▼ This is a study of how EFL teachers’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds and attitudes are articulated as authentic and powerful practices in pedagogical spaces (Presence.) Presence is defined using a poststructuralist framework as the production of meaningful interactions between teachers and students in classroom settings. Using a qualitative research design, three case studies of Japanese EFL teachers at a rural Japanese High School were used, collecting data on-site from interviews, observations, lesson plans, and school reports. The results showed Presence when teachers articulated authentic and powerful language pedagogy directly connected to their attitudes and cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and not simply through the automatic delivery of the prescribed lesson. Theoretically, results critically rethink EFL pedagogy; authentic language practice is a continuum of multiple, site-specific relationships demanding mutual intelligibility, not the application of a decontextualized curriculum. Educational implications offer evidence for integrating pedagogies of Presence into transformative EFL education classrooms. Advisors/Committee Members: Gonzalez, Virginia.

▼  This study investigates the development of academic language related to social studies and science learning within a sixth grade classroom. Academic language has been described as the specialized set of words, grammar, and organizational strategies used to express complex ideas, higher order thinking processes and abstract concepts (Zwiers, 2008). 25 sixth graders, ranging in age from eleven to thirteen years of age were observed for sixty minutes daily during a science and social studies block for a period of twelve weeks. From this observation period, six representative learning sequences were chosen and analyzed using Systemic Functional Linguistics. Analysis showed that while these sixth graders utilized informal social language throughout most of their spoken and written text, within each macrogenre were examples of a feature or features that allowed students to make more precise meanings by accessing explicit, decontextualized, and complex language features. A connection between students’ use of these features and the nuances of the related classroom activity was observed. When students were instructed to attend to a certain feature of the text (i.e. underlining vocabulary words in an essay) there was an increase in academic language features within their responses. Further research is needed in order to provide clear articulation of systems that support the development of this register in order to provide explicit examples of effective choices for classroom teachers. Advisors/Committee Members: Laine, Chester.