avec l’orthographe, la grammaire, la conjugaison,etc., puis générer intelligemment un feedback adéquat selon la situation de l’apprentissage.Cette recherche expose les capacités des outils TAL à apporter des solutions aux limitations des systèmes d’ALAO dans le but d’élaborer un système d’ALAO complet et autonome. Nous présentons une architecture complète d'un système multilingue pour l’apprentissage des langues assisté par ordinateur destiné aux apprenants des langues étrangères, français et arabe. Ce système pourrait être utilisé pour l’apprentissage des langues par les apprenants de la langue en tant que langue seconde ou étrangère.La première partie de nos travaux porte sur l’adaptation des outils et des ressources issues du TAL pour qu’ils soient utilisés dans un environnement d’apprentissage des langues assisté par ordinateur. Parmi ces outils et ressources, il y a les analyseurs morphologiques pour l’arabe et le français, corpus, dictionnaires électroniques, etc. Ensuite, dans la deuxième section, nous présentons la reconnaissance de l’écriture manuscrite en ligne. Dans cette optique, nous exposons une approche statistique basée sur le réseau de neurones, puis, nous présentons la conception de l’architecture du système de reconnaissance ainsi que l’implémentation de l’algorithme de la reconnaissance.La deuxième partie de notre exposé porte sur l’élaboration, l’intégration et l’exploitation des outils TAL utilisés (analyseurs morphologiques, système de reconnaissance de l’écriture, dictionnaires, etc.) dans notre système d’apprentissage des langues assisté par ordinateur. Nous y présentons aussi les modules ajoutés à la plate-forme pour avoir une architecture complète d’un système d’ALAO. Parmi ces modules, figure le générateur de feedback qui permet de corriger les fautes des apprenants et générer un feedback pédagogique pertinent qui permet à l’apprenant de cerner et ses fautes. Enfin, nous décrivons l’outil de génération automatique des activités pédagogiques variées et automatisées. / Today, learning computer assisted language is increasingly widespread in public and private institutions. However, it is still far from expectations teachers and learners, and still does not meet their needs. computer-assisted language learning (CALL) today are rather test environments of learner knowledge and more like a support traditional learning. In addition, the feedback provided by these systems remains basic and can not be adapted for independent learning, because it should be able to diagnose problems a learner with spelling, grammar, conjugation, etc., and intelligently generate adequate feedback according to the situation of learning.This research exposes the capabilities of NLP tools to provide solutions to limitations CALL systems in order to develop a comprehensive system and CALL autonomous. We present a complete architecture of a multilingual system learning the computer assisted language for language learners Foreign, French and Arabic. This system could be used for learning languages by learners of the language as a second or foreign language. The first part of our work focuses on the adaptation of tools and resources from NLP for them to be used in a language learning environment computer assisted. These tools and resources, there are stemmers for Arabic and French corpora, electronic dictionaries, etc. Then, in the second section presents the handwriting recognition online. In this optical, we present a statistical approach based on neural network, then we present the design of the architecture of the recognition system as well the implementation of the recognition algorithm.The second part of the presentation focuses on the development, integration and exploitation of NLP tools (morphological analyzers recognition system writing, dictionaries, etc.) in our learning system assisted language computer. We also present the modules added to the platform to have a the complete architecture of a CALL system. These modules, figure generator feedback that corrects the mistakes of learners and generate a relevant educational feedback which allows the learner to identify and faults. Finally, we describe the tool automatic generation and automated various educational activities.

The purpose of this thesis is to elucidate the connection between the institution of the French educational system and its effects on the new French population (predominately children of Algerian immigrants). This thesis makes the connection between the high school or lycee and the social barriers its "minority" students experience within the school system. By focusing on two broad dimensions of the French school system; its structure and values, this thesis argues that the system produces inequalities amongst its students primarily because of its failure to recognise the multiethnic classroom. By contextualising colonial France in Algeria, this thesis shows the connection between France's unique history and its educational institution as it relates to present day French culture. This thesis shows that the French educational system is so well established in its secular traditions that it no longer meets the needs of its students and consequently produces and reproduces exclusion and otherness.

Cette thèse est une étude exploratoire qui porte sur le lien entre le niveau d'éducation moyen des adultes d'un groupe ethnique et la réussite scolaire au secondaire des jeunes de ce groupe. Afin de mieux comprendre la question, une comparaison interethnique est effectuée entre les Luso-canadiens, les Canado-jamaïcains et les Indo-canadiens à Toronto en 2001. La théorie de la reproduction des classes de Bourdieu est le cadre théorique choisi. Afin d'effectuer des comparaisons, des descriptions de chaque groupe ethnique et des données statistiques sont utilisées. À la lumière des analyses effectuées pour chaque groupe ethnique, il semble exister un lien entre le niveau d'éducation général des adultes d'un groupe ethnique et la réussite académique de ces jeunes. L'étude étant exploratoire, les conclusions ne permettent pas de comprendre la question complètement. Néanmoins, des études empiriques dans ce domaine seraient utiles pour mieux comprendre la réussite scolaire des enfants issus de l'immigration et ainsi favoriser la mobilité sociale.

This research adopts a sociocultural framework (Vygotsky, 1978) to investigate how multilingual children express their mathematical reasoning during collaborative problem solving. The topic is important because North America is becoming increasingly multicultural, and according to mathematics teachers this has complicated the challenges of teaching and learning mathematics. Many educators assume that children should be competent in the language of instruction before they engage with mathematical content (Civil, 2008; Gorgorió & Planas, 2001). A review of recent research in this area challenges the idea that multilingual students need to have mastered the official language of instruction prior to learning mathematics (Barwell, 2005; Civil, 2008; Moschkovich, 2007). These researchers demonstrate that the knowledge of the language of instruction is only one aspect of becoming competent in mathematics. My research was designed to build on the findings of the current research on multilingual children’s reasoning in order to more fully understand how multilingual children express their mathematical understanding and reasoning. For this study, two multilingual families, each with 3 children between the ages of 8 and 12, participated in a mathematical problem-solving activity. Findings show the children’s mathematical reasoning was evidence-based drawing on mathematical knowledge and world knowledge.