Digital Commons Network^™

Silent Subjects: Silence In Theories Of Subjectivity, Nikki Ann Agee

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Postmodern theories describe human subjectivity as fragmented. (Faigley 12). Unlike Enlightenment thinkers, who theorized the Cartesian subject as an autonomous, stable, rational self with "privileged insight into its own processes" (111), postmodern theorists "decisively [reject] the primacy of consciousness and instead [have] consciousness originating in language, arguing that the subject is an effect rather than a cause of discourse" (Faigley 9).

The idea that language constructs who subjects are, how they are, and who they may and may not become is very powerful, for it suggests subjects cannot consciously know themselves apart from language. Self-knowledge results from social, institutional, and …

Bridging The Digital Divide: Infusing Digital Storytelling To Improve Literacy Instruction Among Students In Rural Bhutan, Khendum Gyabak

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine the digital divide among public school students in rural Bhutan. The study presents several broad themes relevant to technological innovation, integration of technology initiatives into educational practices and social structures in underdeveloped and developing countries. The aim of this study is to address the possibility of integrating digital storytelling and through the use of these new literacy practices, understand whether technology education could be a sustainable process for empowerment among public school students in rural Bhutan. This study should be of interest to educators and administrators concerned about the future development …

International Students' Communication Effectiveness With U.S. Faculty Members: A Further Exploration Of Anxiety/Uncertainty Management (Aum) Theory, Yixin Chen

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study established a theoretical model based on anxiety/uncertainty management (AUM) theory with English proficiency and knowledge of U.S. culture as indirect factors. A total of 180 international students at a mid-sized Southwestern university participated in surveys regarding the communication process with U.S. faculty. The results revealed that uncertainty and anxiety are positively related, and anxiety negatively predicts communication effectiveness while uncertainty does not. English proficiency is a negative predictor of both uncertainty and anxiety, while knowledge of U.S. culture is not a predictor of either uncertainty or anxiety. The results also indicated that English proficiency and knowledge of U.S. …

Detection Of Gas/Odor Based On Quartz Crystal Microbalance Sensors And Fuzzy Similarity Measure, Yi-Chen Lo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In this research, an array of six Quartz Crystal Microbalance sensors (QCM) using fuzzy similar measurement is proposed to recognize different gases and the percentage of those gases in a mixed gas. The experiment suggests three different gases, oxygen, helium, and argon as test gases and the nitrogen as the reference gas. Six QCMs in this array are coated respectively with six different specific polymers that are selected based on Linear Solvation Energy Relationship (LSER) method, in order to absorb gas molecules so as to recognize responses of resonant frequency changes from QCMs. Testing with different gases results in different …

Carlos De Sigüenza Y Góngora: Figuras Del Letrado En “Alboroto Y Motín De Los Indios De México”, Daniel Orizaga Doguim

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Estudio sobre el Alboroto y motín de los indios de México de Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora

Survey Research To Assess Secondary School Teachers' Disposition And Readines For Teaching Mathematics To English Language Learners, Rosa Isela Gonzalez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Our society is built with ethnic minorities who in many cases do not speak English. This is the case of ELL students who need to learn mathematics. ELLs need to learn math and teachers are a major part of that process. The purpose of the study was to identify mathematics teachers' beliefs and teaching practices with respect to ELLs. A survey on ELL Education was administered to 42 grade 6-10 educators who attended a summer inservice in July 2009. The survey questions were then categorized into six groups related to the research questions and analyzed with SPSS to address a …

A Study Of Possible Pre-Cognitive Advantages Of Bilingualism, Marisela Gutierrez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Past research has suggested that second language acquisition has a beneficial effect on the development of inhibitory control processes in children and adults. This has been referred to as the "bilingual advantage" and is most commonly quantified using the Simon task. Whether the bilingual advantage extends to precognitive mechanisms has not yet been examined. The goals of this study were to examine the bilingual advantage in university students; and to examine whether the bilingual advantage extends to the precognitive filtering mechanism of sensorimotor gating. It was predicted that, as compared to monolinguals, bilingual university students would have greater inhibitory control, …

Reanalysis Of Some Effects Of The Mutual Exclusivity Constraint And Their Operation In Bilingual Children, Marina Kalashnikova

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study investigates the operation of the Mutual Exclusivity constraint in two groups of three-year-old children: monolingual Spanish speakers and bilingual Spanish-English speakers. Previous research has yielded controversial findings regarding the differences in the intra-lingual level operation of the constraint in monolingual and bilingual children. This investigation sheds light on the conflicting outcomes of previous studies by proposing that non-linguistic cognitive and processing abilities may account for the effects attributed to the constraint and that there may be observable differences in monolingual and bilingual children in the development of some--but not all--of these abilities. Although, this study yielded no significant …

The Exquisite Pain Of Sunny Afternoons, Jessica Jeanne Miller

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Exquisite Pain of Sunny Afternoons is a novella exploring one young woman's journey through mental illness. She struggles with many delusions and extreme emotional reactions to these delusions until she finds balance. She finds balance, if not total recovery, through the help of her mother and three young Canadian travelers. The novella begins with an escape from a psychiatric hospital to Oaxaca, Mexico.

A Critical Analysis Of Immigration And Terrorism In The Usa Patriot Act Of 2001 Through Political Rhetoric., Cesar Hugo Rodriguez, Jr,

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study incorporates the rhetorical implications that presented themselves after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2009. A look at the history of rhetoric in this study gives insight into the present situation of what political rhetoric can accomplish when used as a tool of deception.

Hip Hop Rhetoric: Relandscaping The Rhetorical Tradition, Roberto Jose Tinajero Ii

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation is a rhetorical analysis of hip hop music and culture. Chapter 1 focuses on adding hip hop rhetoric to the discussion and terrain of rhetoric and writing studies and to the rhetorical tradition. Chapter 2 uses the rhetorical notion of kairos to discuss the ethos of hip hop culture and discourse. Chapter 3 uses hip hop rhetoric to discuss the tensuous-solidarity between Latinos and African Americans. Chapter 4 focuses on Latino/Borderland Hip Hop and discusses the multi-consciousness of Latino identity. Chapter 5 focuses on Christiian religious imagery in gangsta rap music. There is also a short conclusion.

Survey Research On Communication And Language For English Language Learners And Native English Speakers Enrolled In A College Course On Statistical Literacy, Maria Guadalupe Valenzuela

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine in what ways language is a factor that affects the learning process of students in an introductory statistics class. This research used a questionnaire survey instrument called: CLASS, Communication, Language And Statistics Survey that was applied to a total of 137 college students from a large southwestern public university, 83 of these students were self-identified as native English speakers (NOELL) and 53 were self-identified as English learner speakers (ELL) and one was dropped. This research found that in statistical instruction, there are some particular differences in behavior and learning process in the …

The Effects Of Nclb On The Principal's Authority To Manage The Success Of English Language Learners, Dr. Annalisa Banegas-Peña

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of the study was to determine the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) legislation on principals' authority to manage the success of English language learners (ELL). Seven research questions guided inquiry about the perceived effects of NCLB on the principal's authority to manage the success of the ELL. Participating principals were randomly selected. The only criterion was that their schools had to serve English language learners and that this population of students was aggregated into the accountability performance of the campus.

Definitions for transactional and transformational leadership styles were given to respondents to select from …

Getting To Know You: The Effects Of Familiarity And Time On Social Perception, Clarissa Arms Chavez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A new direction in social perception research is developed. The present research explored the impact of familiarity and time on social perception processes based on cognitive neuroscience models, social categorization models, and memory consolidation constructs. Familiarity was manipulated within an exposure task and time was manipulated by testing participants both 2-6 hr and 48 hr after the exposure task. Experiment 1 investigated the influence of familiarity and time on the argument of the automaticity of social categorization and associated stereotypes by testing the argument with two separate tasks. Experiment 1a tested the influence of familiarity and time on associated stereotypes …

Does Type Of Stimulus Influence Task-Irrelevant Evaluative Categorization Processes?, Guadalupe Corral

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The effect of stimulus type on task-irrelevant evaluative categorization was examined in two separate studies by using the P3 component from event-related brain potentials. The first study presented idiosyncratic stimuli consisting of individuals that were rated by participants as either positive or negative within sequences of pictorial and verbal stimuli. The second study presented sequences of novel and familiar stimuli consisting of previously normed unattractive and neutral individuals. It was hypothesized that pictures would elicit task-irrelevant evaluative categorization processes and so would novel stimuli (relative to words and familiar stimuli, respectively). Task-irrelevance was examined by assessing P3 peak amplitude to …

Appropriate Prosodic Variation Is Valued By Users, Rafael Escalante-Ruiz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Spoken dialog systems today do not vary the prosody of their utterances, although prosody is known to have many useful expressive functions. In a corpus of memory quizzes, I identified eleven dimensions of prosodic variation, each with its own expressive function. I identified the situations in which each was used, and how to detect these situations from the dialog context and the prosody of the interlocutor's previous utterance. I implemented the resulting response rules and had 21 users interact with two versions of the system. Overall they preferred the version in which the prosodic forms of the acknowledgments were chosen …

Autonomous Vehicle Navigation: A Comparative Study Of Classical Logic And Neural Network Technique, Javier Alejandro Flores

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Today is an era in which humans need the help of automated machines to facilitate their hectic lives. Over the past few decades, robotics has been one of the most researched areas in the world. One area of this research is obstacle avoidance for autonomous vehicles. In order to avoid an obstacle, the system may include two important characteristics: obstacle detection and avoidance control. In this Thesis a classical logic system and artificial neural network approach is presented. With the help of an Integrated Development Environment, a virtual robot was able to negotiate a maze and avoid obstacles according to …

No One Over Your Bones, Veronica E. Guajardo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Thesis, a collection of poems, is sometimes in English, some all in Spanish,and others poems are bilingual. Others still use slang, Calo, and other Pachuquismos. This collection of poetry is divided into 4 section, with an introduction that prefaces the collection by providing an explanation of the origins of the work, the influences of the poet, etc., all while proposing provocative questions such as, what is an American Poem, for example. The Thesis poems delve into issues of immigration, migration, memory, love and violence, masculiniity and feminity, survival,and of course, language. Lnaguage is central,and music also is important to …

The Effectiveness Of Multicultural Based Social Stories To Increase Appropriate Behaviors Of Children With Developmental Delay, Ning Hsu

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The needs of students from culturally and linguistically diverse background have become a growing concern in America. It is a great challenge for educators to provide appropriate education for culturally and linguistically diverse students with disabilities. Although there are some researchers that espouse effective principles of multicultural special education, there have been few empirical on the effectiveness.

Social Stories are a practical behavioral intervention which has been regarded as an individualized intervention since the student's needs, background and learning style should be took into consideration. This present research used an ABA design to compare the modified social story with and …

Production Of Future Forms By L2 English Learners, Sabrina Mossman

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study examines forms of future expression used by L2 English learners, which can be different from those used by native English speakers. Three types of data were collected for this study--language produced daily by L2 English learners in an ESL classroom, language produced in response to open questions in an interview, and language produced in a Discourse Completion Task (DCT). Twenty-six ESL learners from multiple language backgrounds participated in the interview and DCT portions of the study. Of these twenty-six, five also participated in the classroom production portion. Twenty-seven native speakers acted as a control group. The results of …

Claiming The Discursive Self: Mestiza Rhetoric Of Mexican Women Jouranlists, 1876-1924, Cristina Devereaux Ramirez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In the last two decades, scholars in Rhetoric and Writing Studies have been calling for a greater representation of voices of those from other cultures who participated in rhetorical practices. As Jacqueline Jones Royster contends, rhetoric has been framed as mostly white, male, and elite, and that these positions distort the democratic perspective of our discipline. Claiming the Discursive Self: Mestiza Rhetoric of Mexican Women Journalists, 1876-1924 presents women rhetors who were participating in not only creating a national identity, but also in constructing a public identity that would insure women's contribution and participation for future generations. It closely examines …

An Optimization Approach For The Cascade Vulnerability Problem, Christian Servin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In inter-connected systems, where several computers share information with each other, problems may arise when inappropriate information starts to flow through. For example, let us consider a simple scenario of a university composed of three departments: payroll, financial aid, and academic services. We know that the payroll department deals with sensitive information, such as social security numbers, dates of birth, amounts of wages, etc. The financial aid department may use information that payroll owns. Similarly, the academic department communicates with the financial aid department. An intruder can take advantage of this network connectivity and create an inappropriate flow of information …

Dual-Language Education: A Longitudinal Study Of Students' Achievement In An El Paso County, Texas School District, Pauline Anne Dow

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Dissertation describes a longitudinal study of one-way and two-way bilingual education programs (also known as dual-language programs) to assess achievement of elementary-aged English learners (ELs) in a school district located in El Paso County, Texas, using both norm-referenced and criterion-referenced tests. The design features assessment for bilingual students' language skills in both English and Spanish, which allows for the examination of the interrelationships among skills in the two languages. The study also compares the achievement of ELs and non-ELs in the two-way program. The work reported in this Dissertation was conducted with a common group of children over a …

Shakespeare And The Interhuman: The Mimetic Chrysalis Of Buber's Between, Elizabeth Burford Lang

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Shakespeare's plays survive and thrive from age to age in large part due to the incomparably mimetic "rightness" of his characters. However, the various schools of post-modern literary criticism - New Historicist, Cultural Materialist, most variations of cultural theory as applied to literature - definitively deny the possibility of an essential humanity, the very concept on which discussions of character and mimesis must stand.

The work of Martin Buber contributes a means of moderating that conversation. Buber, a self-described "believing" humanist, sought and achieved a semantic framework capable of describing the intersection of man, fellow man, and spirit while obviating …

The Effects Of Using A Scripted Or Unscripted Interview In Forensic Interviews With Interpreters, Nicole Pruss

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The current study set out to replicate and expand the results of a study by Pruss (2007) which found that information is lost when interviews are conducted through interpreters. In the present study, Viewers (i.e., mock eyewitnesses) fluent in Spanish watched a video of a burglary and then were interviewed in Spanish about what they had seen. Half of Viewers were randomly assigned to be interviewed by an English-speaking Interviewer through a bilingual Interpreter (Interpreter condition), and the other half were randomly assigned to be interviewed directly by a Spanish speaking Interviewer with no Interpreter (No Interpreter condition). Within each …

Developing Lexical Competition Resolution Mechanisms Through Reading Experiences, Ana B. Areas Da Luz Fontes

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The goal of the present study was to investigate whether competition resolution mechanisms are improved throughout a student's college years. For this purpose, I bilingual participants with a range in the number of college credits completed (e.g., freshmen to seniors) were recruited. Participants were presented with sentences that biased the less frequent, or subordinate meaning of an ambiguous word (e.g., novel, fast) (e.g., novel: something new; fast: to not eat). The ambiguous word was either a Spanish-English cognate (e.g., novel/novela) or a noncognate control (e.g., fast). These sentences were followed by target words that, on critical trials, were related to …

Unlocking Creativity In The Classroom, Rose Marie De La Cruz-Bechtel

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Creativity is a process involving skills that can be presented and strengthened in a classroom setting. An overview of various research strands regarding creativity since 1950 is included. The pragmatic approach of Roger von Oech forms the basis for a selection of strategies useful for unlocking and encouraging creative thinking in the 4-8 classroom.

Perspectives Of White/Non-Hispanic Male Superintendents Of Majority-Hispanic School Districts In Texas, Samuel Franklin Hogue

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study examines the dynamics and challenges which White/non-Hispanic male superintendents face in leading school districts where the majority of constituents come from a different ethnic or racial background than their own; specifically school districts where the constituency is majority Hispanic. It also identifies the career paths and educational experiences of value of White/non-Hispanic males who serve as superintendents of school districts with majority Hispanic student populations as well as ascertains the general leadership theories and/or styles these men subscribe.

This study advances the understanding of school leadership in majority Hispanic school districts that are led by White/non-Hispanic males, how …

The Effects Of Program Model And Language On Science Taks Scores Among Fifth Graders, Stephanie Leigh Zelenak

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

THE EFFECTS OF PROGRAM MODEL AND LANGUAGE ON SCIENCE TAKS SCORES AMONG FIFTH GRADERS

This study examined the conditions of learning allowing students in one classroom to succeed on the fifth grade science TAKS test whereas students in other classrooms on the same campus do not succeed. It focused on the relationship of program models, specifically as it pertains to the influence of language within the content area of science and student performance on the fifth grade science TAKS scores.

To compare the academic achievement, as measured by the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test, in grade five …