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AbstractThe purpose of this study is to examine textual features in Native American children's literature and Native children's responses to these textual features. Culturally authentic children's literature was used to gain insights into children's perspectives as they engaged in responses within literature circles.This study utilized qualitative research methods and ethnographic techniques. This study draws on two complementary frames: the theorization of culturally authentic Native American children's literature and reader response theory. The study focused on two goals: first, to make explicit decisions about how to depict reoccurring themes, languages, and discourses of culture; second, to acknowledge a reader's ability to draw from a knowledge base of experiences available to members of a particular cultural community while interpreting literature. The students participated in fourteen literature discussions of culturally authentic literature. Data collection included transcripts from literature discussions, interviews, observational field notes, and written artifacts. Categories were constructed through inductive analysis of data.My three research questions were derived from Rosenblatt and reader response theory, including Native American perspectives:1. What Native American textual features are identifiable in fourteen Native American children's books?2. What types of talk about that these textual features do children engage in through literature circles of Native American children's literature?3. What are children's perspectives about reading and discussing Native American children's literature?The findings of this study contribute to teacher education programs, Indigenous education, and the field of Native children's literature. Furthermore, these cultural literatures provide and maintain Native American stories while promoting literacy for all children.

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Abstract Framed within a wholly Indigenous paradigm - Gayanehsragowah - my dissertation is a counterstory constructed to engage colonialism in a decolonizing research and writing project. I chose story, an autoethnographic novel, as form to represent Indigenous reflexive method; a metaphoric text performed to unlock metaphor’s meaning, once known, I see through to and refract truth upon my own life story implicit within that text. To illustrate human potential for healing and self-change, I construct pedagogical relationship between lived experience and theoretical meaning in interlocking and entangled threads inseparable from form, not possible in conventional thesis organization. Tadoda:ho, the Great Law icon for transformation centers my inquiry into effects of cultural, social and political disconnection from Hodinohso:ni: systems; in particular, I examine historical unresolved grief carried both over the life span and across generations. I use Denzin’s approach to critical personal narrative, Ellis’s autoethnographic method and Richardson’s creative analytical practice to create an interpretive text comprised of short stories, poetry, conversations, dialogue, visual representation and layered accounts. My inquiry reveals Battiste’s transforming energy flux, which I call spirit, manifests in Indigenous language structures, and similar to Ellis’s evocative and analytical texts, once voiced through writing, creates change in the universe and in self. Critical reflection and representation of an Indigenous world in constant motion to renew livingness lends key knowledge that reconnection to ancestral histories, lands, and cultures restores Indigenous identity to resolve the trauma of historical grief. As Gayanehsragowah is performative healing narrative, my inquiry intends to add new knowledge of Indigenous story as form with power to inform self-change. / Thesis (Ph.D, Education) -- Queen's University, 2013-03-06 14:34:46.945

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This study investigated reading comprehension, reading fluency and attitudes of students after exposure to extensive reading (ER), an approach to teaching and learning foreign languages without using a dictionary or focusing on grammar, but aiming to get learners to read extensively by choosing books on their own, for general comprehension, good reading habits and enjoyment (Day and Bamford 1998; Prowse 1999). It was conducted in the Thai context with English as foreign language (EFL) students at Rajamangala University of Technology Thanyaburi (RMUTT) in Thailand during a period of four months, one academic semester. The teaching procedure conformed to the principles of ER with a wide-ranging selection of graded reader books. Multiple measurements used to assess comprehension with three narrative texts were written recall protocol, and translation tests; multiple choice questions with twelve texts in timed reading to assess reading fluency; and a survey questionnaire as well as an in-depth interview to gather data on attitudes towards extensive reading. The study employed a double-control pre- and post-test (Solomon) design: two experimental groups (N = 52 and 50) and four control groups (N = 46, 48, 42, and 46) of which two are excluded from the pretest to separate out the effects caused by using the same instruments. The findings suggest positive effects of ER on the learners’ reading comprehension and provide conclusive evidence of reading fluency improvement together with a positive attitude towards ER. The study also revealed that credit or score is a key factor to encourage students to read and they preferred reading in a controlled situation in class including taking the tests of timed reading. The thesis discusses the possibility of using testing as a pedagogical tool for the improvement of reading skills. Implications drawn from the findings suggest that in order to maximize the benefits of ER, an adjustment of procedures is essential prior to the integration with language courses in the Thai and other similar contexts.

This study seeks to determine whether grammatical and presentational features of authentic non-fiction French texts are in any way related to the level of difficulty of texts as perceived by students who have taken Advanced Subsidiary Level (AS). The notions of text and genre are examined, as are the processes of reading in the first language (L1) and in the foreign language (L2). The question of ‘readability, and that of ‘authenticity’ in L2 are also examined. In order to ascertain students’ reactions to different text-types, 150 texts from French sources were gathered and classified. 100-word samples of each text were analysed for various linguistic features. Statistical tests on these were carried out, as well as statistical tests on the visual elements and layout of the whole texts. Further linguistic analysis was carried out within the text-type groups in order to ascertain their grammatical features. 31 students from local tertiary institutions were interviewed, and their perceptions on a sample of the texts were sought. This included the grading of texts for difficulty on a 1-5 Likert scale. The results of the interviews were triangulated with the statistical and linguistic analyses. A relationship was found between text-type and level of perceived difficulty. In the light of these results, the distinction between genre and text-type was examined, and a way was found of linking these into a textual taxonomy, which has close relations with the grammatical and presentational features which characterise the various text-types. In the light of these results, the question of the ‘topic approach’ to the teaching of French is examined, and a way found by which text-types that are perceived to be simpler are studied before those which are perceived to be more difficult. This approach advocates a more logical continuum of grammatical presentation than has hitherto been witnessed in course books for French at this level, while retaining the semantic integrity inherent in the ‘topic approach’.

Ingeniero Civil Industrial / Durante los últimos años en Chile ha aumentado el uso de Internet, de smartphones y de las redes sociales. Entre todas las redes sociales cabe destacar Twitter, dada la visibilidad que tiene al ser una red más abierta que otras. En Chile, el uso de Twitter se concentra en dos tipos: informarse y opinar. La cantidad de opiniones que se registran en Twitter es de gran interés para distintos actores del país, entre los cuales se encuentran empresas que utilizan Twitter como una herramienta de comunicación con sus clientes, para resolver quejas y dudas y hasta para realizar campañas de marketing viral en la red. Dada la masificación de Twitter y la gran cantidad de usuarios, existe la necesidad de poder saber el nivel de influencia de los usuarios y así poder priorizarlos en la resolución de sus necesidad como también poder hacer más efectivas diversas campañas de marketing. Hoy en día, existen diversos servicios que realizan este tipo de tareas, como Klout o BrandMetric. Sin embargo, estos modelos miden la influencia de los usuarios de diversas formas, pero ninguno intenta vaticinar a los usuarios que se volverán influyentes en un futuro próximo. El presente trabajo consiste en definir una influencia en Twitter para luego ver se proyectaría en el tiempo, tomando como hipótesis que es posible medir la influencia de un usuario a partir de su generación de contenido interesante, para lograrlo se definió la influencia en la red de Twitter como la capacidad de generar contenido interesante que repercute en la red social. Viendo los modelos existentes se escogió uno y se modificó levemente para poder obtener un puntaje de lo interesante del contenido generado por un perfil. Dado este modelo se generaron rankings sobre la influencia de un usuario en Twitter, además de rankings en agrupaciones de tópicos asociadas a política y deportes. No se pudo segregar en una mayor cantidad de tópicos por diversos motivos, por lo cual no se consideró que el modelo haya cumplido su objetivo de generar rankings de influencia para distintos grupos de tópicos. Luego, se realizaron los análisis de la predictibilidad para la influencia modelada, llegando a la conclusión que el periodo de datos es muy corto para poder predecir las series temporales. Aunque los resultados pueden parecer desalentadores, el trabajo realizado deja un camino abierto para realizar otros enfoques y trabajos que son explicados en el capítulo final de la memoria. Así, se espera que una buena segmentación y priorización de perfiles puede servir para mejorar la resolución de problemas, encontrar perfiles que serán influyentes en determinados tópicos y focalizar campañas de marketing utilizando perfiles que no sean de un alto costo.