الأطروحات اللغات الاجنبية
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Item Identity Quest in Ayi Kwei Armah's Novels(University of Algiers. Faculty of Arts and Languages, 2009) Mami, Fouad; Bensemmane, M'hamed (Directeur de thèse)The Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah (b.1939) has developed his prose fiction into a quest for ways to postulate a satisfying concept of identity. In The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Fragments and Why Are We So Blest? he uncovers the tenets of the present dysfunctional identity which Africa has adopted. Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers seem to attribute the present dysfunctionality to the African past. The same undertaking is repeated in the last two novels: Osiris Rising (1995) and KMT in the House of Life (2002). In both, this writer offers a similar approach to the cultural, social and political impasse in the continent. What is new in these last two works, however, is that Armah excavates historical evidence that attaches West Africa to the land of Kemet, or ancient Egypt. For him, the revival of present day African culture cannot be achieved until African communities connect and identify with the tradition of Ma'at back in Kemetic times. The present malaise and passivity on the part of the African communities, in Armah’s opinion, have been attributed to a long epistemic conditioning rooted in cultural imperialism via the western educational system. Persistent misinformation about African culture and a crude falsification of Africa’s millennial history have paved the way to the slave trade and colonial occupation. Meanwhile, archaic forms of thinking and the institutionalization of legitimacy in tradition have caused a deep-seated self-hatred and inferiority complex on the part of the African before the non-African. In other words, the post independence period is characterized by a lack of any constructive postulation of identity; a fact that has been detrimental to, and perhaps, the principal reason for, the burgeoning of political corruption, military coups, civil wars and illegal immigration. Still, in Armah's opinion, the sorry state of affairs in Africa can be reversed via serious considerations of the millennial past of the continent reaching to the times of ancient Egypt. According to Armah, one should reach a point where ancient Egyptian mythology, philosophy, architecture, egalitarian ethics and other civilizational additions start to be celebrated as African achievements, and thus form the basis for a true cultural renaissance in present day Africa. The deployment of the myth of Isis and Osiris in Armah’s last two novelistic experiments falls in the direction of placing Africa at the heart of ancient Egyptian cosmology and worldview. The authorial intention in iv Fragments, Armah’s second novel, reflects a bleak worldview; a defiled set of values epistemologically rooted in ancient Greece. The switch, in his last two novels, idealising Egyptian worldview, suggests that Armah blames the Greek matrix for generating the present cultural malaise in Africa. A close reading of Armah’s novels suggests that what can be called the ‘Egyptian paradigm’ is favoured over the Greek one, simply because this latter has spelled only patriarchy, hunger for profit and power, plus unjustifiable violence. Additionally, Armah finds the Egyptian paradigm, with its constellative trends of identity, more egalitarian, peaceful, self-enhancing and empowering. This thesis tries to advance the argument that Armah's placement of two mutually contradicting paradigms (Greek versus Kemetic) can be an oversimplification of the problems facing Africa. While some elements in the Greek paradigm, like patriarchy, characterised by the hunt for profit via slavery and violence, is indeed harmful, history proves that patriarchy has not been limited only to ancient Greece. The myth of Isis and Osiris, Armah's principal myth of liberation, itself exudes patriarchal overtones. Besides, Armah's drama is more in favour of polemics where instead it should opt for analysis. Armah neither appreciates African lore as it has always been, nor does he show how western educational schooling is inhibitive when it come to Africa's cultural regeneration. Armah's identity quest is part of that school of thinking whose main problem is its inability to process and evaluate larger quantities of updates than it feels it can handle. As the novels considered in this thesis clearly illustrate, Armah can be qualified as a self-styled realist who often equates imagination with wishful thinking and sees imagination as a way to address the realities of present-day Africa.Item AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF KNOWLEDGE AND ACHIEVEMENT IN THE ENGLISH DEGREE STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ALGIERS WITH FOCUS ON LITERACY SKILLS(University of Algiers. Faculty of Letters and Languages, 2009) Gacimi- Boukhedimi, Yasmine; Bensemmane, Faiza (Directeur de thèse)This thesis attempts to explore the two notions of knowledge and achievement/success in the English Degree Course. It sets out a double aim; one is to explore the nature of knowledge behind degree readers’ successful completion of the course;the second is to examine the extent to which these students’previously acquired literacy in other languages has a qualitative effect on their achievement in a language degree. The research centers on good achievers’ study experience. What they do to complete their studies within the prescribed period, what contribution they make to their English language ability development, how they face study work across subjects are questions addressed in this thesis. Informed by scholarly work on the following themes: academic achievement (Entwistle and Wilson,1977, Norman,1982, Covington, 1922, McMillan, 2000, Curzon, 2001), language ability development/proficiency (Bachman, 1990, Canale & Swain, 1980, Bley-Vroman, 1988, 1989) literacy in both L1 and in an additional language (Reed et al,1985, Winograd, 1977, Eysenck & Keane,1990, McKay, 1992) multilingualism (Ringbom, 1987, Gass & Selinker, 1994, Sanz, 2000, Cenoz, 2001 & 2003), the research seeks firstly to reach a working definition of what FL proficiency stands for. Secondly, it attempts to arrive at a greater understanding of the type of knowledge that is relevant to academic achievement. It also examines the nature of L1 and L+ literacy. Given a consensus on the distinction between declarative knowledge, procedural and strategic knowledge and on their respective but complementary role in language skill and knowledge development, this study highlights the role that both cognition and metacognition play in literacy development and their combined contribution to academic achievement. It analyzes a group of good achievers’ “story” of their study experience. Selected according to a purposive/non-random sampling procedure, the participants were former students in previous tuitions year. Data which were collected by means of a questionnaire, a semi-structured interview and written documents submitted by students for the research purpose, are mostly verbal in nature. They were analyzed and interpreted by means of a step-by-step procedure of meaning v finding, coding and grouping (Strauss and Corbin, 1990, Tesch,1990, Patton, 2002). The themes that this procedure generated were further processed via inductive and deductive processes that led to conceptualization. Data interpretation suggests that early literacy in L1 and or both L1and L2, a sense of achievement at the start of tuition in an additional language, high interest in the language, acceptance of study content, a will to work hard and at a fairly frequent rate lead to course completion by degree readers. The results obtained consistently inform the research questions about participants’ attitude to work, thoughts , study behaviours and work methods. Though limited to be generalizable, the categories that were arrived at mirror academic fitness and schema knowledge (Covington 1992, Marshall 1992) as two prerequisites to academic achievement. Furthermore, when language ability is only developing, participants perceive it as one among other challenges which they face with positive attitude, consistent study action and personal work methods. While these results partly match Entwistle and Wilson’s conclusion on success-predicting factors, other inferred data about literacy use by these students suggest these students’ ease with these two components of their English proficiency. Two participants who, throughout the interview reiterate their interest in English written skills, also mention a link between early literacy in a second language and a fondness for English written skills. This, as well as these participants’ observed study behaviours in the classroom, do not sound in contradiction with multilingualists’ assumption about a favourable role played by previously acquired literacy in the attainment of an additional language literacy. Though in embryo, a link seems to exist between ease with L1/L2 reading and writing and control of the same skills in an additional language. However, the nature of knowledge that leads to a successful completion of studies for the degree course by these students may or may not be due to attainment of high overall language ability in the additional language even if use of declarative, procedural and strategic knowledge can be traced in the participants’ story.Item CROSS-CULTURAL AND IDEOLOGICAL PERCEPTIONS OF THE OTHER IN W.B. YEATS, JAMES JOYCE, JOSEPH CONRAD, CHINUA ACHEBE AND ASSIA DJEBAR(University of Algiers. Faculty of Arts and Languages, 2009) Rebai Maamri, MalikaThis doctoral thesis investigates ‘Otherness’ through works which have thoroughly examined and questioned the creation of a “stable self” by putting it in dialogue with its others and to society as a whole, namely William Butler Yeats’s selected poems, James Joyce’s Dubliners, (1914) Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, (1899) Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), and Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, La Fantasia (1985). By representing the results of English, Belgian and French oppression in tangible material terms as well as its spiritual bankrupcies, these writers mark their works as clearly critical of the colonial regime and opposed to colonial exploitation, positioning themselves as postcolonial through their representations. In this sense, their texts raise issues debated in current postcolonial discussions. Speaking in the voice of the oppressed, in the language of the oppressor as a weapon to make cultural difference visible, these writers indeed analyse the problem of identity crisis, displacement, disintegration and the effects of colonialism on the culture and psyche of the colonised subject. These authors moreover offer possibilities of dismantling polarized constructions of alterity in a way similar to postcolonial critics such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, among others, whose theories are central to the analysis of the above-cited narratives. This study also draws on Bakhtin’s theory on the dialogues of voices in texts, heteroglossia and polyphony among others and theories of intertextuality such as Julia Kristeva’s and Roland Barthes’s, who by using metaphors of “mosaic” and “social text,” encourage us to view a text as part of, and being overrun by a larger “social context,” hence the importance of a socio-critical reading of these writers’ texts to show that their artistic creations are social practices and ideological productions. Each theoretical approach mentioned above will be used where appropriate to bear on some aspects of our analysis in the various chapters of this thesis, which has been organised into two parts respectvely comprising four chapters and seven chapters. One important way to understand the effects of colonisation and decolonisation on Ireland, Nigeria, the Congo and Algeria is to gauge the institutional legacies of history. Part one therefore addresses the colonial legacy in Ireland, Nigeria, the Congo and Algeria. The examination of the British, Belgian and French models of colonisation will reveal common features. Our concern however lies elsewhere, with those forms of domination that revolve around the construction of the Other. It is particularly important to see to what extent the otherness of the Nigerians, Congolese, Algerians and Irish, their supposed ‘inferiority’ and ‘savagery’ justified the colonisers’ intrusion on their respective territories. In Part two, we have therefore first examined the role played by ethnocentric prejudices in shaping the relations of England, Belgium and France towards their respective colonies. We have also focused on the repercussions this thinking had on the minds of the British, Belgian and French colonisers. Working against the background of the West’s history of the colonial enterprise and its exploitation of other societies and cultures, postcolonial theory has thus been used as a vital tool to re-read the texts of Western imperialism and offers a powerful framework for analysing identity formation. We have then analysed Yeats’s,Joyce’s, Conrad’s, Achebe’s and Djebar’s aforementioned texts in the light of postcolonial theory such as Edward Said’s, Frantz Fanon’s, Homi K. Bhabha’s and Gayatri Spivak’s among others. The gist of our argument in the various chapters of this doctoral thesis is therefore twofold: colonialism and postcolonialism as essentially a critique of colonialism in Ireland, Nigeria, the Congo and Algeria.Item Teaching Grammar Through Discourse(University of Algiers. Faculty of Letters and Languages, 2007) Chaouki, Noureddine; Khaldi, Kamel (Directeur de thèse)The present work sets as its main purpose to bring some insights from the two areas of discourse analysis and pragmatics into the teaching of English grammar at the university, in an attempt to help learners to become conscious of the processes that operate when they use language. It addresses the issue of developing students' grammatical competence in parallel with a discourse and pragmatic consciousnessraising. A framework for teaching the three English clauses, declarative, interrogative and imperative is proposed. It consists in describing the three clauses within a model whereby discourse analysis and pragmatics interact to provide a new perspective for the elaboration of students’ communicatively-sensitive grammar. The study attends to such areas as cohesion, coherence and pragmatic acceptability in relation to grammar teaching. The assumption underlying the current enquiry is that much can be gained from the proposed framework in raising students' awareness to understand and produce the English clause formally and contextually. The trend is that teachers of grammar at the university have been preoccupied more with the sentence and its components i.e. effectively operating at or below the level of the sentence. Now, it is time we took a turn in a more discourse and pragmatic oriented direction. The suggested methodology does not dismiss students’ previous grammatical competence nor does it have them treat language as an assemblage of isolated units. It urges them to use such a competence creatively so long as it contributes to the whole area of communicative competence. So, in order to investigate the English clauses, the two areas mentioned above are brought into a symbiotic relationship. The main leading principle is that when the grammar of language is taught for communication, clauses are held as resources for the creation and interpretation of discourse in context. A characterization of clauses and sequences of clauses in combination is presented, putting much more emphasis on the functions and acts they are set to serve. Also, the present enquiry aims at helping language teachers interested in incorporating insights from the two areas of discourse analysis and pragmatics into their teaching, by suggesting some classroom tasks and activities where learners use such strategies as inferring, interpreting and predicting discourse evolving by drawing upon their grammatical potential. To meet the demands of the current methodological orientation and for the sake of validity, students are assessed, following the suggested methodology to determine how far what is learnt along the applied methodology can be deployed. A pre-test was administered before training took place. Its main aim was to have the maximum instructional data background, to diagnose students’ ability to cope with the suggested methodological model and to compare their performance before and after being trained. After a one-term formal training, a post-test was administered where students were assessed on the amount of the discourse and pragmatic awareness they have acquired along the training period. The assessment component made it clear that by incorporating discourse and pragmatic data into the teaching of grammar, students will see their awareness being raised in making appropriate choices from their formal stock of knowledge.