M.Phil. / With this study the better understanding of the skills in, the background with relation to and the attitude towards communicative Afrikaans of .a specific group of Public Administration students of the Technikon Northern-Transvaal is investigated. The focus is principally on the socio-cultural factors that influence the mastering of Afrikaans. The reseach design, including the problem identification, is vested in the theoretical Vygotskyan concept of zone of proximal development. Founded on the theories of both MM Bakhtin and LS Vygotsky, the researcher establishes an own interpretation of the zone of proximal development, when she proposes an integration thereof with the H-model as thought heuristics (Henning 1996). According to this integrated model, the study of students' zone of proximal development in Afrikaans as foreign language encompasses the study of: their language skills; their knowledge of the language; personal and socio-cultural influences; and their metalinguistic skills. This exposition serves as framework for data gathering, data analysis and chapter division. The format of the study is that of case studies which implies that an in-depth investigation is done of various types of data - obtained from a quantitatively small, but sociologically representative group of Public Adminsitration students, The various types of data which are referred to, are: data from talks delivered; written texts; data from listening and reading protocols; and data from interviews. With the interpretation of the data an attempt is not only made to come to an own understanding ("verstehen" - Weber (1958)) of the community of learners' experience and usage of Afrikaans, but also to cultivate a sensitivity for this with the wider teaching and research community.

Vid ett laborativt arbete i undervisningen får eleverna möjlighet att samtala med varandra och dela med sig av tidigare erfarenheter, vilket har en positiv effekt på elevernas lärande. Att skriva i undervisningen har också visat sig ha en stor effekt på elevernas lärande, då de får utveckla och strukturera om sina tankar. Syftet med denna studie har varit att undersöka hur elevernas kunskap inom kemisk bindning utvecklas, samt hur elevernas språk utvecklas vid kursmoment med laborativt inslag och laborationsrapportskrivning. För att undersöka detta har kommunikationen hos fyra elever, som gick första året på gymnasiet och läste kemi, spelats in och sedan transkriberats, när eleverna genomförde och efteråt presenterade en laboration. Det här materialet tillsammans med elevernas laborationsrapporter blev sedan analyserade dels med PEA, dels med fokus på ämnesspråk och vardagsspråk. Resultatet visar att under alla delar i kursmomenten finns det ett fokus på laborationsrapporten och hur den ska skrivas där eleverna får möjlighet att utveckla sina kunskaper inom kemisk bindning samt utveckla sitt ämnesspråk. / Laboratory work in science education gives students opportunity to have a conversation and share knowledge with other classmates, which have a positive effect on students learning. To be able to communicate by writing in science education, has also been proven to have an enhanced the learning process by helping students to organized and challenged their thoughts. Therefore, this study objective is to explore how students’ knowledge about chemical bonding and their scientific language develops with laboratory work and laboratory report writing. To explore this, the communication of four students in their first year of high school, studying chemistry were recorded and later transcribed, while they performed and afterwards presented a lab. This material together with the students’ final laboratory report has been analyzed with regards to PEA and the language used by students. The study indicates that the use of laboratory report writing has helped students to develop their knowledge about chemical bonding, but also their scientific language.

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC) is a site of linguistic diversity where speakers of three major dialects of American English--Northern, Midland, and Southern--are brought into contact with one another. The speech of undergraduates at SIUC is subject to the processes of dialect contact and accommodation; as a result, regional speech features are lost in favor of an overarching SIUC dialect norm or koiné. The linguistic contact that takes place at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale is unique. Previous studies of dialect contact involve situations created by migrations of large populations of settlers moving to a new area. These --migrants‖ settle permanently in the new area and become isolated from their original anchor dialects. The dialect mixture that arises from countless single instances of interpersonal accommodation will, under many circumstances, lead to koinéization or new dialect formation. However, the dialect contact situation at SIUC is different from these previous studies. First, the contact situation at SIUC is made up of fluid populations of highly mobile individuals--undergraduates. While the groups in contact remain consistent, individual students comprising the populations of these groups come and go every year. Additionally, rather than permanently relocating, the contact between the different groups at SIUC is interrupted by students leaving for three months of summer break and one month of winter break every year, thereby preventing speakers of the displaced dialects from becoming isolated from their original anchor dialects. The presence of these factors at SIUC provides a way to test and expand our existing models of language use and language attitudes in regards to dialect contact, accommodation, self- and group- categorization, and individual- and community-level notions of linguistic variation and language change. / text

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

Finland is officially a bilingual country, with Finnish and Swedish as national languages. FinlandSwedes constitute about 6% of the population. This study treats Finland Swedish in relation to Swedish in Sweden, on the one hand, and, onthe other hand, to Finnish. The main question is whether Finland Swedish should be regarded asa variety on a par with regional varieties in Sweden, which presupposes a common written standard, or as a more independent standard language. A corpus of 289 school essays written by compulsory- and upper-secondary-school students inFinland has been compared with school essays written by Swedes in Sweden. The number of provincial features in the essays provide a quantitative measure of the regional and age-related variation among the students. The purpose of the study is to determine whether the two groups of students are developing inthe same direction, toward a common supra-regional standard language in which provincialismsare rare. My hypothesis has been that the Finland-Swedish essays will reflect a different standardlanguage than in Sweden, which would imply that several of the so-called provincialisms belongto an implicit Finland-Swedish written standard. The results indicate that the upper-secondary students, just as in Sweden, use fewer provincialfeatures than do compulsory school students. Students from bilingual municipalities use more Finlandisms than do their cohorts who reside in more Swedish-speaking environments. In generalthese Finlandisms are more closely related to Finnish than to dialects of Swedish, which meansthat the provincialisms of the Finland-Swedish students are in many cases different in nature fromthose of their Swedish counterparts in Sweden. A comparison between Finland-Swedish studentsand Swedish students in Sweden indicates that the students in Finland use more provincialisms, onthe one hand, and, on the other hand, continue to use them at the upper-secondary level as well,which is rare among Swedish students in Sweden. The conclusion is that in a certain sense Finland Swedish can be regarded as an independentstandard language developed out of the interplay with its own dialects and with Finnish. However,regionally varied influence from Sweden, combined with active language-preservation measuresin cooperation with Swedish language planning bodies in Sweden, ensures that Finlandisms, especially in professional expository prose, are normally few in number and can be regarded as negligible, even by Swedish readers in Sweden.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Mississippi State University. Department of Curriculum and Instruction. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education