Digital Commons Network^™

"Yup, So-Jeer": Interlanguage And Ruptured Translation In Charles Dickens's The Perils Of Certain English Prisoners, Jacob Kurt Nielsen

Theses and Dissertations

Co-authored by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners is a tale of linguistic subversion in colonial spaces. Christian George King-a native "Sambo" that betrays the English colonists on Silver Store to a marauding band of pirates-demonstrates a linguistic phenomenon that scholars call interlanguage, or a quasi-language that partially resembles both English and his native language. Because of its status as a language between languages, King's interlanguage disrupts the linguistic hierarchy of the tale by opening possibilities for miscommunication. To combat this underlying tension, the colonists must rely on translation-specifically, on the mistaken belief that all …

The Effects Of Repeated Reading On The Fluency Of Intermediate-Level English-As-A-Second-Language Learners: An Eye-Tracking Study, Krista Carlene Rich

Theses and Dissertations

Most would agree that reading fluency is a concern of every L2 teacher. Repeated reading (RR) positively affects fluency development, supported by much research with L1 children. However, relatively little focus has been given to L2 RR. Most research on RR in L2 settings has focused on audio-assisted RR, used insufficient data collection methods prone to human error, and taken place in an EFL setting. In our experiment, we used eye–tracking as a direct mode of measurement of the effects that RR has on early and late reading measures. In this study, 30 intermediate-level English language learners studying in an …

Improving Narrative And Expository Language: A Comparison Of Narrative Intervention To Shared Storybook Reading, Karee Douglas

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of oral narrative intervention delivered in a multi-tiered system of support format on proximal narrative retell outcomes, and more distal personal story generation and expository language outcomes of preschool and kindergarten students. Participants included 241 preschool and kindergarten students. Students were divided into 3 different groups (treatment, alternate treatment, and no-treatment control). The treatment group received Story Champs Tier 1 oral narrative language intervention from their classroom teacher twice a week for 15-20 minutes over 14 weeks. A sub-sample of students from the Story Champs group who did not meet …

Sociocultural Identification With The United States And English Pronunciation Comprehensibility And Accent Among International Esl Students, Christinah Paige Mulder

Theses and Dissertations

Sociocultural identity is defined for this study as the element of identity affixed to a social or cultural group. Previous research on sociocultural identity has recognized the need for further study of its effect on second language performance, particularly pronunciation. Previous studies have found contradictory results when studying the relationships between sociocultural identity and various measures of second language pronunciation. This thesis takes a quantitative correlational approach to the study of sociocultural identification with the United States and English pronunciation comprehensibility and accent in a group of 68 international students learning English in the United States. Participants completed a survey …

Teacher Perceptions Of Emergent Bilingual Students And Connection To Pedagogical Resources And Strategy Use, Sarah A. Rozny

Theses and Dissertations

This research considers what informs a teacher's dispositions towards his/her emergent bilingual students and in what way these dispositions influence the resources the teacher calls upon and strategies that he/she employs to teach these students. The findings for this study indicate that more positive dispositions towards their emergent bilingual students is connected to exposure to a foreign culture, attempts to learn a foreign language, experiencing teaching emergent bilingual students, and the way the teacher views his or her role as a teacher. More positive teacher dispositions were also connected to a greater use of Just Good Teaching and Linguistically Responsive …

North American Data, Joseph A. Burwell

Theses and Dissertations

North American Data fractures and reconfigures pre-existing narratives into new, unauthorized forms of storytelling. Core samples extracted from various narrative sources are reassigned new roles according to their proximity to each other. This paper functions as an introduction to the essential actors and their dramatic inclinations within fluctuating scenarios.

Thornfield, Wragby, And Their Discontents: Nature And Civilization In Jane Eyre And Lady Chatterley’S Lover, Marianna Alvarado Teuscher

Theses and Dissertations

In Jane Eyre and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Charlotte Brontë and her literary inheritor, D.H. Lawrence, locate the potentially revolutionary romance between their protagonists in natural settings, distant from the social sphere, in order to demonstrate the un-naturalness of an administered capitalist society in which class distinctions work in dehumanizing ways.

Virginia Woolf And Gertrude Stein’S Repurposing Of Feminine Domestic Language Through The Lens Of Bakhtinian Heteroglossia And Dialogic Theory, Samantha Ortiz

Theses and Dissertations

This essay examines the ways that Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own and Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and “The Good Anna” recapture feminine domestic language in order to produce a new form of feminist heteroglossia, a reworking of Bakhtinian heteroglossia and dialogic theory.

Warped Gates, Christopher Roberson

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in the ambient conditions that are filtered through our bodies and our relationships with the built structures positioning us. I am combining experimental material approaches with a sensitivity to the spaces around an artwork to create sculptural situations that are dissonant and precarious.

"Mute Flesh": Women's Death-Worlds In David's Story And Waiting For The Barbarians, Kate Finley

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis expands upon Achille Mbembe's theory on necropower and death-worlds to incorporate the consideration of gender. This is done using the lens of violence against women during South African apartheid and through an examination of two novels: Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians.

The Case Of New Institutionalism: Maria Lind At The Kunstverein München, 2002–2004., Olga Tykhonova

Theses and Dissertations

The thesis focuses on a particular moment in the history of Kunstverein München - the directorship and curatorial practice of Maria Lind from 2002 to 2004, referred to as exemplary of the New Institutionalism. I analyze Lind’s directorship through the lens of the director-curator concept and institution as an “agonistic space.”

A Bite Of The Big Apple: The Anthropology Of Pesticide Use In New York City, Faye O'Brien

Theses and Dissertations

Pesticide exposure in the developing world is well described in anthropology. How pesticide use and exposure is ordered and experienced socially, economically and culturally in Western urban communities is less well studied. The long-term consequences of synergistic pesticide exposure is not easily measurable, which this research addresses through social inquiry.

Studies Of Musical Borrowing: Borrowing As Compositional Tool In Béla Bartók's Second Piano Concerto And The Influence Of Luciano Berio On The Grateful Dead's Approach To Live Improvisation, Michael J. Crowley

Theses and Dissertations

J. Peter Burkholder’s typology of musical borrowing provides new ways of thinking about and understanding how composers and musicians incorporated influential ideas into their own compositions. This paper explores two cases of musical borrowing in order to gain a deeper understanding of the compositional styles of the chosen subjects. In the first study, I explore Béla Bartók’s use of Paraphrase, Modeling and Stylistic Allusion in his Second Piano Concerto, demonstrating how Bartók used borrowing as a compositional tool to develop his own innovative ideas. In the second study, I investigate how Luciano Berio’s compositional style influenced the Grateful Dead’s approach …

Expanding Experimentalism: Art And Popular Music At The Kitchen In New York City, 1971-1985, Sarah A. Cooper

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores artists' engagement with popular music at the interdisciplinary alternative space, the Kitchen, from 1971 to 1985. It seeks a critical language to challenge institutional frameworks to account for the creative output of artists' bands and the relationship between parallel and hybrid popular music and avant-garde performance practices.

A Comparative Study Of Spoken Word Poetry And Its Literary Counter-Part, Haidy Tarek Zakaria

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses the contrast between spoken word and literary poetry, bearing in mind the differences in imagery, allusions and performance methods. Though both are fall under the same genre, the differences between them show as they are compared. There are many similarities between the two and the differences are not clear cut, however, upon closer inspection, one finds that the use of metaphor, and similes differ from one form to another. The fact that spoken word poetry uses performance as part of the poem also casts a difference between the two forms.

Reading And Creating Comics In The Fully Online Afl Classroom: Students' Perceptions, Mona Azam

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to examine the perceptions of multi-level Arabic as a foreign language (AFL) online learners of reading and creating digital comics in their online classroom. Data were collected from 23 multi-level online AFL students who participated in a 6 weeks fully online comic-based course where they read a comic each week with the teacher and create a digital comic using a web-based comic creation tool related to the topic they have read in class. Participants were asked to respond to a questionnaire and participate in group interviews at the end of the experiment. Results show …

Culture In The Afl Novice Classroom: Teachers' Perceptions, Teaching Techniques, And Assessment., Amera Abdalrahim

Theses and Dissertations

The teaching of cultural content in the foreign language classroom has received a great deal of attention throughout the past few decades. The role of culture in the L2 classroom has been investigated and studied from different perspectives. This study investigates teachers' perceptions of teaching culture in the Arabic as a foreign language novice classroom, in addition to how Arabic as foreign language teachers introduce and assess culture. The aim of this study is to explore the current teaching practices regarding cultural content in the novice classroom, in order to determine what is needed for better teaching practices that can …

Inclusion Strategies In President El Sissi's Discourse In Context Of Election Campaigns, Ihab Abdelhafiz

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this study is to investigate how President Abdelfattah El Sissi used pronouns as well as different alternatives of the word “Egypt” as a discourse strategy to add the sense of inclusion in the context of election campaigns. Group orientation (i.e. inclusion) is of the strategies commonly used in political speeches (Hicks, 2005). Several theories relating to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) have been introduced to help understand political speeches beyond the surface level. For the purpose of this study, which includes the text, discourse practices and socio-political context, has been employed. The sample used for this study was …

The Impact Of Liberal Arts Education On Egyptian Student Identity And Worldview: A Study Of The Core Curriculum Of The American University In Cairo, Rami Wasfi Maurice Guindi

Theses and Dissertations

Liberal Arts Education advocates an enquiry about life at its very fundamental level. In contrast to other forms of higher education, it decidedly delves into the complicated task of engaging with student ontological, epistemological, and axiological foundations. Its mandate - and its promise - is to educate the formation of student identities and worldviews. For Egypt and the Middle East, where the study of humanities is in deep crisis, Liberal Arts Education programs present valuable initiatives to challenge the stagnant status quo and offer to students zones of freedom of thought and expression. It thus becomes imperative to ask: to …

Maʕleš Maʕleš: A Corpus-Based Study On The Discourse Marker Maʕleš, Mukhtar Sayed Abd El Hafiz

Theses and Dissertations

This monograph is an attempt to capture the pragmatic functions and the syntactic behavior of the discourse marker maʕleš in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. It also aims to highlight any potential correlations between the syntactic behavior of maʕleš and its pragmatic functions. Additionally, the collocational behavior of maʕleš within its different pragmatic functions is investigated. The data of this study is a purposeful sample drawn from a corpus of an Egyptian series. Utilizing a corpus-based, qualitative method, the data is analyzed by using WordSmith Tools, a functional corpus software that has the capacity for the search for a word or a …

Ya' Between Vocative And Non-Vocative Use In Egyptian Film Language A Corpus Analysis: Pragmatic Functions And Formal Features, David Henen

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the functional and formal features of constructions built with the particle ya in the Egyptian Arabic film language of the film eš-šabaḥ (The Ghost) (2007). Studying ya is of interest as it is the most frequent lexical item after the conjunction we (and) in the data. By means of using WordSmith Tools Lexical Analysis Software, a concordance of instances of ya in the data was built. In line with the Speech Act theory by Austin (1975), a quantitative design was employed which enabled the findings to be classified according to their functional and formal properties. Regarding formal …

The Usage Of Songs In Arabic As A Foreign Language Classes: Teachers' Perceptions And Practices, Yahia Moshtahari

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL) teachers' perceptions towards the usefulness of songs in fostering language acquisition in AFL classes, in addition to the practices they employ, and the alignment between teacher perceptions and practices. Perceptions and practices are examined further through a focus on the purposes for using songs in class, the activities teachers use with songs, and the challenges they face with using songs in class. In addition, the study evaluates whether there are any demographic features that distinguish teachers who use songs from those who do not. The aforementioned topics were investigated through an …

Pragmatic Functions Of Political Humor Used By Egyptian Facebook Users, Shereen Elshindy

Theses and Dissertations

Political humor has always been a powerful tool to convey messages of resistance, criticism, sarcasm, etc. The growth of digital tools and social networking sites has provided a new platform for the creation and sharing of political humor. This study explores the functions of political humor employed by Egyptian users of Facebook (FB) in reaction to a number of political events and difficult circumstances through investigating the pragmatic functions of a number of humorous posts published on two satirical public FB pages /portō ṭora min ʔajlika ʔant/ and /sōbar faʃxa/. Fifty-nine posts have been selected for analysis. The selected posts …

Exploring Microaggressions Among Trans Populations: Effects On Feelings Of Social Exclusion, Stephanie M. Aubuchon

Theses and Dissertations

Those who identify as transgender face subtle discrimination in the form of microaggressions, which are behaviors and statements, often unconscious or unintentional, that communicate hostile or derogatory messages, particularly to members of marginalized social groups (Nadal et al., 2016). This study explored the microaggressions that transgender participants experience and the psychological effects on their feelings of social exclusion. Specifically, we hypothesized that transgender individuals experience microaggressions that make them feel socially excluded. The participants’ ages ranged from 18-66 and identified as nonbinary, agender, demiboy, genderqueer, male, or female. The study used an online survey that had the participants recall memories …

The Death Penalty In Contemporary Egypt: States, Murderers, And State Murderers, Amira Mahmoud Othman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an ethnography of the encounters between figures of the state and some death row detainees and their family members. The project explores what it means to be sentenced to death and executed in contemporary death row cases, what fantasies encounters with the ‘state’ imply or satisfy, and how time unfolds throughout the murder. As such, in exploring the genealogy and bureaucratization of murder, this ethnography problematizes the official discourses of abstraction, efficacy, and sanitization around the penalty. Instead, it focuses on the everydayness of the penalty within the legal and penal systems, and draws heavily on the …

Cross-Mediterranean Egyptian Migrants: A Discursive Analysis, Sara Hussein

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates how the Egyptian migrant subject who chooses to cross the Mediterranean through irregular means to reach Europe is discursively constructed in Egyptian media, particularly in the wake of the 2016 Rashid boat sinking. In both official and public discourse, this highly visible and well-documented accident raised questions on accountability and the role of the state in this situation. By identifying and analyzing the themes represented throughout a diverse collected fieldwork corpus of various Egyptian media, statements by public officials and organizations, newspaper articles and editorials, television talk show programming, and popular cultural production, this thesis offers a …

Reconstructing The Demographic History Of The Critically Endangered Black-And-White Ruffed Lemur (Varecia Variegata) In Ranomafana National Park, Aparna Chandrashekar

Theses and Dissertations

Due to heavy fragmentation of their remaining range, the Critically Endangered black-and-white ruffed lemur (Varecia variegata) is facing catastrophic population declines. Skyline analyses at Ranomafana National Park show the ruffed lemur effective population size declining by 84% starting around 1,500 years ago.

In Determining The Disparity Between English As A New Language Policy And The English Language Learner High School Graduation Completion, Lilibeth Bernal

Theses and Dissertations

Through a constant growing population of English language learners (ELL) within schools, there is a need to bridge the achievement gap effectively. Currently from the ELL population in New York State, 63.3% of ELLs are considered Newcomers (NYSED, 2019). Newcomer ELLs have been in US Schools for less than three years. The importance of looking at the perceptions of students and teachers within a stand-alone English as a new language (ENL) classroom is important in supporting the future success of English Language Learners. In knowing how the setting of a stand-alone ENL class impacts the student’s high school success can …

Understanding Structure-Activity Relationship Of Synthetic Cathinones (Bath Salts) Utilizing Methylphenidate, Barkha J. Yadav

Theses and Dissertations

Synthetic cathinones are stimulant drugs of abuse that act at monoamine transporters e.g. the dopamine transporter (DAT) as releasing agents or as reuptake inhibitors. More than >150 new synthetic cathinones have emerged on the clandestine market and have attracted considerable attention from the medical and law enforcement communities.

threo-Methylphenidate (tMP) is an FDA approved drug for the treatment of ADHD and narcolepsy, which also acts as a DAT reuptake inhibitor and is widely abused. tMP and synthetic cathinones share some structural similarities and extensive structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies on tMP have been conducted. However, much less is known about the …

Narrative Portraiture Of American Indian Men Who Persist To Completion Of Doctoral Degrees, Shawn F. Holz

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study examines the lived experiences of American Indian men who have completed their doctoral degrees through the positive exploration of portraiture methodology. Semi-structured interviews are conducted with subject-actors being asked to share stories from their earliest childhood memories and educational experiences through high school and through to completion of their doctoral degrees. Using narrative analysis and transculturation theory as the framework, subject-actors stories are examined to identify emergent themes of common experiences and characteristics. These create a composite portrait of a male American Indian student who persists to completion of their doctoral degree.