Digital Commons Network^™

English Medium Instruction ( Emi ) At King Saud Bin Abdulaziz University For Health Sciences ( Ksau-Hs ): Students’ Needs And Instructors’ Attitudes, Abdulelah Mohammed Alkhateeb

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation project aims to shed light on EMI instructional strategies through investigating undergraduate students' and instructors’ perspectives in the College of Applied Medical Sciences (CAMS) at KSAU-HS in the Al-Ahsa campus. This exploratory instrumental case study revealed the students’ and instructors’ beliefs toward EMI implementation to increase the awareness and understanding of the consequences of implementing EMI in one of the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. In so doing, two major research questions about EMI implementation as well as perceived risks and benefits from implementing EMI in the CAMS drive the project: “How do science, health, and …

University Students' Perceptions Of Writing Assessment, Hanan Alaa Hegazi

Theses and Dissertations

Instructors and students are the pillars of higher education. There is substantial interest in teachers’ beliefs, preferences, and perceptions in language assessment research, with an emphasis on writing assessment. Additionally, there is a growing body of research investigating students’ perceptions of assessment. However, research that examines how students perceive writing assessment is limited. Therefore, this study investigates two aspects: (a) students’ perceptions of their writing ability and (b) their perceptions of writing assessment in an English-medium private university in Cairo. This study adopts a mixed-methods approach for data collection, which involved distributing student questionnaires, conducting semi-structured interviews, and collecting writing …

On The Socialization Of Transfer Physics Majors Enrolled Within Upper-Division Physics Courses At Transfer Receiving Institutions: Qualitative Research, Patrick Lee Chestnut

Theses and Dissertations

A host of individual and institutional sociocultural factors mediate transfer physics students' socialization experiences at 4-year transfer receiving institutions. The purpose of this study is to understand how sociocultural factors mediate transfer physics students' socialization while participating in upper-division physics coursework at a 4-year public transfer-receiving university. This study, rooted in sociocultural constructivism, aimed to shape discussion of seven transfer physics students, six regular admit physics students, and a physics course instructor's experiences connected to physics studies that emerged from qualitative data. These data included student and faculty surveys, interviews, and classroom observations. Several key findings emerged. First, a multitude …

Do They Know Or Do They Think They Know? Analyzing Pre-Service Teachers Perceived Cultural Awareness, William Javier Rodriguez-Nieves

Theses and Dissertations

With an increasingly diverse population, are pre-service teachers confident in their abilities to teach Culturally and Linguistically Diverse students? The research available states the importance of teacher becoming culturally aware to work with diverse students, but little is known about how confident pre-service teachers perceive themselves to be in this aspect. This research study seeks to understand how teacher candidates in a teacher preparation program in the Midwest U.S. assess their levels of cultural awareness and how this informs their practice with minoritized students. To understand just how teacher-candidates perceive themselves and implement practices for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse students, …

Reducing The Manual Annotation Effort For Handwriting Recognition Using Active Transfer Learning, Eric Burdett

Theses and Dissertations

Handwriting recognition systems have achieved remarkable performance over the past several years with the advent of deep neural networks. For high-quality recognition, these models require large amounts of labeled training data, which can be difficult to obtain. Various methods to reduce this effort have been proposed in the realms of active and transfer learning, but not in combination. We propose a framework for fitting new handwriting recognition models that joins active and transfer learning into a unified framework. Empirical results show the superiority of our method compared to traditional active learning, transfer learning, or standard supervised training schemes.

The Effects Of Entrepreneurial Education On Haitian Entrepreneurs Of The Bel Initiative Program, Ronald Cetoute

Theses and Dissertations

Entrepreneurship is seen as a vehicle to improve the economy of communities and countries. BEL Initiative is a program that provides entrepreneurship education and resources to entrepreneurs based in Haiti. The program supports the ecosystem in Haiti with the intention to contribute to Haiti’s economy through education and promoting investment. Though the program seems to be helping educate entrepreneurs, what effects do participants of the BEL Initiative have on the Haitian economy? What do they take away from the program? Furthermore, what concepts and information are they able to apply in Haiti’s business environment from American influenced entrepreneurship education?

The …

Turn Of Phrase: Contrastive Pre-Training For Discourse-Aware Conversation Models, Roland Laboulaye

Theses and Dissertations

Understanding long conversations requires recognizing a discourse flow unique to conversation. Recent advances in unsupervised representation learning of text have been attained primarily through language modeling, which models discourse only implicitly and within a small window. These representations are in turn evaluated chiefly on sentence pair or paragraph-question pair benchmarks, which measure only local discourse coherence. In order to improve performance on discourse-reliant, long conversation tasks, we propose Turn-of-Phrase pre-training, an objective designed to encode long conversation discourse flow. We leverage tree-structured Reddit conversations in English to, relative to a chosen conversation path through the tree, select paths of varying …

First And Second Language Use Of Case, Aspect, And Tense In Finnish And English, Torin Kelley

Theses and Dissertations

Important to understanding bilingualism and second language (L2) learning are L2 morphological processing and acquisition of tense and aspect. This study used narrative elicitation to examine the expression of boundedness and definiteness in Finnish and English by first language (L1) Finnish speakers who speak English as an L2 and L1 English speakers who speak Finnish as an L2. In Finnish, boundedness and definiteness were largely portrayed by using partitive and accusative cases, though tense and aspect conjugation also played a role. In English, boundedness was largely conveyed through tense and aspect conjugation and definiteness through article usage. Both L1 speaker …

Inclusive Math And Science Spaces Through Professional Development: A Qualitative Study Focusing On Educator Views Of Multilingual Learners And Educator Identity, Helen Dick Brandon

Theses and Dissertations

This action research qualitative study focused on the role that targeted professional development has on shifting the ways in which middle school math and science educators view their culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students; in addition, this study focused on the role that professional development plays on shifting teacher identity. Through this study, four middle level math and science educators took part in a four month professional development opportunity that included interviews, questionnaires, video lessons, and focus groups. Through this experience, the educators shifted their views of CLD students to be more asset-based. When looking at the shifts in their …

Early & Late Erp Responses To L1 & L2 Emotion Words, Brenda Lizeth Guerrero

Theses and Dissertations

The thesis aims to explore bilingual emotion word processing. Participants performed a lexical decision task and decided whether presented letter strings displayed on the computer screen were legal words or nonwords. Stimuli consisted of positive emotion (i.e., hope), negative emotion (i.e., sad), and neutral (i.e., umbrella) words, as well as emotion-laden words (e.g. death, puppy). Reaction time and participant accuracy were collected as behavioral measures. In addition, participants’ electrophysiological responses were recorded. Specifically, the early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive complex (LPC) components were recorded. Participants’ language dominance was measured using the Bilingual Dominance Scale (BDS) (Dunn & Fox-Tree, …

El Testimonio Literario Traducido: Retos Y Desafíos., Jocelyn Madelein Silva

Theses and Dissertations

Translation is one of the oldest professions in the history of humanity. Without it, it would be impossible to access other civilizations historical, social, and cultural records. The most translated text worldwide is the Bible. One of the literary genres that has not received much attention is the testimony. This literary genre is important because it provides a voice to those who do not have it. In this thesis, four testimonies from Puentes, a Mexican-Chicano journal of literature, culture, and art, are translated into Spanish. Besides the translations, this thesis addresses the history of translation and the testimony as a …

Special Education Preservice Teachers Culturally Responsive Teaching Self-Efficacy: A Mixed Methods Study, Krystal Lewis-Pratl

Theses and Dissertations

The racial and ethnic composition of our nation and schools are changing. Yet the demographics of teachers in the United States do not reflect the growing diversity that exists within classrooms today. There have been increases in the culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) student population over the last two decades; however, these changes have not been realized in the diversification of educators in the field. Disproportionality data of CLD students in special education amplify the need to train all preservice educators to be culturally responsive in their practices in an effort to reduce the number of CLD learners who may …

Effects Of Background Noise On The Speech Acoustics Of People With Aphasia, Kirsten Dixon

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the effect of hearing six background noise conditions (silent baseline, pink noise, monologue, lively conversation, one-sided phone call, and cocktail noise) on acoustic measures of speech production during story retells in people with aphasia. Eleven individuals with aphasia and 11 age- and gender-matched control participants took part in the study. Participants heard the background noise conditions through open-back headphones while they retold six short stories. The examiner calculated mean and standard deviation of intensity, mean and standard deviation of fundamental frequency (F0), and speech rate in words per minute. A Matlab application that identified pauses (i.e., periods …

Mental Contrasting With Implementation Intentions As Applied To Motivation In L2 Vocabulary Acquisition, Lindsay Michelle Stephenson

Theses and Dissertations

Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions (MCII) is a self-regulation method shown to increase goal achievement through a combination of positive visualization and planning to overcome anticipated obstacles, specifically in time management, physical fitness, smoking cessation, dieting, social interaction, and classroom performance (Duckworth et al. 2013; Oettingen & Reininger 2016) Because second language (L2) acquisition is highly influenced by learner motivation, this study investigated whether MCII could be applied to motivation to acquire L2 vocabulary in beginning Arabic classes. A control group was compared to two treatment groups, one receiving vision-oriented MCII training that asked them to recall what first motivated …

Humor Production And Coping On Distress And Help-Seeking Attitudes Among Polynesian Americans, Augusto D. Gancinia Ii

Theses and Dissertations

There is a need for more psychological studies that inform culture-specific adaptations in psychotherapy among Polynesian Americans. The use of humor has been identified as a potential adaptation in psychotherapy. Humor can be a catalyst for building and strengthening a healthy working alliance between counselor and client. The utilization of humor in therapy has significantly reduced mental health-seeking stigma. Evidence of the use of humor exists among Polynesian people prior to western colonization of Polynesia which suggests humor to be a culturally salient practice. The current study explored attitudes of seeking mental health counseling among Polynesian Americans while investigating the …

Using Sentiment Analysis To Craft A Narrative Of The Covid-19 Pandemic From The Perspective Of Social Media, Taylor Breanna Ray

Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, people have turned to social media to share their experiences with the coronavirus and their feelings regarding subjects like social distancing, mask-wearing, COVID-19 vaccines, and other related topics. The publicly available nature of these social media posts provides researchers the chance to obtain a consensus on an array of issues, topics, people, and entities. For the COVID-19 pandemic, this is valuable information that can prepare communities and governing bodies for future epidemics or events of a similar magnitude. However, clearly defining such a consensus can be difficult, especially if researchers want to limit the amount of …

The Impact Of Background Noise On The Spoken Language Of People With Mild To Moderate Aphasia: A Preliminary Investigation, Brenna Delyn Scadden

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined how different background noise conditions affected the spoken language production of people with aphasia (PWA) when performing a story retell task. Participants included 11 adults with mild to moderate aphasia and 11 age- and gender-matched controls. Participants retold stories in a silent baseline and five background noise conditions (conversation, monologue, phone call, cocktail, pink noise). Dependent measures of speech fluency and language production measures (correct information units, lexical errors, lexical diversity, and cohesive utterances) were compared between groups and across conditions. Results reveal that background noise results in significantly lower communication efficiency (i.e., correct information units) for …

A Phenomenological Collective Case Study Of Mexican American Gifted Dropouts In South Texas, Albert Irlas

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the shared experiences of formally identified gifted Mexican American students that decided to drop out of high school in the south Texas region. The researcher utilized a phenomenological collective case study approach that investigated the influences that led gifted learners to drop out of high school via a series of semi-structured interviews that collected and analyzed the shared narrative data (Creswell, 2013; Degand, 2015; Seidman, 2014). Prevailing studies have found that Mexican American gifted learners are more likely to live in economically depressed communities, more likely to suffer from linguistic and cultural …

Just A Little Respect: Authority And Competency In Women's Speech, Bridget Anne Carroll

Theses and Dissertations

Young women have conflicting motivations directing how they use pitch, vocal fry, and uptalk intonation. High pitch and uptalk may emphasize their femininity, but low pitch and vocal fry are associated with better leadership. Thus, it is difficult to predict how young women will speak in a particular situation. This thesis measures how 16 young women used pitch, vocal fry, and uptalk in three different speech styles collected through videoconferencing calls. Surveys determined how the changes in speech affected the listener's judgments of the speaker. The lowest average pitch was in interview style speech and the largest range of pitch …

Participant Reference In Colombian Sign Language Narrative, Martha Lois Gateley

Theses and Dissertations

Much of the research on discourse in sign languages thus far has been carried out on American Sign Language. With this thesis, I add to the current research by comparing what is known about participant reference in American Sign Language with Colombian Sign Language.

This thesis analyzes six separate stories totaling 72 minutes, signed by 5 different native signers of Colombian Sign Language. ELAN (a computer software for annotation) was used to mark all of the referring terms in the subject position and categorize the terms by type (nominal reference, pronominal reference, zero-anaphor, and classifier) and by function (introduction, reintroduction …

El Guitarrista Y Sus Cambios De Codigos: Cruzando Fronteras Musicales [The Guitarist And Code-Switching: Crossing Musical Borders], Hector Manuel Aguilar

Theses and Dissertations

The guitar in border towns has links to many musical cultures that vary in their ways of being due to the customs of the specific space. Individual guitarists learn how to navigate the different environments because they understand the etiquettes needed to belong and participate in the musical circles.

In this autoethnographic work, I explore the various musical spaces that I have participated in through my musical journey growing up in Brownsville, Texas, to understand further how the individual musician embodies the style of music s/he performs. As a primary data source for my work, I use the experiences that …

The Perceived Effect Of Pause Length And Location On Speaker Likability And Communicative Effectiveness, Julia M. Price

Theses and Dissertations

Previous studies have examined the effect of atypical speech pause on conversational fluency and how the conversational listener perceives the speaker. The present study investigated the effect of pause duration of increasing length and in differing sentential locations on listener perceptions of communicative effectiveness and speaker likability. One neurotypical male and one neurotypical female speaker recorded three sentences from the Quick Aphasia Battery, and artificial pauses of varying lengths (250 ms, 400 ms, 550 ms, 700 ms, 850 ms, and 1 sec) were inserted before the subject, verb, and object of each sentence. The six baseline (unmodified) sentences were also …

Linguistics Of Russian Media During The 2016 Us Election: A Corpus-Based Study, Devon K. Terry

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to perform a linguistic analysis of Russian mass media focused on its coverage of the 2016 US presidential election. It will be a corpus-based study, using a corpus as a foundational source for quantitative and qualitative data. This study will use a collection of keywords from the corpus and analyze their contexts as they pertain to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. This study uses corpus linguistic research tools such as sentence tokenization, Key Words in Context (KWIC), sentiment analysis, word embedding visualization, word-vector math, word frequency lists, and collocate analysis as part of the …

Text-To-Speech Systems: Learner Perceptions Of Its Use As A Tool In The Language Classroom, Joseph Chi Man Mak

Theses and Dissertations

Text-to-speech (TTS) systems are ubiquitous. From Siri to Alexa to customer service phone call options, listening in a real-world context requires language learners to interact with TTS. Traditionally, language learners report difficulty when listening due to various reasons including genre, text, task, speaker characteristics, and environmental factors. This naturally leads to the question: how do learners perceive TTS in instructional contexts? Since TTS allows controls on speaker characteristics (e.g. gender, regional variety, speed, etc.) the variety of materials that could be created--especially in contexts in which native speakers are difficult or expensive to find--makes this an attractive option. However, the …

Plot Extraction And The Visualization Of Narrative Flow, Michael A. Debuse

Theses and Dissertations

In order to facilitate the automated extraction of complex features and structures within narrative, namely plot in this study, two proof-of-concept methods of narrative visualization are presented with the goal of representing the plot of the narrative. Plot is defined to give a basis for quality assessment and comparison. The first visualization presented is a scatter-plot of entities within the story, but due to failing to uphold the definition of plot, in-depth analysis is not performed. The second visualization presented is a graph structure that better represents a mapping of the plot of the story. Narrative structures commonly found within …

Shrew Or Sure? Rethinking Power In Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew, Devenny Denise Lupear

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the difference between Shakespeare’s written work The Taming of the Shrew and twentieth-century film director Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation in 1967, specifically the final outcome in the issue of power of Katherine’s character. While some scholars consider Shakespeare a proto-feminist who endows Katherine with cleverness, wit, and cunning to secretly tame Petruchio in order to gain personal freedom within the walls of a forced marriage, Zeffirelli denies Katherine dignity in the face of public humiliation and physical violence. Furthermore, Zeffirelli also undermines Shakespeare’s progressive agenda by perpetuating an oppressive narrative against women using twentieth-century film as his medium …

Can Employees Motivate Themselves? The Link Between Peer Motivating Language And Employee Outcomes, Doreen Hanke

Theses and Dissertations

This study builds upon the leadership, leadership communication, and organizational behavior literature to examine the effects of peer motivating language on employee outcomes. Despite the increasing interest in examining the relationships between leader motivating language and employee attitudes and behaviors, the effects of peer motivating language on such remain unexplored. Researchers Mayfield and Mayfield (2017) are calling for moving beyond ML as a dyadic, leader communication model to research on peer-to-peer motivating language. Moreover, leadership studies started placing greater emphasis on followers to avoid a possible unproductive overemphasis on the leader in an organization. In line with this move is …

A Rhetorical Analysis Of Higher Education’S Mental Health Messaging, Gabrielle Thompson

Theses and Dissertations

In 2017, SAMHSA reported that nearly 20% of the American population have been diagnosed with a mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder. College aged students are within the age group most likely to be diagnosed with a mental illness (SAMHSA, 2017), making mental health services and promotions on college campuses a necessity. Because of the current mental health crisis affecting students, this research aimed to investigate the mental health messages higher education institutions produce for their students. Using close textual analysis, mental health materials in the form of flyers, social media posts, websites, and syllabi from 11 universities and colleges were …

Queering Genre And Joy: Reclaiming And Navigating Queerness Through Hybridity, Rebecca Meier

Theses and Dissertations

Throughout my experience in English education, queer texts and queer interpretations of texts have often been denied to me in favor of upholding more canonical and more cis-heteronormative works and analyses. This delayed my ability to write through my gender, sexuality, and overall queer identity, because I had no literary references to take inspiration from. The ways in which I played with genre and form in my work were discouraged because I was taught that my writing would not be taken seriously in academia if it did not represent the “official” literary canon. By melding together memoir, theory, poetry, and …

Incorporating Black Voices And Perspectives Into U.S. History Curricula Within Small, Rural Midwestern Schools, Jay Ryan Lawler Jr

Theses and Dissertations

In the highly polarized American political climate, teachers are facing immense pressure from legislators, community members and administration that impacts their decisions regarding what and how to teach certain topics perceived as controversial. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which public high school teachers in small, rural Illinois schools incorporated Black voices and perspectives into their curricula to meet the requirements set out by the Illinois General Assembly in HB 0246. This study also aimed to understand what pedagogical methods are used when incorporating those voices and perspectives, along with the challenges that accompany teaching …