Digital Commons Network^™

The Proposal For The Development Of A Minimal Viable Product (Mvp) Repository Website Containing Authentic Texts In Video Format For The Use Of Language Teachers In The Twenty-First Century, Rute Maria Baptista

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis project proposed the building of a website as a repository of authentic texts in video format for teaching foreign or second languages. The project planned the building of a minimal viable product or MVP with authentic videos both in English and Spanish, organized by the ACTFL levels with particular attention to the Intermediate level. Data were collected from a survey of 42 respondents in the United States and 89 combined from Spain and Mexico. The responses collected suggest that there is a need for this MVP. Additionally, the data indicated which features were most wanted by these teachers. …

Cambios En Las Actitudes Estudiantiles Por Medio De Implementación De La Enseñanza Intercultural En Clases De Español, Ana Victoria Madrigal

Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, research in the pedagogical field has focused on the relationship between linguistic and intercultural competence. Through various studies, the connection and interdependence that exists between the teaching of language and culture as part of foreign language classes has been recognized. The following action-research study focuses on the implementation of cultured based instruction as well as the learning and teaching of Latin American culture through specific, clear, and direct cultural lesson plans and assignments. The cultural lesson plans and assignments helped activate a more explicit cultural pedagogical instruction. The cultural lesson plans and assignments implemented in the study …

Mutants, Sentinels, And Cerebro: Messages About Technology And Society In Science Fiction Films, Paige Marie Lee

Theses and Dissertations

Technology plays a significant role in society and in entertainment. People hold an ambivalent attitude about technology that is often illustrated in science fiction films. Much like myth telling stories to teach a lesson, science fiction films caution viewers of the effects of powerful technology usage in culture today. This thesis examines X-Men to show how relevant principles found in myth continue to be relevant to media consumption. Using media ecology to inform the reader about the technological environment (Mumford, 1944), this analysis of technology portrayed in X-Men shows the implications real world technology, such as radiation, weapons, and artificial …

Positive Psychology Interventions In An Sla Context: A Semester-Long Study Of The Impact Of Positive Psychology On The Well-Being And Language Development Of English Language Learners, Carolee Rogers

Theses and Dissertations

This article reports on a study investigating the effectiveness of positive psychology interventions (PPIs) in an Intensive English Program (IEP) for non-matriculated university students. Interventions based on the PERMA model for wellbeing (positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment) were implemented through weekly 65-minute lessons and short daily activities. Each lesson introduced an aspect of the PERMA model such as positive emotion or achievement. Along with this focused instruction, students concurrently engaged in language learning activities. Teachers also provided short daily activities for reinforcement throughout the week. Six classes received these interventions, while three classes served as a control group …

The World, Rebecca Dawn Billings

Theses and Dissertations

A poem comes into the world when an obsession takes hold of a person who must write about it. These twenty-eight original poems are products of obsession and pleasure.

The Effects Of Dialogic Reading On The Oral Language Ofâ Diverse Kindergarten Students, Abigail Figgins

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine if dialogic reading involving diverse kindergarten students would significantly affect narrative language. Various studies have corroborated the effectiveness of dialogic reading instruction on the expressive vocabulary of monolingual children. However, few studies have examined oral narrative language outcomes, especially with diverse students. A total of 142 kindergarten students were randomly assigned to a treatment group or control group. Each child in the treatment group received 14 weeks of whole-class dialogic reading instruction from their kindergarten teacher two times per week for 20 minutes each session in their classroom. The dialogic reading program …

The Caregiver's Conflict: The Toll Of Death And Dying On Nurses' Mental Health And Wellbeing, Madison Brown

Student Works

A major responsibility for nurses is caring for patients during the end-of-life process, as well as helping families and patients cope with the death and dying process. It is well known that death and dying greatly impacts families, but little holistic research has been done on how death and dying impacts nurses’ mental and emotional wellbeing. Using databases Google Scholar, Web of Science, and EBSCO, 14 articles were analyzed regarding the impact of death on nurses’ mental health. Results show that the age of a patient plays a bigger role on death impact than nursing specialty does, as younger patients’ …

Aiding Semantic Memory Creation With Navigational Context, Thomas Benjamin Lyle Wasden

Theses and Dissertations

While we have traditionally understood the hippocampus to be involved in memory and navigation, it also appears that it has a role in language processing, creation and prediction. An obvious explanation for this is that language is impossible if linguistic signs cannot be remembered and retrieved. Because linguistic signs are definitionally biologically neutral or arbitrary, we must use the brain's apparatus for learning and storing information from the external world to store and retrieve them. Although plausible, this explanation fails to take into account the hippocampus' role in navigation as a contributing element in the processing, storage and retrieval of …

Reading Fluency Development And Science In A Fourth Grade Dual Language Immersion Classroom, Talia A. Casares

Theses and Dissertations

Students from dual language immersion (DLI) classrooms are required to learn the language through content. However, some students have not yet developed these abilities by the time they start fourth grade. Thus, to fully comprehend content such as science, students need stronger reading and writing abilities in the second language (L2). To help stakeholders have a better understanding on how to effectively help students throughout this process, this action research studied the effectiveness of integrating literacy with science and mobile assisted language learning (MALL). Findings showed that the integrations of literacy, science and MALL were effective with statistically significant results …

How She Sleeps At Night, Alexandra Malouf

Theses and Dissertations

How She Sleeps at Night is a collection of lyric poetry constellated around experiences of disability, trauma, and womanhood. A critical essay introduces the collection by elucidating the experiences and theoretical underpinnings that shaped the body of these poems. The introductory essay distills the principles that informed my cardinal poetic goals as I wrote: to create poems that can be read again and again over a lifetime, which connect with readers' common humanity, and which acknowledge the nuances and complexities of being alive.

Satanic Injustice: A Pentadic Rhetorical Analysis Of State Of Arkansas V Echols And Baldwin, Shaelee Bryne Erickson

Theses and Dissertations

Injustice continues to be a highly discussed topic in many scholarly disciplines, including rhetoric and law. Scholars in both fields are exploring how language in legal discourse contributes to systematic inequality, discrimination, and unfairness--racial and nonracial. This rise in scholarly interest correlates with civic concern, as there have been many court cases in the last few decades that have captured public and media attention. One of these cases involved Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin, two teenage boys who were convicted for murdering three 8-year-old boys. Echols and Baldwin were tried during the late 20th-century satanic panic, a well-documented social phenomenon …

Cherry Red Greenwashing: The Rhetoric Behind Corporate Recycling Narratives, Jessica Wallace Haws

Theses and Dissertations

As the public becomes more aware of environmental issues, corporations are pressed to consider and address the sustainability of their practices. Unwilling to drastically change business models, many corporations turn to greenwashing in an attempt to construct an environmentally friendly image while doing little to nothing to address sustainability issues. Using Kenneth Burke's work on identification and terministic screens, I analyze The Coca-Cola Company's "2020 World Without Waste Report" to illuminate how consumers come to believe in and identify with corporate greenwashing tactics. In line with Burke's theories related to identification, I argue that Coca-Cola's greenwashing strategies can be categorized …

Chameleon: A Collection Of Poems, Daniel Albert Daw

Theses and Dissertations

Chameleon is a collection of poetry that largely springs from John Keats' notion of the chameleon poet, which posits that poets can and should be able to speak with any voice or perspective in their work. A critical essay introduces the collection by putting Keats in conversation with other poets and scholars, such as Paisley Rekdal, Philip Sidney, and Fernando Pessoa, who also have much to say regarding the nature of voice in poetry. The essay further explores some of my most recurring strategies in poetry as well as what I consider to be some of the touchstones of great …

A Randomized Control Trial Examining The Effects Of A Multi-Tiered Oral Narrative Language Intervention On Kindergarten Expository Writing, Shaylee Rae Woods

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the current study was to examine the effects of a multi-tiered oral narrative language intervention on kindergarten students' written expository discourse. The participants included 270 participants from a larger sample of 686 kindergarten students from four school districts in the upper Midwest geographical region of the United States. Participants received contextualized language intervention using Story Champs narrative intervention procedures. Tier-1 treatment groups received large group instruction from their classroom teacher who followed Story Champs procedures. Students whose oral narrative retell scores did not improve following the initial four weeks of treatment were assigned to receive additional small …

Implementation Of An Automated Grading Tool For Phonetic Transcription Training, Marisha Speights Atkins, Dallin J. Bailey, Cheryl D. Seals

Faculty Publications

Clinical phonetic transcription is regarded as a highly specialised skill requiring hours of practice for mastery. Although this skill is a critical part of students’ clinical preparation to become speech-language pathologists, students often report feeling unprepared to apply the skill in clinical practice. Previous studies suggest that increased opportunities for practice and timely feedback on transcriptions are needed in order to develop skill confidence. However, providing more opportunities for practice can be impeded by the limited resources to manage the grading of additional assignments. The purpose of this study is to show the implementation of a web-based learning management system …

Russell Means' Use Of The Universal Ecosystem Metaphor As An Act Of Indigenous Resistance, Clarissa Mcintire

Theses and Dissertations

Studies of American Indian protest rhetoric often define American Indian opposition either by its resistance or its conformity to non-Native institutional discursive norms, suggesting that only one of the two can be considered authentic to American Indian cultures and identities. Addressing this debate, this thesis examines an instance of Native opposition which successfully blends the two approaches: Russell Means' 1989 statement to the United States Senate. Means employs the mode of story to effectively shift discursive authority from the Senate committee members to pan-Indigenous peoples. I call this shift rhetorical occupation, or the appropriation of rhetorical space. Through rhetorical occupation, …

Entropic Interactionist Theory: Reading Social Constructionism Through Thermodynamics And Samuel Beckett, Brie Barron

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This essay aims to explain the breakdown of social constructs through the concept of Entropic Interactionist Theory. EIT argues that it is the nature of creations to be vulnerable to the same forces as their creator, and that social constructions (like identity, for example) are subject to the very same physical forces that give rise to humanity’s creative impulse. At its core, EIT is informed by social constructionism and Nietzschean sociological theory, but it names the second law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy as the driving force behind societal disintegration. The complication with this theory is that it …

Medical Accreditation For Foreign-Educated Refugees: An Undue Burden, Katherine Jolley, Alex Hansen

Brigham Young University Prelaw Review

Historically, the United States has maintained a policy of robust assistance to refugees that enter the country. Refugee relief includes short-term health coverage and employment services. Unfortunately, many international medical graduates who come as refugees face excessive barriers to join the healthcare industry when they arrive. In light of emergency adjustments to the accreditation processes during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article proposes that the accreditation process for foreign-educated healthcare workers poses an undue burden on refugees.

The Intersection Of Fashion And Politics: A Semiotic Analysis Of Vogue Magazine Covers Surrounding Election Seasons, Megan M. Vincent

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the political messages framed within the cover of Vogue magazines by reviewing the published issues that surround election season. By focusing on the intersection of politics and fashion through the visual representation provided by a prestigious, globally known fashion magazine, the research will observe the potential increase and growth of political involvement within influence of the fashion industry. This study will begin with the October, November, and December covers from the 2016 and 2020 presidential election. These will be accompanied by the January, February, and March covers of the following years. Guided by semiotic analysis and visual …

"I Don't Think You Understand": Performativity And Comprehensibility In Washington Square, Robyn Amy Peterson

Theses and Dissertations

Washington Square, like The Portrait of a Lady, is an open-ended Henry James novel that concludes ambiguously and unhappily, counter to the trend of many other Victorian novels. While many contemporary Victorian novels center on marriage and inheritance plots, concluding their protagonists' struggles with felicitous performative utterances of "I do" and "I bequeath," Catherine Sloper's future is less clear: at the conclusion of Washington Square, she remains both unmarried and disinherited. Both characters and readers alike seem stymied by Catherine's motivations at the end of the novel, as famously studied in Judith Butler's essay, "Values of Difficulty." Catherine seems calculable, …

Aesthetic Response To The Fires At Notre Dame: A Case For Rhetorical Aesthetics Within Conventional Rhetorical Analysis, Amanda Clifford

Theses and Dissertations

The field of rhetorical aesthetics has a long and rich history. Despite that history, however, aesthetic artifacts have yet to be considered with the same weight that conventional rhetorical artifacts are. My project is to consider the rhetorical effectiveness of aesthetic artifacts, making a case for more inclusion of these types of artifacts in rhetorical theory. I will demonstrate the effectiveness of the aesthetic by performing a comparative analysis of both an aesthetic and conventional reaction to the 2019 fires at Notre Dame de Paris. By considering the constitutive power of the aesthetic, I will argue that the depth of …

Gender-Related Language Trends In Online Written News: Comparative Corpus Analysis Of Prescribed Vs. Actual Usage, Brooke James

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Contrary to traditional thought in linguistics and editing, recent studies using corpus-based evidence suggest that historical English usage patterns influenced prescriptive usage manuals’ guidelines more than the other way around. To investigate the modern relationship between English language prescriptions and usage, this study focuses on the wide-reaching genre of written online news and the topic of gender-fair language. It compares changes regarding gender-specific language in the Associated Press’s stylebooks to actual usage trends as documented in the News on the Web (NOW) corpus. Results from NOW show -man title variants as the dominant form in the early 2010s, consistent AP …

Symbolic Semantic Memory In Transformer Language Models, Robert Kenneth Morain

Theses and Dissertations

This paper demonstrates how transformer language models can be improved by giving them access to relevant structured data extracted from a knowledge base. The knowledge base preparation process and modifications to transformer models are explained. We evaluate these methods on language modeling and question answering tasks. These results show that even simple additional knowledge augmentation leads to a reduction in validation loss by 73%. These methods also significantly outperform common ways of improving language models such as increasing the model size or adding more data.

“The Only Story I’Ll Be Able To Tell”: An Analysis Of Shame And Queer Identity In Gothic American Campus Novels, Aubrey Dickens

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis analyzes shame and queerness in contemporary gothic American campus novels, also known as “dark academia” novels. The thesis looks specifically at the novels The Secret History by Donna Tartt, published in 1992 and considered to be the first dark academia novel, and Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas, published in 2020 and a more modern adaptation on the subgenre. The two novels deal explicitly with how shame constitutes identity, specifically in regards to individuals who are depicted as queer or outside of heteronormative expectations of sexuality. Queerness in the context of this paper is defined as any portrayal of …

Descripción Panorámica Del Español En La República Dominicana, Orlando Alba

Faculty Publications

El objetivo de esta presentación consiste en facilitar una ojeada general al español hablado en la República Dominicana. Las principales características fonéticas, morfosintácticas y léxicas son descritas con el aval de múltiples ilustraciones orales que permiten observar de forma directa y segura la realidad lingüística dominicana.

Hsi-Chu Bolick: A Tribute On Her Retirement, Wen-Ling Liu

Journal of East Asian Libraries

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Positive And Negative Emotion On Picture Naming For People With Mild To Moderate Aphasia: A Preliminary Investigation, Tyson G. Harmon, Courtney Nielsen, Corinne Loveridge, Camille Williams

Faculty Publications

Purpose: To investigate how emotional arousal and valence affect confrontational naming accuracy and response time in people with mild to moderate aphasia compared with adults without aphasia. We hypothesized that negative and positive emotions would facilitate naming for people with aphasia but lead to slower responses for adults with no aphasia.

Method: Eight participants with mild to moderate aphasia, 15 older adults, and 17 young adults completed a confrontational naming task across three conditions (positive, negative, neutral) in an ABA case series design. Immediately following each naming condition, participants self-reported their perceived arousal and pleasure. Accuracy and response time were …

Man Vs Robot: Weapons Against Automation, Talmage Lamb

Marriott Student Review

No abstract provided.

Ethnic Differences In Lbms Structure, Lisa M. Johnson

Faculty Publications

This poster reports on structural correlations between low back vowel merger/position and front lax vowel lowering/retraction (Low-Back-Merger Shift or LBMS). Based on analyses of word list recordings from two groups of Utah teens (Pacific Islanders and Euro Americans), I argue that the position of BOT affects the front vowels in the two ethnic groups differently: while the F1 of EA front vowels is inversely correlated with BOT F1, PI front vowels appear to be more sensitive to BOT F2. These results highlight the structural complexity of LBMS and the importance of recruiting ethnically diverse groups of participants for such studies.

Foul Play: A Comparative Look At Community Fragmentation And Gender Roles Through Internment And Relocation Of Japanese Canadians And Japanese Americans, Maryn J. Rolfson

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.