Classroom discourse analysis: gender in Algerian EFL classroom interaction

This thesis investigates the role of gender in Algerian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classroom interaction. Its main foci are twofold. First, it investigates gender patterns in both teacher- student discourse and student- teacher discourse to explore the potential effect of teacher differential treatment and gender differences in classroom language interaction. Second, it examines the gendered classroom discourses and their relation to the wider social context. Based on a broad qualitative research design, the data was obtained through a broad ethnographic approach to classroom observation along with transcripts of audio recordings of the classroom observation, semi structured interviews with the students, and field notes. The study took place in two EFL classrooms consisting of 23 women and man students along with their woman and man teachers of two different subjects (Oral Expression and Phonology, respectively) at the university level. The data was analysed based on different approaches namely, an adopted version of Tsui (1994) framework, and CDA. The main conclusions drawn from the study is that woman students interacted more with both teachers while the man students rarely contributed to the interaction. This is argued to be related to power relation and gendered ideologies in the society. For the teachers’ discourse, the discourse acts used by both teachers demonstrated that the woman teacher enacted power overtly while the man teacher enacted power covertly during the classroom sessions. The analysis also demonstrated that the classroom was a site for constructing and perpetuating gendered discourses such as ‘gender differences discourse’, ‘back-row students’, and ‘diligent women students discourse’

Privacy-Sensitive Audio Features for Conversational Speech Processing

The work described in this thesis takes place in the context of capturing real-life audio for the analysis of spontaneous social interactions. Towards this goal, we wish to capture conversational and ambient sounds using portable audio recorders. Analysis of conversations can then proceed by modeling the speaker turns and durations produced by speaker diarization. However, a key factor against the ubiquitous capture of real-life audio is privacy. Particularly, recording and storing raw audio would breach the privacy of people whose consent has not been explicitly obtained. In this thesis, we study audio features instead – for recording and storage – that can respect privacy by minimizing the amount of linguistic information, while achieving state-of-the-art performance in conversational speech processing tasks. Indeed, the main contributions of this thesis are the achievement of state-of-the-art performances in speech/nonspeech detection and speaker diarization tasks using such features, which we refer to, as privacy-sensitive. Besides this, we provide a comprehensive analysis of these features for the two tasks in a variety of conditions, such as indoor (predominantly) and outdoor audio. To objectively evaluate the notion of privacy, we propose the use of human and automatic speech recognition tests, with higher accuracy in either being interpreted as yielding lower privacy. For the speech/nonspeech detection (SND) task, this thesis investigates three different approaches to privacy-sensitive features. These approaches are based on simple, instantaneous, feature extraction methods, excitation source information based methods, and feature obfuscation methods. These approaches are benchmarked against Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP) features under many conditions on a large meeting dataset of nearly 450 hours. Additionally, automatic speech (phoneme) recognition studies on TIMIT showed that the proposed features yield low phoneme recognition accuracies, implying higher privacy. For the speaker diarization task, we interpret the extraction of privacy-sensitive features as an objective that maximizes the mutual information (MI) with speakers while minimizing the MI with phonemes. The source-filter model arises naturally out of this formulation. We then investigate two different approaches for extracting excitation source based features, namely Linear Prediction (LP) residual and deep neural networks. Diarization experiments on the single and multiple distant microphone scenarios from the NIST rich text evaluation datasets show that these features yield a performance close to the Mel Frequency Cepstral coefficients (MFCC) features. Furthermore, listening tests support the proposed approaches in terms of yielding low intelligibility in comparison with MFCC features. The last part of the thesis studies the application of our methods to SND and diarization in outdoor settings. While our diarization study was more preliminary in nature, our study on SND brings about the conclusion that privacy-sensitive features trained on outdoor audio yield performance comparable to that of PLP features trained on outdoor audio. Lastly, we explored the suitability of using SND models trained on indoor conditions for the outdoor audio. Such an acoustic mismatch caused a large drop in performance, which could not be compensated even by combining indoor models

Participation and agency on an initial training course for teachers of ESOL: managing the discursive demands of the feedback on teaching conference

This small-scale study explores trainee participation and agency in six feedback on teaching conferences (FTCs) on a pre-service English language teacher training (TESOL) course. A requirement of the course is that trainees teach alongside their peers and the trainer, and feedback collectively on their own and each other’s performance. In the first phase of the study, the conferences were video-recorded, and transcribed. Subsequent coding and analysis of the data aimed to establish which topics were discussed, and crucially, who initiated each topic: trainee, peer-observer, or trainer. The objective was to ascertain the balance between trainee and trainer participation. The second phase consisted of a discursive exploration of five individual feedback episodes. Using elements from the field of discourse analysis (conversation analysis, speech act theory, lexical signalling), the study investigated how participants demonstrated agency by using discursive features to manage the content and trajectory of the FTC. The results of the initial topical analysis indicated that trainees took an active role by initiating 363 of the 615 topics tabled in the FTC. The qualitative phase of the study demonstrated how trainees showed further examples of agency: they made discursive choices which directed the flow of the discussion, occasionally limiting the response options available to the trainer. Trainees effectively used the opportunities afforded by the participatory structure of the FTC to ‘think aloud’, verbalizing their understanding of their teaching practice session. They did not openly contest the authority of the trainer but were agentive in other ways: they seemed to ‘flaunt’ the language norms of the FTC, emphasise personality traits, or employ humour to save face or reinforce group solidarity. The findings have several implications for ELT teacher trainers, including the need to foreground speaking rights and responsibilities in the FTC and make the ‘rules of the game’ more transparent

Participation and agency on an initial training course for teachers of ESOL: managing the discursive demands of the feedback on teaching conference

This small-scale study explores trainee participation and agency in six feedback on teaching conferences (FTCs) on a pre-service English language teacher training (TESOL) course. A requirement of the course is that trainees teach alongside their peers and the trainer, and feedback collectively on their own and each other’s performance. In the first phase of the study, the conferences were video-recorded, and transcribed. Subsequent coding and analysis of the data aimed to establish which topics were discussed, and crucially, who initiated each topic: trainee, peer-observer, or trainer. The objective was to ascertain the balance between trainee and trainer participation. The second phase consisted of a discursive exploration of five individual feedback episodes. Using elements from the field of discourse analysis (conversation analysis, speech act theory, lexical signalling), the study investigated how participants demonstrated agency by using discursive features to manage the content and trajectory of the FTC. The results of the initial topical analysis indicated that trainees took an active role by initiating 363 of the 615 topics tabled in the FTC. The qualitative phase of the study demonstrated how trainees showed further examples of agency: they made discursive choices which directed the flow of the discussion, occasionally limiting the response options available to the trainer. Trainees effectively used the opportunities afforded by the participatory structure of the FTC to ‘think aloud’, verbalizing their understanding of their teaching practice session. They did not openly contest the authority of the trainer but were agentive in other ways: they seemed to ‘flaunt’ the language norms of the FTC, emphasise personality traits, or employ humour to save face or reinforce group solidarity. The findings have several implications for ELT teacher trainers, including the need to foreground speaking rights and responsibilities in the FTC and make the ‘rules of the game’ more transparent

Teacher talk at three stages of English language teacher career development: a corpus-aided study

Classroom discourse (CD) and teacher talk (TT) have received much attention over the years across a range of research perspectives, from qualitative case studies of individual teacher narratives to large-scale quantitative research using corpus linguistics (CL) tools. The present study aims to combine the affordances of qualitative and quantitative approaches by using a mixed-method research design to examine the espoused beliefs and classroom discourse of fifteen English language teachers at three stages of career development: novice, developing, and expert. Under the theoretical framework of expert–novice research (e.g. Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1980, 1986; Berliner 1988, 1989; Bereiter and Scardamalia 1993; Tsui 2003, 2005), the present study incorporates corpus-linguistic and discourse-analytical (DA) methodology using a corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) approach (e.g. Partington 2008) in the analysis of two original, spoken corpora, built for the purposes of this research. The first is a corpus of classroom talk titled the ‘Dublin Corpus of Teacher Talk’ (DUBCOTT) and the second is a corpus of face-to-face interviews with the same teachers, titled the ‘Teacher Interview Corpus’ (TIC). Although commonly used to investigate classroom discourse, there is currently a dearth of studies into teacher cognition, in particular the area of teacher beliefs specifically using CL approaches. Using a CADS approach in the analysis of a corpus of face-to-face teacher interviews allows the researcher to identify beliefs and perceptions of teachers at different career stages through the use of thematic analysis, complemented by CL tools, particularly frequency, cluster and keyword analyses Analysis of how teachers at three career stages talk about their teacher talk is conducted concurrently with an examination of classroom discourse at each of the stages, with particular focus on operationalisation of initiation and feedback acts. As well as identifying patterns of language use specific to each stage, overall results indicate the presence of some shared beliefs and approaches of teachers at all three stages, while clearly showing the differentiation and change in beliefs and approaches across the three career stages.N

Becoming an EFL Teacher in a developing country : a qualitative case study from the Republic of Niger

This research study examined the effectiveness of initial English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher education in a Sub-Saharan African context (Niger). It draws on theoretical perspectives from Stenhouse (1967; 1975), Schön (1987; 1991), Vygotsky (1978) and Freire (2000), who defined effective teaching as a process of sharing experience, posing problems, reflecting-in-action and creating meaningful interaction with and for learners. The study therefore situates effective teacher learning as a process of creating and reconstructing knowledge, taking into account student teachers’ prior knowledge and experience rather than transmitting predefined knowledge to them. With these theoretical perspectives in mind, the research was carried out through a qualitative case study framework. An EFL programme was selected, and classroom observation, semi-structured interviews and documents review were undertaken based on a theoretical sampling process for data gathering. Consequently, three modules were observed over a full semester, and twenty-two participants (eighteen students, one part-time educator, one full-time educator and two other educators wearing the hats of administrators) offered interview data. Using thematic analysis strategies, the study has revealed the predominance of traditional approaches of English language teacher education (ELTE) within the EFL programme. The latter offers linguistic and cultural knowledge as the key element for becoming an EFL teacher; it does not provide much in terms of professional pedagogical knowledge and skills. This situation is exacerbated by the predominant modes of course delivery and assessment through which memorisation and rote learning are emphasised. Other findings include students’ attitude towards speaking English and reading as a form of resistance to practices established through educational borrowing, which characterises the review process in that context. The examination of certain institutional and contextual factors has also revealed the extent to which large classes, programme policy, shortage of academic staff and academic resources negatively affect teaching, learning and educators’ professional development. These factors can be regarded as colonial legacies and the consequence of underdevelopment characterised by the lack of solid funding schemes for higher education institutions. Overall findings suggest that the effectiveness of initial EFL teacher preparation within the studied programme is impeded by both pedagogical and institutional factors. Theoretically, findings confirm assumptions relating to the influence of English as an international language and globalisation on educational practices in diverse context. Methodologically, they raise issues pertaining to the need for customisation of research based on beliefs, norms and values of local contexts. To cater for these factors, possible improvements could be secured through a restructure of the ELTE curricula and establishment of an inquiry-based teaching and participatory review framework

Religion and Politics in Swaziland

The author offers a candid reflection on the interface between politics and religion in Swaziland by reflecting on the works of Joshua Mzizi. The strength of the book lies in the fact that the author, a public theologian, gives insight into the bigger story – the interface between politics and religion in Africa

Religion and Politics in Swaziland

The author offers a candid reflection on the interface between politics and religion in Swaziland by reflecting on the works of Joshua Mzizi. The strength of the book lies in the fact that the author, a public theologian, gives insight into the bigger story – the interface between politics and religion in Africa

The institutional and archival social ecologies of a state mental hospital’s records, 1870 to present

In this dissertation, I construct the social ecologies of records from a state mental institution in order to explicate the impact and value of the records to different groups and individuals over time, with a focus on the social implications of the organizational records becoming archival objects. I engage with the repercussions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 on the access of health information, and posit what are the social complexities underlying potentially sensitive institutional records in general. My research site is a still-active facility that arose out of the Reconstruction South, and exclusively served the state’s African American population until it was desegregated after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Through the theoretical frameworks of social constructionism, and specifically Actor-Network Theory, I examine the discursive work that mental hospital records perform in order to mediate relationships between people. The design of the research is rooted in sociological and archival activist research so that I can focus purposefully on the power inequalities and silent participants within record ecologies. I collected data for my study from archival registers and minutes from several distinct eras in the hospital’s history and from interviews with people who currently have or had substantive connections to the creation, management, or use of the archival collection, including former and current facility personnel. In order to construct themes from the data, I use grounded theory with an emphasis on situational analysis and critical discourse analysis. By employing multiple means of analysis, I form a longitudinal picture of the human and non-human participants involved in record-creation and record-keeping work at the hospital. I also develop several major themes, including accountability, classification, the development of psychiatry, and power, which point to the overarching institutional use of records to help bureaucratic bodies control various populations and maintain hierarchies. In illustrating how the records support and perpetuate hegemonic structures, I advocate for a pluralization of the stakeholders who have the right to be included in the discussions about if and how the historical records are to be preserved and accessed.  Informatio