Applied Linguistics Commons^™

The Effect Of Age Of Acquisition On The Development Of Lexical Attainment And Oral Proficiency In English As L2 In Adult Native Arabic Speakers, Mona Ahmed Kamar El-Zaman

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the influence of the age of acquisition (AoA) on the development of lexical attainment and oral proficiency in English as a second language (L2) among adult native Arabic speakers, focusing on classroom foreign language learners within the Egyptian context. AoA, a critical variable in second language acquisition (SLA) research, is explored in relation to two key domains: lexical knowledge and oral proficiency. The study examines the role of AoA and AoA related effects, such as the order of bilingualism and the length of exposure to rich language input (LoE) as a confounding factor. Through a mixed-methods approach, …

Principal Agency 50 Years After The Lau Decision: Building And Sustaining Bilingual Education Programs For Asian Languages, Kevin M. Wong, Zhongfeng Tian

Education Division Scholarship

This study examined how three champion principals of Asian language dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs—Cantonese, Korean, and Mandarin—in California have navigated the oscillating language-in-education policies after the Lau decision. We explored principals' various roles through a lens of agency in a social justice leadership framework, specifically considering the opportunities and challenges for agentive leadership from three different phases: foregrounding and engaging, planning and implementing, and evaluating and sustaining. Findings demonstrate that the success of DLBE programs goes beyond the overarching language policies that supposedly enable bilingual education; rather it hinges on the bottom-up commitment, collaboration and resilience of principals, …

Promoting Emergent Literacy In Preschool Through Extended Discourse: Covert Translanguaging In A Mandarin Immersion Environment, Robin E. Harvey, Kevin M. Wong

Education Division Scholarship

Rich oral language practices, including the opportunity and ability to participate in cognitively and linguistically challenging extended discourse, are foundational to early literacy development. To meet children’s needs in their first exposure to the languages of schooling, educators may engage students in extended discourse multilingually. The current study focuses on student-centered translanguaging conversations to examine strategies that preschool teachers employ to support young children’s emerging bilingual and biliteracy development in a Mandarin immersion preschool serving primarily nonheritage learners of Mandarin in the United States. Findings indicate that, despite the school’s Mandarin-only policy, teachers engaged in covert translanguaging practices to extend …

Openings And Closings In Human-Human Versus Human-Spoken Dialogue System Conversations, Judit Dombi, Tetyana Sydorenko, Veronika Timpe-Laughlin

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Although conversation openings and closings are ritualized speech acts (House & Kádár, 2023), they do require interactional work (Schegloff, 1986). Thus, they are important elements of interactional competence (Roever, 2022) and have been studied extensively in L2 interactions, including various types of technology-mediated communication contexts (e.g., Abe & Roever, 2019; 2020). However, to our knowledge, no research on openings and closings has been conducted with newer technologies such as spoken dialogue systems (SDS). To address this gap, this study compares conversation openings and closings across two modalities: a role-play with a human interlocutor versus with a fully automated agent. We …

Talking Yourself Up: Multimodal Conversation Analysis Of Status In An Improvised Setting, Aubrey Lewarne

University Honors Theses

A single-case analysis looked at two individuals performing a scripted exercise during an Applied Improvisational workshop. The analysis examined how performers modify their linguistic and embodied actions in order to perform an assigned status role. The analysis was undertaken to better understand how social status can be constructed in everyday talk-in-interaction. I first outlined the three major theoretical frames that are relevant to the analysis: Applied Improvisation as a pedagogical approach, the use of Conversation Analysis (CA) for the analysis of language in educational contexts, and the concept of status from a sociological perspective. I then present a single-case study, …

Exploring The Impacts Of Genai On English And Applied Linguistics: Implications For A Future-Ready Journal, Jasper Roe

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

Since publishing our review in JEAL on AI-powered writing tools in 2023, a lot has changed, and will continue to change in the field of English and Applied Linguistics. Primarily, this is a result of the ‘AI Spring’ that global industrialised society is currently experiencing. In this editorial, I will discuss my perspective on some of the major developments over the last year in reference to teaching and research with GenAI, and attempt to chart what seems to be the most salient points of these technologies for our journal, in the hope that it will stimulate discussion, argument, experiments and …

Cross-Cultural And Cross-Proficiency Analysis Of Selected Cohesion Indices In Student Essays, Audrey Buenavista Morallo

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

Cohesion is important in writing because of its role in writing quality development (Abdi Tabari & Johnson, 2023) and in making texts comprehensible (Ghasemi, 2013). It can differentiate between proficient and deficient writing (Crossley et al., 2016b, 2019), demonstrating its use as an index of language proficiency. Despite being an index of proficiency, little is known about cohesion use in L2 contexts (Abdi Tabari & Johnson, 2023; Crossley, 2020; Crossley et al., 2016a). To address this, this study investigated the use of connectives, givenness, and lexical overlap in essays from the Philippines, Singapore, and China available in a corpus. A …

Cultivating Connections: Future Approaches To Tourism Esl Pedagogy, Kelly Abrams

Student Research Symposium

My poster will display my research that investigates the pivotal role of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in Cuba's tourism sector and its broader implications for global tourism contexts. Through qualitative methods including written questionnaires and oral interviews with people working in the tourism industry in Cuba, I examined the significance of language proficiency, particularly English, in various industry roles within Cuba's tourism and hospitality sector. Findings highlight how ESP facilitates effective communication, elevates service standards, and fosters career progression for individuals working in the sector. Furthermore, my research underscores the interconnectedness of language and tourism, emphasizing the importance of …

My Father's Story: An Ethnography About Language Loss, Ariel Wilsey-Gopp

Student Research Symposium

War disrupts everything, including a child’s developing language and cultural identity. My father grew up in both Serbia and Germany during the post-WWII political upheaval. By the time he was an adult, he knew five languages, yet lacked his own language and languaculture (Agar, 1994).

It benefits us to understand more completely the effects of language loss as political borders continue to shift and human migration increases. Research in social sciences, psychology, and biology all examine the effects of trauma, the brain, and child development. Applied linguistics examines language loss in relation to Second Language Acquisition (Altarriba & Heredia, …

Prosodic Analysis Of Wh-Indeterminate Questions In L2 Korean, Jung In Lee

Student Research Symposium

Wh-indeterminate questions, particularly wh-questions and yes-no questions, in Korean are ambiguous due to the limited morpho-syntactic markers in the sentence. The absence of these markers leaves two questions syntactically identical, leading to lexical ambiguity. The disambiguation of these two questions relies primarily on prosodic cues. Drawing from previous studies in the L1 Korean context, this study examines the intonation patterns of English learners of Korean in producing and perceiving wh-questions and yes-no questions and explores if there is any sign of L1 influence from English. Five English learners of Korean, who received formal instruction in Korean at a U.S. university, …

Experiences Of Dyslexic Students Learning A Second Language: A Review Of The Literature, Lauren Ricci

Senior Honors Theses

A systematic review of the literature was conducted to explore the experiences that college students with dyslexia face learning a second language in the classroom setting while studying at a private institution in Central Virginia. This literature review offers an analysis of the scholarly research related to this topic. The processability theory is discussed in the first section, followed by a review of recent literature on how dyslexia affects the brain’s processing, specific experiences of students, and how to best support these students in second language acquisition (SLA). Lastly, the literature surrounds phonological processing, working memory, specific struggles in the …

Second Language Acquisition In The Era Of Technology And Artificial Intelligence: Exploring New Frontiers, Mimoun Akhiat

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

This portfolio is the capstone project of the Master of Second Language Teaching program. It offers perspectives and insights into major themes of importance to the writer. It begins with a general introduction pertaining to the writer’s education and teaching background, his goals for joining the program and an overall reflection of this experience. Following this is the writer’s teaching philosophy comprised of a description of professional environment and a teaching philosophy statement centered on the principles of multimodality, authenticity, and collaboration. The second section of this portfolio is entitled hands-on teaching experience where the writer presents and reflects on …

An Idiolectal “Voice Report” Analysis Of Single And Double Coda Devoicing In Minnesota English, Ettien Koffi, Nicolas Wollinski

Linguistic Portfolios

The Voice Report function in Praat makes it possible to calculate the amount of voicing that occurs dynamically within a segment. This function is used here to investigate how Author 2 produces voiced consonants that occur in the codas of 15 words in an elicitation paragraph read at a normal tempo. Some words end with a singleton coda, while others have double codas. When the measurements are interpreted in accordance with F0 and the 40/60 Just Noticeable Difference (JND) thresholds, we see that coda devoicing is pervasive in Author 2’s speech. When the evidence presented here is added to the …

An Acoustic Phonetic Investigation Of Lexical Stress Encoding In Vietnamese-Accented English, Ettien Koffi, David Mason

Linguistic Portfolios

A psychoacoustic methodology is used to investigate lexical stress encoding by 15 Vietnamese-Accented English (VAE) speakers. In this framework, Just Noticeable Difference (JND) thresholds in F0/pitch, intensity, and duration are used to investigate the strategy that speakers rely on to produce lexical stress. The key finding for VAE speakers is that they rank the three acoustic correlates as follows: F0 (67.61%) > Intensity (54.28%) > Duration (31.42%). According to Nguyen and Ingram (2005) and Nguyen (2017), this hierarchy mirrors the strategy that Vietnamese speakers rely on to encode tone in their native language. Transferring their native prosodic strategy into English affords them …

Accentedness And Intelligibility: The Typical Phonetic Story Of An Lx Couple In The Us, Mahdi Duris

Linguistic Portfolios

For the past 20 years, intelligibility research has paved the way in making pronunciation teaching and learning about individual competency rather than sounding like a native speaker. The body of research has empirically shown that language speakers of English (Lx) can be intelligible while sounding heavily accented. However, studies have yet to examine how first-generation immigrant couples from different cultural backgrounds interact with each other using an Lx. A phonetic analysis of an oral transcription is conducted to describe the segmental features of Dominican English (DomE) and Pakistani English (PakE), two Lx English spoken by Tabinda and Tariq, as they …

Klattgrid And Formant-Based Speech Synthesis: Demonstration With Betine, Hannah Loukusa, Jacob Haapoja

Linguistic Portfolios

In this paper, we describe a method for extracting speech segment features from an audio recording such that speech may be reconstructed while maintaining emphasis and stress with minimal annotation. We also present a script for the linguistic research tool, Praat, for performing this extraction and reconstruction via KlattGrid synthesis [1]. This technique contributes to the ongoing research efforts to preserve the Betine language (ISO 639-3:eot), one of 10 critically endangered languages spoken in Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa.

Speech Synthesis By Syllable A Concatenation: Experimentation With Betine, Ettien Koffi, Daniel Fabres, Swathi R. Pingili, Gopikrishna K. Chava

Linguistic Portfolios

The endangerment of minority languages has reached pandemic proportions. No country or continent is spared. The editors of Ethnologue (2019:14-15) report that 2,923 of the world’s 7,111 languages are critically endangered. McWorther (2003:257-8) adds that, statistically speaking, “A language dies roughly every two weeks.” UNESCO (2010) projects that 90% of the world’s indigenous languages will be dead by the end of 2100. In Africa alone, Kandybowicz and Torrence (2017:3) note that 201 languages of the estimated 2000 languages have already died, and 308 others are on the brink of extinction. Minority languages worldwide are in such deplorable conditions that the …

The Acoustic Phonetic Properties Of Voiceless Fricatives In Anyi, Ettien Koffi

Linguistic Portfolios

African languages are well endowed with fricatives. Common ones /f, v, s, z, ʒ, ʃ, h /, less common ones /β, ɸ, s’, ç, ɣ, χ, ɦ/, and rare ones /ʃw, ɕ, ɕw , zɥ/ are all found in West African languages (Ladefoged 1968:45-66). Yet, surprisingly, there is a severe paucity of data on the acoustic phonetic properties of fricatives in these languages. This paper seeks to remedy this situation by providing a comprehensive overview of voiceless fricatives in Anyi, an Akan language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire. Twelve correlates, i.e., F0, F1, F2, F3, F4, Center of Gravity, intensity, duration, …

Synthesizers Demonstrated On Betine, Clare Miller, Isabella Randolph

Linguistic Portfolios

This paper provides basic information on developing speech synthesis to help preserve and revitalize critically endangered languages. It uses Betine, (ISO 639-3:eot), as a model. The death of minority languages is escalating globally, and 90% are predicted to die by 2100, which results in the loss of cultural heritage and knowledge. Synthesizing speech in dying and near-extinct languages can preserve and even revitalize them. The paper includes spectrographs and waveforms of the given Beti name transcribed phonetically as [aːɟo]. It also contains voice component measurements and the synthesizing programs used for comparison. The measurements taken from the data include F0/pitch, …

The Acoustic Phonetic Properties Of The Epenthetic Vowel In Spanish-Accented English, Luis Lopez

Linguistic Portfolios

The purpose of this research paper is to describe the acoustic phonetic features of the epenthetic vowel inserted by Spanish-accented speakers of English in sC syllable onsets. Numerous studies have examined this issue. Many have identified the epenthetic vowel as [ɛ]. However, its true acoustic phonetic identity has not been established. This is the first study of its kind that relies on acoustic phonetic measurements to examine the epenthetic vowel. Formant correlates (F0, F1, F2, F3, F4), intensity, and duration cues are used in revealing the true properties of this epenthetic vowel. The insights derived from this study also have …