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Attribution theory has deserved increasing attention over the last fifteen years as far as foreign language (FL) learning is concerned. Several studies have been conducted with the purpose of relating students' perceptions of success and failure in FL learning to the students' age, gender, perceived level of success, and language studied. The fact that learners' perceptions of success and failure in foreign language learning can be influenced by their own culture is an idea put forward in the 19805 and that has recently been explored in studies on attribution theory. However, these studies did not involve thorough research of the 'cultures' investigated, being therefore simply based on assumptions about the nations' cultural traits, resulting on scientifically inconsistent findings, mainly due to stereotyping. Considering culture as a set of habits, values and beliefs shared by a group of people and construed by them over time in interaction with each other and the environment surrounding them, leading to similar patterns of behaviour, the purpose of this study is to show how students' cultural characteristics may influence the attributions they present for their successes and failures in learning English as a foreign language. It also attempted to identify differences between the way attributions are classified by learners in relation to their dimensions and the way researchers have classified these attributions, to see whether learners' success and failure attributions differed depending on learners' degree of exposure to other cultures, cultural orientation and age, and if these learners' attributions differed from their teachers'. The study took place in a public and a private university in Luanda, capital of Angola (a West African country), with 366 learners and their English teachers. Learners were involved in three different forms of inquiry: focus groups (conducted to uncover cultural parameters that described learners' culture), questionnaires (aimed at confirming these cultural factors and relate them to attributions for success and failure), and interviews. Data findings were analysed from a social constructivist perspective. A mixed methods approach to data analysis was carried out, starting with a qualitative analysis (through constant comparative analysis and grounded theory), followed by quantitative analysis using principal component analysis ~ (to identify significant factors) and logistic regression (to determine to what extent each factor predicted the occurrence of the attributions mentioned). Results, from all the data gathering methods were brought together. These suggest that the most frequently mentioned attributions and the way these were classified as internal/external. controllable/uncontrollable, stable/changeable by respondents differed from the results presented in previous studies conducted in different cultural contexts. A relationship between some of the attributions mentioned by Angolan learners and characteristics of learners' context was established. This relationship was especially observed in relation to new categories of attributions mentioned, the frequency with which specific attributions were mentioned (especially attributions that were part of initial models of attribution theory), and the lack of difference in attributions mentioned by teachers from the public institution for their learners' successes and failures and these learners' attributions. Implications for teachers and learners are discussed.

The data on language acquisition in children with specific language impairment (SLI) primarily come from studies in English reporting particular morphemes that differentiate them from their typically developing (TYP) peers, but markers of impairment vary cross-linguistically. There is some cross-linguistic evidence that SLI disrupts language acquisition at a deeper linguistic level than grammatical morphology; at a level called argument structure (Grela & Leonard, 1997, 2000; Grela, 2003; Sanz-Torrent, Andreu, Badia & Sidera, 2001, 2011), but little is known of the trajectory of acquisition in TYP needed for comparison. The current study examined argument structure production and comprehension in TYP bilingual Spanish/English and their monolingual school-aged children (N = 78), with a focus on expressing causation in alternating and non-alternating verbs that require periphrastic or passive forms, and their anti-causative counterparts. Published studies of argument structure have methodological issues including small Ns, limited details of production errors and exclusion of certain verbs, while bilingual studies fail to separate the languages. Productions of overgeneralizations by TYP are reported from diary data and language samples across languages. A tendency to omit arguments in monolingual and bilingual SLI is based on few opportunities to the exclusion of certain verb types and few exemplars. Results inform theoretical issues related to acquisition and complexity of different verbs and sentence structures, as well as clinically relevant data for comparison against children suspected of being SLI. Findings of productive use of argument structure revealed that monolingual speakers were significantly more accurate than bilingual speakers for English, suggesting that bilinguals had less familiarity with the varying sentence structures despite comparable conversational skills. Significant differences in accuracy among verb types point toward variation in the use of the elicited structures, which was not found to vary by group. Results of the comprehension task revealed no group differences. Significantly greater accuracy was found for particular sentence types compared others as seen in the expressive task, though differences were not noted for group. Discussion centers on the implication of these findings as it relates to our current understanding of argument structure acquisition and how researchers approach future studies, and translation to clinical practice. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Student academic writing in higher education is a central component of language programs whose purpose is to promote advanced literacy in the target language. At this level, students are required to produce texts that are analytical-argumentative in nature. This type of genre requires writers to formulate an interpretative statement or thesis and support it with examples and evidence. Utilizing the theoretical framework of Systemic-Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1985; Martin & Rose, 2003; Colombi, 2003, 2006, 2009; Schleppegrell, 2004; Christie & Derewianka, 2008; Rothery & Stenglin 1997, 2000), this dissertation examines the relationship between argumentative strategies, logical organization, and lexical-grammatical features in two types of argumentative texts, the expository essay and the literary analysis essay. The corpus of this study consisted of 75 texts produced by university-level learners of Spanish who were novices with regard to the use of Spanish for argumentative purposes. Forty-two of the 75 texts were expository essays written by speakers of Spanish as a heritage language on the topic El corrido in Mexico and the United States. This composition was the fourth and last written assignment in the first trimester of a language program specifically designed for home-background speakers who have acquired Spanish mainly through informal oral interactions at home or the community. The second group of texts consisted of 33 literary analysis on the short novel The House on Mango Street. These essays were written by students of Spanish as a second language as the fourth and last written assignment in an intermediate-high Spanish Composition course with emphasis in the development of an academic register. The previous instruction of this group of students had an emphasis on the development of speaking skills through a communicative approach. The results of the analysis show that even though the linguistic-rhetorical strategies of addition (Montano-Harmon, 1991) and reliance on personal experience or on the "everyone knows" type of data (Spicer-Escalante M. L., 2002, 2005) are present in the argumentative writing of speakers of Spanish as a heritage language, their rhetorical and lexico-grammatical repertoire is more comprehensive. It includes rhetorical strategies that are valued in an academic register such as definitional arguments of concepts; comparison of moral values promoted by the social phenomena being analyzed; evaluation of the representativeness of an instance proposed as a model; and the interpretation of the socio-political message that emerges from a story. In regard to the argumentative strategies employed by speakers of Spanish as a second language, the analysis shows that novice writers organized their interpretations on the novel by focusing on character recontextualization (description of qualities and emotional responses to conflicts) or on character development (personal growth as a result of being involved in the events of the narrative). In contrast, for more mature writers characters and their responses to adversity become tokens for values. Their interpretations articulate the dominant messages in the story as representations of values in conflict within the narrative and in the society at large. The results of this study suggest that there are crucial stages of abstraction development through which novices pass as they develop into mature writers. These stages are not restrictive categories, but rather tendencies towards configurations of meaning along a continuum of language development. Considering that diversity in language proficiency is prevalent in our language classrooms, the knowledge of the different language development stages through which language learners pass can assist instructors in the design and improvement of current curricula for the teaching of writing as well as to provide more differentiated feedback according to student's specific needs and language skills. This study includes specific pedagogical recommendations to promote an explicit teaching that identifies social purposes, grammatical structures and rhetorical strategies expected in the different type of argumentative texts commonly assigned in classrooms for both speakers of Spanish as a heritage language and as a second language. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]