Digital Commons Network^™

Famine, Plague, And Greed: Socio-Historical Factors Affecting The Development Of The Middle English Dialect Of London., George Vincent Yonek

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

A significant factor in the rise of Standard English was the importance of London as a center of commerce and government, yet the foundation for Modern Standard English is not derived from the Southern dialects, which heavily influenced London in the late Old English and early Middle English period. The variety of English we speak and write today is derived mainly from the East Midland dialect and, to a lesser extent, the North in late Middle English. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the socio-historical causes behind this change in the distribution of features of the London dialect. …

Training Parents To Facilitate Language Through Storybook Reading., Linda K. Crowe

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Six parent-child dyads participated in a single subject, multiple-baseline study evaluating the effectiveness of storybook reading as a context for parent training. Six children, ages 3;2 to 3;5 with specific language impairment, and their primary caregivers completed three-to-five baseline, eight-to-ten training, and two follow-up sessions. Parents were taught to use a complete reading cycle (CRC) based on a typical parent-child storybook reading format described by Ninio & Bruner (1978). The CRC consisted of four steps: (a) an attentional vocative to establish joint focus or topic for discussion, (b) a query to elicit a verbal response about the topic, (c) a …

The Effects Of Analytic Reading Skills On Sixth Graders' Ability To Solve Mathematical Story Problems., Linda Hale Eilers

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of the present study was to determine the effects of two levels of instructional treatment on sixth graders' ability to solve mathematical story problems. The two levels of instructional treatment were instruction in the use of graphic organizers in conjunction with specific analytic reading skills and instruction in specific analytic reading instruction alone. These were compared to the absence of either treatment. The steady decline in students' scores on measures of ability to read and solve story problems over the past decade prompted research in three sixth-grade public school classes in northeast Louisiana. The study employed an experimental/control, …

Performance, Cultural Identity, And Feminist Practice In The Oral History Of An African-American Domestic Worker., Elondust Patrick Johnson

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This study analyzes the personal narrative of Mary Rhyne, an elderly African American domestic worker. The study describes the ethnographic process of collecting, transcribing and interpreting the informant's oral history. Interpretive and theoretical perspectives concerned with African American culture, domestic labor, and feminist practice are used to analyze the narrative. Further, the ethnographic process, the informant's oral "telling," and the events that she recalls and recounts are viewed as, and in terms of, performance. Performance foregrounds the collaborative and "fictional" aspects of the ethnographer-informant relationship. It directs attention toward the "performance event" as a site and situation where the teller …

Reflection On Teaching: An Ethnographic Study Of Preservice Teachers' Beliefs And Practices., Thomasine Haskins Mencer

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between preservice teachers' expressed beliefs, their practices, and how they described the two. Particular emphasis was given to factors that influenced the preservice teachers' expectations of students. The preservice teachers were in the graduate year of a five year teacher education program that embraced reflective practice. In many ways, the two preservice teachers conformed to the mold of the typical American teacher in that they were middle class, Anglo Saxon, females who were high achievers from small towns. However, the pair differed in their experiences with diversity. The preservice teachers' …

Cognitive Differences And Their Predictive Ability On Reading Performance In Skilled And Unskilled Readers., Mary Elizabeth Carter

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The present study examined the relationships among short-term memory, working memory, phonological awareness, and reading performance as measured by an informal reading inventory. Relationships between and among the tasks, their predictive importance with regard to word recognition, accuracy, fluency, and comprehension, and their ability to discriminate among groups of readers were investigated. A battery of tests comprising 14 cognitive variables and 24 reading variables was individually administered to 105 fourth and fifth grade normally achieving readers, unidentified unskilled readers, and school identified unskilled readers. Results revealed that working memory, phonological awareness, and syntactic awareness tasks were significantly intercorrelated among themselves, …

Deux Niveaux D'Expression Du Systeme Aspectuel-Temporel En Francais., You Qi He

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

There are, among natural languages in the world, two modes of temporal expression: tensed languages use morphological means to express time relationships; whereas tenseless languages use only lexical, co-textual and/or contextual means in their temporal expression. In fact, we can also identify two modes of temporal expression among different moods in French. The Indicative Mood uses morphological means to expresse time relationships; whereas with moods other than the Indicative (i.e. the Infinitive, the Participle, the Subjunctive and the Conditional), the utterer has to recourse to lexical, co-textual and/or contextual indication to distinguish different time relationships. Furthermore, within the forms of …

Bead Colors As Social Relations Markers At Mission Soledad, California, Lori Lee Buck

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This thesis is an interpretive analysis focusing on the use of beads as a tool for determining social relations at Mission Soledad, California. The main indicator of social relations used in this thesis is bead distribution. Two attributes were used to classify the beads, color and type.

To understand the importance of the bead distribution, the ideologies of the three native cultures that were recruited to the mission and the Spanish missionaries who founded the mission were studied. From this information, color symbolism and sources were examined to gain knowledge of important colors. This was done with the hopes that …

Re: (Writing) Desire In "Fragments D'Un Discours Amoureux" By Roland Barthes And "La Carte Postale" By Jacques Derrida., Laura Elizabeth Volpe

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation examines the way in which Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida rework the psychoanalytical constructions of desire through what can be referred to, short of a better word, as play or gaming. Play takes many forms in these two texts; etymological play and structural play are two of the more prominent manifestations of this gaming. In an effort to analyze and at the same time emulate this play and its use by these two authors, I introduce the idea of the dreidel which functions as a device which objectifies the discourse of desire. It also serves as a physical …

The Transcendental Element In The Absent Presence., Maggie Burnaman Martin

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

"The Transcendental Element in the Absent Presence" analyzes the absent presence, the rhetorical and literary states of being there in the mind of the perceiving individual, though not there physically. It seeks to answer: What does the term "absent presence" mean? Is there a difference between rhetorical and literary absent presences? If so, how is each manifest through the reading process? And, what sustains these absent presences? Evidenced through selected works of Plato, Aristotle, New Testament writers, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Dickinson, the study argues for the intellectually, spiritually, or aesthetically transcendent quality of the absent presence. Any encounter between reader, …

Evaluating The Efficacy Of Communicative Reading Strategies With High-Risk First-Grade Students., Melanie Crim Michaelson-Ezell

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The specific aim of this project was to determine the efficacy of an integrated approach to remediation of oral language and reading. Communicative Reading Strategies (CRS) (Norris, 1985) was used with a group of twenty-one high-risk first grade students. Improvements were measured for aspects of language development that are specifically related to success in oral language use and reading. Nine children demonstrating below average performance on standardized measures assessing language and reading received intervention. A control group of 12 matched children served to control for changes as a result of maturation or general curriculum effect. The treatment group received intervention …

Henry James And The Process Of Autobiography., Paul S. Nielsen

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

James's autobiographies differ from most by dramatizing so extensively the process of recovery and reanimation of memory, the act that signifies autobiographical activity. They therefore reveal a great deal about the generic nature of autobiographical recollection. James's Major Phase, from 1900 to his death in 1916, was chiefly and gloriously autobiographical in purpose and crowns his career with an autobiographical production of astonishing variety, extent, and creativity. The proto-autobiographical material includes biography of a culture (William Wetmore Story and His Friends), travel memoir and cultural analysis (The American Scene), and recapitulation and intimate disclosure of his creative life (the Prefaces …

Ethnic Community Involvement And Academic Achievement Among Vietnamese-American Secondary School Students: A Community Study., Carl Leon Bankston Iii

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

In this dissertation, I examine the role of involvement in an ethnic community in the academic achievement of Vietnamese American teenagers. I first describe the social context of these young people by discussing the situation of Vietnamese people in the United States and by offering a detailed description of a Vietnamese American community. Next, I examine how Vietnamese American students are performing in American schools and look at the characteristics of young people in the community in question. Finally, I employ data from a survey administered in the public schools of New Orleans where Vietnamese youth are concentrated in order …

The Politics Of Decolonization: Race, Power, And Ideology In Contemporary American Drama., Byung-Eon Jung

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation traces the politics of decolonization dramatized in selected plays from the contemporary American playwrights: African Americans (Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, and August Wilson), white Americans (Arthur Kopit and David Rabe), and a Chinese American (David Hwang). Through the application of cultural theory to an analysis of dramatic texts, I demonstrate how the plays enact the struggle for decolonization on social, political, and cultural levels. In keeping with the interactions of race, power, and ideology, the plays deconstruct the white cultural formulations of racial minorities. I explore the ways in which the playwrights reclaim the authority of …

Race And The Fragmented Self In Twentieth-Century American Literature., Jerold Malcolm Martin

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Beginning with a definition of "race" as a system of discourse about human difference sustained by its symbolic articulations, I approach "race" as analogous to the social disciplines that Foucault describes as constructing the modern subject. Bringing together certain speculations of Lacan, Fanon, and Morrison, I suggest that this racial discipline facilitates a racial "mirror stage" through which "blackness" and "whiteness" are projected as distinct and unified conceptions of identity. My readings of representative texts examine how such racial identity patterns are both seductive as resolutions of self-discord and destructive in tension with the multiple, interpersonal, and historical determinations of …

Attraction Vs. Repulsion: The Narrative Ambivalence Of Gender In Byron's "Don Juan"., Melinda A. Piontek

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Previous studies of gender in Byron's Don Juan, such as those by Susan Wolfson and Louis Crompton, have concentrated primarily on identifying gender ambivalence and attributing that ambivalence to factors outside the text, such as Byron's ambivalence toward his personal homoeroticism as well as to the social attitudes of Regency England toward questions of gender ambiguity. In this dissertation, I propose to turn the critical gaze back to the text in order to go beyond identifying gender ambivalence to track how that ambivalence works within Don Juan. In order to bring into focus the serial and episodic nature of Byron's …

Oral Noetic And The Communicative Rubric In "Beowulf"., Paul David Muller

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Theoretically, this treatise is a study at the nexus of two fields: oral tradition and the philosophy of language. In application, it is a "reading" of the Anglo-Saxon epic narrative of Beowulf. It proceeds from the hypothesis that in its present, performative moment, the oral traditional narrative instantiates a moment of communicative meaning evincing characteristics of oral, thus speakerly, and thus intention-vitalized meaning, as defined by linguistic philosophers Austin, Grice, Searle, Schiffer, Strawson, and others. In the light of this theoretical perspective, the oral noetic and thus the communicative moment of the Beowulf poem is sought in its most dynamic …

Articulation Of French Programs Between Secondary And Postsecondary Institutions: Language And Culture Performance Achieved By High School Students Enrolled In French Ii And College Students Enrolled In Second Semester Of French., Fatima Chajia

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine whether or not there are differences in the performance achieved by high school students (enrolled in French II) and college students (enrolled in second semester of French), on tests of culture, listening, reading, grammar, speaking and writing. The results from the background questionnaires and the six tests show that: (1) Selfplacement is the most common procedure used by university false-beginners; (2) Overall, college students scored significantly higher than their high school counterparts on all six tests; (3) College true- and false-beginners scored significantly higher than high school students on tests of listening, …

A Cross-Case Analysis Of Middle School Reading Teachers' Theoretical Orientations As They Relate To Classroom Practices., Shirley Theriot Fogleman

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Each interaction between teachers and students is a reflection of the theory that these professionals, sometimes unknowingly, posit about what should be occurring in their classrooms. The purpose of this study is to explore the differences between middle school language arts teachers' beliefs about how children actually read a text, and how these teachers translate these beliefs into classroom practices. The beliefs we hold about reading comprehension are essential to our understanding about how we should instruct and assess our students in our classes. Leu and Kinzer (1988) refer to two beliefs' frameworks of comprehension in reading, based on the …

Linguistic And Cultural Immersion And Second Language Acquisition: International Young Student Exchange., Rosita Mira Maristany

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The trend in foreign language learning reflects a move from "fragmented" language to "whole" language (Rigg 1991). It includes the individual as well as the social aspect of language acquisition; and the integration of language and culture. Student international exchange programs provide the ideal atmosphere for "whole" language learning and the integration of language and culture in total language and cultural immersion. Most research in international student exchange programs described the organization of the program or addressed a particular variable. There is a need for integrative "whole" research rather than "fragmented" research. The method chosen as most appropriate for this …

Performing The Community, Telling The Self: Storytelling By Members Of A Group Home For Men With Mental Retardation., Sharon Elizabeth Croft

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This study uses an ethnographic approach to examine the stories told by members of a group home for men with mental retardation. The author contends that the culture of the group home works to constrain how group home members interact within this community. The author argues, however, that despite the cultural constraints, the men use storytelling to establish their individuality, even though the stories themselves, in their content and in the performance of their telling, often reify cultural constraints and their cultural constructions. The author recounts how she, as ethnographer, interacted within this community. After identifying, describing, and analyzing eight …

An Insider's View: The Teacher As Impetus In Literacy Acquisition., Kerry Pierce Laster

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this study was to derive a deeper understanding of one successful kindergarten teacher, her behaviors, and her effect on students as they develop early literacy skills. This study examined the following aspects of teacher behavior as they related to early literacy development: (a) the interactions of the teacher with regular education and special education inclusion students in an inclusive kindergarten classroom with holistic, language-based curricula, (b) the behaviors of the teacher while engaging students in the literacy processes of reading and writing, (c) the behaviors of the teacher as she encouraged students to react to books using …

Gulf Literacy: A Marine Science-Based Model Of Scientific Literacy., John Edward Trowbridge

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

A trend in science education reform is the move towards the goal of scientific literacy. Attributes of scientific literacy include: (a) understanding key concepts and principles of science; (b) understanding newspaper articles and graphics related to science issues; and (c) using scientific ways of evaluating evidence for individual and societal purposes (AAAS, 1989; Demastes & Wandersee, 1992). Furthermore, BSCS (1993) has proposed a model of biological literacy that includes four distinct levels (nominal, functional, structural, and multidimensional). The Gulf of Mexico and its coastal environments are of social, economic and scientific importance. An understanding of the Gulf of Mexico in …

The Efficacy Of Scaffolding Strategies In Holistic Language Intervention On Language And Phonologically Delayed Children., Monica Lynne Bradshaw

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This study investigated the efficacy of scaffolding strategies within holistic language intervention with six language and phonologically delayed preschool children. The scaffolding condition was compared to two experimental controls using either wh-questions or print awareness techniques. It was hypothesizsd that the use of scaffolding strategies would result in greater semantic displacement, syntactic complexity, and phonological complexity than the use of either the wh-questions or print awareness controls. Efficacy of the conditions was measured by (a) semantic levels, (b) mean length of utterance, and (c) percent of words produced correctly. An alternating treatment was employed in the single-subject study. The subjects …

The Effect Of Developmental Factors On The Use Of An Electronic Communication Device., Judith Danute Oxley

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This study addressed a poorly understood variable of voice output communication aid (VOCA) use, namely mnemonic development. Forty children without disabilities, aged from 49 to 60 months, were required to use an IntroTalker (Prentke Romich Company) to participate in a one-on-one storybook reading task with the investigator. They were provided with sixteen messages to use during a scripted reading of The Three Bears. Children could use a trained verbal elaboration strategy or generate their own methods to retrieve messages. Immediate and delayed responses of children under two training methods were compared, and the contribution of developmental factors, including metamemory, were …

The Pueblo Region As A Linguistic Area: Diffusion Among The Indigenous Languages Of The Southwest United States., Catherine Bereznak

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The goal of this dissertation is to investigate whether the Pueblo region of the Southwest United States is a legitimate linguistic area (LA). The Pueblo region has long been recognized as a cohesive culture area, but an in-depth examination of the Pueblo region as a linguistic area has not previously been done. Because a linguistic area is by definition an area in which linguistic features have spread through diffusion, traits which are widespread for other reasons (e.g., genetic inheritance or independent parallel development) must be eliminated as evidence for a Pueblo LA. The methodological approach which I adopt emphasizes the …

Text And Context Of The Suwo': Bribri Oral Tradition., Carla Victoria Jara

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation comprises the analysis of six extensive texts in Bribri, a Chibchan language spoken in Costa Rica, Central America. The theoretical framework is based mainly on M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan's social-semiotic perspective of text analysis and on Joseph Grimes' analysis of discourse. In order to characterize this genre within its context of discourse, the three components of context, i.e., field, tenor and mode, have been defined for the corpus of texts. To determine how texture and structure, the basic properties of text, are displayed, one text is analyzed in detail and the results are compared with the other …

An Approach To The Musical Analysis Of Wind Band Literature Based On Analytical Modes Used By Wind Band Specialists And Music Theorists., Jerome Raymond Markoch Jr

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this study was to construct a method of musical analysis based on analytical modes used by theorists and wind-band specialists, and to apply this method to wind-band literature. The study was motivated by the failure of wind-band sources to address the spectrum of musical analysis and ideas practiced in the music theory community. Two bodies of literature were reviewed: (1) wind-band analyses and methods of analysis proposed by conductors and composers, and (2) analytical methodologies described by theorists. The analytical method advocated in this study modified and incorporated methods and ideas espoused by two theorists (Jan LaRue, …

Celts, Greeks, And Germans: Macpherson’S Ossian And The Celtic Epic, Howard D. Weinbrot

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

The Philosophy Of Rhetoric In Campbells Philosophy Of Rhetoric, Joel Weinsheimer

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.