Digital Commons Network^™

Maximizing Target Language Use Outside The Classroom: The Advanced-Level Student Of Russian As Digital Consumer, Alexander M. Groce

Russian Language Journal

The article examines recent trends in digital and social media consumption among domestic foreign language students and Russian Overseas Flagship students, analyzing a number of approaches for seeding Russian-language material within students’ everyday extracurricular digital practices. The goal of the project has been to encourage language learners to strengthen their own skills at identifying Russian media sources of personal or professional interest and incorporating habits of media consumption into their language-learning experience. The recommendations provided are informed by the results of a survey distributed among American students of Russian in Kazakhstan during the period from 2017 to 2019. The survey …

Full Issue

Russian Language Journal

No abstract provided.

Казахстанская Модель Академической Программы «Флагман», Людмила Екшембеева

Russian Language Journal

The article The Kazakhstan Model of the Russian Flagship Academic Program examines the current model of the Russian Flagship Capstone Program as implemented in Kazakhstan. This study analyzes the application of core principles of the Flagship overseas training model as well as necessary adaptations required by the distinctively multi-cultural environment of the host country. Among core adaptations, two new courses were introduced: Kazakh language and intercultural communications. In order to foster greater inclusion of capstone participants within the host culture, students are encouraged to study and reflect on both implicit and explicit meanings of the linguistic and cultural texts they …

“That Which They Most Desired”: The Waters Of Mormon, Baptism, The Love Of God, And The Bitter Fountain, Matthew L. Bowen

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Paronomasia in the Hebrew text of Exodus creates narrative links between the name Miriam (Mary) and the “waters” (mayim) of the Re[e]d Sea from which Israel is “pulled” and the nearby “bitter” waters of Marah. Nephi sees Mary (Mariam), the mother of Jesus, associated with the “love of God,” and thus to both “the tree of life” and “the fountain of living waters” (1 Nephi 11:25) vis-à-vis “the fountain of filthy water” (1 Nephi 12:16). Mormon was named after “the land of Mormon” (3 Nephi 5:12). He associates his given name with “waters,” which he describes as a “fountain of …

González-Allende, Iker, And José Ángel Ascunce Arrieta, Editors. El Mundo Está En Todas Partes: La Creación Literaria De Bernardo Atxaga., David Laraway

Faculty Publications

Few living writers know what it means to bear the weight of an entire literary tradition, represent- ing it synecdochally to readers who lack linguistic access to its primary sources. Fewer still know what it is like to work in a language as poorly understood and as limited in its geographical and demographic reach as Euskera. In this regard, Bernardo Atxaga (the pseudonym of Joseba Irazu Garmendia) is in rare company and, although he is by no means the only author writing in the Basque language who currently enjoys a readership beyond the borders of Euskal Herria—his contemporary Ramon Saizarbitoria …

Front Matter

The Bridge

No abstract provided.

Language Shift And Maintenance Among Danish Immigrants In The Us, Karoline Kühl

The Bridge

The destination of most participants in the mass emigration from Denmark around the turn of the twentieth century was North America. In total about 400,000 to 450,000 Danes immigrated to the United States between 1820 and 2000, the majority between 1880 and 1920 (Grøngaard Jeppesen 2005, 265ff., 323). Danish immigration to the United States was, generally speaking, a story of socioeconomic success due to rapid assimilation based on both sociodemographic factors and attitudes. Between 1870 and 1940, when most Danish immigrants settled in the United States, the group included, to a larger degree than most other European groups, young, unmarried …

Vowel Dynamics Of The Low Vowels In Cowlitz County, Washington, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Q1: Does Cowlitz County participate in the Elsewhere Shift?

BOT/BOUGHT:

• Not 100% merged.
• Have been in a stable near-merger since the 1930s.
• Hypothesis: Started when area was being settled (1850s–1920s) because of the demographic shift.

/æ/ BAT:

• Slowly lowering over 4 generations (since at least the 1930s)
• Women consistently ahead of the men - change in progress for over 60 years.
• Hypothesis: Began in earnest when Longview was founded (mid 1920s), in addition to language-internal pressure.

Age-Related Changes In Speech And Voice: Spectral And Cepstral Measures, Christopher Dromey, Sammi Taylor, Shawn L. Nissen, Kristine Tanner, Dennis Eggett, Kim Corbin-Lewis

Faculty Publications

Purpose

This study examined differences in selected acoustic measures of speech and voice according to age and sex and across families.

Method

Participants included 169 individuals, 79 men and 90 women, from 18 families, ranging in age from 17 to 87 years. Participants reported no history of articulation disorders, stroke or active neurologic disease, or severe-to-profound hearing loss. They read aloud two passages to facilitate examination of the following speech and voice acoustic parameters: fricative spectral moments (center of gravity, standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis), the proportion of time spent speaking, mean speaking fundamental frequency, semitone standard deviation (STSD), and …

Prosodic Elements For Content Delivery In Broadcast Journalism: A Quantitative Study Of Vocal Pitch, Shawn L. Nissen, Quint B. Randle, Jared L. Johnson, Jenny Lynes

Faculty Publications

Individuals verbally express meaning not only through speech sounds and words but also prosodically through the pitch, loudness, and tempo of their voice. Through a quantitative analysis, this exploratory study examined the prosodic elements of mean pitch, pitch variability, and pitch range in a sample of 450 voice-overs and throws from 90 male and female broadcast reporters and anchors from larger markets across the United States. Findings indicate that compared to typical speakers in the general population, male broadcasters actually speak with an elevated mean pitch, more pitch variability, and use more range. However, female broadcasters were found to speak …

Solving Russian Velars: Palatalization, The Lexicon And Gradient Contrast Utilization, Jeffrey R. Parker, Andrea D. Sims

Faculty Publications

The complexity of an inflection class system is the average extent to which elements in the system inhibit motivated inferences about the realization of lexemes’ paradigm cells. Research shows that systems tend to exhibit relatively low complexity in this sense. However, representations of inflectional systems tend to include only affixal and regular patterns, leaving questions about how irregular patterns and non-affixal ‘layers’ of inflectional exponence affect the complexity of a system. We address these questions by exploring four layers of inflectional exponence of Russian nouns, including irregular patterns within each layer. Our data show that the Russian noun system exhibits …

Understanding Diversity – Perspectives From University Departments Hosting Large Percentages Of International Students, K. James Hartshorn, Maureen Snow Andrade, Norman W. Evans, Gwyneth Gates

Faculty Publications

The international student enrollment in some university departments has grown to the point that these students are the majority. This study sought to determine the extent to which departments hosting large numbers of international English as a second language (ESL) students demonstrate awareness and planning to address these learners’ needs. Analyses were conducted in reference to a framework designed to aid institutions in meeting international ESL students’ needs. Findings indicate some awareness of students’ needs and related strategies for linguistic and cultural development. They also demonstrate that the proposed framework could foster more intentional strategies to ensure international student success.

The View Of Southern Vowels From Large-Scale Data, William A. Kretzschmar Jr., Margaret E. L. Renwick, Katherine I. Kuiper, Lisa M. Lipani, Michael L. Olsen, Rachel M. Olsen, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Abstract:

We have extracted c. 2 million tokens of vowels from a rigorous sample of 63 speakers across the American South in an NSF-funded project for forced alignment and automatic formant extraction. We show how our vowel measurements across the whole region differ from national mean F1/F2 scores. We contrast men and women, and African Americans and non- African Americans, within the Southern region.

Rubric Rating With Mfrm Versus Randomly Distributed Comparative Judgment: A Comparison Of Two Approaches To Second-Language Writing Assessment, Maureen E. Sims, Troy L. Cox, Grant T. Eckstein, K. James Hartshorn, Matthew P. Wilcox, Judson M. Hart

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study is to explore the reliability of a potentially more practical approach to direct writing assessment in the context of ESL writing. Traditional rubric rating (RR) is a common yet resource-intensive evaluation practice when performed reliably. This study compared the traditional rubric model of ESL writing assessment and many-facet Rasch modeling (MFRM) to comparative judgment (CJ), the new approach, which shows promising results in terms of reliability. We employed two groups of raters—novice and experienced—and used essays that had been previously double-rated, analyzed with MFRM, and selected with fit statistics. We compared the results of the …

New And Everlasting: The Relationship Between Gospel Covenants In History, Kerry Muhlestein, Joshua M. Sears, Avram R. Shannon

Faculty Publications

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints speak of covenants in general, baptismal covenants, temple covenants, the new and everlasting covenant, the Abrahamic covenant, and the Mosaic or Sinai covenant. But what are these covenants, and how are they related to each other? Students in many settings experience confusion about these questions. Each book of scripture shares aspects of covenants that students may not understand as well as they could. Greater clarity will allow them to draw more power from scriptural and current prophetic teachings about the centrality of the covenant in every dispensation.

How Responsiveness From A Communication Partner Affects Story Retell In Aphasia: Quantitative And Qualitative Findings, Tyson G. Harmon, Adam Jacks, Katarina L. Haley, Antoine Bailliard

Faculty Publications

Purpose: Because people with aphasia frequently interact with partners who are unresponsive to their communicative attempts, we investigated how partner responsiveness affects quantitative measures of spoken language and subjective reactions during story retell.

Method: A quantitative and a qualitative study were conducted. In study 1, participants with aphasia and controls retold short stories to a communication partner who indicated interest through supportive backchannel responses (responsive) and another who indicated disinterest through unsupportive backchannel responses (unresponsive). Story retell accuracy, delivery speed, and ratings of psychological stress were measured and compared. In study 2, participants completed semi-structured interviews about their story retell …

Dialect And Employability: Human Resource Managers' Perceptions Of African American English, Kimberly Michelsen

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis addresses the question of whether different dialects can change the probability of speakers being perceived as employable. It is one of the few that takes this question away from college campuses and directly to Human Resources Managers in the workforce. Using the Matched Guise Technique, recordings of Standard American English (SAE) and African American English (AAE) were presented to forty-two HR Managers from regions across the United States. Using a series of Likert scales, the HR Managers rated the recordings on eight characteristics of employability: four focused on professional skills and four focused on human-relation skills. The study …

Reading Instruction For Students With Intellectual Disabilities:Inservice Teachers' Perceptions, Agatha Lee Gibbons

Theses and Dissertations

Students with intellectual disabilities have at times been overlooked and denied effective reading instruction. Teachers tasked with instructing such students are often limited in the training, resources, and support necessary to effectively instruct these students in reading. These problems are further compounded by the fact that students with intellectual disabilities have historically been misperceived, often by the very educators tasked with instructing them, as either being unable to learn to read or that the prospect of teaching them to read is simply too daunting and complicated to be of sufficient worth (Aldridge, 2014; Kluth & Chandler-Olcott, 2008). Such misperception may …

Measuring L2 (Russian) Reading Proficiency Across Various Levels Using Eye Tracking, Anastasiia Nikol Rybakova

Theses and Dissertations

In recent years interest in L2 reading research has focused largely on word frequency, sentence level, word recognition, and several researchers have begun to use eye tracking to better study reading behaviors. Parshina et al. (under review) have found that high proficiency heritage speakers of Russian read faster in terms of gaze duration and total time and had fewer regressions than low proficiency heritage speakers. The current study focuses on the establishment of benchmarks for L2 Russian readers in terms of first fixation duration, gaze duration, and total time when reading a complete passage, and compares these variables among different …

Evaluating And Addressing The Information Needs And Habits Of Turkish English Majors, Leanna C Fry

Theses and Dissertations

Information literacy is a relatively new concept in Turkey and is most accessible to English Language Learners. This article-format dissertation identifies the information needs and habits of English Language and Literature majors at a major Turkish university, discusses the development of an online intervention to teach information literacy to these students, and tests the efficacy of using Turkish subtitles to teach information literacy skills to these English majors. Article 1 surveyed students majoring in English Language and Literature about their attitudes towards library usage and sources. Student attitudes revealed a preference for internet sources over library sources and a belief …

A Preliminary Study Using Electropalatography In Second Language Instruction: An Examination Of Formant Frequencies, Summer Ann Price

Theses and Dissertations

The importance of accent reduction to those who are learning English as a second language cannot be understated as it has direct and indirect impacts on credibility and income. This study is an evaluation of an instructional technique involving visual feedback through an electropalatography device to assist speakers in acquiring the /r/ and /l/ sound contrast in American English and whether or not that progress varied across speech task type or word position. This study involved four native Japanese participants in their first semester at the English Language Center located at Brigham Young University. Each subject participated in 7 45-minute …

Global Impact Of A Business School Degree: International Alumni Voice, K. James Hartshorn, Maureen Snow Andrade, Norman W. Evans

Faculty Publications

Business schools in English-dominant countries host significant numbers of international students. In the U.S., where few students remain in the country to work, little is known about the role of English language proficiency and employer-valued outcomes on students’ professional success. This study reports survey findings from international alumni on the development and impact of learning outcomes, particularly English proficiency. Participants felt they had acquired outcomes valued by employers and reported using English in their work. The study indicates a need for more institution-specific studies to increase knowledge of a population with a significant presence in schools of business.

Verb Usage In Egyptian Movies, Serials, And Blogs: A Case For Register Variation, Michael G. White

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis contributes to the discussion of register variation within Egyptian Arabic by focusing on the usage of verbs in blogs and transcripts of movies and television. Register variation has been extensively researched for English as well as several other languages; yet, the lexical and grammatical features that distinguish registers of Egyptian Arabic have not been analyzed. Several challenges have prevented such an analysis, among them the perceived lack of an automatic annotator and the uncertainty of results. In order to overcome these challenges, two corpora were compiled: one containing texts from blogs and the other transcripts of movies and …

Yea, Yea, Nay, Nay: Uses Of The Archaic, Biblical Yea In The Book Of Mormon, Michael Edward De Martini

Theses and Dissertations

This work examines the word yea in the Book of Mormon, the Earliest Text and enumerates the usages found therein. Already recognized definitions in addition to new definitions are given with examples. Also included are textual variations from the Earliest Text and the current Book of Mormon used generally as scripture in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Impact Of Intercultural Competence On Communicative Success In L2 Environments(With Reference To Missionaries Of The Church Ofjesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints), David Milford Lucero

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the impact of cultural competence on success in completing key missionary tasks. Qualitative survey results are supported by data from an intercultural effectiveness assessment and a Mandarin Chinese listening proficiency test to describe themes related to missionary communicative success and to explore correlations between intercultural effectiveness and listening proficiency. Missionary communicative tasks are clarified into themes:"obtaining referrals,"obtaining teaching opportunities," and"helping people make and keep commitments." Factors perceived as associating with communicative success include"feeling and communicating love" and receiving"spiritual guidance." The effect of training on intercultural competence is also described. The intercultural effectiveness subcategory of positive regard is …

The New Woman In Embryo: Masculine Women In Victorian Novels, Kayla Merrick

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Immediate Repeated Reading Has Positive Effects On Reading Fluency For English Language Learners: An Eye-Tracking Study, Jennifer Hemmert Hansen

Theses and Dissertations

Fluent reading has been described as the ability to read a passage with accuracy, at a steady rate, with minimal hesitancy, and good comprehension (Grabe, 2009; Kuhn, Schwanenflugel, & Meisinger, 2010). Dysfluent reading can affect motivation for reading in English language learners, thereby limiting access to a wealth of language input from written texts (Taguchi, Gorsuch, & Sasamoto, 2006). Extensive research of repeated reading in L1 settings has been shown to increase reading fluency (Samuels, 1979; National Reading Panel, 2000), while comparatively little research has been done on repeated reading in L2 settings (Grabe, 2009). The objective of this eye-tracking …

The Impact Of Electropalatography In Teaching The /R/-/L/ Sound Contrast For Native Japanese Language Learners Of English: Evidence From Lingua-Palatal Contact, Nicole Rose Mcdougal

Theses and Dissertations

The ability for English Language Learners (ELL) to communicate in a native-like manner can be vital when seeking to improve job opportunities and social interactions. Native Japanese ELL speakers commonly struggle with identifying and producing the English consonants /r/ and /l/ as separate phonemes, even for experienced Japanese ELLs. Traditional means of second language (L2) learning has primarily used auditory feedback. Electropalatography (EPG) is a visual biofeedback system designed to visualize lingua-palatal contact in real time. This study explores the impact of using EPG technology in L2 Speech Learning with Japanese ELLs. Research has shown that EPG technology is an …

Same Language, Different Histories: Developing A “Critical” English Teacher Identity, Julia Menard-Warwick, Eric Ruiz Bybee, Enrique David Degollado, Sophia Jin, Shannon Kehoe, Katherine Masters

Faculty Publications

Our paper contends that growing awareness of the historicity of English lies at the heart of the process by which English language teachers develop “critical” identities. We compare novice teachers in three different contexts of English teaching: urban Guatemala, rural Nicaragua, and a Tibetan refugee community in India. Collectively, these ethnographic case studies illustrate the complexity of English teacher identity formation in contemporary global society, as our participants developed new understandings of their positions in history, their relationships with English learners, and the local meanings around English as symbolic capital.

The Goodness Of God And His Children As A Fundamental Theological Concept In The Book Of Mormon, Noel B. Reynolds

Faculty Publications

The phrase goodness of God does occur occasionally in the Hebrew Bible, but has not been considered by Old Testament scholars to be an independent principle in Israelite theology. Rather, it has been interpreted as just another way of talking about God’s acts of hesed or loving kindness for his covenant people and is usually interpreted in the context of the covenants Israel received through Abraham and Moses. The Book of Mormon clearly echoes that Old Testament pattern, but also presents two additional conceptual frameworks that are explained in terms of the goodness of God. It advances an explicit …