Digital Commons Network^™

Research Into The Utility Of Standards In Foreign Language Instruction: A Case Study Of Methods Used In The High School Setting, Paul S. Kirby

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Given the increased emphasis on language acquisition in public education, and in university, government, and military settings there will be an increased focus on the
language classroom. My goal in this study was to investigate how five foreign language instructors in the Salt Lake metropolitan area perceived and implemented the national standards disseminated by the American Council for the Teachers of Foreign Language (ACTFL) known as the five Cs. These standards have also been adopted by the Utah State Office of Education (USOE). A broadened understanding was achieved through analysis of structured interviews, direct observation of foreign language instructors, evaluation …

Young Children‘S Mathematics References During Free Play In Family Child Care Settings, Shawnee M. Hendershot

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This study was undertaken to determine how children use math in their everyday activities, which includes caregiving environments outside of their home. Audio recordings were taken of children while they played. The researcher typed transcripts of the audio recordings in order to search for references to math. The different types of math that the children used were: (a) classification, (b) magnitude, (c) enumeration, (d) patterns and shapes, (e) spatial reasons, and (f) part/whole. An example of classification would be a child sorting blocks into groups based on shape. Magnitude is used when a child uses phrases to compare two or …

Development Of Teaching Beliefs And The Focus Of Change In The Process Of Pre-Service Esl Teacher Education, Eunice Lai-Yiu Tang, John Chi-Kin Lee, Cecilia Ka-Wai Chun

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

This study sets out to investigate how pre-serviceESLteachers shape their beliefs in the process of experimenting with new teaching methods introduced in the teacher education programme. A 4-year longitudinal study was conducted with four randomly selectedESLpre-service teachers. Their theoretical orientations ofESLinstruction were tracked at intervals through a protocol which consisted of i) descriptive accounts, ii) surveys, iii) lesson plan analysis, iv) lesson recording and v) interviews. Despite the fact that these 4 student teachers had shown different theoretical orientations in the protocols, they shared similar patterns of instructional practices in the Teaching Practicum. It was also found that the new …

Literacy By Subscription: Writing Instruction In Turn-Of-The-Century American Periodicals., Alicia Brazeau

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines popular periodicals in the late 19th- and early 20th-century America as pivotal artifacts in the history of literacy education. It first reviews current histories of literacy, writing instruction, and magazines at the turn of the century, and then concentrates on the formation, circulation, and function of agricultural journals and of two women's periodicals, Harper's Bazar and The Ladies' Home Journal, between 1880 and 1910. In analyzing this collection of periodicals, this dissertation outlines both how magazines provided audiences with explicit instruction in reading and writing practices, and how editors and readers constructed unique, contextually-specific, definitions of advanced …

Public Parks And Private Ideologies: Building Nineteenth-Century British National Identity Through Landscape, Laura Swaim Witherington

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project examines how nineteenth-century landscape theories shaped national identity and were influenced by it. Predominant is an investigation of how the desire for a more egalitarian class structure underlies the changes in British landscape design from an attachment to classical exclusivity through pastoral tropes to a limited acceptance of middle and working classes within public landscapes that represented patriotic values. Although poetic works inform the study, novel-length fiction and non-fiction prose and periodicals are also a primary source of consideration. Novels demonstrate how fictional geography generates the constructs of national ideology, and although canonical works typically referenced in studu …

Maternal Language During Book-Sharing: Wordless Verses Print, Jessica Nielsen

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The importance of adult linguistic responsiveness in facilitating language development in young children is well documented (e.g. Cross & Morris, 1980; Snow, 1994; Tamis-LeMonda, Bornstein, & Baumwell, 2001; Yoder, Warren, McCathern, & Leew, 1998). Research has shown that the use of responsive language by parents in the context of play is associated with greater child language productivity (Girolametto, Hoaken, Weitzman, & van Lieshout, 2000). Rocissano and Yatchmink (1983) found that when mother-child dyads utilized more joint attention, the toddlers demonstrated higher language skills and syntax abilities. Research has also shown that parent-child shared book reading contexts can be very beneficial …

Image-Enabled Discourse: Investigating The Creation Of Visual Information As Communicative Practice, Jaime Snyder

School of Information Studies - Dissertations

Anyone who has clarified a thought or prompted a response during a conversation by drawing a picture has exploited the potential of image making as an interactive tool for conveying information. Images are increasingly ubiquitous in daily communication, in large part due to advances in visually enabled information and communication technologies (ICT), such as information visualization applications, image retrieval systems and visually enabled collaborative work tools. Human abilities to use images to communicate are however far more sophisticated and nuanced than these technologies currently support. In order to learn more about the practice of image making as a specialized form …

Closing The Achievement Gap: The Promise Of Dual Language Programs For English Language Learners, Jocelyn Jane Strong

Honors Program Theses

With an academic achievement gap formed between English Language Learners (ELL) and English-dominant students in the United States, this thesis examines the literature on the successes and failures of different types of bilingual educational programs in order to determine which provide students with the highest levels of academic achievement and affective benefits in an effort to alleviate the differences between the majority and minority language status is education. It also investigates the research on effective practice within these bilingual educational programs, focusing on what administrators and teachers can do in order to foster the highest levels of success within their …

Language And Swallowing Intervention In Children With Cerebral Palsy, Meghan Serlin

Research Papers

No abstract provided.

The Last Orchard, Caleb David Camacho

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

The Last Orchard is a screenplay about two rival groups of ten-year-olds in 1989 Pharr, Texas. Their elementary school conflicts create a neighborhood war within their mobile home park, coinciding with the entire park's wide eviction and land ownership crisis. The story is written with a mythic fiction approach – a method I learned through Carl Jung's and Joseph Campbell's works on archetypes, mythology, and the hero's journey; it is a practical tool for storytelling. The Last Orchard is based on Homer's Iliad: the Trojan War, its heroes, and gods. Some plays and numerous films have their mythic counterparts, along …

Prairie Bound: How Laura's Past Forged My Future, Lori J. Houston

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This work of creative non-fiction seeks to explore my past at the same time as I explore the past of a favorite childhood author, Laura Ingalls Wilder. This exploration took the form of a road trip with my father to visit the sites written about in Laura’s books. I found that Laura’s life appealed to me because it represented an insular security that I felt I needed, and that was why I chose, as a child, to immerse myself in the 1880’s. While finding out what she meant to me then, I also discovered that Laura is an even better …

Preparing Australian Students For The Digital World : Results From The Pisa 2009 Digital Reading Literacy Assessment, Sue Thomson, Lisa De Bortoli

OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Australia

In PISA 2009, the assessment of digital reading literacy was offered as an international option for the first time. The digital reading literacy assessment assessed 15-year-old students’ ability to read, understand and apply digital texts. Australia and eighteen other countries or economies participated in this assessment. This report presents the results of the PISA digital reading literacy assessment for Australia. It presents the results for Australia as a whole, and where relevant makes comparisons to the other participants in the study. Results are also reported for the Australian states and territories and for different social groups within Australia. Overall, Australian …

From Martyrs To Mothers To Chick In Choos: The Medieval Female Body And American Women's Popular Literature, Gina M. Sully

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Placing the generic conventions of medieval hagiography, Nina Baym's insights about nineteenth-century American sentimental fiction's overplot, and contemporary American women's popular literature into tension illuminates some important commonalities. First, biographers of the medieval virgin saints and authors of contemporary American women's popular literature deploy the same overplot that Baym identifies as characteristic of American women's nineteenth-century popular fiction. Second, in order to define feminine virtue and establish the virtue of their protagonists, nineteenth-century and post-millennial American women writers rework the contrastive tropes by which hagiographers establish their heroines' virtue. Third, struggles for ascendance in the domestic realm gesture toward its …

The Irreversible Line: Adornian Contribution And Communication Through The Use Of Arabic Calligraphy In The Videos Of Mona Hatoum And Kutlug Ataman, Oylun Albayrak

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

This project analizes the use of the Arabic script in Mona Hatoum's Measures of Distance (1988) and Kutlu?? Ataman's Animated Words (2003) to understand the variety of interpretations made possible to audiences familiar and unfamiliar to Arabic. These artists' roles as Middle Eastern artists working/exhibiting in diaspora is a central issue that defines the variety and distinction between their potential audiences. Some interpretations of these works, in turn, are evaluated through the notions of contribution and over -intentional communication proposed by Theodor Adorno in his brief essay, "Questions on Intellectual Emigration." In effect, Hatoum and Ataman's works circumvent the expectations …

The Critical Rumble: Marinetti, Benjamin, And The Politics Of Gastroaesthetics In Modernity, Kelly Rae Aldridge

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

This paper initiates an investigation into the aesthetic spaces surrounding comestibility and potability. Throughout the Western philosophic tradition, eating and drinking have been subject to dismissal on the grounds of the corporeality, subjectivity, and temporality implicit in the consumptive act. After briefly tracing the systematic marginalization of both the properties and pleasures of food and drink throughout the development of art discourse, this paper will turn two unlikely contemporaries, F.T. Marinetti and Walter Benjamin, who shared an interest in the potential revolutionary ramifications of food to expand the category of aesthetic experience and to radically thrust corporeality and temporality into …

Inhume, Entomb, Inurn, Immure: Cemeteries And Constructions Of Britishness, 1767-1852, Sarah Hoglund

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

This dissertation examines the emergence of commercial cemeteries in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Britain, arguing that these spaces of the dead were a key site for the rehearsal of a middle class, British identity. Unlike earlier scholars, who tended to approach the nineteenth century as something like a golden age of burial, hoping to remind the reader of the sacrifices we have made to become thoroughly modern, I have instead attempted to use the cemetery as a way of engaging a series of current issues in the field of nineteenth century studies. Seeking to provide a transcultural, interdisciplinary framing of …

Re-Schematizing Pre-Reflective Consciousness, Adam Kohler

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

This thesis aims at constructing an ontology of pre-reflective and reflective modes of consciousness in an attempt to understand how pre-reflective responses to certain stimuli become schematized through reflection. After mapping movements made in phenomenology that allow for the body to be our departure point for analysis, this paper focuses especially on the role that affectivity plays in motivating a reflective act, and how that reflective act may habituate new behaviors over time. To do so, I look to Jeffrey Schwartz's theory and research on his patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and through phenomenological methodology show why his Four-Step Method for …

The Intersection Of Karuk Storytelling And Education, Waylon Lenk

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

The Karuk Tribe is located in northwest California along the mid-stretch of the Klamath River. An understanding of Karuk dramaturgy cannot be complete without understanding traditional Karuk storytelling. And an understanding of Karuk storytelling cannot be complete without understanding its interaction with forms of education. The stories told by the Karuk people and the way in which they are told are intimately tied to the tumultuous changes that have occurred in pedagogical goals and structures over the past 160 years. To approach a better understanding of Karuk dramaturgy, this thesis shows that the intersection between storytelling and education exists in …

A Remote Province: Between The Visible And The Sayable, Jamie Callum Macaulay

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

The following thesis investigates the idea and practice of my painting from the point of view of the uncanny - that "remote province" characterized by Martin Heidegger as a paradoxical union of emerging and not emerging, concealment and unconcealment; described by Sigmund Freud as the way "back to what is known of old and long familiar" (220); and that Paul Celan reminds us is also the way of the abyss of heaven underfoot - the abyss that opens up the earth (Selected Poems and Prose, 407). Chapter 1, "Analytic of Forms: An Attempt at Self-Criticism, provides a critical and typological …

L'Imperativo Vero E Suppletivo Nei Dialetti Italiani, Emily Romanello

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

This thesis provides evidence for the need of a re-analysis of the imperative mood based on data taken from thirty-six minor Romance varieties (so-called `dialects') spoken on the Italian peninsula. A clear distinction exists between the imperative of the second person singular and the first person plural based on the following characteristics: verbal morphology, the negation of the verb, the position of stress in the presence of enclitics, the lexical realization of enclitics, and the position of clitics with respect to the verb. In each of these varieties, the second person singular is distinct from the first person plural in …

Relational Information Between Objects Is Available To Guide Search., Joseph C. Schmidt

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

Objects in the real world exist relative to other objects, resulting in an intricate web of spatial relationships. Do we use this relational information when we search for objects? Current search theory suggests that object relationships can only be established using focal attention (Logan, 1994; 1995). If this is true, pre-attentive search guidance by relational information should be impossible. In a series of seven experiments, I demonstrate that search guidance by relational information is possible, even in the absence of real-world contextual constraints that may magnify relational guidance. Experiment 1 shows search guidance by relational information only, i.e. in the …

Superman, Can You Hear Me?, Kristina Stoyanova

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

We live in a world defined by language. The communication and our understanding of the world around us happen through words and symbols. We define objects, space, and relationships through the language we use. As we cannot isolate the visual from the linguistic disposition, it is difficult to think of works of art without thinking of their verbal form, without giving them names, labels and definitions, and without putting them in categories and movements. Since Conceptual Art, art became an investigation in the nature of art, and is no longer an object of aesthetics, but a form of examination and …

Nuestras Experiencias: A Phenomenological Study Of Latina First Generation Higher Education Graduates, Diana Elizabeth Cruz

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A review of the literature indicates that Latinos lag behind White and

African American students in higher education degree attainment. This educational gap is of concern because Latinos are the largest minority group in the United States, and the Latino population is expected to increase in the future. Higher education degree attainment for Latinos is vital because statistics show an undeniable relationship between degree attainment and income level. In order to ensure the economic well being of Latinos, it is important that Latinos persist through university degree programs. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences of …

Exercise And Nutrition Survey Of Nevada Air National Guard Members, Matthew Antonio Demattei

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

One hundred seventy-three Nevada Air National Guard members voluntarily participated in this exercise science and nutrition survey-based study. The survey consisted of ten closed-ended questions; the intent of the study was to determine whether the participants were willing to attend exercise science or nutrition related classes, or if the participants were willing to instruct exercise science or nutrition classes if they possessed a degree in either field. Forty-six females, and one hundred twenty-seven males participated in this study; one hundred thirty-six of the respondents were enlisted, and thirty-seven of the respondents were officers. Participants were demographically separated by age groups …

The Acquisition Of Cultural Competence: A Phenomenological Inquiry Highlighting The Processes, Challenges And Triumphs Of Counselor Education Students, Douglas L. Garner

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Although research has effectively isolated and identified the key characteristics of a culturally competent counselor, there are few studies regarding the acquisition of these characteristics. To close the gap between theory and practice, studies are needed researching the emergence and, acquisition of these characteristics. This study explores how Masters-level Counselor Education students narrate the encounters, challenges, triumphs and epiphanies associated with their preliminary attempts to practice in a culturally competent manner. This phenomenological inquiry seeks to shed light students attitudes, beliefs and dispositions; defines the processes related to the acquisition of cognitive awareness and learning, skills and abilities; and illuminates …

Factors Affecting Talent Development: Differences In Graduate Students Across Domains, Stephanie Hartzell

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

There is an abundance of literature on young individuals who show early signs of talent and on older individuals who have demonstrated their abilities throughout the years. This research aims to look at those individuals who are in between, that is, graduate students who have the demonstrated potential to achieve within their fields of study. This study explored backgrounds of talented individuals in their adolescent period and their current measures of cognitive abilities. A total of 38 graduate students majoring in the areas of art (n= 12), science (n= 12), and education (n= 14) were used as examples of individuals …

Leadership Practice In Elementary School Dual Language Programs: A Collective Case Study, Joanie K. Monroy

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Research in effective programming for English language learners has demonstrated the efficacy of dual language education as a model for closing persistent achievement gaps for this growing population of students. With goals of high academic achievement, linguistic proficiency in two languages, and cross-cultural proficiency, dual language education is an enrichment model of education that eschews the deficit thinking often associated with language-minority students. Based on the promise of enriched education for all participants, the number of dual language programs is increasing nationwide. As districts across the United States plan for the implementation of dual language programs, identifying effective leadership practices …

The New American Conservation Movement: New Strategies, Focus And Organizations For The 21st Century, Amy Deanna Northrup

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation provides evidence of the emergence of a new conservation movement in the United States. The strategic, tactical and organizational approaches of traditional conservation efforts, which began in the early 1900s, have shifted during the last two decades. Specifically, the new conservation movement is characterized by three distinct changes. First, many of the well-established conservation organizations, such as the Sierra Club and National Audubon Society, have largely abandoned their traditional focus on increasing the number of acres preserved; instead more defensive and fragmented forms of conservation now reign. The second change to the conservation movement involves a dramatic expansion …

Die Deutschen In Kalifornien: Germans In Urban California, 1850-1860, Carole Cosgrove Terry

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

German immigrants came to San Francisco, Sacramento and Marysville, urban northern California, seeking a better life than they had in the Germanic states of central Europe. Some came directly from Germany but some made an intermediate stop during their journey in Europe or the United States. In all three cities, they created an ethnic community where they practiced the social, economic and cultural traditions from their homeland,including Vereinswesen (associational life) and Gemutlichkeit (celebration of the joy of life), led by their ethnically based association, the Turnverein. They interacted with the main steam Anglo-Americans through associations and celebratory events to create …

A Turkish Dictionary, Andrew Wessels

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The poems in this manuscript, A Turkish Dictionary, probe a number of related issues: What is the relationship between a word and its object? What is the connection between meaning in two different languages? How do we live in a city overwhelmed with history? What is necessary? How do we accept knowing that we cannot know? These and other questions constitute the investigative purpose of the manuscript as specifically and actively an exploration of the questions rather than an argument for a final, singular answer. Structurally, the manuscript uses two poetic forms: dictionary poems and prosaic poems. The dictionary poems …