http://hdl.handle.net/1842/154 2013-06-13T01:24:01Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6677 Title: When language policy and pedagogy conflict: pupils’ and educators’ ‘practiced language policies’ in an English-medium kindergarten classroom in Greece Authors: Papageorgiou, Ifigenia Abstract: An international school (BES) in Greece, overwhelmingly attended by Greek origin children, has adopted, as its language policy, English as the ‘official’ medium of interaction, including in the Reception classroom, the target of this research. That is, through its language policy, the school aims to promote the learning and use of English throughout school. At the same time, the school has adopted ‘free interaction’ in designated play areas as its pedagogical approach. The aim of this approach is to promote learners’ autonomy and, in the particular case, it could be interpreted as including the possibility of using Greek. Thus, a conflicting situation has developed: how to reconcile the school’s English monolingual language policy and the pedagogical approach in the play areas? Reception educators are expected to police the use of English in the kids’ play areas without however undermining children’s autonomy and/or disrupting their ‘free interaction’. The feelings and views expressed by educators show that they are seriously concerned about how this conflicting situation can be approached. The aim of this thesis is to respond to this issue of concern by providing a detailed description of how the school’s conflicting policies are actually lived in the educators’ and pupils’ language choice practices in the play areas of their classroom. By adopting the Applied Conversation Analytic perspective of “description-informed action” (Richards 2005), a perspective whereby practitioners are made aware of their own practices and are left to “make (their own) decisions regarding the continuation or modification” of their own policies and practices (Heap, 1990: 47), the aim is to raise BES stakeholders’ awareness about the possible advantages, possibilities and limitations of their policies and practices in Reception, and thus pave the way to more informed language policy making and practice in the school. The data consists of audio-recorded naturally occurring child-child and childadult interactions in the school’s play areas. The analytic framework draws on Spolsky (2004), for whom “the real language policy of a community” resides in its language practices (hence the notion of ‘practiced language policy’), and on conversation analytic methodologies applied to language choice (Auer 1984, Gafaranga 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007a, 2009). The key finding is that, adult school members and children respond to the school’s conflicting policy demands in different ways, i.e. by orienting to different ‘practiced language policies’. On the one hand, as the adults’ ‘medium request’ (Gafaranga 2010) practices in the kids’ play areas demonstrate, from the adult perspective, at all times, participants need to attend to a language preference that is ‘institutionally-assigned’, i.e. adults orient to a ‘practiced language policy’ that is in line with the “declared” (Shohamy 2006) English monolingual language policy of the school. This shows that they have responded to the school’s conflicting policy demands by prioritising the school’s language policy (use of English) at the expense of the pedagogical approach (learners’ autonomy). On the other hand, children approach the conflicting situation differently. Children seem to have developed an alternative ‘practiced language policy’ according to which language choice during peer group interaction is not organised around the school’s “declared” (ibid) language policy but around their interlocutor’s “linguistic identity” (Gafaranga 2001). This alternative language policy allows the kids to attend to the pedagogical approach (learner autonomy and free interaction). 2012-11-28T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6592 Title: EDINBURGH COGNITIVE AND BEHAVIOURAL ALS SCREEN – ECAS English version 2013 Authors: Abrahams, Sharon; Bak, Thomas Abstract: to be added 2013-03-19T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6590 Title: Can Dogs Be ‘Child’s Best Friend’? Authors: Rutherford, Siobhan Abstract: Pre-school children are at the highest risk of being bitten by dogs, and previous research suggests that this is due to limitations in their emotion recognition ability. The use of stimuli in emotion recognition literature has been criticised for being limited by using photographs as videos acquire better performance. 25 pre-schoolers from Edinburgh aged 3 – 5 years old (mean age=4.1 years) were shown photos and videos of dogs and humans displaying the four basic emotions (anger, happiness, sadness and fear) and were asked how they thought the dog or human was feeling. They were then asked what body parts they were looking at to be able to tell this, and why the child thought they could be feeling this way. Their attitude towards dogs and ability to understand that dogs have emotions was also compared to their dog emotion recognition performance. T-test comparisons found that pre-schoolers performed significantly better in the human (M=87%) than dog condition (M=43%), but stimulus type had no effect on performance. Children mainly attended to the face when looking at humans but looked at the whole body when recognising emotions in dogs. Attitude and ability to understand that dogs have emotions had no effect on ability to recognise dog emotions. Experience with dogs did not seem to have an effect but sampling limitations did not allow for inferential testing. The addition of sound to the stimuli in the future could aid video emotion recognition. If this did improve performance it could be helpful in dog bite prevention programmes and may in turn reduce the number of dog bite incidents. Similarly, if eye-tracking studies were carried out on similar stimuli, prevention programmes could assist children in learning where they need to attend to in order to recognise a dog’s emotion by focusing upon their weaknesses. 2013-07-02T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6583 Title: Interactions between languages in verb- and pronoun-agreement in bilingual sentence production Authors: Hatzidaki, Anna Abstract: This thesis investigates how fluent bilinguals make use of the grammar of their two languages when they construct verb- and pronoun-agreement only in one language (monolingual mode) or in both their languages (bilingual mode). We are particularly interested in the impact of the non-response language in sentence processing on the response language. Bilingual research has provided evidence for language integration in bilingual speech (e.g., Hartsuiker, Pickering, & Veltkamp, 2004) which is also consistent with the phenomenon of code-switching whereby speakers can use elements of each language in producing mixed-language utterances (e.g., Myers-Scotton, 2002). So far, studies at the lexical level have provided support for parallel language activation (e.g., Colomé, 2001), yet the issue of whether activation of either language can be strong enough to influence the workings of the other is still in dispute (e.g., Hermans, Bongaerts, de Bot, & Schreuder, 1998, but see Costa, La Heij, & Navarrete, 2006). In three separate sections of the thesis we employ a sentence-completion paradigm widely used in monolingual agreement literature (Bock & Miller, 1991) to examine language interaction effects in the monolingual and the bilingual modes of speech (Grosjean, 2000). English-Greek and Greek-English fluent bilinguals produced completions to singular or plural subjects when the number of the translation was either the same or different, and when their completion either did or did not switch languages. The first section investigates whether there is influence of the divergent number properties of the nonresponse native language (L1) on verb-agreement in the response second language (L2). The results of Greek-English bilinguals show influence of the underlying number of the L1 on completions in the L2. We interpret this in terms of a markedness account (e.g., Eberhard, 1997) whereby parallel activation and competition between an L2 singular subject noun and its L1 plural translation results in plural verbagreement because the singular form is more vulnerable to the marked plural form. English-Greek bilinguals who perform on the same monolingual mode do not show influence of their L1 when speaking in the L2 (Greek). We attribute this finding to a difference of morphological/inflectional properties between the two languages which renders a language that displays fewer overt markings (English) easier to control when utterances are produced in a language that displays more overt markings (Greek) (e.g., Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Semenza, 1995). 2007-06-27T00:00:00Z