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theses

The purpose of this research is to understand the information seeking and information utilization behaviors of Armenian-English adult bilinguals, while paying particular attention to the contextual and experiential as well as to the affective and motivational aspects involved.
At a meta-theoretical level, the study is rooted primarily in the symbolic interactionism of George Herbert Mead, Herbert Blumer, and Erving Goffman and the social constructionism of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. Its central underpinning assumption is that the generation, seeking, and utilization of information are social and collective behaviors.
At a theoretical level, this exploration of the human information behavior of adult bilinguals is informed by ELIS (Everyday Life Information Seeking) and the scholarship of Reijo Savolainen, Kimmo Tuominen, and Sanna Talja, together with the works, among others, of Jerome S. Bruner and his notions pertaining to narrative construction, Elfreda Chatman and her small worlds and life in the round, Ross J. Todd and his information intents, and Marcia J. Bates and her berrypicking. The central assumption here is that, because language plays a key role in social construction, bilinguals – with two or more languages at their disposal – occupy a distinct position within this social process.
The research uses mainly qualitative methods, based primarily on the grounded theory of Juliet Corbin, Anselm Strauss, Kathy Charmaz, Thomas R. Lindlof, and Bryan C. Taylor and the narrative-inquiry method of D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly, while also drawing upon biographical methods, as described by Joanna Bornat, Zhiwei Chen, Sanjeev Sonawane, and Brian Roberts, the thick description of Clifford Geertz, and the case study method of Robert K. Yin.
The study is also inspired, among others, by the andragogy of Malcolm S. Knowles, the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, the many notions, including language games, of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the bilingualism of François Grosjean, the communities of practice of Etienne Wenger, the deschooling of Ivan Illich, the hierarchy of needs of Abraham H. Maslow, and the zone of proximal development of Lev Vygotsky.
The value of this endeavor inheres in making a contribution toward understanding the information behaviors of bilinguals, which is prerequisite to designing information products and services optimized for them. Given that half of humanity is bilingual and in view of the paucity of research in this arena, the need for basic research on the human information behavior of adult bilinguals is both evident and pressing.

ETD_9792

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-tga3-z342

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.