Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

With Liberty And Justice For All? Examining The Role Of Hegemony Throughout U.S. History In Influencing Multilingual Discriminatory Practices Within Academic Policies And Legislation, Katie Olivia Wallen

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The discriminatory systems that multidialectal and multilingual users experience in the United States have historically influenced how educators and policymakers approach the construction of academic policies and curricula. These hegemonic systems shape and inform linguistic attitudes that have continually imparted prejudice against non-White language users, resulting in a gap of inclusivity for diverse student populations. Research aiming to address this gap has traditionally approached linguistic discrimination by specifically examining the use of dialects or non-English languages in the classroom rather than the underlying systems that affect both multidialectal and multilingual users similarly. Through the lens of policy and social construct …

Applying The Dialogic Method In An Eighth Grade English Curriculum, Maggie Repko

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In this thesis, I provide an analysis of Paulo Freire’s (1973) dialogic method for language education. I then synthesize his theories with the work of sociocultural and linguistic researchers who have determined the strongest activities to bring about student language development. Finally, I apply these theories to my appendices of created works that might be utilized in an eighth-grade creative writing course. This thesis demonstrates the similarities between Freire’s students and our students in the USA today and the ways that a critical dialogic pedagogy will meet their language learning needs while also inspiring their creative, critical conscientização. Paulo Freire …

Transcending The Transactional Function Of English As A Lingua Franca Expressing Subjectivities In English As A Lingua Franca Spoken Discourse, George Romero

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In 2008, David Crystal estimated that there were approximately two billion English speakers in the world (p. 5). For Crystal, an English speaker was anyone with “any systemic awareness, whether in speaking, listening, reading or writing [of English]” (p. 4). The conspicuous absence in Crystal’s definition of any reference to English native speaker competency points to the independence of the global spread of English from an Anglophone center. In our contemporary society, Crystal’s two billion English speakers are not using English to communicate with native English speakers. Instead, as the literature illustrates, the foremost trajectory of the global spread of …

Language Ideologies In First Year Composition Textbooks, Joanna Clevenger

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis examines how standard language ideologies are perpetuated in the five most frequently assigned first year composition textbooks from four higher education institutions in Southern California’s Inland Empire. Standard language ideologies position one variation of a language as superior, correct, appropriate and the normal variation of a language which everyone should be able to speak. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, the five textbooks were analyzed in order to uncover the embedded power and hegemony over women, people of color, and those from a lower socioeconomic status which are prevalent throughout society because they are unchallenged and widely accepted as the …

Co-Construction Of Identities Within The Home Brewing Community Of Practice, Ryan Julius Miller

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This project applies Community of Practice (CoP) theory to examine co-constructions of identity and membership within a Community of Practice based around the home brewing of beer. The study focuses on both the interactions of members with each other and within the community, as well as how the members display their membership and expertise while participating in their practice and acting as identifiable members of their community.

By observing members and their interactions as members of a community, this study attempts to both further the development and understanding of Community of Practice theory as well as gaining understanding of a …

Kinesthetic Language: A Dialect Of Kinesics, Terrill Suzanne Corletto

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Human communication requires the disciplines regarding physical fitness, codified language, and the performing arts to overlap, and exist symbiotically. Within the realm of artistic performance, the three disciplines working together deliver a deliberate message in a way unique to performing artists. The general tendency to compartmentalize sports, communication, and the performing arts into their pigeonhole categories of Kinesiology, Linguistics, and Theatre Arts is impractical, particularly for performing artists simply because all of the disciplines are mutually dependent in the context of all kinesthetic communications.

The purpose of this paper is to define and discuss several concepts and the ways in …

Critical Period Controversies For Second Language Acquisition: Implications For Language Teaching, Randy Lucio

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

It was proposed by Eric Lenneberg (1967) in Biological Foundations of Language that implicit first language (L1) acquisition was only possible during a critical period (CP) spanning from infancy to puberty. The critical period hypothesis (CPH) has since been a topic of controversy among L1 and second language (L2) scholars, whose studies have produced varying results that argue for and against a CP. It is suggested in this paper, however, that these often-varying results offer important insight that can serve to inform current and future L2 educational policy and instruction within K-12 education in the U.S. Thus, it is imperative …

“This Is A Stunning, Stunning Night”: News Media Constructions Of Emotional Reality, Karrina Janelle Oravetz

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The news media is one of the main influences of people’s perception, especially during elections. It can have an influence on a voter’s perception during and after the results of an election. One of the issues that arises is that news reports are biased, which affects viewers’ perceptions and interpretations of the information reported. This paper presents an analysis of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in the genre of news media and further shows that prosodic features is another layer of analysis in CDA. I am looking specifically at how news broadcasts construct information after the 2016 election results. News media …

Multicompetence, Multiple Intelligences And First-Year Composition Students, Patricia Rice'-Daniels

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine, gain, and ultimately share an understanding of certain cognitive differences, similarities, intelligence patterns, and preferences between competent monolingual (English) and multicompetent bilingual/multilingual first-year composition (FYC) college students. Within this project is an attempt to address the following questions: Do monolingual and bilingual/multilingual FYC students show different strengths and weaknesses in their cognitive abilities? Are there learning preferences and literacy differences or similarities between monolingual and bilingual/multilingual FYC students?

Primarily, two cognitive concepts were used in this examination to provide perspectives and quantitative data in response to the above questions. First, is Vivian …

L2 Learners And The Intelligiblity Of The Bostonian And Californian Accents, Russell Paul Kapryn

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis investigates issues of intelligibility through the lens and focus of prosody when the Bostonian and Los Angeles-based accents are heard in casually occurring conversation by native and non-native speakers. Over the spring and summer of 2017, six native speakers and 11 non-native speakers of English were interviewed from having listened to two 2.5 minute audio sample clips of speakers who have these accents. Respondents were asked questions such as what was difficult or easy or whether they could summarize the recordings for me. Findings indicate that while the native speakers often had difficulty with vocabulary due to context, …

Project On Designing Activities For Teaching Grammar, Sunny Hyon

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

This document outlines a project for a course in second language acquisition taken by undergraduates who intend to be high school or university teachers/professors. The project asks the undergraduates to design a sequence of activities for teaching English language learners (ELLs) a particular English grammatical construction, and to connect those activities to reading or writing assignments in their future classrooms. The students also must explain how their activities will facilitate ELLs' grammatical learning, drawing on research on language acquisition presented in the course.

Language Culture Wars: Effects Of Language Policy On Language Minorities And English Learners, Ambar A. Perez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the intertextuality of language policy, K-12 TESL pedagogies, and EL identity construction in the perpetuation of unjust TESL practices in these contexts. By examining the power structures of English language ideology through critical discourse analysis of recent California language policy, this thesis demonstrates English language teaching’s intrinsically political nature in K-12 education through negotiations and exchanges of power. Currently, sociolinguistic approaches to TESL and second language acquisition acknowledge the value of language socialization teaching methods. This requires the acceptance of cognition, not as an individual pursuit of knowledge containment and memorization, but cognition as a collaborative and …

Tracing Trajectories In A Community Of Practice Through Podcasts, Richard W. Mansikka

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The purpose of this project is to understand how humor works in expert-novice identity construction in podcasts. I employ a Community of Practice (Lave and Wenger, 1989) framework to examine the social hierarchy among the participants of a regular podcast. I am particularly concerned with uncovering how novice members construct themselves and are constructed by expert members through humor, as well as how expert members socialize novice members to participate in the kinds of humor practices that index membership in the Community of Practice (CoP).

Rooster Teeth is an internet-based entertainment production company. They produce a weekly podcast which they …

The Narrative Performances Of Teenage Girls: Participation, Identity, And Authority As The Foundation For Power, Chere M. Smith

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which teenage girls use narrative performance to negotiate participation, social and gender identity, and individual authority in order to establish ratified and equal statuses of power within their social peer group. Although previous work on narrative discourse has shown that narratives can act as the catalyst for the complex co/construction of identity especially in social situations of talk, little work has been done to focus on the way teenagers, particularly girls, use this discourse to their benefit as they fulfill social and gender goals in social and conversational settings. Furthermore, while multimodal, narrative performance …

Identity Phauxnetics, Nathan T. Jones

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the construction of identity and authenticity through sociophonetic variation, focusing on British Hip Hop artist Amy Winehouse. Prior work on British vocal artists’ phonetic variation has relied upon regional categorical frameworks (Trudgill, 1983; Carlsson, 2001) and found variation to be evidence of production errors and speakers’ misidentification of targeted speech patterns, resulting in summative interpretations of conflict between speakers’ discreet identities and speech pattern categories. More recent work has attended to linguistic processes within cultural movements influenced but not strictly delimited by sociolinguistics’ canonical categories of region, class, race, etc. Within the context of the Hip Hop …

The Phenomenology Of Second Language Acquisition: Poiesis And The Emergence Of The Multilingual Subject, Courtney E. Scarborough

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This study explores relationships between second language acquisition (SLA), poetic language, and embodied cognition and its connection to second language speakers’ linguistic self-formation, or their distinct ways of speaking and thinking. In particular, this study examines processes by which second language (L2) learners’ subjective realities are constructed and demonstrates that these processes are inherently poetic, emerging from a combination of the constraining structures of the language system and second language speakers’ phenomenological experiences. The context of the study is a poetry-making activity the researcher designed and took place in the English Department Writing Center at California State University, San Bernardino. …

Kalamazoo Revisited: Heritage Language Maintenance Among Latvians In North America, Margaret J. Stepe

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the entwined roles of schooling, family support and investment, and community contact in Heritage Language Learning (HLL), Heritage Language Maintenance (HLM) and identity formation among two groups of North American Latvians. One is made up of 49 teenagers at Gaŗezers language camp in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The other comprises 25 parents, other adult Latvian speakers and camp staff members. I explore differences and similarities among them by age, gender and self-stated national identity and language proficiency. Primary data consist of some 70 questionnaires completed by youths and adults and six 30- to 90-minute …

Whatever: Prosodic Context Cues And Their Influence On Pragmatic Meaning, Pamela Kathleen Wahler

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis examines real language in use to observe the different intonation contours associated with the discourse marker "whatever" to see if or how these contours contribute to the pragmatic meaning associated with the different functions. Interactional sociolinguistic and conversational analysis approach to investigate the different pragmatic meaning associated with the discourse marker "whatever" were employed to carry out the analysis. In addition, corpus linguistic methodology was used to gather data to investigate the different pragmatic meanings of the word "whatever."

Prospective Teachers Of English Learners' Error Detection In Oral Output Of Nonnative English Speakers, Begüm Yengel

Theses Digitization Project

This project is designed to present the extent to which native English speakers (NESs) and nonnative English speakers NNESs) detect errors in NNESs' oral output. It also aims to shed light on the error of perception of participants from different first-language (L1) backgrounds, and intends to uncover the possible underlying reasons of the variations in their detection rates.

Teachers Believe Singing Will Scaffold, Mediate, And Facilitate Oral Language Acqusition: Place Arts Back In The Curriculum, Alicia Rubio

Theses Digitization Project

The objective of this qualitative study was to explore if elementary school teachers who teach English Language Learners (ELLs) believe that singing used as an instructional tool would facilitate the development of oral English language acquisition.

The Effect Of Strategies On Relieving Initial And Recurring Tip Of The Tongue States, Cheryl Elizabeth Emery

Theses Digitization Project

One of the most common forms of memory failure is the phenomenon known as "tip-of-the-tongue" (TOT) where you can't quite articulate a particular word even though you know that you know it. Strategies for resolving this phenomenon were explored in two experiments. This thesis explored the effectiveness of different strategies for resolving the TOT experience.

Effects Of Bilingualism On Goal Representation And Maintenance, Amina Saadaoui

Theses Digitization Project

The main focus of this study was to examine whether the bilingual advantage in cognitive control is due to the bilinguals' ability to represent and maintain goal information in working memory. Cognitive control, also referred to as executive control, is the ability to inhibit one cognitive task while executing another task.

The English Experience: An Examination Of Philippine English Use Among Filipino Immigrants In The United States, Nicholas Macias-Williams

Theses Digitization Project

The present study aims to discover how a variety of world English, like Philippine English, serves Filipino immigrants who use it here in the United States. In order to conduct this investigation, a series of one-on-one interviews with ten Filipino immigrants was conducted. This thesis examines the attitudes of a group of adult Filipino immigrants to the U.S. towards the English language vis-a-vis their Filipino languages, and their experiences using English in the Philippines and the U.S.

Phonological Awareness And Its Affect On Second Language Acquisition, Mallory Ann Ruiz

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the role phonological awareness plays in the second language (L2) classroom among English as Second Language (ESL) learners. In order to better understand the reasons behind second language (L2) student's phonological improvements, phonological awareness was tested to see what affect, if any, it had on student's intelligible speech. Six English as Second Language (ESL) college students participated in the study in which they provided three audio recordings of their English speech over the course of ten weeks.

Research On Autonomous English-Learning Strategies Of American Culture And Language Students, Jing Xu

Theses Digitization Project

This study will serve as a guideline for adult second-language learners who want to strengthen the effectiveness of self-directed learning outcomes or develop their self-directed learning strategies. Through the understanding of learning factors, fossilized language elements, and their own learning strategies, learners will be more confident and motivated to pursue their personal second-language acquisition goals and aspirations. These strategies are designed to help Taiwanese second-language learners.

A Critical Analysis Of L1 And L2 Composition Scholarship On Instructor Feedback, Danny Elbar Marenco

Theses Digitization Project

This study focuses on what the scholarship indicates about students' attitudes toward instructor feedback and strategies of instructor feedback. This thesis presents a critical analysis of L1 and L2 composition scholarship instructor feedback.

How Kindergarten English Language Learners "Come To Know" Written Language, Teresa Renee Morris

Theses Digitization Project

This project explored some of the methods and strategies used by teachers to teach writing in the classroom. The writing development of ten kindergarten English language learners was analyzed. These students interacted in a meaningful manner with their teacher, through use of interactive dialogue journals, over the course of the school year.

Satire's Club: Reality, Reason, And Knowledge In Joseph Andrews, Heather Anne Law Davis

Theses Digitization Project

Satire has been credited with possessing the power to deconstruct the distinctions we make between opposing concepts and thus lead us to reevaluate established views. Structuralist Ferdinand de Saussure claimed that language relies on sets of opposites, or binary pairs, to create meaning. Building on this idea, deconstructionist Jacques Derrida explored the hierarchies he believed were inherent in all binary pairs, arguing that on concept in each pair occupies a superior position in our consciousness.

United States Mainland Speakers' Use Of Hawaiian Creole English And Standard American English Across Social Situations, Nicole Kaylani Kanahele Stutz

Theses Digitization Project

This study will focus on Hawaiian Creole English and standard American English (HCE/SAE) speakers who grew up in Hawai'i and relocated to the mainland as adults, and how their use of HCE and SAE varies across different social situations. In Hawai'i much of the population speaks Hawaiian Creole English and Standard American English, speakers often code-switch between the two varieties. Fluency in HCE and SAE differs among speakers, and this fact has implications for communication in a preferred language variety in particular social situations.

Prospective English-As-A-Second-Language Educators' Use Of Vygotskian Scaffolding In Mentoring Academic Writing, Ixchell Alejandra Keller

Theses Digitization Project

This study focuses on two prospective teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) who were enrolled in a master's program and were being tutored as they prepared to write a scholarly review of literature. The methodology involved videotaping four tutoring sessions, each tutor was assigned to participate in two tutoring sessions each with the same participant. The videotaped data was then transcribed and analyzed for significant scaffolding occurrences that may have promoted successful transfer of responsibility facilitating autonomy for the learner. The goal of this project was to promote autonomous learning and to help find ways for students …