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Teaching the cultural aspect of foreign language education is a complex and sometimes difficult task, especially since English has become an international language used in different settings and contexts throughout the world. Building on the idea that the spread of the English language and its international status in the world has made English an important school subject to develop students’ cross-cultural and intercultural awareness, this paper has studied what research reveals about the influence this has had on cultural representations in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks. Findings from a systematic literature review that analyzed four different international studies on the topic are presented. The study showed that EFL textbooks often present stereotypical and overgeneralized representations of culture and that the cultural aspect of EFL education is not adequately addressed since focus tends to lean towards language proficiency. Results also indicated that though steps are made to include cultural representations from different international contexts, the target culture of countries where English is the first language remains dominant in EFL textbooks. The findings are discussed in correlation with the Swedish national curriculum and syllabus.

The purpose of this thesis is to gain a better understanding of linguistic representations among young Québec adults between 25 and 35 years old. Few studies have dealt with this subject since the 1990s, and the more recent work has been concerned with future teachers (Remysen, 2002) or high school students (Razafimandimbimanana, 2005). I chose to focus on young Québec adults raised after the Quiet Revolution and the adoption of the Charter of the French Language (1977) and who are not working in a field related to language in order to determine if, on the one hand, linguistic representations have changed since the 1990s and, on the other hand, if the facts of not being a"language professional" and of not being assessed by a learning institution anymore could affect their attitude towards language. Based on a corpus of interviews conducted with 30 young Québec adults living in and around Sherbrooke, this study aims firstly at collecting the opinions of my informants on various themes related to linguistic representations in Québec, i. e. superiority of French from France, the threat of English in Québec, the use of anglicisms, the degeneration of French in Québec, the concept of mistakes and the complexity of written French. Second, I identify the normative criteria revealed in the informants' discourse that are used to assess the French that is spoken in Québec. This identification is based on an argumentative analysis of the epilinguistic discourse in order to shed light on commonplaces, which are clues of what the informants view as being part of the common standards. Based on the criteria I found, in combination with the standards of A.-M. Houdebine's linguistic imaginary, I developed a hierarchy allowing to determine, on the one hand, which criteria most often lead to a conclusion, and on the other hand, which ones are only used as a concession, indicating that they are acknowledged as a common standard but not taken up by the informant. As some commonplaces are not agreed upon in the discourse on language, I analyse the discourse in which these contradictions are found while paying special attention to the scope of the arguments put forward and to the dissociation of concepts, which helps foster a better understanding of these apparent contradictions.The results of this research reveal, among the group of a speakers interviewed, a certain tolerance towards discrepancies from the standard described in reference works as well as a certain indifference regarding the standard coming from France. Moreover, the normative criteria that bear the greatest argumentative weight are criteria associated to the use of the language, not to the standard of reference. This distinction between use and standard is also found in the explanation of contradictions, which means that the informants make a distinction between assessment of their own use of French and assessment of the use of others (for instance using French of France) and between the spoken language and the"ideal" language.The conclusions drawn from the various analyses carried out in this study reveal a greater linguistic security among my informants than among the populations that had been examined in previous studies.

Dimensional Analysis is a technique that has allowed engineering evaluation of complex objects by scaling analysis results of representative simpler models. The original premise of the procedure stems from the idea of developing non-dimensional parameters to relate physical events and underlying analytical basis. Extending the process to incorporate non-linear and time variant behavior has led to development of a novel process of similitude called the Empirical Similitude Method (ESM) where experimental data of test specimen is combined to produce the required prediction values. Using the original motivation and hypothesis of ESM, this research has expanded the experimental similitude process by using adapted matrix representations and continuous functional mapping of test results. This new approach has provided more rigorous mathematical definitions for similarity and prediction estimations based on an innovative error minimization algorithm. Shape factors are also introduced and integrated into ESM to obtain comprehensive evaluation of specimen choices. A detailed overview is provided summarizing methods, principles and laws of traditional similitude (TSM) and systems that satisfy extension into ESM. Applicability of ESM in different systems is described based on the limitations of TSM in the evaluation of complex structures. Several examples and ideas spanning aerodynamic, thermal, mechanical and electro-magnetic domains are illustrated to complement inherent technical analysis. For example, the new ESM procedure is shown to be considerably more accurate than earlier methods in predicting the values of drag coefficient of an airfoil. A final foray into the regime of \design evaluation by similarity" is made to elucidate applicability and efficiency of developed techniques in practical systems and products. A thorough methodology is also presented highlighting pertinent procedures and processes in usage of this method. / text

This thesis concerns representation growth of finitely generated torsion-free nilpotent groups. This involves counting equivalence classes of irreducible representations and embedding this counting into a zeta function. We call this the representation zeta function. We use a new, constructive method to calculate the representation zeta functions of two families of groups, namely the Heisenberg group over rings of quadratic integers and the maximal class groups. The advantage of this method is that it is able to be used to calculate the p-local representation zeta function for all primes p. The other commonly used method, known as the Kirillov orbit method, is unable to be applied to these exceptional cases. Specifically, we calculate some exceptional p-local representation zeta functions of the maximal class groups for some well behaved exceptional primes. Also, we describe the Kirillov orbit method and use it to calculate various examples of p-local representation zeta functions for almost all primes p.

The development of reading competency is one of the most significant pedagogical achievements during the first few years of schooling. Although most children learn to read successfully when exposed to reading instruction, up to 18% of children experience significant reading difficulty (Shaywitz, 1998). As a group, young children with speech impairment are at risk of reading impairment, with approximately 50% of these children demonstrating poor acquisition of early reading skills (Nathan, Stackhouse, Goulandris, & Snowling, 2004; Larivee & Catts, 1999). A number of variables contribute to reading outcomes for children with speech impairment including co-occurring language impairment, the nature and severity of their speech impairment as well as social and cultural influences. An area of research that has received increasing attention is understanding how access to the underlying sound structure or phonological representations of spoken words stored in long-term memory account for reading difficulties observed in children (Elbro, 1996; Fowler, 1991). Researchers have hypothesised that children with speech impairment may be at increased risk of reading disability due to deficits at the level of phonological representations (Bird, Bishop, & Freeman, 1995). Phonological representation deficits can manifest in poor performance on tasks that require children to think about the sound structure of words. Knowledge about the phonological components of words is commonly referred to as phonological awareness. Identifying and manipulating phonemes within words are examples of phonological awareness skills. Some children with speech impairment perform poorly on phonological awareness measures compared to children without speech difficulties (Bird et al., 1995; Carroll & Snowling, 2004; Rvachew, Ohberg, Grawburg, & Heyding, 2003). As performance on phonological awareness tasks is a strong predictor of early reading ability (Hogan, Catts, & Little, 2005), there is an important need to determine if children with speech impairment who demonstrate poor phonological awareness, have deficits at the level of phonological representations. This thesis reports a series of studies that investigated the relationship between phonological representations, phonological awareness, and word decoding ability in children with moderate to severe speech impairment. A child with complex communication needs (CCN) who used Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) was also examined to determine how the absence of effective articulation skills influences the development of phonological representations. The study employed a longitudinal design to compare the performance of nine children (aged 3:09-5:03 at initial assessment) with moderate to severe speech impairment and 17 children with typical speech development on novel assessment measures designed to determine characteristics of children's phonological representations. The tasks required children to judge the accuracy of spoken multisyllable words and newly learned nonwords. The relationships between performance on these tasks and measures of speech, phonological awareness and early print decoding were also examined. Four assessment trials were implemented at six-monthly intervals over an 18-month period. The first assessment trial was administered approximately 6 to12 months before children commenced school. The fourth trial was administered after children had completed 6 to 12 months of formal education. The child with CCN completed three assessment trials over a period of 16 months. Data analyses revealed that the children with speech impairment had significantly greater difficulty (p<0.01) judging mispronounced multisyllable words compared to their peers with typical speech development. As a group, children with speech impairment also demonstrated inferior performance on the judgment of mispronounced forms of newly learned nonwords (p<0.05). No group differences were observed on the judgment of correctly pronounced real and nonword stimuli. Significant group differences on speech production and phoneme segmentation tasks were identified at each assessment trial. Moderate to high correlations (i.e., r = 0.40 to 0.70) were also observed between performance on the phonological representation tasks and performance on phonological awareness and speech production measures at each trial across the study. Although no significant group differences were observed on the nonword decoding task, 4 of the 9 children with speech impairment could not decode any letters in nonwords (compared to only 1 child without speech impairment) at the final assessment trial when children were 6-years-old. Two children with speech impairment showed superior nonword decoding ability at trial 3 and 4. The within-group variability observed on the nonword decoding task highlighted the heterogeneity of children with speech impairment. The performances of four children with speech impairment with differing types of speech error patterns were analysed to investigate the role of phonological representations in their speech and phonological awareness development. The child with delayed speech development and excellent phonological awareness at trial 1, demonstrated superior phonological awareness and word decoding skills at age 6 years, although his performance on phonological representation tasks was inconsistent across trials. In contrast, a child with delayed development and poor early phonological awareness demonstrated weak performance on phonological representation, phonological awareness, and decoding at each successive assessment trial. The child with a high percentage of inconsistent speech error patterns generally demonstrated poor performance on phonological representation, phonological awareness and decoding measures at each of the 4 assessment trials. The child with consistent and unusual speech error patterns showed increasingly stronger performance on the phonological representation tasks and average performance on phonological awareness but limited word decoding ability at age 6. The 11-year-old girl with CCN, whose speech attempts were limited and unintelligible, demonstrated below average performance on phonological representation tasks, suggesting that an absence of articulatory feedback may negatively influence the development of well-specified phonological representations. This thesis provides evidence for the use of receptive tasks to identify differences in the phonological representations of children with and without speech impairment. The findings also provide support for the link between the representation of phonological information in long-term memory and children's speech production accuracy, phonological awareness and print decoding ability. The variable performance of some children with speech impairment and the child with cerebral palsy demonstrate the need to consider individual characteristics to develop an understanding of how children store and access speech sound information to assist their acquisition of early reading skills.

This thesis sought to conceptualise children’s spelling and reading representations in a novel way based upon the implicit-explicit framework proposed by the Representational-Redescription (RR) model (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). The children studied were aged 4-7 years. Existing models of spelling and reading (e.g. Frith, 1985, Ehri, 1998, 1999, 2002) describe the developmental process as a series of stages/phases. An alternative approach adopted here is derived from the author’s previous research (Critten et al. 2007). It employs a coding scheme that analyses children’s explanations of and performance on, recognition tasks that reveal varying levels of explicitness in understanding of spelling. In this thesis the levels are empirically validated for both spelling and reading. It begins with an attempt to show that young children represent spelling knowledge implicitly. A longitudinal study then elucidates the developmental trajectory of both spelling and reading over the course of a year demonstrating that changes occur in the explicitness of children’s underlying representations. By comparing the co-development of spelling and reading it was possible to demonstrate that phonological information is often explicitly used first in spelling before reading, lending support to Frith’s (1985) “pace maker” notions. The final study examined how context, previously known to facilitate children’s reading ability can also facilitate their spelling development. This effect occurs not just for reading and spelling performance but for explicit understanding, building on the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002) that proposes a role for semantic information in successful spelling and reading. These findings are integrated into a proposal for a new model of development: the Spelling and Reading Explicitation Model (SREM). This model postulates that children develop beyond implicit recognition to form “active” explicit representations, accounting for generalisation errors and characterised as being consciously accessible and verbalisable. It proposes that the development of reading and spelling skill is based upon processes of abstraction, interpretation and application of phonological and morphological knowledge.

In this thesis we consider in detail the following two fundamental problems for semigroup presentations: 1. Given a semigroup find a presentation defining it. 2. Given a presentation describe the semigroup defined by it. We also establish two links between these two approaches: semigroup constructions and computational methods. After an introduction to semigroup presentations in Chapter 3, in Chapters 4 and 5 we consider the first of the two approaches. The semigroups we examine in these two chapters include completely O-simple semigroups, transformation semigroups, matrix semigroups and various endomorphism semigroups. In Chapter 6 we find presentations for the following semi group constructions: wreath product, Bruck-Reilly extension, Schiitzenberger product, strong semilattices of monoids, Rees matrix semigroups, ideal extensions and subsemigroups. We investigate in more detail presentations for subsemigroups in Chapters 7 and 10, where we prove a number of Reidemeister-Schreier type results for semigroups. In Chapter 9 we examine the connection between the semi group and the group defined by the same presentation. The general results from Chapters 6, 7, 9 and 10 are applied in Chapters 8, 11, 12 and 13 to subsemigroups of free semigroups, Fibonacci semigroups, semigroups defined by Coxeter type presentations and one relator products of cyclic groups. Finally, in Chapter 14 we describe the Todd-Coxeter enumeration procedure and introduce three modifications of this procedure.

A massive amount of data is being generated at an unprecedented level from a diversity of sources, including social media, internet services, biological studies, physical infrastructure monitoring and many others. The necessity of analyzing such complex data has led to the birth of an emerging framework, graph signal processing. This framework offers an unified and mathematically rigorous paradigm for the analysis of high-dimensional data with complex and irregular structure. It extends fundamental signal processing concepts such as signals, Fourier transform, frequency response and filtering, from signals residing on regular lattices, which have been studied by the classical signal processing theory, to data residing on general graphs, which are called graph signals. In this thesis, we consider five fundamental tasks on graphs from the perspective of graph signal processing: representation, sampling, recovery, detection and localization. Representation, aiming to concisely model shapes of graph signals, is at the heart of the proposed techniques. Sampling followed by recovery, aiming to reconstruct an original graph signal from a few selected samples, is applicable in semi-supervised learning and user profiling in online social networks. Detection followed by localization, aiming to identify and localize targeted patterns in noisy graph signals, is related to many real-world applications, such as localizing virus attacks in cyber-physical systems, localizing stimuli in brain connectivity networks, and mining traffic events in city street networks, to name just a few. We illustrate the power of the proposed tools on two real-world problems: fast resampling of 3D point clouds and mining of urban traffic data.