Modern Languages Commons^™

Perceptual Sensitivity To Stress In Native English Speakers Learning Spanish As A Second Language, Ramsés Ortín, Miquel Simonet

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Second language (L2) learners of Spanish whose first language (L1) is English tend to find Spanish lexical stress patterns difficult to acquire. This study investigates whether such difficulty derives, at least in part, from an obstacle encountered during perceptual processing: reduced perceptual sensitivity to stress distinctions. Participants were adult L1 English L2 Spanish learners of various proficiency levels. The experiment was a categorical matching task with triads of auditory stimuli minimally contrasting in stress (target) or segmental composition (baseline), an ABX task. The results show that learners were more accurate in the baseline condition than in the target condition, suggesting …

Gendered Translations: Working From Asl Into English, Campbell Mcdermid, Brianna Bricker, Andrea Shealy, Abigail Copen

Journal of Interpretation

American Sign Language (ASL) is a visual-spatial language that differs from spoken language, such as English. One way is in the use and characteristics of pronouns (Meier, 1990). Pronouns in ASL, for example, are created by pointing to objects or locations in space (written in English here as POINT), and do not have a gender assigned to them as they do in English (he, she, him, her). So, where it is not specified in ASL, interpreters must decide how to interpret pronouns into English. Limited research has been done on this topic (Quinto-Pozos et al., 2015), and so a study …

Understanding Libyan Teachers’ Intentions And Classroom Practices In Teaching English As A Foreign Language, Khaled El Mezughi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

International demand for learning English has increased dramatically during the last three decades. The ability to speak English has become an essential tool of global communication in many sectors, including international commerce, science, technology, and entertainment. Little research has been conducted to examine the teaching methods and instructional practices being used in Libyan EFL classrooms and their impact on the students' use of English in authentic situations. Due to the importance of improving both the teaching and learning of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Libya, the aim of this study is to understand EFL Libyan educators’ classroom instructional …

Saternus Dissertation-Multilingual Literacy Practices In One Community.Pdf, Julie Saternus

Julie Saternus

English As A Foreign Language (Efl) In Captivity: The Case Of Iranian Prisoners Of War In The Iraq-Iran War, Abbas Emam

Journal of Prison Education and Reentry (2014-2023)

During the Persian Gulf War of Iraq-Iran (1980-1988), thousands of Iranians were taken captive by Iraqi troops. These prisoners of war (POWs) had to find ways to enrich and fill their time in prison camps. Learning English was one such activity. This study was carried out to appraise the motivations of the Iranian POWs for learning English, and to understand more about their textbooks, their classroom environment, the teaching methods and techniques employed, the skills emphasized, the teaching aids improvised, the types of exercises mobilized, as well as the test-taking techniques adopted. A relevant corpus of 21 memoirs and 7 …

The Production Of Mexican Rhotics By Haitian Creole Speakers In Tijuana Mexico: A Sociophonetic Approach, Natasha A. Swiderski

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study investigates the production of the Spanish /ɾ-r/ (e.g., [ˈpɛ.ɾo] ‘but’ vs. [ˈpɛ.ro] 'dog') contrast by 30 multi-lingual Haitian Creole speakers learning Spanish, living in Tijuana, Mexico. Specifically, it (a) tests the Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1995) regarding the ease of acquisition of 'new sounds' (i.e. the Spanish rhotics), (b) examines the effect of orthography and (c) investigates the role of social factors, namely language attitude and education on the production of the Spanish rhotics. An acoustic analysis of 2396 tokens show that despite Flege's predictions, the [r] and the [ɾ] are difficult for the learners to produce, albeit …

Data Diving Into “Noticing Poetry”: An Analysis Of Student Engagement With The “I Notice” Method, Scot Slaby, Jordan Benedict

Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education

This paper explores students’ engagement in reading poems, examining data on their self perceptions of their confidence and competence in reading poems before, during, and after using the “I Notice” methodology as adapted from The Academy of American Poets’ unit plan, “Noticing Poetry” (Slaby, 2017). The data was collected over the course of a month from January 9 through January 30, 2018 and involved five classes of one hundred general English tenth grade students across three teachers’ classrooms at Shanghai American School’s Puxi High School Campus. Data indicates that the “I Notice” method and the “Noticing Poetry” unit and its …

Say "Oui" To "We": A Longitudinal Analysis Of Pronouns And Articles In French And English, Colleen Wilkes

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Modern English only uses gender in personal, reflexive, and possessive third person singular pronouns. Modern English also does not use gendered articles, which extends to not assigning an arbitrary gender to inanimate objects. This study examines how recent this aspect of grammar is, and to what degree did cultural interaction with the French throughout history influence the use of gendered pronouns. Two written texts in British English (one in Old English, one in Modern English) and one written text in French are analyzed for elements of grammatical gender embedded within articles, pronouns, and possessive adjectives. The geopolitical influences on incorporating …

The Other Side Of Fun, Dan Forkapa

ETD Archive

"The Other Side of Fun" is a collection of creative non-fiction essays that examine the relationship between several cultural pastimes and our society as a whole. The thoughts, feelings, and observations made throughout these essays are reflections of my time spent working various jobs pertaining to some form of entertainment. "Mayflies" explores my time as a game-day security worker for the Cleveland Indians, examining the relationship between unionized labor and the lifestyle that encompasses it. "Spiders" chronicles my time spent as a Resident Assistant at Cleveland State, investigating the deep web and the potential dangers that technology can bring. "House …

Arab 202: A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Inquiry Portfolio, Abla Hasan

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This project examines the impact of adopting a text book of teaching Arabic for nonnative speakers that doesn’t use any English. The project targets “ARAB 202”, second year Arabic, since this course has already used a text book that uses English for instructions and grammar for 3 semesters, ARAB 101 , ARAB102, ARAB 201 and before the new curriculum was available in the market. Students of ARAB 202 will be the first to experience the switch to the new curriculum and therefore can be the best to evaluate the experience. For the project, students were asked to complete a pre-course …

A Linguistic Comparison: Stress-Timed And Syllable-Timed Languages And Their Impact On Second Language Acquisition, Madeline M. Conlen

Honors College Theses

Acquisition of a second language can be a challenging task because no two languages are alike in their structure, syllabification, pronunciation, rhythm, etc. Also, after speaking one language for any amount of time, the speaker becomes accustomed to the specific qualities of that language; therefore, learning to speak another language takes extra effort because it is essentially rewiring the brain to think differently in many ways. One important element of language is prosody, or the patterns of stress and intonation in language (Dilley et al 237). The subsector of prosody that is to be studied is rhythm, explicitly isochrony and …

Should English Spelling Be Reformed?: A History Of English Spelling, Rachel M. Schloneger

The Research and Scholarship Symposium (2013-2019)

This paper explores the deep, and surprisingly informative, history of English spelling. It is a well-known fact that English spelling is confusing and troublesome for native speakers and non-native speakers alike. Its history is a winding road that ventures into various languages, picking up rules and idiosyncrasies along the way. The question facing linguists and other English language scholars is whether the system that is worth keeping or if reformative measures are needed. In its history, English has overcome invasions, subjugation, and conversion efforts to become what it is today. In the past many individuals have suggested reforms and have …

Studying And Supporting Writing In Student Organizations As A High-Impact Practice, Brian Hendrickson

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

Institutions of postsecondary education, and the field of writing across the curriculum and in the disciplines (WAC/WID) in particular, need to do more to trouble learning paradigms that employ writing only in service to particular disciplines, only in traditional learning environments, and only in particular languages, or in service to an overly narrow or generalized idea of who students are, where they're going, and what they need to get there. In relating a cross-section of a larger effort to study and support writing as a high-impact practice in a student chapter of an international nonprofit humanitarian engineering student organization, I …

Observations On The Nature Of Translation: El Murmullo De Las Abejas, Gerardo Fuentes

Senior Projects Fall 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

A Corpus For Investigating English-Language Learners' Dialog Behaviors, Nigel Ward, Paola Gallardo

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

We are interested in developing methods for the semi-automatic discovery of prosodic patterns in dialog and how they differ between languages and among populations. We are starting by examining how the prosody of Spanish-native learners of English differs from that of native speakers. To support this work, we have collected a new corpus of conversations among college students. This includes dialogs between a nonnative speaker of English and a native, dialogs between native speakers of English, and Spanish conversations.

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

English In South Asia And Pedagogical Implications, Brittany R. Ehret

Senior Honors Theses

English at present maintains a significant role as a second or foreign language in the region of South Asia as well as globally. In a discussion of this topic, it is important to explore a brief history of the expansion of English and its origins in South Asia. It is also essential to provide a background of South Asian English and its unique linguistic characteristics as well as its use in different contexts of South Asia. The perspectives of linguists and educators who are native to the region of South Asia should be included as much as possible in this …

The Development Of Differential Object Marking In Spanish-English Bilingual Children, Mariluz Ortiz Vergara

Open Access Theses

In monolingual development, the acquisition of differential object marking (DOM) is completed by three years of age (Rodríguez- Mondoñedo, 2008). However, among bilingual speakers, the development and use of the marker at a young age is less predictable. Spanish marks animate and specific direct objects with the preposition-a; English in contrast does not. Based on previous studies documenting transfer in areas where Spanish and English differ, it was predicted that bilingual children would experience difficulties with the use of the preposition both in matrix and left dislocated sentences (CLLD) (Montrul, 2004, Montrul & Bowles, 2009). This study tested 14 simultaneous …