Education Commons^™

Use Of Eportfolios As A High-Impact Learning Practice For The B.A. In Arabic Program At Csusb, Oraib Mango

Workshops & Institutes

This paper offers a description of how ePortfolios can be used in world language learning programs--specifically Arabic-- not only to assess the success of the program but also to provide students with a platform for reflection, self regulation and self assessment. ePortfolios allow students to set and review their goals, engage with and reflect upon their learning as they document and track the progress of their language proficiency and intercultural competence starting from first year courses and ending with a capstone Signature Work project.

How To Promote Education For Sustainable Development? Vision Of The Educational Situation And Its Contribution To Sustainable Development., Khalid Aada

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

During the last decade, the importance of leaving a rational paradigm, debtor of functionalist and utilitarian models, towards another more congruent with the preservation of natural resources, and therefore of life, has been widely discussed. In the same way, different voices have been raised, pointing out the urgency of inserting these precepts into the educational field, hoping to achieve the true cultural transformation that is needed to consolidate the change. Multiple International Entities promote sustainability in Education as an initiative that should be ambitious, complex and reforming character, given the global scope of the social, economic and environmental situation affecting …

Building An Effective Learning Environment For Chinese Language Learners, Wen-Yu Chang

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This portfolio is a compilation of papers that the author originally wrote during her study in the program of Master of Second Language Teaching at Utah State University. While pursuing the Master’s degree, the author also served as an instructor, teaching assistant, and research assistant in the Chinese program. Thus, this work is framed by the author's personal reflection accumulated from her day-to-day teaching experiences and class observations.

The portfolio consists of three major sections: (1) teaching perspectives, (2) research perspectives, and (3) an annotated bibliography. With the aim to identify the elements of an effective and communicative learning environment …

The Long-Term Impact Of A Study Trip Abroad On The Acquisition Of Regional Spanish Vocabulary Incidentally, Juan P. Rodríguez Prieto

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This quantitative study investigated the possible gains in the acquisition of regional vocabulary as a result of incidental learning after studying abroad for one semester. Five college students took courses at a language institute in Madrid (Spain) while living with a host family during a semester, while a control group with five participants continued their studies at XXXX, in the US. They took a survey online that contained forty vocabulary items exclusive to Spain (majo, mola, guay and similar) three times: at the beginning and at the end of the program and after three years. Results indicated …

Bridging The Cultural And Linguistic Divide Through Virtual Exchange, Diane Ceo-Difrancesco, Carolina Marturet De Paris, Oscar Kennedy Mora, Xóchitl León Oyarzabal, Edison Rene Santacruz Bastidas, María Mena-Böhlke, Olaf Böhlke

Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal

The AUSJAL/AJCU Virtual Exchange Program maximizes the strengths of the Jesuit educational mission and its network to establish sustainable partnerships across borders, language and cultural divides. Initiated in 2006 as a grass roots project between two language instructors, the collaboration has grown to involve 22 universities, 29,561 students and 200 instructors in an innovative, high impact practice that leverages technologies to foster global engagement through virtual interaction. This study documents the perspectives of U.S. and Latin American students participating in virtual exchange experiences at five Jesuit universities. Specifically, research methodology included qualitative data collection to examine the impact of a …

The Impact Of College Students’ Motivational Orientations And The Social Dimension Of Emotional Intelligence In Their Willingness To Study Abroad, Juan P. Rodríguez Prieto

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This study investigated the effect of motivational orientations and the social aspects of emotional intelligence (EI) on L2 Spanish learners’ willingness to participate in a study abroad program. The only significant result was the correlation between an integrative motivational orientation and the Altruism Scale score (N = 68, r = .290, p < .05), indicating that those learners with a higher desire to learn the L2 in order to interact with members of the target community also showed more responsiveness to others as measured by empathy, nurturance, helpfulness, and social responsibility. No additional interactions were found between the motivational orientations and the social aspects of EI. Neither the motivational orientations (integrative/instrumental) nor the social subscales of EI used correlated with the L2 learners’ participation in a short-term (three weeks to Costa Rica, N = 30) or a long-term study abroad program (a full semester to Spain, N = 13). This finding is indicative that those variables do not seem to have an influential effect or predictability on whether participants would ultimately continue their study of L2 Spanish in a foreign country or at home in the near future.

Using Inquiry In Teacher Professional Learning To Build Efficacy For Writing Instruction, Jacqueline B. Koonce, Melissa Brooks-Yip, Kathleen Gibson

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Whitacre (2019) and Curtis (2017) found that participants’ efficacy impacted their writing instruction and ability to engage students. We share our experiences with a professional development program aimed to improve teacher efficacy and literacy of elementary teachers. In this professional learning network, the Study of Early Literacy (SOEL), a higher percentage of teachers reported to a Hanover Research survey that they felt less confident in teaching writing than other areas of literacy. To address this need, one of the authors developed a subgroup to specifically address the teaching of writing with an inquiry-based action research component. Most of the teachers …

Writing Instruction In China: Challenges And Efforts, Rongrong Dong, Danling Fu, Xiaodi Zhou, Buyi Wang

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This qualitative study examined the current writing instruction in 1-12 level education with the data collected in three Chinese cities. The data from the Interviews of teachers and teacher-educators at different levels and from classroom observations at upper elementary to high schools in three metropolitan cities across China provide insights into 1-12 writing instruction in contemporary China. To further reveal the efforts taken by writing teacher under China’s high-stakes testing culture, this paper also presented a case study of an exemplary 10th grade writing teacher, who took tremendous efforts in nurturing true readers and writers in his classroom under the …

Guiding Language Students To Self-Sustained Learning, Hyrum Boone Checketts

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This portfolio is a compilation of written pieces which express the author’s beliefs about excellence in second language teaching. The views expressed here have been shaped by the author’s personal experience and by his time in the Master of Second Language Teaching (MSLT) program and are supported by relevant research throughout.

This portfolio contains three sections: (1) teaching perspectives, (2) research perspectives, and (3) annotated bibliographies. The teaching perspective section is centered on the author’s teaching philosophy, which emphasizes communication in the target language, classroom community, and student motivation. The second section consists of three research papers written over the …

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 …

Dmt And “The Man Box:” Provoking Change And Encouraging Authentic Living, An Arts-Based Project, Steven Reynolds

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

This thesis explores the mind-body experience through an arts-based research approach to examine, and redefine the emotional capacity and usefulness of males through societal determinants that limits and hinders men from living their authentic selves. Through the lens of a metaphoric “Man Box” 112 men participated in a workshop recreating their personal narratives of socialization through, style of dress, coping mechanisms, belief systems and who they should be as men through society's standards. In the “Man Box,” male bonding, and emotional feelings are discouraged, while the objectification of women, material property and physical/emotional strength are encouraged. This research investigates the …

“We Listened To Each Other:” Social-Emotional Growth In Literature Circles, Elena M. Venegas

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Literature circles undoubtedly foster literacy. Yet successful participation in literature circles requires social and emotional competence of students. This article presents findings from a study of a fifth-grade student who demonstrated social-emotional growth while participating in literature circles. Specifically, growth in intrapersonal and interpersonal skills such as self-management, social awareness, social metacognition, and empathy were evident. These findings suggest that literature circles not only foster literacy but also social-emotional learning.

Developing A Hands-On Food Science Curriculum With Bilingual, Elementary-Aged, Hispanic Heritage Students, Jaime Leia Ragos

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

In the United States alone there are over 48 million cases of foodborne illness, with most of these cases deriving from food cooked in the home (Young 2016). Many themes have been assessed such as confidence, knowledge, habits, taste in food preferences, and societal/social influences (Young 2016). However, when food safety curricula are targeted toward younger populations, including young adults and children, attitudes and behavior change (Mullan 2018 and Young 2016). As there is a lack in home economics education in today’s current curriculum, students and their families may not know food safety behaviors (Finch 2005; Young 2016). It has …

Remaking Identities, Reworking Graduate Study : Stories From First-Generation-To-College Rhetoric And Composition Phd Students On Navigating The Doctorate., Ashanka Kumari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation responds to the decreasing number of first-generation-to-college doctorates in the humanities and the limited scholarship on graduate students in Rhetoric and Composition. Scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have long been invested in discussions of academic and/or disciplinary enculturation, yet these discussions primarily focus on undergraduate students, with few studies on graduate students and far fewer on the doctoral students training to become the next wave of a profession. In this dissertation, I argue that if we engage intersectional identities as assets in the design of doctoral programs, access to higher education and academic enculturation can become more manageable …

Developing A Hands-On Food Science Curriculum With Bilingual Elementary-Aged Hispanic Heritage Students, Jaime Leia Ragos

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Why Study Language? Discussing Language And Its Influence On Gender Discrimination, Katelyn Eisenmann

Honors Projects

An applied research project, with the culminating piece being a panel discussion that focused on the ways in which language use and structure contribute to attitudes and perceptions of gender within our society, and the politics that surround concepts of gender.

Patterns In Color Perception, Madeline Henson, Taimur Iftikhar

Student Symposium

Synesthesia is a neurological condition that forces individuals to process a lot of different senses at once. These different senses can be stimulated by anything; for example, if one hears some sounds, they might also perceive those sounds as colors and vice versa. Another form of Synesthesia, termed Grapheme-Color Synesthesia, can occur when one looks at different characters in a language and they see different colors generated in their brain. The amount of colors a person sees by looking at different characters varies. Our goal for our project was to figure out how different languages stimulate different neurological senses for …

Perception Is Reality?, Madeline Henson, Taimur Iftikhar

Student Symposium

Related presentation in Panel 1A: Brain Games

A Pilgrim’S Progress For The Digital, Post-Human(Ist) Age?: Social And Religious Allegory In Russell Banks’S Lost Memory Of Skin, David J. Buehrer Dr.

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

In Lost Memory of Skin (2011), his twelfth novel, Russell Banks continues his exploration of the dark underbelly of American society—in this instance, the moral wilderness of a group of convicted sex offenders exiled to living beneath a concrete causeway in the south Florida city of Calusa, a fictionalized Miami. Banks, who has long been “our premier chronicler of the doomed and forgotten American male” (Schulman 8), focuses in Lost on a twenty-two-year-old parolee referred to throughout only as “The Kid.” While guilty and duly convicted of propositioning an underage girl online for sex, The Kid is still presented in …

Realismo Y Exasperación: Un Estudio De Los Personajes Femeninos En La Pata De La Sota Y La Nona De Roberto Cossa, Mariana Pensa

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

En esta presentación analizamos las obras teatrales La pata de la sota (1967) y La Nona (1977), del dramaturgo argentino Roberto Cossa. Estos textos se constituyen en textos-faro del subsistema teatral del realismo reflexivo. El primero, uno que define la ortodoxia del universo realista, mientras que el segundo la supera, incorporando un universo muy cercano al absurdo y el sin sentido. Trabajando, entonces, desde las coordenadas del realismo y su evolución, nos focalizamos aquí en la relación madre-hija, para señalar cuáles y cómo son los cambios en la construcción de los personajes femeninos en el pasaje de una fase a …

Seccll Conference Program 2019, Seccll Conference

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

Conference Program 2019

Motivated To Learn: Motivational Differences In High School And University-Level Foreign Language Classroom Experiences, Roy Williams Iv

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Student motivation in the context of foreign language learning is a complex topic that influences many areas of language study. Dornyei’s L2 Motivational Self Model and the concept of future self guides give some insight into the underlying motivational orientations when used to analyze self-reported survey data regarding language learning and its perceived benefits (Dornyei & Ushioda, 2009, p. 456). This analysis brings to light some of the major differences between these two contexts, challenges the idea that they are identical or equivalent in learning outcomes, and suggests some practical application to the foreign language classroom at Western Kentucky University.

Encouraging Languages Other Than English In First-Year Writing Courses: Experiences From Linguistically Diverse Writers, Alyssa G. Cavazos

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

First-Year Writing (fyw) courses are ideal writing spaces where students' diverse identities and language resources can flourish for specific rhetorical purposes. While research has focused on multilingual students' language and writing practices, little attention has focused on self-identified multilingual students' perceptions of language difference in fyw. Because fyw courses are an integral space in students' writing experiences and an ideal place to counter English-only ideologies, this article focuses on self-identified multilingual students' perceptions of how they negotiate language practices in academic contexts in higher education and how they perceive the role of languages other than English in fyw. Self-identified multilingual …

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 …

Estado Del Arte Sobre Pensamiento Crítico Y Estrategias Didácticas En Aulas Universitarias De Colombia Periodo 2013-2018, Diego Alejandro Santamaría Pilonieta, Laura Katherine Espitia Mateus

Licenciatura en Español y Lenguas Extranjeras

El presente artículo pretende determinar los mecanismos a través de los cuales se promueve el pensamiento crítico en las universidades del país. Este dilema surge del interés por corroborar que las estrategias didácticas propuestas en el aula fomentan el desarrollo de habilidades de pensamiento crítico, pues en ocasiones la carencia de lineamientos claros de aplicación y medición no permite ratificar la implicación que las habilidades críticas suponen dentro del proceso formativo para el desarrollo social. Así, se propone como incógnita y objetivo general describir de qué manera se fomenta el pensamiento crítico en las aulas universitarias de Colombia; para lograrlo …

Implementing New Strategies In Flan 312: Pedagogies In Foreign Language Teaching, Valerie Morgan

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

FLAN 312 is a pedagogy course that will be offered during the semester system as WLL 3112. The ACUE course provided evidence-based teaching practices which were examined to improve on FLAN 312 as the campus transitions to a semester system. Several strategies were tested in class or developed for subsequent classes. They include aligning assignments with learning objectives and creating transparent assignments, developing rubrics and checklists, and using large group activities to encourage collaboration and discussions.

Propuesta Para La Animación A La Lectura Dirigida A Niños Y Niñas Que Conviven Junto Con Sus Madres En Contextos De Reclusión, Andrea Carolina Pedraza Pinilla, Adriana Del Pilar Cubillos Cubillos

Sistemas de Información, Bibliotecología y Archivística

La presente propuesta de investigación es creada con el fin de dar a conocer cómo, a partir de la bibliotecología se puede llevar a cabo una propuesta de animación a la lectura con niños y niñas que conviven con sus madres en contexto de reclusión, teniendo en cuenta principalmente a Colombia y basándonos en diferentes conceptos y manejos que tienen algunas cárceles de Latinoamérica como (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Perú), contribuyendo a un proceso de resocialización y de reinserción en la vida social de esta comunidad infantil que están tras las rejas con sus madres. Por consiguiente, esta investigación es desarrollada …

Understanding Diverse Bilingual Learners: The Need For A Transdisciplinary Lens, Amy Weimer, Mario Gil, J. Joy Esquierdo

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

The chapter synthesizes findings from diverse disciplinary perspectives to make the case that we need a new lens to better serve the diversity of bilingual learners. Drawing upon theories and findings from studies by educators, child developmentalists, and neuroscientists, but moving beyond any one disciplinary perspective, the authors aim to create a unity of new knowledge developed of theories from across disciplines. This approach is exactly what is needed to address the complexity of factors surrounding bilingual learners. Taking a transdisciplinary approach will allow us to move closer toward an understanding of the many factors affecting bilingual children and families, …

Magnifying English Language Learners' Success Through Culturally Relevant Teaching And Learning Frameworks: Acknowledging The Multidimensional Implications On Language, Literacy, And Learning, Isela Almaguer

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

There is a need to amplify the voices of English language learners through authentic language and literacy learning using a multifaceted culturally relevant and responsive teaching and learning framework that encompasses social justice. Specifically, framing the chapter through the lens of the sociocultural theory to better recognize, acknowledge, and understand the influence of culturally relevant learning. Culture plays a crucial role in forming identity and agency, so we must rethink the effect of culturally relevant pedagogy by linking principles of learning to the cultural realities of children, families, and communities on literacy. English language learners require more empowering and engaging …

Examining The Connections Between Target Community Exposure And Language-Related Motivations In University Spanish Students, Allison N. Beecher

Honors Program Projects

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