The study investigates how the separate and combined resources of wordings, intonation and music are used to construct emotions and shape the interpersonal worlds of characters in six filmtrailers promoting psychological narrative feature films. The study responds to the concerns of educators that much more needs to be known about the interpersonal potential of sound resources in different texts and contexts to meet the demands of contemporary multiliteracies curricula in Australia. The social semiotic study of multimodality is informed by a systemic functional theory of semiosis, which provides for the analysis of meanings made by distinct semiotics in social contexts. A range of analytical methods is used to describe interpersonal semantics within and across narrative phases. An appraisal framework describing evaluative attitudes in English is used as a means of coding the expression of emotions, judgements and appreciations consistently across the wordings, intonation and music of filmtrailer texts. Different types of prosodic realisations are analysed to describe interpersonal motifs created by wordings, intonation and music. The intermodal and intramodal coupling of attitudinal realisations is analysed to describe how wordings, intonation and music contribute in concert to emotional meaning in orchestrations of genre features. The study identified extensive resources used to highlight the emotions, contrasting attitudes and transformed attitudes typical of the genre, to interest global audiences in the feature films. It was found that music and intonation are vital contributors to the expressions of displeasure, disquiet and misery shaping the kinds of emotional situations that are relevant and familiar to audiences. The study extends current approaches to the analysis of multimodality by drawing on complementary theories and descriptions of sound and emotion. It describes the intonation and music resources used to instantiate attitudinal sub/category meanings and their intensification. It explores prosodic realisations relevant to intonation, and exemplifies multimodal construals of emotional tone.

The Ecole Jacques Lecoq is an international theatre school that was founded by Lecoq in 1956. The school offers a movement-based training, teaching the principles of performance through improvisation, the creation of original theatrical material, and through the study of a repertoire of performance styles including melodrama, bouffon, commedia dell'arte, tragedy and clown. The Lecoq school has had a profound influence on theatre training and practice in many parts of the world, including Australia. Approximately fifty alumni of the Lecoq school have lived and worked in Australia as actors, directors, writers and teachers of theatre. These include theatre practitioners such as Geoffrey Rush, George Ogilvie, Nigel Jamieson, Isabelle Anderson, Heather Robb and Therese Collie. As with their international counterparts, Lecoq alumni in Australia have helped to forge new directions for theatre training and practice, challenging and undermining the dominance of text-based realism and contributing to current trends in physical/image/circus/dance theatre forms. Through an examination of the work of these alumni, the thesis traces and maps the influence of the Lecoq school on Australian theatre. The research strategies employed in the study are based on oral history methodologies, using extensive interviews with alumni as the primary data. The study finds a theoretical basis in post-modernist approaches to history and, using these as a model, attempts to position the influence of the Lecoq school on Australian theatre within its relative socio-cultural, historical and ideological contexts. The thesis problematises the term 'influence' , offering the concepts of 'diaspora' and 'leavening' as complementary alternative terms for understanding 'influence' as it might be applied specifically to the study.

This qualitative study examines the meaning of music in the lives of older people. It maps the diversity of the experience of music for older people and focuses on the emotional, social, intellectual and spiritual roles that music plays in their lives. In-depth and focus group interviews are used to explore the meaning, importance and function of music for 52 older people living in the community aged 60 years and older. The findings reveal that music provides people with ways of understanding and developing their self-identity, connecting with other people, maintaining well-being, experiencing and expressing spirituality, and enhancing cognitive and physical functioning. The results also show how music can contribute to quality of life and positive ageing. Participants revealed how music provides ways for them to have positive self-esteem, feel competent and independent, and avoid feelings of isolation and loneliness. The study highlights the need for health practitioners, community workers, and educators working in gerontology to be better informed of how music can facilitate and sustain older people's quality of life.

The teaching and learning of grammatics ('knowledge about grammar') with young school children is the focus of this study. Historical literature on the teaching of grammar is widely believed to show that a knowledge of grammar is not effective for improving students' literacy outcomes, usually specified in terms of writing. Under-scrutinised in this research are two issues which bear strongly on questions of effectiveness: the affordances of the kind of grammatical description taught, and the quality of pedagogy deployed in the teaching of grammatics. The thesis explores both these issues. Specifically, it investigates the teaching and learning of aspects of systemic functional grammar (developed by M.A.K. Halliday) within a pedagogic framework based on sociocultural constructivist theory (L.S. Vygotsky). The data for the project are drawn from two case studies conducted in Year 2 classrooms. 'Slices' of the case study data are used to analyse and interpret: ways in which to begin the study of a functional grammatics with young novices; benefits from knowledge about verbal Processes for children's improvement in expressive oral reading and punctuation of direct speech; the application of grammatical and genre knowledge in developing a critical reading of a narrative; and early moves in using the grammatics of Theme in one specific aspect of writing. A significant contribution is the project's incorporation of transcribed classroom talk, which is used to illuminate situated practices in teaching and learning grammatics, including the ways in which teacher talk and class discussion mediate the learning of grammatical concepts. Evidence is provided for the accessibility and utility of a grammatics drawn from systemic functional grammar, with the grammar's orientation to meaning in language being central to its potential. Attention to pedagogic design is also argued to be integral to the development of a productive grammatics for schools. The thesis recommends the principled design of forms of semiotic mediation used to teach grammatical concepts (including teacher talk), and the thoughtful and meaningful integration of grammatics with other dimensions of the English/literacy curriculum so that grammatics is taught 'in context' but also with a view to longer term development of a flexible, systematic understanding.