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The purpose of this study is to present a contrastive analysis of the different types of interrogative sentences in English and Vietnamese including their structures and meanings. It is also hoped that the result of this study will be of some use to English teachers in Vietnam in their classroom teaching and in their preparation of teaching materials. It may also be useful to Vietnamese students who are learning English, especially when learning the English interrogative mood. Hitherto, there have been different models of description of language, but the systemic model is considered to be one of the most comprehensive, since it is able to bring out the functional uses of language and can be used to describe any language. For this reason, the systemic model is adopted in this paper to describe the two systems of the English and Vietnamese interrogative mood. The varieties of the two languages, English and Vietnamese, from which examples are taken for analysis in this paper, are Southern British Standard and Standard Vietnamese ranging from colloquial to literary. Throughout each chapter, the examples are numbered in consecutive order. Examples in Vietnamese are presented with a slash mark ( / ) placed between lexical items to facilitate the matching of Vietnamese with the literal English translation which follows. The literal translation is followed by a freer English translation enclosed in quotation marks. The study consists of five chapters. In the first chapter, the author begins by summarizing different views on the nature of language and their applications in language teaching and learning, and then presents a short introduction to systemic linguistics and a brief sketch of systemic grammar. The second chapter is about the English interrogative mood. This description of the English interrogative mood is largely based on the ideas on Mood presented by D. J. Young, lecturer in English in the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology in Britain. In the third chapter, an attempt is made to provide a detailed description of the different types of interrogative sentences in Vietnamese. Chapter four moves to a contrastive analysis which consists of a textual and then a systemic comparison and contrast of the two interrogative mood systems in English and Vietnamese. A recapitulation of what has been done in the previous chapters and some suggestions for the preparation of teaching material and the teaching of English interrogative sentences to Vietnamese students are presented in chapter five, which is the last chapter of the study.

<p>When children encounter new subjects in school, they are also faced with new ways of using language. Learning science thus means learning the language of science, and writing is one of the ways this is accomplished. The present study investigates writing in natural sciences in grades 5 and 8 in Swedish schools. Major theoretical influences for these investigations are found within the socio-cultural, dialogical and social semiotic perspectives on language use.</p><p>The study is based on texts written by 97 students, interviews around these texts and observations from 16 different classroom practices. Writing is seen as a situated practice; therefore analysis is carried out of the activities surrounding the texts. The student texts are analysed in terms of genre and in relation to their abstraction, density and use of expansions. This analysis shows among other things that the texts show increasing abstraction and density with increasing age, whereas the text structure and the use of expansions do not increase.</p><p>It is also argued that a central point in school writing must be the students’ way of talking about their texts. Analysis of interviews with the students is thus carried out in terms of text movability. The results from this analysis indicate that students find it difficult to talk about their texts. They find it hard to express the main content of the text, as well as to discuss it’s function and potential readers.</p><p>Previous studies argue that writing constitutes a potential for learning. In the material studied in this thesis, this potential learning tool is not used to any large extent. To be able to participate in natural sciences in higher levels, students need to take part in practices where the specialized language of natural science is used in writing as well as in speech.</p>

When children encounter new subjects in school, they are also faced with new ways of using language. Learning science thus means learning the language of science, and writing is one of the ways this is accomplished. The present study investigates writing in natural sciences in grades 5 and 8 in Swedish schools. Major theoretical influences for these investigations are found within the socio-cultural, dialogical and social semiotic perspectives on language use. The study is based on texts written by 97 students, interviews around these texts and observations from 16 different classroom practices. Writing is seen as a situated practice; therefore analysis is carried out of the activities surrounding the texts. The student texts are analysed in terms of genre and in relation to their abstraction, density and use of expansions. This analysis shows among other things that the texts show increasing abstraction and density with increasing age, whereas the text structure and the use of expansions do not increase. It is also argued that a central point in school writing must be the students’ way of talking about their texts. Analysis of interviews with the students is thus carried out in terms of text movability. The results from this analysis indicate that students find it difficult to talk about their texts. They find it hard to express the main content of the text, as well as to discuss it’s function and potential readers. Previous studies argue that writing constitutes a potential for learning. In the material studied in this thesis, this potential learning tool is not used to any large extent. To be able to participate in natural sciences in higher levels, students need to take part in practices where the specialized language of natural science is used in writing as well as in speech.

<p>During a few hours of a school day, a student might read textbook texts which are highly diversified in terms of abstraction. Abstraction is a central feature of specialized language and the transition from everyday language to specialized language is one of the most important things formal education can offer students. That transition is the focus of this thesis.</p><p>This study introduces a new three-graded classification of abstraction including the levels of specificity, generalization and abstraction, based on a discussion of the concept of abstraction. The investigations performed, based on this classification, show that texts from different subject areas display distinct patterns of abstraction. The Swedish literary texts had the lowest degree of abstraction, the social science texts had an intermediate degree and the natural science texts were the most generalized and abstract. The results also show that the degree of abstraction in the textbook texts increases in later grade levels.</p><p>The thesis presents a new way of analyzing shifts between levels of abstraction and their functions. Interestingly, the texts with a medium degree of abstraction, the social science texts, are the ones with the greatest variety in shifts. The functions of the shifts differ with respect to cultural domains. The shifts in the Swedish literary texts in general belong to the everyday domain while the shifts in the natural science texts belong to a specialized domain. The shifts in the social science texts had features of both domains.</p><p>A secondary aim of the thesis is to develop the understanding of the relationship between author and reader in the texts. The results from my investigation of modality in the Swedish textbook texts confirm the earlier findings from English and Spanish textbooks. In comparison to other text types, textbook texts present knowledge in a more authoritative and less modalized way.</p><p>From time to time, abstraction is described as a feature that hinders students accessing texts. Some researchers even suggest a removal of features of specialized language in textbook texts, in order to increase students’ understanding. However, in a society where specialized knowledge is necessary, the access to specialized texts is important. A democratic view of education and school mandates that children and adolescents have the opportunity to encounter and learn to encounter specialized language in school. In analyzing the texts special attention is paid to the relationship between the texts, the contexts of use and the student readers.</p>

During a few hours of a school day, a student might read textbook texts which are highly diversified in terms of abstraction. Abstraction is a central feature of specialized language and the transition from everyday language to specialized language is one of the most important things formal education can offer students. That transition is the focus of this thesis. This study introduces a new three-graded classification of abstraction including the levels of specificity, generalization and abstraction, based on a discussion of the concept of abstraction. The investigations performed, based on this classification, show that texts from different subject areas display distinct patterns of abstraction. The Swedish literary texts had the lowest degree of abstraction, the social science texts had an intermediate degree and the natural science texts were the most generalized and abstract. The results also show that the degree of abstraction in the textbook texts increases in later grade levels. The thesis presents a new way of analyzing shifts between levels of abstraction and their functions. Interestingly, the texts with a medium degree of abstraction, the social science texts, are the ones with the greatest variety in shifts. The functions of the shifts differ with respect to cultural domains. The shifts in the Swedish literary texts in general belong to the everyday domain while the shifts in the natural science texts belong to a specialized domain. The shifts in the social science texts had features of both domains. A secondary aim of the thesis is to develop the understanding of the relationship between author and reader in the texts. The results from my investigation of modality in the Swedish textbook texts confirm the earlier findings from English and Spanish textbooks. In comparison to other text types, textbook texts present knowledge in a more authoritative and less modalized way. From time to time, abstraction is described as a feature that hinders students accessing texts. Some researchers even suggest a removal of features of specialized language in textbook texts, in order to increase students’ understanding. However, in a society where specialized knowledge is necessary, the access to specialized texts is important. A democratic view of education and school mandates that children and adolescents have the opportunity to encounter and learn to encounter specialized language in school. In analyzing the texts special attention is paid to the relationship between the texts, the contexts of use and the student readers.

Learning in school is in many respects done through language. However, it has been shown that the language of school assignments is seldom explicitly discussed in school. Writing tasks are furthermore assigned without clear guidelines for how certain lexical choices make one text more powerful than another. The present study is a contribution to a linguistic and pedagogical discussion of student writing. More specifically the focus is on the use of evaluative language in texts written by students in the school subject of Swedish in grades 5, 8 and 11. The major investigations of the study have been accommodated within the theoretical framework of Appraisal. An overview is given of the language resources in the student texts for constructing emotion, judging behavior in ethical terms and valuing objects aesthetically. Another question addressed is that of how attitudinal meaning is intensified, thus creating greater or lesser degrees of positivity or negativity associated with the feelings. The results show that manifestations of attitude are found in practically all texts in the study. However, variations are noted in relation to different genres, age, proficiency level, language background and gender. A contribution of the study in relation to the theoretical framework upon which it draws is an extension of the system of Attitude as well as an identification of different patterns in the use of attitudinal resources. These patterns are furthermore discussed in relation to how students talk about their own written production in terms of text movability. Results indicate that students with a high degree of text movability also use attitudinal resources to a large extent. It is argued that applying the linguistic tool of Appraisal can facilitate a discussion of how to make one aspect of the hidden curriculum more visible, namely, how to write with an Attitude.

This thesis investigates how various text-talks, i.e. text-focused classroom discussions, may scaffold students’ reading of specialised texts in upper secondary school. The study consists of qualitative case studies based on classroom observations of two teachers’ History instruction, focusing on parts defined as text-talks. An intervention study was conducted where one teacher worked with two text-talk approaches. The research questions regard how students move in relation to the text in the text-talks and how text content is incorporated, what scaffolding structures emerge, and whether and how the text-talks differ. A secondary aim is to generate theories concerning the potentials and limitations of text-talk as a reading scaffold. Analyses were done in terms of text movability to show reading positions, intertextual cohesion to show relations between source text and text-talk, and scaffolding which includes peer scaffolding, teacher scaffolding and the text-talks as a scaffold per se. A methodological contribution is the development of a model for content-based analyses of authentic text-talks. The results show that in text-talks that work as a scaffold, students take the expected positions toward the text, and the talks are clearly related to the source text, by means of lexical and conjunctive cohesion that is often varied and built-out. For more demanding texts, the students show dynamic text movability and move between exploring contents, subject field and context. Other characteristics are either peer scaffolding showing dialogicity and negotiation of meaning, or teacher scaffolding enabling students to progress and develop tools for text reception. The intervention approaches seem to scaffold reading to a greater extent than text-talks within ordinary instruction where the framing is weak. In conclusion, the results suggest that both student- and teacher-led text-talks may scaffold reading, but they need to be well planned and prepared with a structured framing.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T18:22:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Marisa de Mitri Ruiz Omaki.pdf: 514146 bytes, checksum: d667f247920e221a4a1cdfed0698e9f3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-10-21 / The creative potential of advertising as a type of genre that calls forth imaginary situations intended to persuade has been dealt with by many authors (CARTER; NASH, 1990, COOK, 1992, 1994, SEMINO, 1997, apud DOWNING, 2003). This is partly due to the fact that current advertising is less interested in listing objective properties of objects than linking the product to another entity, effect or person, making a fusion that ends up involving a featureless product in desirable properties . By the way, Downing (2003) talks about making a textual world in advertising, world in which the choices of the linguistic system give different interpretations of reality, that is, they present different views of the world. The objective of my research is, thus, examining persuasion in advertising, through checking the resources used to make the textual world. Therefore, I resort to Fowler´s Critical Linguistics (Fowler 1991) and to Fairclough´s Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1992), which indicate that Functional Systemic Linguistics is the adequate methodology for this type of analysis / O potencial criativo da propaganda como um tipo de gênero que desempenha a evocação de situações imaginárias com finalidades persuasivas tem sido tratado por muitos autores (CARTER; NASH, 1990; COOK, 1992, 1994; SEMINO, 1997, apud DOWNING, 2003). E isso se deve, em parte, segundo Cook (1992, p. 105), ao fato de a propaganda atual estar menos interessada em alistar propriedades objetivas dos objetos do que em ligar o produto a alguma outra entidade, efeito ou pessoa, criando uma fusão, que acaba envolvendo com propriedades desejáveis um produto descaracterizado . A propósito, Downing (2003) fala em criação de 'mundo textual' na propaganda, no qual, as escolhas no sistema linguístico dão origem a diferentes interpretações da realidade, ou seja, criam diferentes visões de mundo. O objetivo do meu estudo é, assim, o exame da persuasão na propaganda, por meio da verificação dos recursos utilizados para a criação do mundo textual. Analisarei duas propagandas de telefonia celular veiculas no segundo semestre de 2009: (a) uma propaganda da empresa VIVO veiculada em folders encontrados em shoppings, nas lojas da VIVO e (b) uma propaganda da empresa OI veiculada na revista OI Bazar encontrada em shoppings, nas lojas da OI. Para tanto, recorro à Linguística Crítica, de Fowler (1991) e à análise do discurso crítica, de Fairclough (1992), que indicam a metodologia da Linguística Sistêmico-Funcional (LSF) (HALLIDAY, 1994) como adequada para esse tipo de análise. Na LSF, o enfoque recai sobre o sistema da Avaliatividade, uma ampliação da metafunção interpessoal

This thesis investigates how various text-talks, i.e. text-focused classroom discussions, may scaffold students’ reading of specialised texts in upper secondary school. The study consists of qualitative case studies based on classroom observations of two teachers’ History instruction, focusing on parts defined as text-talks. An intervention study was conducted where one teacher worked with two text-talk approaches. The research questions regard how students move in relation to the text in the text-talks and how text content is incorporated, what scaffolding structures emerge, and whether and how the text-talks differ. A secondary aim is to generate theories concerning the potentials and limitations of text-talk as a reading scaffold. Analyses were done in terms of text movability to show reading positions, intertextual cohesion to show relations between source text and text-talk, and scaffolding which includes peer scaffolding, teacher scaffolding and the text-talks as a scaffold per se. A methodological contribution is the development of a model for content-based analyses of authentic text-talks. The results show that in text-talks that work as a scaffold, students take the expected positions toward the text, and the talks are clearly related to the source text, by means of lexical and conjunctive cohesion that is often varied and built-out. For more demanding texts, the students show dynamic text movability and move between exploring contents, subject field and context. Other characteristics are either peer scaffolding showing dialogicity and negotiation of meaning, or teacher scaffolding enabling students to progress and develop tools for text reception. The intervention approaches seem to scaffold reading to a greater extent than text-talks within ordinary instruction where the framing is weak. In conclusion, the results suggest that both student- and teacher-led text-talks may scaffold reading, but they need to be well planned and prepared with a structured framing.