Education Commons^™

Relationship Between Empathy And Language Proficiency In Adult Language Learners, Mika Sakai

Dissertations and Theses

This study reviews concepts and the mechanism of empathy, and the relationship between empathy and language proficiency, focusing on the aspect of cognitive empathy. It also discusses whether empathy levels could be developed by learning language to a highly proficient level. I compared the empathy levels between high and low proficiency second-language learners to determine if there was correlation between empathy and other factors such as gender, studying abroad, education background, and usage of a second language. I found that there was no relationship between empathy level and language proficiency level; however, there was one between empathy and gender. For …

Beyond The Classroom Walls: A Study Of Out-Of-Class English Use By Adult Community College Esl Students, Tracey Louise Knight

Dissertations and Theses

Research in Second Language Acquisition indicates that using English outside of the classroom is an important part of the language learning process. However, studies done on university level ESL and EFL students indicate that students use English minimally when outside of the classroom. This thesis furthers the research on English use outside of the classroom in order to more fully understand all types of language learners and the link between language proficiency and out-of-class English use.

The Constraints Of A Typological Implicational Universal For Interrogatives On Second Language Acquisition, Dee Anne Bess

Dissertations and Theses

A typological implicational universal based on a diverse sample of the world's languages describes a hierarchy for interrogatives. The universal hierarchy states that in any given language, inversion in Yes-No questions (YNQs) implies inversion in information questions (WHQs in English), which, in turns implies the fronting of the information word pronoun to sentence-initial position.

Several researchers have proposed that typological implicational universals such as this one for interrogatives may constrain not only the primary languages on which they are based, but also the interlanguages of second language learners.

This study, a partial replication of one by Eckman, Moravcsik, and Wirth …

English-Speaking Three-Year-Olds In A Spanish Language Immersion Program, Alice Golstein

Dissertations and Theses

Foreign language immersion programs, wherein the regular school curriculum is taught through the foreign language, have become increasingly widespread in recent years. Although there have been a plethora of studies reporting on second language immersion programs involving school-age programs, there is a dearth of information describing such programs for preschoolers. The purpose of this study was to observe and describe an immersion program for three-year-olds, particularly with respect to specific features of early stages of the language acquisition process.

The primary area of interest was to determine the existence of and features of a silent period for these children. Secondary …

Spectrographic Analysis Of Second Language Speech: Investigating The Effects Of L1, Troy D. Bailey

Dissertations and Theses

Technological advances in Digital Signal Processing over the last decade have provided applied linguists with a number of computerized applications for speech analysis which can be of benefit to both the researcher and the instructor. This research project explores the techniques of speech spectrography and implements methods of acoustic phonetics to current issues in Second Language Acquisition theory. Specifically, the effects of vowel production in one's native language on the targets in a second language are investigated. Acoustic measurements of English vowels spoken by Japanese students were compared with measurements of native Japanese vowels and American English vowels. In addition, …

The Natural Approach And The Audiolingual Method: A Question Of Student Gains And Retention, Jeffrey Robert Richards

Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this study was to determine the difference in the short term and and long term second language (L2) gains of first year Spanish students exposed to the Audiolingual Method (ALM) and the Natural Approach. The experiment consisted of two randomly selected groups which were exposed to four presentations. Two of these presentations delivered content material following a Natural Approach lesson design while the other two delivered content material following an ALM lesson design in such a way that both groups were exposed to two ALM lessons and two Natural Approach lessons. All subjects were pre-tested prior to …

Effects Of Participant Roles On Input Interactions And Comprehensible Output, Larry Douglas Morgan

Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate what effect, if any, the social roles between second language learners and their conversational partners have on the types and frequencies of the following discourse categories: (a) input interactional modifications (b) corrections of language learners' linguistic errors by others and (c) language learners' production of comprehensible output. This study also seeks to corroborate previous research findings with regards to negotiation of meaning interactions and other-corrections of language learners' linguistic errors.