Digital Commons Network^™

The Relationship Between Reported Out-Of-Class English Use And Proficiency Gains In English, Denisa Krizanova Cundick

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the relationship of out-of-class English use and proficiency gains. It also explored the relationship of gender, proficiency level and native language and the possible effect of these demographics on out-of-class English use and language gains in English. Though some studies have shown that those who spend more out-of-class time using the target language have higher language gain (Seliger, 1977), other studies have not found this to be true (Day, 1985; Freed 1990; Spada, 1986). Some reasons for the discrepancy in findings may be differences in the length of the time data is collected, samples of study participants …

The Textual Construction Of Femininity In Women's Fitness Magazines, Tracy Lynn Rundstrom Williams

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Women in the first decade of the 21st century encounter competing ideologies of traditional femininity and empowered femininity. Language, in particular Discourse Analysis, provides a means for investigating what these ideologies, or discourses, are and how they are perpetuated. One source of language which encodes and perpetuates ideologies of femininity is women's magazines. As pervasive, monthly texts directed specifically at women, women's magazines provide a rich source of contemporary ideologies of femininity. Given the rise of health and fitness magazines over the past 20 years, it appears that one primary focus of contemporary femininity is the body. Previous research has …

Phonological Facilitation Through Translation In A Bilingual Picture-Naming Task, Paul Amrhein, Aimee Knupsky

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We present a critical examination of phonological effects in a picture-word interference task. Using a methodology minimizing stimulus repetition, English/Spanish and Spanish/English bilinguals named pictures in either L1 or L2 (blocked contexts) or in both (mixed contexts) while ignoring word distractors in L1 or L2. Distractors were either phonologically related to the picture name (direct; FISH–fist), or related through translation to the picture name (TT; LEG–milk–leche), or they were unrelated (bear–peach). Results demonstrate robust activation of phonological representations by translation equivalents of word distractors. Although both direct and TT distractors facilitated naming, TT facilitation was more consistent in L2 naming …

Beyond The Classroom Walls: A Study Of Out-Of-Class English Use By Adult Community College Esl Students, Tracey Louise Knight

Dissertations and Theses

Research in Second Language Acquisition indicates that using English outside of the classroom is an important part of the language learning process. However, studies done on university level ESL and EFL students indicate that students use English minimally when outside of the classroom. This thesis furthers the research on English use outside of the classroom in order to more fully understand all types of language learners and the link between language proficiency and out-of-class English use.

Prototype Speech Corpus, Dermot Campbell, Yi Wang, Ciaran Mcdonnell

Conference papers

DIT’s prototype speech corpus allows language learners and researchers access to real, informal dialogues–not just the transcripts of dialogues. Because the dialogues were created at a very high acoustic level they are capable of being slowed down using a time-scaling tool for more detailed study of speech production. The recording methodology used produces a natural dialogue exhibiting all the features of native-to-native interchanges. The speech corpus is capable of serving the needs of students and researchers of spoken language. LinguaTag is the first prototype tool within the language work package in the FP6 EU project SALERO to automatically tag speech …

Students' Noticing And Incorporation Of Written Feedback: A Snapshot Of Esol Writing Instructors' Commentary On Adult Esol Students' Essays, Heather Leilani Clark

Linguistics & TESOL Theses - Archive

Combining descriptive text analysis with qualitative interviews, the current study addresses the student-teacher written feedback interaction. Reflecting upon the existing debate within second language acquisition research, which focuses on the interface, or non-interface, of conscious and unconscious learning, the first part of the study investigates the role of noticing. Using teacher written commentary on student essays, learners are asked to identify the existence, boundaries, and nature of errors in their interviews. Student interviews are also used to articulate student perspectives on the purposes of feedback. This data illuminates differing opinions between students and teachers. Student essays are further used to …

Grice's Conversational Implicature Revisited: A Discourse Analysis Of Reproductive Loss In Women's Talk, Barbara Hauser

Theses and Dissertations

In my thesis, Grice's Conversational Implicature Revisited: A Discourse Analysis of Reproductive Loss in Women's Talk, it is my intent to explore the discursive modalities of reproductive loss narrated by women, who, at different stages of gestation, have lost one or more children. Rooted in a theoretical framework in discourse analysis, my thesis seeks to analyze how women, having participated in an interview with a female interlocutor who lost a child herself, narrate their experiences of reproductive loss.

My hypothesis is that the more personal information about the experience of reproductive loss the participant is supposed to share, the …

A Family Literacy Curriculum For Community Esl Courses, George William Clair Bailey

Theses and Dissertations

This project describes the piloting of a family literacy curriculum developed for use in a community ESL course. The purpose of this curriculum was to teach family-literacy-oriented English to students in the community ESL courses that are part of Brigham Young University's TESOL Teacher Training Course (TTTC) held at the University Parkway Center on BYU's campus. Students in BYU's TESOL Graduate Certificate program are required to complete a one-semester teaching practicum in the TTTC program. This program regularly offers English courses that enroll approximately 100 ESL students from the local community who are non-native speakers of English. These ESL students …

Task-Based Mood Induction Procedures For The Elicitation Of Natural Emotional Responses., Brian Vaughan, Charlie Cullen, Spyros Kousidis, Yi Wang

Other resources

This paper details experimental procedures designed to elicit real emotional responses from participants within a controlled acoustic environment. The experiments use Mood Induction Procedures (MIP’s), specifically MIP 4, to implement a co-operative task using two participants. These cooperative tasks are designed to engender emotional responses of activation and evaluation from the participants who are situated in separate isolation booths, thus reducing unwanted noise in the signal, preventing the participants from being distracted and ensuring a cleanly recorded audio signal. The audio is recorded at a professional level of quality (24bit/192Khz). The emotional dimensions of each audio recording will be evaluated …

An Evaluation Of Brigham Young University's Local Tesol Internship Program, Laura Kathleen Steeby

Theses and Dissertations

An evaluation of BYU's Local TESOL Minor Internship program shows the strengths and weaknesses of this academic internship program. Students are required to complete 150 hours of TESOL-related work outside of their courses. The interns volunteer in different English-teaching programs in the area. Internship hours include the time in the classroom, preparation, materials development, as well as the time in the Linguistics 496R course. The interns are required to have most of their minor classes finished before they complete their internship so that their internship can be a capstone to and an application of what they have learned thus far. …

A Correlation Of Pronunciation Learning Strategies With Spontaneous English Pronunciation Of Adult Esl Learners, Grant Taylor Eckstein

Theses and Dissertations

In the last thirty years, language learning strategies have been used in the field of English as a Second Language (ESL) to help learners autonomously improve their English listening, speaking, reading, and writing. However, language learning strategies have not been applied to pronunciation learning in a large scale manner. This study attempted to bridge this gap by investigating the usage of pronunciation learning strategies among adult ESL learners. A strategic pronunciation learning scale (SPLS) was administered to 183 adult ESL learners in an Intensive English Program. Their scores on the SPLS were compared with their scores of spontaneous pronunciation on …

A Web-Based Tool For Oral Practice And Assessment Of Grammatical Structures, Heather Colleen Torrie

Theses and Dissertations

The grammar course objectives at Brigham Young University's English Language Center (ELC) are a list of grammar structures for each level that students are expected to be able to master. These objectives currently are only measured by pencil-paper grammar tests, providing information regarding receptive grammar ability only. Therefore, there is a need for an oral grammar assessment to measure productive grammar ability, providing diagnostic and achievement information about the specific grammar objectives. This project is a web-based oral grammar assessment tool that enables teachers to assess students' mastery of the structures covered in the ELC grammar classes. The core of …

The Development Of A Literacy Curriculum For Adult Liberian Refugees, Kristen Marie Kohler

Theses and Dissertations

From 2003 to 2006, Tucson, Arizona became the new home of many Liberian refugees. Because of civil war in their homeland and ensuing years spent in refugee camps, these refugees had not had many opportunities for literacy development. Tucson had several literacy and ESL programs available; however, none of these programs was meeting the Liberians' particular needs. For my project, I designed and implemented a literacy curriculum for the Liberian refugees in Tucson. In preparation for developing my curriculum, I not only took coursework but also thoroughly reviewed the literature on literacy learning and instruction for first language learners, second …

A Grammar Of West Coast Bajau, Mark Turner Miller

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation is a description of the grammar of West Coast (WC) Bajau, a western Austronesian language spoken in Sabah, Malaysia by some 60,000 people. Drawing extensively from elicited data as well as a corpus of compiled texts, I describe the language at its various levels: phonology, morphology, phrase structure, clause structure, clause-combining operations, and discourse. In its verbal morphology, WC Bajau shows a (marked) actor-orientation vs. (unmarked) undergoer orientation with both transitive and intransitive verb roots. I show evidence for a verb phrase in WC Bajau, in one (and possibly two) voices. Investigation of the pragmatic structure of the …

A Constitutional Conundrum Of Second Amendment Commas, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Publications

Prompted by the court’s decision in Parker v. District of Columbia, this series of correspondence discusses the effect possible forms of punctuation may have on the Second Amendment. The article makes comments on the important grammars during the founding and also two possible writings of the Second Amendment that contain different sets of punctuation.

Intrasentential Vs. Intersentential Code Switching In Early And Late Bilinguals, Kelly Ann Hill Zirker

Theses and Dissertations

Significant research has been done regarding the influence of age of acquisition (i.e., the age at which one is exposed to a second language (L2)) on L2 learning (e.g., Johnson & Newport, 1989; Bialystock & Hakuta, 1999). Some researchers have shown that bilinguals who have learned their second language early in life may differ in their fluency from bilinguals who learned their second language later in life (White & Genesee, 1996; Flege, 1999). Specifically, studies have suggested that bilinguals who have not acquired their L2 by puberty will never acquire native-like proficiency (Lenneberg, 1967); however, others claim that there is …

Interference Of L1 English In L2 French Lexical Processing, Sarah Kuhn

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This study examines the interference, if any, caused by a first language (specifically English) in the processing of lexical items in a second language (French). Participants performed a computer-based translation recognition task where they were asked whether a pair of words, one French and the other English, represented an acceptable translation. Six different types of critical pairs were randomly alternated with actual translation pairs and unrelated distractor pairs. Each of the different categories of critical pairs had a different relationship with the L1 word, the L2 word, or both. Participants’ scores on this task were then analyzed to determine the …

The Novice Consultant And Electronic Mail: Strategies For And Implementation Of Politeness Techniques In Different Organizational Contexts, Nancy Annett

All Theses

This study examines the ways in which experienced and novice consultants in different organizational settings think about and use e-mail for communication to superiors. The methods by which novices in the workplace communicate via e-mail, especially to superiors, present a gap in the literature. Comparing novice and experienced employee e-mail behavior across organizational boundaries yielded several findings. First, employees seem to use particular decision criteria when formulating e-mail messages to managers, including considerations of the message's recipient and purpose. Novices seem most attuned to hierarchical levels and to the revision opportunities available through e-mail. Second, organizational context appears to affect …

Language Shift: Spanish In The United States, Alison Philbrick

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

This thesis deals with the concept of language shift, paying particular attention to Spanish in the United States. Initially, the factors that influence a language’s shift in dominance such as population dislocation, conquest etc. are examined. The origins of English are also explored as an example of how a language evolves over time. Spanish influence, including the language, was gradually introduced to North America in the 15th and 16th centuries during the age of exploration. Columbus, Ponce de Leon, Hernando De Soto and Francisco Vazquez de Coronado contributed greatly to this surge of Spanish culture. Immigration also played and continues …

The Only Differences Are The Words And The Sounds: Register Variation In Modern Written Icelandic, Jim Wood

Inquiry Journal 2007

No abstract provided.

Language As An Emergent System, K. David Harrison, E. Raimy

Linguistics Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Adult Esol Reading Comprehension And Text-To-Speech Software, John Drezek

Linguistics & TESOL Theses - Archive

This study involved ten ESOL adults and examines the extent to which text-to-speech (TTS) software facilitates their reading comprehension. The five treatment participants read fifty, 300-word, non-fiction stories and answered six comprehension questions per passage using TTS software, while five control participants read the same fifty passages and answered the same questions printed on paper. Using a pre- and post-test design, data showed two findings. First, control and treatment groups achieved gains on overall reading comprehension at 26 and 25 respectively, but the gains among question types were not equal. Second, participants in both groups enjoyed the stories and questions …

Learner Perceptions Of Small Group And Pair Work In The Esl Classroom: Implications For Conditions In Second Language Acquisition, Elissa K. Polley

Linguistics & TESOL Theses - Archive

Second language acquisition (SLA) research finds that small group (SG) and pair work (PW) are essential tools in language learning, specifically creating optimal conditions for negotiation of meaning (e.g., Long, 1985; Pica, et al., 1996). Limited research has focused on learner perceptions playing a part in establishing these conditions. This study examines learner perceptions of participation in SG/PW and the actual character of their participation in creating necessary conditions for SLA. This study involved 29 adult ESL learners enrolled in a private institute. Using focus group discussions, video-recorded SG/PW activities, and "stimulated recall" (Gass & Mackey, 2000), learner perceptions of …

Can Nature's Language Be Written, Spoken, And Heard? Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl" And Marlene Nourbese Philip's Looking For Livingstone, Lori Martindale

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

How do traditional western epistemologies affect natures' subjectivity? This essay deconstructs the status of nature as silent Other. I argue Mahasweta Devi's The Pterodactyl and Marlene Nourbese Philip's epic Looking for Dr. Livingstone translate nature, or the radical Other, as subject. Scientific, xenophobic, and imperial behaviors have affected the status of natures' subjectivity in the naming, mapping, and exploitation of land, during colonial and commodity enterprise. As a result, nature’s language has become increasingly radical and is one to be translated for an awareness and avoidance of imposition; nature is a language yet to be understood.

Childhood Obesity, Problem Or Pandemic?, Roxanne Baudry

Whittier Scholars Program

This project is a close study of childhood obesity and finding a solution to unhealthy eating habits. This is a multiple-part project which includes an essay that features statistics and analysis of children's dietary habits as well as a specifically designed 6-week program to get kids actively involved with activities that are fun and promote health. Students would be engaged in activities, games, tutorials, work-shops, and lessons interwoven with opportunities for interaction with a trained canine. The program is designed to meet once a week for approximately one hour and 30 minutes a day over a six-week span. This study …

Statistical Machine Translation Of Japanese, Erik A. Chapla

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to find ways to improve the performance of a statistical machine translation system that translates text from Japanese to English. Methods included altering the training and test data by adding a prior linguistic knowledge, altering sentence structures, and looking for better ways to statistically alter the way words align between the two languages. In addition, methods for properly segmenting words in Japanese text through statistical methods were examined. Finally, experiments were conducted on Japanese speech to produce the best text transcription of the speech. The best statistical machine translation methods implemented resulted in improvements …

American Identity And Attitudes Toward English Language Policy Initiatives, Carlos Garcia, Loretta E. Bass

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Relatively little is known about what individual-level factors drive Americans' attitudes toward offering services to immigrants. Using national-level data and logistic regressions, we examine what factors co-vary with whether respondents agree or disagree with specific policy initiatives regarding support for English language use for immigrants. We then examine what factors are related to whether respondents agree that tax money should be used to fund English classes for immigrant children and adults. We find that age, race, and general warmth toward undocumented immigrants predict English-only attitudes, and that marital status, education, and warmth toward undocumented immigrants predict attitudes toward the use …

From Alps To Alpnet (And Beyond), Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

Nestled in the Wasatch range of the Rocky Mountains in northern Utah lies scenic Utah Valley. Home to Brigham Young University (BYU) and a host of foreign-speaking residents, the setting also served as a hotbed throughout the 1980's for the machine translation (MT) industry. To fully appreciate this narrative the chronologically prior story of BYU's Translation Sciences Institute (TSI)—which has not yet been written— would need to be consulted. When the Church1 withdrew funding for the project, the TSI team disbanded. Some former participants remained at BYU, others left the university to work for industrial corporations, and the majority remained …

Second Language Acquisition From A Mcneillian Perspective, Gale Stam

Faculty Publications

Most second language acquisition research has concentrated on learners’ speech. This paper argues that it is necessary to look at both learners’ speech and gesture in order to better understand second language acquisition. It provides a summary of the second language acquisition process and the types of studies that have been conducted in the field. It discusses how gesture can be used to investigate learners’ thinking for speaking.

An Exploration Of Language Dominance, Michael Bishop

MA TESOL Collection

When two or more cultural groups make contact and interact over a period of time, language dominance often occurs. In this situation, one dominates the others both culturally and linguistically. This in turn, causes the weaker to start using the language of the more powerful until eventually it shifts its language and then its culture over to that of the more dominant group. Eventually its own language and culture dies. Language dominance, language shift and language death are social and linguistic phenomena that has been occurring for thousands of years. Historically, there were two great waves of language dominance, and …