Modern Languages Commons^™

Insights Into Chinese Second Language Acquisition: The Relationship Between Glossing And Vocabulary Recall In Reading, Steven S. Devellis

Masters Theses

Reading enhancement strategies are an important tool utilized by foreign language teachers. One of the most common types of during-reading assistance is the marginal gloss, which provides first language (L1) translations of selected foreign language (L2) terms in the margins of a text.

Glossing is an inherently individual approach to reading. It is predominantly motivation-driven, and provides as much assistance to the learner as he or she is willing to use it. Studies to this point have been largely inconsistent in regards to the exact usefulness of glossing, analyzing many variables such as the size, scope, and type of gloss, …

How Students Of Japanese Perceive And Use Technology, David Rubino

Masters Theses

The role of technology in education has expanded to a near universal reality. In foreign languages the field of Technology-enhanced Language Learning, has long sought to effectively implement instruction with these tools, and often to great success, often through the guise of Computer-assisted Language Learning. However, most studies investigating the student perception of class structures incorporating technology are based on what instructors have implemented.

Students, the counterparts of instructors, often own more than one technological tool and will often employ these tools in their studies. For learners of foreign languages, certain aspects of technology are selected for various tasks based …

Japanese Pronoun Adventure: A Japanese Language Learner's Exploration Of His Japanese Gender Pronoun, Takumi Nakano

Masters Theses

In Japanese, there are various kinds of first-person pronouns, and some of them express the referent’s gender identity. Gender-neutral pronouns are made in English- speaking world day by day, but there is not any common first-person pronoun which indicates the gender identity that positions the referent’s gender somewhere between masculine and feminine. The present paper conducted a life story research on the “Japanese life” of an advanced learner of Japanese at a university in the United States who has been exploring his gender identity by coining and using a new Japanese first- person pronoun 㛪 ore, which indicates “in the …

The Effectiveness Of Explicit Instruction Versus Implicit Instruction Method On Chinese Grammar Acquisition, Fuyang Peng

Masters Theses

In the past century, grammar instruction has aroused debate among scholars and instructors in the field of second language teaching and acquisition without absolute consensus. However, for the acquisition of Chinese grammar by adult L2 learners, there is wider acceptance that grammar should be taught due to the unique Chinese grammatical features. The issue in question is merely on how to teach Chinese grammar effectively. Hence, inspired by many other comparative studies on explicit and implicit instruction methods for teaching Western languages such as English, French, Spanish and so forth, the researcher conducted an empirical study to investigate the effectiveness …

Constructing Abe No Seimei: Integrating Genre And Disparate Narratives In Yumemakura Baku's Onmyōji, Devin T. Recchio

Masters Theses

The Onmyōji series has had an incredible impact on Japanese fiction. It has created an entire genre of material called onmyōjimono and sold 5 million copies counting only the novel series. Despite this, it has been woefully understudied by both Japanese and English speaking scholars. The Japanese scholars that do acknowledge it use it as a springboard to launch a survey of Abe no Seimei in written and performed media throughout history, and the English speaking scholars have limited their analyses to the form that oni take in the narrative. My research has revealed that Yumemakura Baku utilizes a complex …