An examination of the drafting-responding process used to develop students' writing in an English Language for Academic Purposes Course
- Authors: Quinn, Lynn
- Date: 2000
- Subjects: English language -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- Foreign speakers , Rhodes University -- Academic Development Programme , Academic writing -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- South Africa , Educational anthropology -- South Africa , Educational sociology -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2359 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002642 , English language -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- Foreign speakers , Rhodes University -- Academic Development Programme , Academic writing -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- South Africa , Educational anthropology -- South Africa , Educational sociology -- South Africa
- Description: Many students when they arrive at university do not possess the “cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1977) which is favoured by the institution. The purpose of the English Language for Academic Purposes (ELAP) course and the drafting-responding process is to help students to begin to acquire the “cultural capital” required to succeed at university. The research reported on in this thesis examined the drafting-responding process as it is used to develop students’ writing in the ELAP course at Rhodes University. The process involved students submitting drafts of their essays on which they received constructive and formative feedback from their ELAP tutor. This feedback was then used to revise their essays before a final version was submitted for assessment. The research took the form of a case study with an essentially interpretive orientation. I examined the drafts (with the tutor’s comments) and final versions of seven students’ ELAP essays. Additional data was obtained by interviewing the students and the tutor. Underpinning my beliefs regarding the role of writing in learning as well as my orientation to research is an understanding of knowledge and learning as being socially constructed. All writing is embedded in and dependent on, not only the immediate social circumstances, but also the broader social and cultural context. In analysing and discussing the data in this research I used Halliday’s (1985) definition of context, in which he draws a broad distinction between the immediate context of situation and the broader context of culture The research findings showed that the drafting-responding process can help students with the process of developing the academic literacy they need in order to write essays within specific situational contexts, in this case, the context of the ELAP course. In addition, at a broader level, it can help students to begin the process of being initiated into the culture of the university as a whole.
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Morphological development in the interlanguage of English learners of Xhosa
- Authors: Hobson, Carol Bonnin
- Date: 2000
- Subjects: Grammar, Comparative and general -- Morphology Xhosa language -- Foreign speakers Xhosa language -- Morphology
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2348 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002630
- Description: This study investigates the development of morphology in the interlanguage of English learners of Xhosa. A quasi-longitudinal research design is used to trace development in the oral interlanguage of six learners of Xhosa for a period of eight months. The elicitation tasks employed range from fairly unstructured conversation tasks to highly structured sentence-manipulation tasks. The learners have varying levels of competence at the beginning of the study and they are exposed to input mainly in formal contexts of learning. One of the aims of the study is to investigate whether the features of interlanguage identified in other studies appear in the learner language in this study. Most other studies discussed in the literature have investigated the features of the interlanguage produced by learners of analytic and inflectional languages. However, this study analyses the interlanguage of learners of an agglutinative language. Studies of other languages have concluded that learners do not use inflectional or agreement morphology at early stages of development and this conclusion is tested for learners of an agglutinative language in this study. Since agreement and inflectional morphology play a central role in conveying meaning in Xhosa, it is found that learners use morphology from the beginning of the learning process. Although forms may be used incorrectly and the functions of forms may be restricted, morphemes appear in the interlanguage of learners of this study earlier than other studies predict. One of the characteristics of early interlanguage and an early form of learner language called the Basic Variety (Klein & Perdue 1997) is the lack of morphology, but this feature proves to be inadequate as a measure of early development in the interlanguage of learners of a language such as Xhosa. This study concludes, therefore, that the presence of morphology in the interlanguage of learners of Xhosa cannot be an indicator of advanced language development.
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