Applied Linguistics Commons^™

Adding Production To High Variability Phonetic Training, Caleb Crosby

Honors Theses

The effectiveness of adding a production component to a High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) regimen to improve native Japanese speaker’s pronunciation of English [b], [v], [f], and [h] was investigated. L1 Japanese-speaking English learners were recruited as participants, and a pretest-posttest procedure was used to evaluate improvement at production of the target consonants. For the pretest and posttest, recordings were taken of participants pronouncing twelve tokens, and the recordings were rated for intelligibility by a phonetically trained native English-speaking rater. Participants were divided into two groups. Group A received only HVPT training, and group B received a regimen of ...

A Dynamic Interplay Of Professional Identities: Teacher-Researcher’S Identity (Re)Construction, Karolina Achirri

The Qualitative Report

While recent years have seen a research interest in the concept of teacher identity, still less is known about the interplay between teacher-researcher identity. This issue is important for the fields of applied linguistics and teacher education because it sheds light on teacher-scholars’ identity realizations. In this study, I examine the interrelations of teacher and researcher identity across different contexts and spaces. Namely, I analyze the trajectories of one teacher as he moved through countries and educational experiences. Data sources included semi-structured interviews, artifacts, and email correspondence. Beginning with the assumption that identity is a complex, dynamic, multidimensional, negotiated, and ...

Restructuring A Beginner Language Program: A Quantitative Analysis Of Face-To-Face Versus Flipped-Blended Spanish Instruction, Nina Moreno, Paul Malovrh

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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 ...

Combining Case Study Design And Constructivist Grounded Theory To Theorize Language Teacher Cognition, Eman I. M. Alzaanin Dr

The Qualitative Report

Although second language (L2) teacher cognition has been a sustained area of research in the field of L2 teacher education for the last three decades, designing an appropriate methodology to investigate teacher cognition is still a key challenge due to the unobservable nature of cognition. Teacher cognition is defined as “what teachers know, believe, and think” (Borg, 2003, p. 81). This article seeks to enable researchers who are interested in exploring L2 teacher cognition to design qualitative multiple case study research and to use constructivist grounded theory to data analysis to build theoretical models that capture L2 teachers’ cognitions. I ...

Implementing A Literary Text Extensive Reading Program Through Learning Logs, Elih Sutisna Yanto, Hilmansyah Saefullah, Deny Arnos Kwary

The Qualitative Report

This article reports the findings of action research on the implementation of extensive reading to literary text (henceforth ER) with learning logs (henceforth LL). The research question was: In what ways do the students engage in comprehending literary texts through ER with learning logs? And what are students’ reactions to these activities? The research was conducted in the English Language Education Study Program English Education Department of a state university in Indonesia in which twenty six students voluntarily participated in this study. The data of the research were collected from students’ reflective journals and semi-structured interviews. The empirical findings show ...

Le Troisième Genre: Le Genre Neutre, Artemis Pomerenke

Languages and Cultures Student Work

Gender neutral and inclusive language has become more prominent around the world with the recognition of non- binary genders. This trend has extended to the French-speaking non-binary community, which has begun to find ways to subvert the gendered constructs of the French language using various strategies that work within the language and the research of linguist Alpheratz who has proposed a neutral grammatical gender. This third gender would function as well as the masculine and feminine genders and serve as an option for francophone non-binary people. But this gender neutral system is less interested in the non-binary community, and has ...

Surviving Monolingualism: Embracing Translingual Perspectives And Trans-Semiotizing, Kyle O'Brien

MA TESOL Collection

This thesis is an attempt to contribute to the deconstruction of the monolingual myth that has dominated language attitudes and the language classroom in the U.S. for centuries. Its main proposition is that by promoting and advocating for translanguaging and trans-semiotizing in the classroom and in daily life, we can affirm the linguistic and cultural identities of students, individuals, and groups that are marginalized or oppressed by hegemonic monolingual ideologies and improve our language teaching practices. Through literature review and personal narrative, the author has endeavored to demonstrate how translanguaging offers potential solutions to some current linguistic conflicts and ...

The Use Of Themself To Refer To A Singular Antecedent, Cassandra Davenport

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The pronouns people use, and the pronouns used to address other people are influential in the formation and perception of gender identity. It is generally accepted in the linguistics literature that English pronouns like he and she are a closed class. But this can prevent individuals who do not identify with these binary identities from having pronouns that properly reflect their gender identity. A work-around that is often pursued is to adopt the use of singular they or themself to avoid gender specification. Historically, the use of they with singular, generic antecedents originated in the fourteenth century, and the use ...

“So, Literally,…Basically,...It’S Like…”: A Study Into The Generational And Sociological Impact Of American Language Culture, Richard Moreno

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Language is unique to the human species. It serves to communicate thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc. Within the context of this capstone I outline the theory that language is much more than this. Words can also serve to bond or reject, based on the level of acceptance within social groups towards the speaker. In seeking to discover what effects specific language utterances have on social interaction and the processes involved in developing cohesiveness collective identity in these groups, I found that they do have a definite impact and this is based mainly within generational parameters. Using a mixed method approach of ...

Journeying Into A New World: Constructing A New Identity Through Language Acquisition, Hyrum Hansen

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports

The following portfolio represents the author’s experiences and studies while he has participated in the Master of Second Language Teaching (MSLT) program. It is the result of the author’s teaching experiences abroad and at Utah State University, his teaching observations of peers and colleagues, and insights from his studies in the MSLT program.

The portfolio is divided into three major sections, namely: teaching perspectives; research perspectives; and an annotated bibliography. The teaching perspectives demonstrate the author’s beliefs in regard to communicative language teaching and identity construction and their importance in the language acquisition process. The research perspectives ...

Sociolinguistics And Insider/Outsider Status In Hawai'i, Elissa M. Uithol

Linguistics Senior Research Projects

Prior to the rise of tourism in Hawai’i, the Hawaiian economy was largely driven by plantations. As labor was imported to work these plantations, a rich, multiethnic culture developed on the islands, producing a similarly diverse linguistic situation. What began as a pidgin blend of several languages for the purpose of communication between workers and supervisors has since developed into a language unique to the islands: Hawaiian Creole English (HCE). Social status in Hawai’i has long been influenced by a person’s manner of speech, as evidenced by elite Standard English (SE) schools founded to educate children of ...

Khmer Phonetics & Phonology: Theoretical Implications For Esl Instruction, Alex Donley

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis develops an approach to English teaching for Khmer-speaking students that centers on Khmer phonetics and phonology. Cambodia has a strong demand for English instruction, but consistently underperforms next to other nations in terms of proficiency. A significant reason for Cambodia’s skill gap is the lack of research into linguistic hurdles Khmer speakers face when learning English. This paper aims to bridge Khmer and English with an understanding of the speech systems that both languages use before turning to the unique challenges Khmer speakers must overcome based on the tenets of L1 Transfer Theory. It closes by outlining ...

Student Perceptions Regarding The Use Of Purposive English In A Spanish As A Foreign Language Classroom, Kacey Booth

Dissertations

In modern American society, diversity is both challenged and celebrated, and inclusion is imperative. This ideology begins in the classroom. Oftentimes, this celebration of diversity, more specifically linguistic diversity, is most visible in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) classes and similar bilingual educational programs. In TESOL programs, students’ international identities are highlighted and students are often instructed using multilingual educational resources to scaffold their acquisition of English. Historically, foreign language teaching also utilized dual-language instructional methodologies. Such archaic teaching methodologies have since been replaced by more modern and immersive sociopsycholinguistic approaches such as Communicative Language Teaching. Such ...

Marrying Science And Experience: An Exploration Of How Multilinguals Interact With And Between Languages And Cultures, Allie Heeg Polzin

MA TESOL Collection

This paper will begin exploring bi- and multilingualism at an individual level. The author will explore previous research written on how the brain processes several languages, how languages might affect individuals emotionally, and how one switches between languages as well as the effects of this, if any. Beyond this, the experience of navigating languages between discourse communities and balancing two or more cultures will be considered. As the title suggests, the science of multilingualism will be married with the diverse individual experience while considering both intrapersonal and interpersonal relations. The author will look at her own experience as well as ...

A Tutorial On Acoustic Phonetic Feature Extraction For Automatic Speech Recognition (Asr) And Text-To-Speech (Tts) Applications In African Languages, Ettien Koffi

Linguistic Portfolios

At present, Siri, Dragon Dictate, Google Voice, and Alexa-like functionalities are not available in any indigenous African language. Yet, a 2015 Pew Research found that between 2002 to 2014, mobile phone usage increased tenfold in Africa, from 8% to 83%.[1] The Acoustic Phonetic Approach (APA) discussed in this paper lays the foundation that will make Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) applications possible in African languages. The paper is written as a tutorial so that others can use the information therein to help digitalize many of the continent’s indigenous languages.

[1] http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/04 ...

The Acoustic Phonetic Correlates Of Lexical Stress In Japanese-Accented English, Ettien Koffi

Linguistic Portfolios

According to existing suprasegmental typologies, languages fall into three broad categories: accent, tone, and pitch-accent. Japanese has long been viewed as the poster child of the latter. The fact that Japanese and English (accent language) belong to two different prosodic systems raises three important questions:

1. Since Japanese is suprasegmentally different from English, can L2 speakers produce English lexical stress intelligibly?
2. Which acoustic correlate do they rely on to encode lexical stress in English?
3. Does the prosodic strategy used interfere with intelligibility?

The current study examines these issues by measuring the stress bearing units in produced by 10 Japanese L2 speakers ...

A Sociophonetic Account Of The Similarities Between Northern Minnesota English And Winnipeg Canadian English, Michel Lopez-Backstrom, Ettien Koffi

Linguistic Portfolios

The Minnesota dialect of American English is often confused with some vague “Canadian English” (Bartholdi 2015).[1] The current study aims to identify precisely which Canadian dialect of English. In so doing, we extract F1 and F2 measurements of 11 monophthong vowels of English ([i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ, ɑ, ɔ, o, ʊ, u, ʌ]) produced by 20 Northern Minnesota speakers (10 males and 10 females) and compare and contrast the same set of vowels produced by 10 speakers (5 males and 5 females) of Winnipeg Canadian English whose vowels were measured by Hagiwara (2006). Our findings confirm the impressionistic ...

English Education In Japan From The Perspective Of A Japanese Student, Firas Ismail, Ettien Koffi, Moeka Uchikawa

Linguistic Portfolios

According English Proficiency Index (EPI) of 2019, p. 24, English proficiency in Japan is low, i.e., 53^rd in the world. In this paper, we attempt to understand why this is so despite Japan’s excellent political, economic, and military relationship with the USA. The experiences of the third author, a native speaker of Japanese, who studied English in Japan serves as a launching pad for our investigation. We interface her experience with pedagogical practices, cultural norms surrounding pronunciation feedback, and English proficiency expectations and delve deeper into our inquiry. We also examine the third author’s current proficiency ...

Transparency And Headedness In Processing Compound Words: A Lexical Decision Study, Sarah Steinke, Weiyi Zhai

Linguistic Portfolios

In this study, we investigate the effects of lexical transparency and headedness on English compound word processing. Previous research involving semantic priming of compounds suggests that individual constituents of at least partially transparent compound words are activated during processing (e.g. Jarema, Busson, Nikolova, Tsapkini, & Libben, 1999; Sandra, 1990). We hypothesized that in a lexical decision task, subjects would show faster average response times to compound words when primed by a word related to one constituent, especially a transparent or head constituent. Our results are generally consistent with previous studies in that response times are faster for transparent compounds paired with related ...