From Visual Poetry to Digital Art: Image-Sound-Text, Convergent Media, and the development of New Media Languages

This research arises from my practice as a professional artist and my concern with issues of language and communication, particularly, the investigation of ways that arouse emotion and rational thought at once through language. Visual Poetry is a form of expression, which provokes both, and I saw the potential to expand its underlining principles further with the emergence of new technologies. With the digital medium, the main elements of visual and sound poetry: image, sound and text, can now be incorporated into the same piece of work. The aim of this study is to explore new digital communicative systems that interweave visual, oral and semantic elements of language, to produce new media languages where the pre-linguistic and linguistic maintain their symbiotic identities. This study examines theoretical and artistic concerns emerging from the area in-between, which is created by interlacing image, sound and text in the same artwork. It addresses the following series of questions: How to transfer the main concepts from Visual Poetry to Digital Art? How does computer technology transform image, sound and text to create new media languages? What is the role of the author, reader, writer, producer in these new interactive textualities of image, sound and text? How has this affected the new conventions of reading, looking, producing, using and thinking? What does the digital add to the interactivelexts of Visual Poetry? What new meanings and processes of thinking, understanding and interpretation are appearing? In which way do new technologies enhance the collaborative nature of practice? This investigation brings knowledge from other disciplines into the art field and it explores different serniotic models such as the linguistic the visual and the aural. It blurs the barriers between the visual and the linguistic: between different art forms such as fine art, visual poetry and sound art/poetry in a new digital and technological arena. It questions the conventions applied to these critical areas with the aid of the new tools and critical concepts available through digital technology. This study challengest he viewer/listener/userw ith an interface of signsf rom different languages and serniotic systems: the visual (still and moving images), the audible and the linguistic, to participate and explore the multiple possibilities within a work. This investigation seeks to contribute to a new body of knowledge in the development of the areas of Visual Poetry, Digital Art and the new genre of Electronic Poetry, by creating new, innovative, digital artworks for which, as a new form of expression, critical and analytical conventions are still in the process of development

Learning to read Chinese as a second language: building lexical representations in the initial stages of character learning

How do learners of Chinese as a second language acquire characters? When and how do initial L2 Chinese learners build the phonological, semantic and orthographic representations of the graphics? My research investigated the very earliest stages of learning Chinese and the effect of grouping, focusing on how we initially build these representations especially for a writing system which differs from our original one. My research demonstrated, for the first time, that in a time span of only seven days, a considerable number of behavioural changes could be observed to confirm that the learning of Chinese characters takes places. Moreover, representations of the learnt Chinese characters were maintained in long-term memory over the course of several days without further inputs. In this thesis, I provided clear evidence for that learning Chinese characters in semantic group without semantic radical and in phonological group by homophones contributes to better learning results compared to ungrouped learning. Meantime, grouping in semantic category with shared radicals or in rhyming sets inhibits the specification of representations. Reasons for such effects could be attributed to the coactivation of relevant lexical representations as well as to the degree of specification of newly formed lexical representations. A timeline of the initial L2 Chinese learning was also reconstructed based on empirical evidence. The consolidation effect of sleep was also addressed and discussed in this thesis

What Makes Writing Academic

This book argues that what makes writing academic emerges from socio-academic and historical practices rather than conventionalised stylistic, linguistic or syntactic forms. Using a critical realist lens, it re-imagines academic writings as 21st century open systems that change according to affordances perceived by writers. In so doing, the book offers opportunities for re-imagining how, which and whose knowledge emerges. Academic communication hinges on being able to write in certain forms but not others, which risks excluding knowledge that may lend itself to alternative forms of representation, including dialogues, chronicles, manifestos, blogs and comics. Moreover, because academic ability tends to be misleadingly conflated with writing ability, limiting how the academy writes to a relatively narrow set of forms (such as the essay or thesis), may be preventing a range of abilities from emerging. Standardised forms require abstracts, introductions, main bodies, and conclusions and are also predominantly monolingual and monomodal; this can narrow, distort or flatten epistemic representation and can lead to a range of epistemic losses and gains. Drawing on the history of academia, socio-semiotic research, integrational linguistics, and studies in multimodal and visual thinking, and presenting examples from a range of academic writers including students, the book proposes that academic writings be re-imagined as multimodal artefacts that harness a wider range of epistemic affordances

NEGOTIATING CRITICAL BILITERACIES: LANGUAGE AND LITERACY LEARNING IN A BILINGUAL ELEMENTARY CLASSROOM

For over two decades, US bilingual education has been underdeveloped and underexplored due to the No Child Left Behind policy. Thus, additive bilingual-education programs, which develop students’ primary language while simultaneously adding a second language (L2), are becoming more popular in K-12 schools. Traditionally, L2 theories and education tend to focus on narrow aspects of language learning, e.g., vocabulary, grammar, and skills in listening and communication. Students have rare opportunities to contextualize language or participate more deeply in an L2. This work considers a contextualized approach to bilingual education, an integrative model of critical biliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015; Luke & Freebody, 1997;), which considers dynamic identity making as part of language learning. This approach combines critical literacy pedagogies with a multimodal approach to language teaching to support students in learning how to interpret, critique, and produce writing by taking advantage of writing, speech, visual and tactile representations, in both their home language and L2. I examine the intersections between L2 acquisition, specifically writing and writing processes, and dynamic identity making for fifth-grade students in a bilingual elementary school in New England, where I conducted ethnographic research through critical sociocultural perspectives that allowed me to understand how language and literacy learning work with power relationships and produce student identities. Specifically, I consider students’ “becoming” and how an immersive language-learning environment develops transcultural and transnational student identities. My research, whose design is based on critical ethnographic case study, investigates the cultures of a fifth-grade classroom during one school year. My results could subvert mainstream assumptions about L2 acquisition by examining whether fostering dynamic identities for L2 learners is crucial to becoming bilingual and biliterate. My findings challenge the linear perspective of language learning, i.e., the idea that language acquisition need not impact students’ core identities, by questioning whether accepting and fostering students’ dynamic identities facilitates their attaining fluency in the L2. My results address a glaring research gap by offering educators an alternative way to support L2 learners as they interact with the wider world. The findings should greatly interest L2 educators, researchers, and curriculum specialists, by offering a new pedagogical approach to language and literacy learning, one that combines applied linguistics with a critical attention to sociocultural dynamics

What Makes Writing Academic

This book argues that what makes writing academic emerges from socio-academic and historical practices rather than conventionalised stylistic, linguistic or syntactic forms. Using a critical realist lens, it re-imagines academic writings as 21st century open systems that change according to affordances perceived by writers. In so doing, the book offers opportunities for re-imagining how, which and whose knowledge emerges. Academic communication hinges on being able to write in certain forms but not others, which risks excluding knowledge that may lend itself to alternative forms of representation, including dialogues, chronicles, manifestos, blogs and comics. Moreover, because academic ability tends to be misleadingly conflated with writing ability, limiting how the academy writes to a relatively narrow set of forms (such as the essay or thesis), may be preventing a range of abilities from emerging. Standardised forms require abstracts, introductions, main bodies, and conclusions and are also predominantly monolingual and monomodal; this can narrow, distort or flatten epistemic representation and can lead to a range of epistemic losses and gains. Drawing on the history of academia, socio-semiotic research, integrational linguistics, and studies in multimodal and visual thinking, and presenting examples from a range of academic writers including students, the book proposes that academic writings be re-imagined as multimodal artefacts that harness a wider range of epistemic affordances

Mandarin Chinese Teacher Education Issues and solutions

Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world, and in a rapidly globalizing environment, speaking it is an increasingly important skill for young people in the UK. 'Mandarin Chinese Teacher Education' stems from the work of the UCL Institute of Education Confucius Institute, which supports the development of Mandarin Chinese as a language on offer in schools as part of the mainstream curriculum. This edited collection brings together researchers, teachers involved in action research and student-teachers, in an effort to address the current lack of literature specifically aimed at supporting Chinese language teachers. It features: • practical ideas for teachers of Chinese to implement in their own classrooms • evaluation of differing strategies and approaches unique to teaching Chinese • examples of using action research to help teachers reflect on their own practice while informing practice across the discipline. The book will be useful for PGCE Mandarin students, teacher trainers and those involved in the development of Mandarin Chinese in schools across the UK and further afield

The effects of direct instruction in phonological skills on L2 reading performance of Chinese learners of English

Phonological skills are found to be highly predictive of children's reading achievement in the English LI context. Chinese ESL learners are found to be weak in phonological skills because of their logographic Ll background. They often have difficulties in decoding English words, and thus affect their L2 reading development. \ud LI training studies showed that improvement in phonological skills will lead to improvement in reading performance. But no similar training study for Chinese ESL learners is found. This thesis reports three studies which aim at (i) confirming the relationship between phonological skills and reading development in the L2 context of Chinese learners, (ii) identifying the effects of phonological skills training on reading performance, and (iii) determining the effective level or age for receiving the training.\ud The first study compared two groups of Chinese ESL learners, one with phonological skills training in their LI literacy experience and the other without. Results indicated that better phonological skills had led to more effective L2 reading development of the former group. The second and third studies are phonological skills training experiments conducted to Hong Kong students at primary and secondary school levels. The studies found that training at primary level was effective in improving the students' phonological skills, decoding efficiency and reading performance. However, the phonological skills training at secondary level produced no significant effect.\ud Results of the three studies together add positive evidence to research related to phonological skills and reading development, especially in the L2 context. Results of the two training studies conducted at different levels indicate that phonological skills training can be effective if given at early stage, to support L2 literacy development and to counteract interference from Ll. The participants' age and the length of the programme could be determining factors for the effectiveness of the training.\u

The Social and Cultural Contexts of Historic Writing Practices

Writing is not just a set of systems for transcribing language and communicating meaning, but an important element of human practice, deeply embedded in the cultures where it is present and fundamentally interconnected with all other aspects of human life. The Social and Cultural Contexts of Historic Writing Practices explores these relationships in a number of different cultural contexts and from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including archaeological, anthropological and linguistic. It offers new ways of approaching the study of writing and integrating it into wider debates and discussions about culture, history and archaeology