Digital Commons Network^™

Parents' Perceptions Of Children's Attitude Of The Heritage Language Through Intergenerational Reading In The L1, Ruth A. Aldrich

Theses and Dissertations

Cultural diversity is not a new concept for the United States. In recent years a demographic shift has taken place so that the "language minority" has become the majority in many urban schools. Educational researchers actively seek innovative ways to acculturate new arrivals into North America. They observed that one way to strengthen acculturation is by affirming the heritage languages and cultures. This study involved three educated Afghan-Minnesotan parents reading heritage storybooks to their children at home. Through promoting heritage literacy, I hypothesized that an intergenerational reading program would enhance children's attitude and behavior toward heritage language and culture while …

Hindi "To" And Relevance, Virginia Crowell Phillips

Theses and Dissertations

The morpheme to occurs in the Hindi language frequently, but is difficult to define and difficult for speakers of Hindi as a second language to use correctly. The purpose of this study is to provide insight into how to contributes to the understanding of the utterance that contains it. Relevance Theory, developed by Sperber and Wilson in 1986, is the framework for this study. Relevance Theory makes a distinction between the implicit and explicit content of utterances and between words that encode conceptual representations and words that encode processing instructions. I will consider whether to contributes to implicit or explicit …

Writing System Development And Reform: A Process, Elke Karan

Theses and Dissertations

Orthography issues are complex. Although literature about writing systems has flourished in recent years, issues which preoccupy practitioners involved in orthography design or reform are rarely addressed.

This thesis provides an overview of theory relating to establishing orthographies for unwritten languages and modifying existing systems. It presents principles and recommendations which favor popular acceptance and successful implementation. Introductory chapters explain the recent increased interest in orthography, define terms, introduce pertinent literature, and give an overview of writing system typology. Remaining chapters present linguistic and non-linguistic factors which influence orthography decisions, examine writing system adaptation options, discuss orthography testing, consider motivations …