Digital Commons Network^™

Do The Words People Write Capture Their Process Of Change, Orrin-Porter Morrison

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The current study examined the use of commonly used word categories, less commonly used word categories, and change in word use over time in an expressive writing task. A sample of 250 undergraduate students from an archival study who were still experiencing unresolved feelings wrote about a targeted distressing experience for 15 minutes on each of three consecutive days. Narratives were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Program (LIWC). Results showed that six word categories predicted change in outcome, namely first-person singular pronouns, words related to causation, inhibition, certainty, past-tense verbs, and word count. Words related to cognitive …

Canadian Teacher Candidates’ Narratives Of Their Cross-Cultural Experiences In China, Minghua Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is a narrative study, exploring the perspectives of Canadian teacher candidates’ cross-cultural learning experiences in China as a result of their involvement in the Reciprocal Learning Program between the University of Windsor in Canada and Southwest University in China. The study builds on my two years of participation as a graduate assistant in the Reciprocal Learning Program, which is part of the SSHRC Partnership Grant Project between Canada and China. This study focuses on five participants’ personal and professional understanding of cross-cultural knowledge. Based on Connelly and Clandinin’s (1988) narrative inquiry, this study finds some changes from the participants’ …

Normative Democratic Deliberation And The Role Of Argumentation In The Canadian Mandatory Minimum Sentence Debate, Caitlin Sivell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores the role of argumentation within the debates on Bill C-10, the Safe Streets and Communities Act, that came into force in 2012. Through examining Hansard transcripts, this paper aims to investigate how argumentation on mandatory minimums was utilized in this political decision making setting to legitimize and accomplish this policy initiative. I draw upon the concepts of normative democratic deliberation, new right ideology and the punitive turn to explore the Harper government’s use of argumentation strategies and discuss their implications for the Canadian political process and the current direction of the administration of justice in Canada. This …

Towards A New Model Of Semantic Processing: Task-Specific Effects Of Concreteness And Semantic Neighbourhood Density In Visual Word Recognition, Ashley Danguecan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to data from three tasks, Danguecan & Buchanan (2014) demonstrated that semantic neighbourhood density (SND; Buchanan, Westbury, & Burgess, 2001) interacts with concreteness to influence visual word recognition response times (RTs). Importantly, these data suggest that the behavioural effects of these semantic variables are differentially impacted by task demands. The goal of the present study was to more precisely chart the flexibility of semantic processing by comparing recognition RTs of words (varying in concreteness and SND) across seven tasks with different explicit semantic requirements. The data show that linguistic associative information is particularly critical for abstract as compared to …

Situating The Self: Identity And Power Relationships In A Pakistani Esl Classroom, Rooh Ul Amin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Pakistani universities, English plays the key role in students’ upward academic and social mobility; however students do not always enter universities with equal English language skills. This study, therefore, extensively explores the relationship between English language learners’ (ELLs) access to English via prior schooling (public vs. private), participation in classroom discourses and negotiation of identities and power relationships as situated social processes. Informed by Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital and cultural reproduction complemented with the communities of practice (CoP) approach, this study explores how ELLs’ identity and power relationships in an ESL classroom are shaped by (un)limited cultural capital—the …

Somali Parents' Involvement In The Education Of Their Children In American Middle Schools: A Case Study In Portland, Maine, Abdullahi Ahmed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Across the nation, language minority students comprise one of the largest minority groups in U.S. public schools. The increase of linguistically diverse students, especially Somalis, brings unique challenges to Portland, Maine public schools. Different subgroups have their unique characteristics, yet the U.S. education system treats immigrants and English Language Learners (ELL) as somewhat the same (Barrera, 2006; Hosp & Reschly, 2004). Although there are many reasons for the underachievement of minority students in public schools, one way to mitigate low performance of students is engaging parents by creating mutual relationships between parents and schools and involving all families in the …

Selected Student Characteristics Related To Academic Cell Phone Use, David Pauley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The researcher addressed the need for understanding student perceptions and habits of academic cell phone use within a high school environment in regards to student characteristics. Data were gathered and analyzed in order to answer research questions regarding student perceptions of: (a) the usefulness of cell phones as an academic tool, (b) the use of cell phones within school and outside of school for academic purposes, (c) the encouragement of cell phone use to complete assignments, (d) the potential for distractions within the classroom occurring from cell phone use, and (e) the functionality of cell phones for completion of school …

Multiple Instance Fuzzy Inference., Amine Ben Khalifa

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A novel fuzzy learning framework that employs fuzzy inference to solve the problem of multiple instance learning (MIL) is presented. The framework introduces a new class of fuzzy inference systems called Multiple Instance Fuzzy Inference Systems (MI-FIS). Fuzzy inference is a powerful modeling framework that can handle computing with knowledge uncertainty and measurement imprecision effectively. Fuzzy Inference performs a non-linear mapping from an input space to an output space by deriving conclusions from a set of fuzzy if-then rules and known facts. Rules can be identified from expert knowledge, or learned from data. In multiple instance problems, the training data …

Student Engagement And College Readiness In Mathematics., Leah White

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between reform practices, student engagement in mathematics class, college readiness in mathematics for high school students, and mathematics teacher Professional Development (PD). Quasi-experimental mixed methodology addressed the research question(s) in a parallel design. Treatment teachers participated in PD where reformed teaching practices were presented, observed, discussed, and analyzed using a Cognitive Apprenticeship (CA) framework. Student’s mathematics readiness was measured distantly and proximally. Student engagement in mathematics class and reform practice implementation were observed, using Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP), and compared across groups to assess treatment effects pre and post …

The Impact Of Pedagogical Agents' Conversational Formality On Learning And Learner Impressions, Haiying Li

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation examined the impact of agents' conversational formality on the learning of summarization skills and learner impressions in an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) with trialogues (a teacher agent, a student agent, and a human learner). Formal language is in the informational genre (as opposed to narrative) and increases with word abstractness, syntactic complexity, referential cohesion, and deep cohesion. At the other end of the continuum, informal discourse tends to have concrete words, simple syntax, low cohesion (because knowledge-based inferences can fill the gaps), and high narrativity. There have been no experimental investigations that have maniputed teacher language because it …

Communicatin, Conflict And Mental Health: Chinese Immigrant Parents And Their Children, Nonghong Liu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate the potential conflicts between Chinese immigrant parents and their children. Data were collected through survey and interviews. A total number of 170 surveys were analyzed and nine pairs of Chinese Immigrant parents and their high school children were interviewed. The exploration into the participants revealed that Chinese immigrant parents and their children experienced conflicts in education, career choice, and daily behaviors because of cultural differences, different expectations in education and career, language barriers, different ways of thinking, child rebellion, generation gaps, and a lack of communication. These conflicts had made their children …

Using Curriculum-Based Measurement In The Assessment Of Reading Disabilities, Jessica Menard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present investigation looked at students’ reading achievement within the context of the Peer Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) intervention. It consisted of three separate studies, all of which are related to reading achievement and intervention during the early years of school. The purpose of Study One was to determine whether students who are identified with reading disabilities via psychological assessment report make improvements over the school year subsequent to the implementation of this report. It was hypothesized that when teachers have access to psychological assessment reports, they will better understand their students’ individual learning needs and that this will translate …

Auditory Processing And Linguistic Prosody As Cross-Linguistic Precursors In Reading Development, Wei-Lun Chung

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Little is known about the role of prosody in word reading. Mandarin-English bilingual speakers who speak Mandarin as a first language (L1) and English as a second language (L2) are particularly interesting because they must acquire two segmental/phonology systems (Mandarin has simpler syllable structures than does English), linguistic prosody systems (Mandarin tone and English stress), and orthographic systems (Chinese characters and English alphabet). The two papers included in the dissertation implemented correlational designs to examine the contributions of prosodic awareness and other variables to word reading in adult Mandarin-speaking English learners and Mandarin-English bilingual children. The first paper examined English …

'My Heart Is In His Hands': The Lived Spiritual Experiences Of Congolese Refugee Women Survivors Of Sexual Violence, Melissa Anne Smigelsky

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has experienced widespread violence, including sexual violence. Sexual violence toward women includes rape, genital mutilation, and sexual slavery. Many Congolese have sought to escape such conditions as refugees in the United States. In the present study, we examined lived spiritual experiences of nine Congolese refugee women, survivors of sexual violence. Overall, this study provides new insights into participants' experiences of spirituality in the aftermath of sexual trauma and in living as a refugee. Consensual qualitative research (CQR) methods were used to analyze participants' responses to a semi-structured interview protocol. Participants endorsed faith that God …

A Case Study Of The Influence Of Student Recruitment Agencies On Chinese Students' Decision-Making When Pursuing Higher Education In English-Speaking Countries, Yiting Jiang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This case study examines in what ways student recruitment agencies influence the decision-making of Chinese students when pursuing higher education in English-speaking countries. Research shows that the decision-making process, involving selection of programs, institutions, and destinations for international students, is influenced by various factors (Chen & Zimitat, 2006; Hazelkorn, 2011; Mazzarol & Soutar, 2002; Pimpa, 2003). However, the extent to which student recruitment agencies influence the decisions of Chinese students has not been sufficiently studied. Research participants were 25 Chinese students who were using one student recruitment agency located in Northwest China. Data were collected through a questionnaire and interviews. …

Symbolic Representations Versus Embodiment: A Test Using Semantic Neighbours And Iconicity, Simritpal Kaur Malhi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to the symbolic representation account, word meaning can be sufficiently captured by lexical co-occurrence models (Markman & Dietrich, 2000). In contrast, the embodied cognition account maintains that words are understood via simulated perceptual experiences (Barsalou, 1999). The Symbol Interdependency Hypothesis reconciles these different approaches by proposing that we use symbolic representation most of the time and embodied approaches when deeper processing is required (Louwerse, 2007). To test this hypothesis, a series of experiments manipulated symbolic and embodied factors in shallow and deep processing tasks. Concreteness was also manipulated because it is thought to interact with depth of processing. Overall, …

Language Matters In Predicting Meme Success: A Feedforward Connectionist Network, Keith Thomas Shubeck

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The challenge of predicting meme success has gained attention from researchers, largely due to the increased availability of social media data. Many models focus on structural features of online social networks as predictors of meme success. The current work takes a different approach, predicting meme success from linguistic features.We propose predictive power is gained by grounding memes in theories of working memory, emotion, memory, and psycholinguistics. The linguistic content of several memes were analyzed with linguistic analysis tools. These features were then trained with a multilayer supervised backpropagation network. A set of new memes was used to test the generalization …

Bringing Frames Into Focus: Reading Middle English Literature, Jeffery Stoyanoff

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Middle English readers were critical readers who expected rhetorically-sophisticated texts. Middle English authors, who were themselves trained as readers first, acknowledge such a readership by using a variety of framing devices within their texts. The reading techniques that students applied to classical texts in the classroom were beginning to be applied to the then-modern texts of Middle English authors. Authors use these generically-situated framing devices to play with readers’ expectations and to open up their texts for a number of possible interpretations. I elucidate the possible rhetorical moves authors make using framing devices in their texts in response to this …

A Study On The Efficacy Of Sentiment Analysis In Author Attribution, Michael J. Schneider

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The field of authorship attribution seeks to characterize an author’s writing style well enough to determine whether he or she has written a text of interest. One subfield of authorship attribution, stylometry, seeks to find the necessary literary attributes to quantify an author’s writing style. The research presented here sought to determine the efficacy of sentiment analysis as a new stylometric feature, by comparing its performance in attributing authorship against the performance of traditional stylometric features. Experimentation, with a corpus of sci-fi texts, found sentiment analysis to have a much lower performance in assigning authorship than the traditional stylometric features.

Veils: Truth In Translation, Katherine M. Block

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This supporting document for the thesis exhibition entitled “Veils: Truth in Translation” will discuss Block’s exploration of painting during her time at East Tennessee State University. The supporting document also provides the historical background and influences which have contributed to Block's overall process and techniques. These influences include the Abstract Expressionists, Carl Jung, Ferdinand de Saussure, John Dewey, Theodor Adorno, Joan Mitchell and Gerhard Richter. In the supporting document Block probes the idea that non-objective painting is more than a language confined by linguistic elements of sign, signifier, and signified, but is a process of thinking, which is communicated on …

Tennessee Per-Pupil Expenditures In Special Education And Academic Achievement, Melanie C. Davidson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Federal legislation known as the No Child Left Behind act has required states to close achievement gaps. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between special education spending by districts in the state of Tennessee and standardized achievement for students with disabilities.

Secondary data were obtained from the Tennessee Department of Education’s website (www.tn.gov/education). Data from each local education association were collected for the years of 2010-2014 in the areas of special education spending, special education population, and TCAP proficiency percentages in reading and math grades 3-8. Data from each local education association were collected …

African American Parents’ Perceptions Of Public School: African American Parents’ Involvement In Their Childrens’ Educations, Eric D. Howard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The goals for public schools are to educate all students so that they may attend colleges and/or develop relevant job and citizenship skills. African American students enrolled in American public schools struggle to keep up academically, revealing a so called “achievement gap.” Consequently, many African American children are unable to realize their potential and participate as successful contributing citizens. This study examined how African American parents might engage in their children’s schooling and how schools might support this participation to better meet the needs of these students.

The segregation and racism historically practiced in public schools has led to negative …

Ideological Becoming : Intern Teachers' Experience Of Becoming Culturally Responsive Teachers., Sonya Burton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explored the ways that teachers on an intern license who have been recruited by a Teacher Recruitment program experience ideological becoming into culturally responsive teachers in the Four Corners region of the United States. Bakhtin’s theories on ideological becoming and authoritative and internally persuasive discourses frame this study with emphasis on the experiences that caused intern teachers tension and helped them make culturally responsive teaching practices an internally persuasive discourse. I used narrative inquiry methodology to discern intern teachers’ stories and experiences. I interviewed 5 intern teachers teaching in elementary classrooms in the Four Corners region of the …

Mediation In Literacy : Language, Technology, And Modality., Hem Sharma Paudel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The issue of difference in writing, both in terms of language diversity and modalities, has received increasing attention in the context of new developments in technologies, increasing global migration, and intensified intersections of cultural and linguistic practices accompanying these changes. Theories of language and modality are trying separately to develop ways to best respond to the challenges and opportunities brought about by these changes. Responding to scholars’ recent calls for bridging the gap between studies of multilingualism and those of multimodality, this dissertation offers an approach that, instead of separating the study of modality and languages, questions such a tendency …

The Being Of Art And The Art Of Being : Hermeneutic Ontology In Gadamer And Woolf., Adam Noland,

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Overall, the point of this project is to plumb the affinities between Gadamer’s notion of hermeneutic ontology and Virginia Woolf’s novels—how these affinities illuminate and contribute to an improved understanding of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and Woolf’s novels. For their part, Gadamer and Woolf belong to a similar cultural and historical milieu, each, in one way or another, a participant in the intellectual and artistic movement known as Modernism. This movement arose in response to the encroaching impersonality of scientific objectivity: both Woolf and Gadamer recognized the pitfalls of this objectivity, as it necessarily discounts the interpretive opportunity and responsibility of …

An Fmri Study Of Fluent And Nonfluent Beginning Readers, Jennifer Joyce Long

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although reading fluency has been identified as an important component of skilled reading, few studies have examined the underlying neural processes. The purpose of the current study was to compare the neural systems for reading in fluent and nonfluent beginning readers. The Goldberg and Costa (1981) theory of hemisphere differences provided a theoretical framework for conceptualizing the development of reading fluency. This theory proposes that the right hemisphere processes novel stimuli and assembles new descriptive systems while the left hemisphere utilizes fully formed and well-routinized codes, and that a right-to-left shift in hemisphere superiority occurs during skill development. Children between …

An Investigation Of Special Education Administrators' Perceptions Of Response To Intervention Implementation, Tamika Denise Jones

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this researchwas to determine to which extent, as measured both by implementation stage and by number of implementation activities, was RTI being implemented in school districts in Tennessee. In addition the purpose was to determine what impact did special education administrators in Tennessee perceive that RTI implementation has had on student educational outcomes as arbitrated by state support, district support, and adequate professional development opportunities. A sample of 65 special education administrators across the state of Tennessee participated in the study. Participants completed an online version of theSpecial Education Administrators Perceptions of Response to Intervention Surveywhich investigated …

The Role Of Motivation In Second Language Acquisition: The Critical Constructs Of L2 Motivation, Nicholas Cross

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

L2 motivation, as it has been defined in Robert Gardner's composite construct of the integrative motive, has been determined to be essential in the acquisition of a second language. Though some modern researchers have reconceptualized the construct, they have nonetheless reaffirmed its critical components through their own studies. This study explored the phenomenological orientation of the perception of the importance of L2 motivation as understood my 20 ESL teachers with at least three years of teaching experience through four questions: 1. How important to student language learning success (proficiency) do experienced ESL teachers consider motivation to be? 2. What are …

Context In Mind: Contextual Influences In Architecture, Andrew Taylor Gray

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I was fortunate to grow up near New Orleans, Louisiana, a city overflowing in culture and history. Growing up there taught me about the influence of architecture on a place and how it comes into existence out of the surrounding context. Memphis, Tennessee, like New Orleans, is a city rich in culture and history, but due that every place that makes up the earth’s landscape is different in some way, Memphis is another city along the Mississippi River with unique features that set it apart from other places around the globe. The thesis investigates those unique features and how architecture …

Automatic Question Generation And Student Answer Assessment In Dialogue-Based Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Nobal B. Niraula

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dialogue-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) have already proven to be very effective at inducing learning gains in students. These systems are guided by dialog scripts, the heart of many dialog systems, for the interactions with students. The scripts typically consist of a list of questions and corresponding ideal answers. In most ITSs, such scripts are manually crafted from instructional task descriptions. Such manual efforts not only cost more in terms of time and effort but also set a bottleneck in the scalability of the systems. Another major challenge they face is to automatically assess student answers with respect to the …