Digital Commons Network^™

Activity Theory As A Basis For Negotiation Training In Adult English-As-A-Foreign-Language Instruction, Cheng-Wei Lu

Theses Digitization Project

The project offers Taiwanese teachers who work with adults a new concept of teaching crosscultural negotiation skills as part of their EFL instruction. It also presents Taiwanese teachers with a method of analyzing their educational practice to encourage more active and engaged teaching with a useful curriculum and its corresponding assessment.

Bilingual Lexical Activation In Sentence Context, Ana Schwartz, Judith Kroll

Departmental Papers (Psych)

The present study investigated the cognitive nature of second language (L2) lexical processing in sentence context. We examined bilinguals’ L2 word recognition performance for language-ambiguous words [cognates (e.g., piano); and homographs (e.g., pan)] in two sentence context experiments with highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals living in a bilingual community (Experiment 1) and with intermediate proficiency Spanish-English bilinguals living in a monolingual community (Experiment 2). To determine the influence of sentence constraint on cross-language activation, the critical words and their matched controls were inserted in low- and high-constraint sentences. In low-constraint sentences significant cognate facilitation was observed, suggesting that both languages were …

Sluicing Puzzles In Russian, Lydia Grebenyova

Linguistics

The general goal of this paper is to explore the properties of sluicing (IPellipsis) in Russian and to see how the Russian data shed light on the general processes underlying the phenomenon of sluicing. The first issue we will address is what positions wh-remnants occupy in sluicing constructions in Russian, considering the properties of wh-movement in Russian. We will then turn to sluicing with multiple wh-remnants, which I will refer to as multiple sluicing, following Takahashi (1994). Here we will investigate how the interpretative properties of multiple interrogatives in Russian affect the multiple sluicing possibilities in this language. Finally, I …

Aboriginal Languages In Canada: Trends And Perspectives On Maintenance And Revitalization, Mary Jane Norris

Aboriginal Policy Research Consortium International (APRCi)

No abstract provided.

Really Intriguing, That Pred Np!, Ileana Paul, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Terminological Reflections Of An Enlightened Contextualist, Robert J. Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Really Intriguing, That Prednp!, Ileana Paul, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Meaning And Reference: Some Chomskian Themes, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Neither Fragments Nor Ellipsis, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Problems With Steve Pinker's Mentalese: On The Implications Of Bilingualism, Marino Fernandes

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.

Phonological Awareness Instruction: Opinions And Practices Of Educators And Speech-Language Pathologists In West Virginia, Melinda J. Daniel

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Research has shown phonological awareness to be a strong predictor of literacy. To support literacy development, a phonological awareness project was piloted in several West Virginia schools in 2001. This study compared WV educators based on employment setting (schools participating and those not participating in the phonological awareness project) and professional category (classroom teacher, reading specialist, speech-language pathologist) on answers to survey questions related to phonological awareness. Results showed no significant relationships between employment setting and responses. However, reading specialists reported spending more minutes per week providing phonological awareness instruction to children at risk for reading difficulty than did speech-language …

Na(T)Ive Orthographies And Language Endangerment: Two Case Studies From Siberia, K. David Harrison, G. D. S. Anderson

Linguistics Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Evolving Secondary Colours: Evidence From Sorbian, Andrew R. Hippisley, Ian Davies

Linguistics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Diachronic Change In The Discourse Markers "Why" And "Say" In American English, Laurel Smith Stvan

Linguistics & TESOL Faculty Publications & Presentations - Archive

Generational variation and contrasts in speech vs. writing are shown in usage of the discourse markers why and say across 20th century American English. Collocating with earlier 20th century address forms (e.g. say, pal rather then say, dude) these forms appear more dated than interjectional markers like oh, well, and so, Further, distinct subtypes of why and say show different frequencies across time. Using corpora of English from different eras, I present a diachronic description of these terms, and show evidence of new terms (e.g. hey and yo) taking over some of the functions that why and say once covered. …

The Contingent Meaning Of -Ex Brand Names In English, Laurel Smith Stvan

Linguistics & TESOL Faculty Publications & Presentations - Archive

The –ex string found in English product and company names (e.g., Kleenex, Timex and Virex), is investigated to discover whether this ending has consistent meaning across coined words and to observe any constraints on its attachment and interpretation. Seven hundred and ninety-three –exbrand name types were collected and examined, derived from American English texts in the Brown and Frown corpora as well as over 600 submissions to the US Patent and Trademark Office's Trademark Electronic Search System database (TESS); American native English speakers were also surveyed to assess interpretations of –ex meaning in brands. Analysis of these coined terms reveals …

A Grammatical Sketch Of Isaalo (Western Sisaala), Steven Paul Moran

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Language Ideology And Racial Inequality: Competing Functions Of Spanish In An Anglo-Owned Mexican Restaurant, Rusty Barrett

Linguistics Faculty Publications

This article examines the influence of language ideology on interactions between English-speaking Anglo and monolingual Spanish-speaking employees in an Anglo-owned Mexican restaurant in Texas. In directives to Spanish-speaking employees, Anglo managers typically use English with elements of Mock Spanish. Because the Anglo managers fail to question whether their limited use of Spanish is sufficient for communicative success, Spanish speakers are almost always held responsible for incidents resulting from miscommunication. For Latino workers, Spanish provides an alternative linguistic market in which Spanish operates as a form of solidarity and resistance. The competing functions of Spanish serve to reinforce racial segregation and …

Natural English In Speaking And Listening Activities, Dermot Campbell, Marty Meinardi, Bunny Richardson, Yi Wang

Conference papers

DIT Speech Research Cluster will present recommendations for materials development based on the technologies and methodologies they are developing in the area of listening skills and the use of natural English in learning situations. The first speaker will address features of native speech flow which cause difficulties for EFL students (Brown, Cauldwell) and establish the need for improvements in the teaching of listening skills. She will give examples of elision, assimilation and weak forms, and how these can be made accessible for study using DIT’s slow-down technology, which gives students more time to study native speech features, without tonal distortion. …

Study Abroad Social Networks, Motivation And Attitudes: Implications For Second Language Acquisition., Christina Isabelli

Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Future Foreign Language Teachers' Social And Cognitive Collaboration In An Online Environment, Nike Arnold, Lara Ducate

Faculty Publications

Discussion boards provide an interactive venue where new and future language teachers can reflect, evaluate, solve problems or simply exchange ideas (e.g., Bonk, Hansen, Grabner-Hagen, Lazar, & Mirabelli, 1996; DeWert, Babinski, & Jones, 2003; Kumari, 2001; Pawan, Paulus, Yalcin, & Chang, 2003). In addition, encouraging future teachers to learn with technology before teaching with it allows them to become comfortable using various computer applications.

This article examines transcripts from a semester-long asynchronous discussion between foreign language methodology classes at two different universities. Social and cognitive presence in the discussions was analyzed using Garrison, Anderson, and Archer's Framework of a Community …

Geeks At Play: Doing Masculinity In An Online Gaming Site, Natasha Chen Christensen

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paper uses data taken from chat logs within a first person shooter game, Quake Online, in order to explore the performance of gender online. Previous research has shown how physicality is given a position of importance in institutions where masculinity is developed and reproduced such as sports and war; cyberspace offers the opportunity of divorcing the performance of masculinity from the body. Researchers of gender in cyberspace are divided into two perspectives about the effect of the absence of a physical body on the performance of gender: One camp believes that without the constraints of the body, gender in …

Language Classification And Manipulation In Romania And Moldova, Chase Faucheux

LSU Master's Theses

Linguistic classification is a scientific methodology for categorizing the languages of the world. However, the tools and methods of linguistic classification have been used to various degrees by political entities to further nationalistic agendas. This thesis assesses the role of linguistic classification in nationality and politics, and addresses the disjunct between true linguistic classification, based on genealogical, areal, and typological features, and language designation, based on political and nationalistic motives. This thesis uses the Romanian language as a vehicle for illustrating both linguistic classification methods as well as how these methods have been manipulated for non-linguistic reasons both internally by …

Currents And Eddies In The Discourse Of Assessment: A Learning-Focused Interpretation, Pauline Rea-Dickins

Institute for Educational Development, East Africa

This article explores processes of classroom assessment, in particular ways in which learners using English as an additional language engage in formative assessment within a primary school setting. Transcript evidence of teacher and learner interactions during activities viewed by teachers as formative or summative assessment opportunities are presented as the basis for an analysis of teacher feedback, learner responses to this feedback, as well as learner-initiated talk. The analyses suggest that there are different teacher orientations within assessment and highlight the potential that assessment dialogues might offer for assessment as a resource for language learning, thus situating this work at …

Paradigm Uniformity And Analogy: The Capitalistic Versus Militaristic Debate, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

In American English, /t/ in capitalistic is generally flapped while in militaristic it is not due to the influence of capi[ɾ]al and mili[tʰ]ary. This is called Paradigm Uniformity or PU (Steriade, 2000). Riehl (2003) presents evidence to refute PU which when reanalyzed supports PU. PU is thought to work in tandem with a rule of allophonic distribution, the nature of which is debated. An approach is suggested that eliminates the need for the rule versus PU dichotomy; allophonic distribution is carried out by analogy to stored items in the mental lexicon. Therefore, the influence of the pronunciation of capital …

A Cross-Language Approach To Rapid Creation Of New Morpho-Syntactically Annotated Resources, Anna Feldman, Jirka Hana, Chris Brew

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We take a novel approach to rapid, low-cost development of morpho-syntactically annotated resources without using parallel corpora or bilingual lexicons. The overall research question is how to exploit language resources and properties to facilitate and automate the creation of morphologically annotated corpora for new languages. This portability issue is especially relevant to minority languages, for which such resources are likely to remain unavailable in the foreseeable future. We compare the performance of our system on languages that belong to different language families (Romance vs. Slavic), as well as different language pairs within the same language family (Portuguese via Spanish vs. …

Verb Aquisition In Students Of English As A Second Language: Language Learning Background And Attitudes, Erin Kyles Rogers

LSU Master's Theses

In order to determine how learner background and learner attitudes affected English as a Second Language students’ verb production, eleven ESL learners participated in both oral and written tasks. They were given written surveys to determine what was emphasized more in learning English in their home countries: speaking or writing. Another survey was administered to determine which of these activities that they liked best. Next, the subjects watched a movie clip, wrote about it, and then spoke about it. Their written and spoken total amount of verbs produced and total amount of verbs used correctly were compared and analyzed to …

Future Foreign Language Teachers' Social And Cognitive Collaboration In An Online Environment, Nike Arnold, Lara Ducate

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Discussion boards provide an interactive venue where new and future language teachers can reflect, evaluate, solve problems or simply exchange ideas (e.g., Bonk, Hansen, Grabner-Hagen, Lazar, & Mirabelli, 1996; DeWert, Babinski, & Jones, 2003; Kumari, 2001; Pawan, Paulus, Yalcin, & Chang, 2003). In addition, encouraging future teachers to learn with technology before teaching with it allows them to become comfortable using various computer applications.

This article examines transcripts from a semester-long asynchronous discussion between foreign language methodology classes at two different universities. Social and cognitive presence in the discussions was analyzed using Garrison, Anderson, and Archer's Framework of a Community …

The Acquisition Of Japanese As A Second Language And Processability Theory: A Longitudinal Study Of A Naturalistic Child Learner, Junko Iwasaki

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The aim of this study was to investigate longitudinally how a child learner acquired verbal morpho-syntax in Japanese in a naturalistic second language (L2) context. Specifically the points of emergence for three verbal morpho-syntactic structures, namely verbal inflection, the V-te V structure and the passive/causative structure, were investigated within a framework of Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann, 1998b). The subsequent development of these structures was also examined. Unlike earlier research about morpheme orders and developmental sequences in language acquisition which was criticised because of its apparent lack of theoretical underpinnings, Pienemann’s Processability Theory (PT)(1998b) connects the processability of morpho-syntactic structure to …

Pronunciation Matters: English Consonant Production By Auap Students, K. James Hartshorn

Faculty Publications

Most Asia University students study English for at least six and a half years by the time they come to the United States to participate in the Asian University America Program (AUAP). For many, the AUAP experience is the realization of a dream to be able to forge new friendships and communicate successfully with Americans. However, despite their enthusiasm for learning, those participating in AUAP are not immune to the struggles experienced by most Japanese students as they endeavor to master English pronunciation (Purcell and Suter, 1980; Wells, 2000, Aoyama, K. Flege, J., Guion, S., Akahane-Yamada, R., Yamada, T., 2003). …

Proximity In Context: An Empirically Grounded Computational Model Of Proximity For Processing Topological Spatial Expression., John D. Kelleher, Geert-Jan Kruijff, Fintan Costello

Conference papers

The paper presents a new model for context-dependent interpretation of linguistic expressions about spatial proximity between objects in a natural scene. The paper discusses novel psycholinguistic experimental data that tests and verifies the model. The model has been implemented, and enables a conversational robot to identify objects in a scene through topological spatial relations (e.g. ''X near Y''). The model can help motivate the choice between topological and projective prepositions.