Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Multilingualism And Multiculturalism: Opinions From Spanish-Speaking English Learners From Mexico, Central America, And South America, Cailey Catherine Moe

Dissertations and Theses

Within the population of adult English-language learners in the United States, the largest portion is comprised of Spanish speakers from Mexico and Central and South America. At the same time, Spanish is the second-most commonly spoken language in the U.S., and an increasing presence in U.S. media and culture. This puts English learners from this demographic in a unique position with respect to language and culture acquisition and the experience of working towards their goals within U.S. society at large.

The purpose of this study is to explore motivations and beliefs about language and culture held by a small number …

Loanwords In Context: Lexical Borrowing From English To Japanese And Its Effects On Second-Language Vocabulary Acquisition, Andrew Michael Sowers

Dissertations and Theses

Research has shown that cognates between Japanese and English have the potential to be a valuable learning tool (Daulton, 2008). Yet little is known on how Japanese learners of English produce cognates in context. Recently, studies have argued that cognates can cause a surprisingly high number of syntactic errors in sentence writing activities with Japanese learners (Rogers, Webb, & Nakata, 2014; Masson, 2013). In the present study, I investigated how Japanese learners of English understood and used true cognates (words that have equivalent meanings in both languages) and non-true cognates (words where the Japanese meaning differs in various ways from …

Teacher And Student Perceptions Of World Englishes (We) Pronunciations In Two Us Settings, Marie Arrieta

Dissertations and Theses

The present study investigated the perceptions and attitudes of two groups each of ESL teachers and students in the United States regarding World Englishes (WE) pronunciations before and after watching a video on WE accents. Data gathered via online surveys were analyzed using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. The results show that the perceptions of the teachers in the study ranged from somewhat negative to mildly positive, both pre- and post-video, which is consistent with Brown's (1993) findings that teachers' perceptions changed little if at all after being briefly exposed to WE stimuli. The education of the teachers …