Modern Languages Commons^™

Latino Youth’S Out-Of-School Math And Science Experiences: Impact On Teacher Candidates, Maria E. Diaz, Kathy Bussert-Webb

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

This qualitative study examines the learning and interaction processes between Latino/a teacher candidates (TCs) and youth during a community service-learning program involving science and math. Knowing and affirming nondominant youth‟s strengths are essential from funds of knowledge and Third Space perspectives. Participants were 11 TCs and their tutees, 30 youth in first through tenth grades. The study took place in a Texas border colonia, or unincorporated settlement lacking basic services. Data sources were participant observations, youth‟s interviews and TCs‟ pre- and final reflections, rapport- building analyses, a focus group, and lesson plans. We found TCs incorporated the youth‟s funds to …

Multimodal Pedagogical Approaches To Public Writing: Digital Media Advocacy And Mundane Texts, Sarah Warren-Riley, Elise Verzosa Hurley

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

With the proliferation of digital media and other forms of technologically mediated communication, this article argues that critical multimodal pedagogical approaches to public writing—particularly through interrogating mundane, everyday texts—have the potential to engage students with advocacy and its role in shaping public discourse. In this article, we propose a pedagogy that views multimodal composition as advocacy. Because all texts are embedded with advocacy, encouraging students to recognize their own advocacy practices, and teaching them to carefully approach how they construct texts, we argue, may better prepare our students to be more social-justice minded public writers and rhetors in the future.

Derechos Humanos Y Corporeidad En Los Ejércitos De Evelio Rosero, Carlos Gardeazábal Bravo

Global Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications and Presentations

La novela Los ejércitos (2007) del escritor colombiano Evelio Rosero (1958) ha conseguido un amplio público lector en el mercado internacional, gracias en parte a un conjunto importante de premios, entre los cuales se cuentan el Tusquets 2006, el Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2009, el Aloa del Danish Center for Culture and Development 2011. Antonia Byatt, miembro del jurado del Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, afirmó sobre la novela: "A book that not only tells us about how life is torn apart in a country wrought by war, but also adds to our understanding of the human condition" (cit. en Flood …

Beyond Us-Centered Multicultural Foundations On Race, James C. Jupp, Miryam Espinosa-Dulanto

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

Our conceptual essay begins with the recognition of the U.S. racialized tragedy and embattled discussions on race. Within this tragedy and embattled discussion, we attempt to renew and reinvigorate authentic, dialogic, and vulnerable exchanges on race. With this focus, we critique yet further advance multicultural foundations’ notions of racial identity predominant in the academy and in broader national discussions on race. Critiquing yet advancing multicultural foundations, we emphasize conceptual content from five books on race and power by Cornel West. Working through West’s conceptual content, we emphasize complex and historicized identifications and relationalities as key concepts in the present moment.

A Novice Bilingual Teacher’S Journey: Teacher’S Noticing As A Pathway To Negotiate Contradictory Teaching Discourses, Sandra I. Musanti

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

This qualitative case study investigates a fourth grade novice bilingual teacher’s repertoire of practice during her first year of teaching. Drawing on recent work on teacher noticing, the study explores how the teacher negotiates prevailing bilingual education discourses. Two themes are discussed: how this novice teacher embraced bilingual teaching while questioning practices and policies and how she negotiated contradictions through multiple attempts to redefine her teaching practices. Findings show how the teacher’s ability to notice framed her possibility to bridge her understandings about teaching, her critical pedagogical discourse, and the contextual contradictory discourses predominant in her school about bilingual education.

Wh-Interrogatives In Early L1 Greek: Comprehension Vs. Production, Evangelia K. Asproudi

The ITB Journal

This paper examines the comprehension and production of wh-interrogatives in early L1 Greek. Specifically, children’s performance is explored at both levels with regard to argument/adjunct extraction and presence/absence of negation. In order to test the predicted lead of comprehension over production, a group of ninety four-to-seven-year old Greek children participated in elicitation tasks that were designed mainly along the methodological principles of Crain and Thornton (1998). On the whole, the results were in line with the initial expectation. That is, the Greek children performed better in question comprehension compared to question production, with individual findings suggesting that children’s economy-based processing …

Children Of Vienna: Translation, Rewriting, And Robert Neumann’S Legacy, Sarah Painitz

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This essay aims to bring attention to the complex intersections of language, translation, and exile through an analysis of the production and various reproductions of Robert Neumann’s Children of Vienna. With this novel, first written in English in the fall and winter of 1945, Neumann wanted to direct attention to the plight of children in the destroyed cities of the former Third Reich and appeal for humanitarian aid from the British and American public. Why, then, considering its original intent as a call for action in response to an acute crisis, did the author retranslate his text almost 25 …

Translation As A Rhetoric Of Meaning, Jose M. Davila-Montes

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

From early romanticism to more recent post-structuralist and post-colonial studies, all the possibilities and impossibilities that are inherent in translation have fueled debate about authorship, intent, readership, functional equivalence, world view, the building of national literatures, power differentials, ethics, and gender issues—among many others. And, of course, about the nature of “meaning,” as the alleged sole legal tender of “all things translation.” Translation has less often been scrutinized as a form of rhetorical transaction: fundamentally, all translations are attempts, in and of themselves, to persuade their readership about some degree of correspondence with their source. However, the relationship between Translation …

Gender And Mutation In Irish: A Preliminary Account For Further Investigation, Alessio S. Frenda

The ITB Journal

Standard Irish is the outcome of language planning and as such it significantly diverges from the three main spoken dialects of the language (or traditional Gaeltacht varieties) that provided the basis for its creation. It is also expected to differ, in its codified form, from the way it is actually employed within the small, usually urban communities of bilinguals who employ standard Irish and not some form of Gaeltacht Irish as a second language. The reason why such difference is expected is that the language planners codified as part of the standard many complex structures that had already been abandoned …

In Italiano, As Gaeilge: A Matter Of Metaphorical Semantics, Alessio S. Frenda

The ITB Journal

In the present article the linguistic expression of MATTER will be considered with regards to (a) the prepositions involved and (b) the basic spatial meanings (BSMs) of such prepositions. The analysis will concentrate on Italian and Irish. The motivations for the choice of the preposition(s) will be sought after in the theoretical frame provided by Lakoff’s metaphorical semantics. In other words, we shall assume that the MATTER sense is a motivated extension of the spatial senses that primarily expressed by those prepositions. According to the abovementioned framework, a preposition is chosen to express MATTER when there is a metaphorically (i.e., …

Cross-Linguistic Comparisons: A Case Study Involving Irish And Italian Prepositions, Alessio S. Frenda

The ITB Journal

Cross-linguistic comparison of unrelated or distantly related languages is often hindered by the lack of a one-to-one correspondence between the formal repertoires of the different languages. This article presents an example of such a situation, where the comparison of the Irish and Italian prepositional inventories is made impossible, on a formal basis, by the different sizes of the two sets of forms and the different semantic segmentation of the spatial-content continuum, i.e., the fact that one and the same form can express different concepts in a way that is cross-linguistically not always valid, and – conversely – that one and …

Reflexive And Reciprocal Constructions In Modern Greek, Evangelia Asproudi

The ITB Journal

This paper examines the various constructions that convey reflexivity and reciprocity in Modern Greek. Modern Greek reflexive and reciprocal constructions are characterized by a considerable degree of overlap between them, in the sense that they are structurally parallel to each other. More concretely, both reflexives and reciprocals in the language can be lexicalized through the addition of the non-active suffix -mai to a transitive verb; moreover, reflexivity and reciprocity can be syntactically realized by means of an active transitive verb followed by a pronominal that is referentially bound to an antecedent. Lastly, pronoun incorporation to a –mai verb constitutes another …

Beginning From The Border, Kip Austin Hinton

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

Abstract

In this essay, Educational Borderlands: A Bilingual Journal (EBBJ) is introduced in relation to borderlands, in South Texas and beyond. The journal’s purpose is explained, beginning with its inception as part of the bilingual mission at a majority Mexican American university, then placed within educational, political, and linguistic contexts. Each of EBBJ’s threads is situated in relation to hybridity, intersectionality, bilingualism, translanguaging, transnationalism, and the border itself. The journal seeks to apply these to the study of curriculum, instruction, special education, dual language bilingual education, and research across various interdisciplinary fields.

Resumen

En este ensayo, Educational Borderlands: A Bilingual …

Language Choice Of Bilingual Musicians, Macy Lethco

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Often unconsciously, every bilingual makes a choice in each interaction of which language to use. These choices have many motivating factors but are mainly based on the content of the message and the identity of the speaker. This may occur in seconds and without hesitation. If even here, a choice is taking place, how much more in the writing, composition, and production of a song or album? Artists, unlike speakers in a conversation, can choose the audience the communicate with. Musicians and music listeners who choose to define themselves in a personal bilingual identity, which at the same time is …

Tabaquismo: ¿Negocio Y Forma De Identidad Cultural?, Caroline Zuhone

Modern Language, Literature, and Culture Honors Theses

España es un país con un nivel de desarrollo similar a los Estados Unidos, no obstante, a pesar de su inserción dentro de los países del primer mundo tiene un índice que no se corresponde con esta categoría, una gran parte de su población usa tabaco frecuentemente. Con la actualización de muchos trabajos científicos que explican los efectos negativos del tabaco y su difusión pública, en los Estados Unidos se ha logrado que muchas personas dejen de fumar. No ha sucedido lo mismo en España, allí muchos españoles siguen consumiendo tabaco desestimando la difusión de los mismos estudios científicos. El …

Breaking The Cycle Of Silence : The Significance Of Anya Seton's Historical Fiction., Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek)

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the feminist significance of Anya Seton’s historical novels, My Theodosia (1941), Katherine (1954), and The Winthrop Woman (1958). The two main goals of this project are to 1.) identify and explain the reasons why Seton’s historical novels have not received the scholarly attention they are due, and 2.) to call attention to the ways in which My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman offer important feminist interventions to patriarchal social order. Ultimately, I argue that My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman deserve more scholarly attention because they are significant contributions to women’s …

Critical Mirrors: Diverse College Students' Perspectives On Stereotypes Depicted In Popular Films About College Life, Elena M. Venegas, Lakia M. Scott, Karon N. Lecompte, Toby Zhu, Mia Moody-Ramirez

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

This qualitative study explored diverse college students’ perspectives on the portrayal of college life in recent popular films. Results from this study suggest that White college students dismiss stereotypes as comedic satire whereas their non-White peers readily identify the influence of negative media representations upon their academic and ethnic identities. These findings exemplify the need to promote positive representations of college students from racially and culturally diverse backgrounds. Findings suggest the need for Critical Media Literacy education to help young adults dismantle stereotypes in mainstream society while developing cultural competence.

Texto, Contexto Y Cultura En Los Comentarios Sobre Teología De La Liberación, Sara Heist

Senior Honors Theses

The critical dialogue sparked by Latin American liberation theology in the 1970s has involved diverse authors from various creeds and cultures. Although dozens of critics have offered an analysis of both Liberation Theology and its foundational text, Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation, the discussion has not reached consensus. Some critics, such as Ray Hundley, Ronald Nash, C. F. H. Henry, Harold O. J. Brown and Michael Novak, dismiss the movement as a hopeless entanglement of social goodwill, economic ignorance, and insidious Marxist philosophy. Others, among them the Catholic Magisterium, Michael Löwy, Juan Carlos Scannone, and João B. Chaves, …

English As A Global Commodity, Katarina Bouton

Senior Honors Theses

English is currently the language of diplomacy, higher education, business, science, the internet, and more. In order to understand what this means for the present state of English and its future, one must begin by looking at this language’s diachronic journey, followed by a synchronic picture of English today. In addition to statistics on English, this analysis will consider potential language competitors of Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, and Hindi, among others, in displacing the English language. Compared to these prospective challengers, English has broad roots in world history, lending to its depth and growing breadth; however, not only do the diachronic …

Law And Translation At The U.S.-Mexico Border: Translation Policy In A Diglossic Setting, Gabriel González Núñez

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Language regimes adopted by states can favour one group over all the others in a way that undermines minority groups. In essence, when multilingual societies are administered through a one-language regime, inequalities arise. This growing understanding has led States to come up with varying solutions, which in turn create a wide array of language policies. One aspect that all these policies have in common is that they involve choices about translation. Hoping to contribute to our understanding of such translation policies, this chapter describes translation policies as found in the judiciary and local government in Brownsville, Texas, USA. This can …