Digital Commons Network^™

Is A Degree Relevant? A Comparison Of Pedagogical Thought Units Of Teachers With And Without Elt-Related Academic Credentials, Ramin Akbari, Shahab Moradkhani

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

This paper studies the difference between the pedagogical thought units of ELT practitioners with English-relevant degrees and those with non-relevant degrees. An entire teaching session of eight EFL teachers’ performance was video recorded and their pedagogical thoughts were identified by using stimulated recall technique. The findings revealed that, in general, teachers with English-related degrees significantly reported more pedagogical thoughts than their colleagues with unrelated degrees. With respect to the categories of pedagogical thoughts, although the same families were reported by participants in both groups, there were slight differences in their rankings and significant differences in their frequency.

The Road To Pomp And Circumstance For Ell Students: The Perceived Ambivalent Schooling Experience Of Ell Students With Mexican Ancestry In An Urban Midwestern High School, Kristine M. Sudbeck

Department of Anthropology: Theses and Student Research

Perceptions of high school faculty and staff members about the graduation outcomes of English language learners of Mexican ancestry were explored. Throughout the course of one semester, observations were made and field notes taken in classrooms and other school locations. Interviews were conducted with 25 faculty/ staff members and 7 students, all of whom were former or current English language learners of Mexican ancestry. The author used a mixed methods strategy; interviews were coded for themes to assess qualitative data, and SPSS was used to analyze quantitative data. Faculty/staff perceived the top three indicators of whether or not an ELL …

Russian-Moldovan Relations After The Collapse Of The Soviet Union, Anna Napieralska

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

After the break-up of the Soviet Empire a newborn Republic of Moldova faced a series of challenges, one of which was creating the political and economic foundations that would allow it to become the sustainable European country. It proved to be an extremely difficult task. Indeed, at the beginning of the 1990's Moldova was widely known as the poorest and the least economically stable country on the old continent. During the first years of independence the Moldovan leaders realized that the greatest challenge would be to limit Russian influences on the domestic and foreign policy of the country. Since the …

Bringing Pragmatics Into The Esl Classroom, Tahnee Bucher Barbosa Da Silva

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

As a result of the expanding interest in the cognitive and social dimensions of language use beyond single sentences, a great number of research studies have been conducted in order to examine nonnative speakers' ability to use language appropriately in a social context. Recently, with a growing understanding of the key role pragmatic competence plays in second language development, researchers have also investigated the benefits of direct instruction in helping language learners become aware of the pragmatic conditions governing the uses of grammatical structures. This thesis reports on the design and administration of a study that investigated language learners' knowledge …

Text-Dependent Audio Biometric Person Authentication, Ekhlas Falih

Iraqi Journal of Computers, Communications, Control and Systems Engineering

Audio biometric person authentication is the task of verifying the identity of a person based on the information in the speech signal that occurs during the production of speech. In this research, audio person authentication is focus on acoustic text-dependent speaker verification system. The proposed recognition process begins by converting that audio into frequency domain by applying discrete cosine transform (DCT), then compute the seven moments as a features for that audio and build a database depends on these features, then compute the Kohonen neural network for person identification, and then compute the dynamic time wrapping (DTW) for verification and …

The Southern Woman: A History Of Rebellion, Passion, And Betrayal In Gone With The Wind And Caballero: A Historical Novel, Jessica Banda Vela

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This thesis closely reads, Margaret Mitchell’s, Gone with the Wind and Caballero, co-authored by Jovita González and Eve Raleigh, to illustrate how women in two separate regions of the Southern United States were transformed by the effects of a historical war setting. While these two literary texts deal with distinctive social, political, and historical contexts, they both highlight factors that contributed to the Southern woman’s alteration: colonization, gender roles and a historical war--setting that ironically liberated women. As a result, the female characters of each story become progressive by the events that take place with and during their respective wars. …

Constructing A Professional Identity: Non-Native Speakers As Teachers In College Freshman Composition Classes In An American University, Marcela Hebbard

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This study is a qualitative, quantitative investigation of how non-native speakers of English construct a professional identity as teachers of English composition and rhetoric in freshman classes in an American University and how their students perceived such identity. A sample of 4 participants teaching ENG 1301 Rhetoric and Composition classes were recruited. Data were gathered through personal interviews, questionnaires, class observations, and students' anonymous survey at the end of their course to measure course satisfaction and their perception of their non-native speaker instructors. The investigation revealed that in order to develop a Professional Teacher Identity, non-native speakers of English need …

Domain Independent Ordering Of Narrative Events, Lucian T. Silcox

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

A key aspect towards gaining a rich understanding of a text is the ability to order the events that occur in the narrative. For us, as readers, this is a simple task, accomplished without effort by recognizing subtle contextual and linguistic clues. For natural language systems, however, the task is considerably more difficult. It is the intent of this research to automate the process of annotating and ordering temporal events in a narrative, and to measure the success of techniques trained on news articles when applied to less sequentially-structured texts. We build on the earlier work of Mani et al …

Aqui Es: The Rhetoric Of Identification In An Act Of Local Branding, Bonnie M. Garcia

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Brands are a large part of our cultural discourse. In the Rio Grande Valley a group of network-marketing sponsored entrepreneurs has tapped into branding as a rhetorical resource. I use Burke’s concept of consubstantiation to analyze the rhetorical motives represented both in the use of branding in general and in the “Aqui Es” sign utilized by local nutrition clubs. Burke’s concept of consubstantiation allows me to contextualize the production of the sign and open avenues to explore the relationships behind the sign’s use. I then utilize Lacanian psychoanalysis to explain the psychological motives behind the sign’s use and production. I …

Selected Factors Related To The Mathematics Academic Achievement Of Eighth Grade English Language Learners, Anthony Garza

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

The purpose of this study was to examine selected factors related to the 8th grade mathematics achievement levels of English Language Learner (ELL) students in selected South Texas middle schools. The dependent variable, ELL mathematics achievement, was measured by the ELL student’s raw score on the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) or the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness linguistically accommodated test (STAAR L). The factors examined in this study were 1) parent’s educational background, 2) socioeconomic status, 3) parental involvement status at school, 4) number of people in the household, 5) family structure, 6) primary …

Zumba® Fitness As A Cultural Mediator, Cole E. Durain

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This ethnography describes local experience as it pertains to aspects of music, dance, and fitness which are compiled into Zumba® Fitness classes of the Rio Grande Valley. While Zumba is not unique to this region, it is locally interpreted based on geo-cultural factors of the Texas-Mexico border region. A large part of Zumba’s success in the Valley can be attributed to the way music is used to identify with regional popular culture and becomes a catalyst for changing the way locals think about health. Research gathered through participant-observation shows that Zumba has become a cultural expression where participants perform both …

Listening Difficulties Among Non-Native Speakers Of Arabic, Fatma Yousuf Al-Busaidi

Journal of Educational and Psychological Studies

This qualitative study analyzed the listening difficulties of 19 students learning Arabic as a foreign language in the Sultanate of Oman from a social-constructivist perspective. Analysis of the data obtained from interviews and students’ diaries has indicated that learners experienced five listening difficulties that occurred either in the classroom setting, in their real-life conversation with Omanis or while listening to TV and radio programs. It was found that their listening difficulties were related to speed of speech, quickly forgetting what was heard, missing the next part when thinking about meaning, the inability to understand what they had heard and inability …

Accessing Justice Ii: A Model For Providing Counsel To New York Immigrants In Removal Proceedings, Stacy Caplow, Peter L. Markowitz, Claudia Slovinsky, Jojo Annobil, Peter Cobb, Amy L. Kenepaske, Nancy Morawetz, Lindsay Nash, Raluca Oncioiu, Oren Root, Maribel Hernández Rivera, Jane Stern, Isaac Wheeler, Marianne Yang

Online Publications

The New York Immigrant Representation Study (“NYIR Study”) is a two-year project of the Study Group on Immigrant Representation to analyze and ameliorate the immigrant representation crisis—the acute shortage of qualified attorneys willing and able to represent indigent immigrants facing deportation. The crisis has reached epic proportions in New York and shows no signs of abating.

In its year-one report (issued in the fall of 2011), the NYIR Study analyzed the empirical evidence regarding the nature and scope of the immigrant representation crisis. In that report, we documented how many New Yorkers—27 percent of those not detained and 60 percent …

An Ethnographic Case Study Of A Deaf Workforce Collective, Peter Shane Butler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This ethnographic study seeks to increase our understanding of the individual and shared experiences of five members of a Deaf United States Postal Service (USPS) collective employment cohort in regards to their early learning experiences, how these experiences led to collective employment, and how the collective employment opportunity led them to establish a new Strong Deaf Community in Houston. The data collected through semi structured interviews will be used to increase our understanding about how Strong Deaf Communities form, and what purpose they serve for grassroots members.

This study also seeks to shed light on why it is critical for …

The Academic Effects Of Learning Styles On Esl (English As A Second Language) Students In Intensive English Language Centers, Baderaddin Mahmood Yassin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the learning styles of ESL students (students who learn English as a second language). The focus in this study was on the ESL Arab Gulf (Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, and United Arab Emirates) students who study English as a second language in Intensive English Language Centers (IELCs) in the United States. The study explored the ESL Arab Gulf students' learning style preference and how they are affected by different variables such as cultural background, gender, and language level in IELCs. ESL Arab Gulf students were administered the VARK Learning Styles questionnaire. It measures several sensory types of …

Finding Thoughtful Comments From Social Media, Gottipati Swapna, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online user comments contain valuable user opinions. Comments vary greatly in quality and detecting high quality comments is a subtask of opinion mining and summarization research. Finding attentive comments that provide some reasoning is highly valuable in understanding the user’s opinion particularly in sociopolitical opinion mining and aids policy makers, social organizations or government sectors in decision making. In this paper we study the problem of detecting thoughtful comments. We empirically study various textual features, discourse relations and relevance features to predict thoughtful comments. We use logistic regression model and test on the datasets related to sociopolitical content. We found …

Community-Based Classification Of Noun Phrases In Twitter, Freddy Chong Tat Chua, William W. Cohen, Justin Betterridge, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many event monitoring systems rely on counting known keywords in streaming text data to detect sudden spikes in frequency. But the dynamic and conversational nature of Twitter makes it hard to select known keywords for monitoring. Here we consider a method of automatically finding noun phrases (NPs) as keywords for event monitoring in Twitter. Finding NPs has two aspects, identifying the boundaries for the subsequence of words which represent the NP, and classifying the NP to a specific broad category such as politics, sports, etc. To classify an NP, we define the feature vector for the NP using not just …

The Role Of Referentially Biased And Unbiased Contexts In The Processing Of Relative Clauses, William Battinich

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Two studies were conducted in order to examine the role of biased and unbiased contexts on the processing of object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) (e.g., The child that the babysitter chased squealed with delight.) and subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) (e.g., The child that chased the babysitter squealed with delight.) In Experiment 1 ORCs and SRCs were embedded in licensing contexts that referentially supported the use of the relative clause (i.e., more than one child was present. In Experiment 2 ORCs and SRCs were embedded in context that biased towards either an ORC interpretation (e.g., One of the children was chased by …

Policy-Making Under Evo Morales: Explaining Ethnopopulist Redistributive Measures In Bolivia, Luis Ferreira

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

The Evo Morales administration has radically transformed the Bolivian state since his election in 2005. As a result of Morales' indigenous identity and overt ethnic tensions in this state, there is a perception that this factor plays a decisive role in Bolivia's policymaking. However, as the 'renegotiation' of the hydrocarbon industry in 2006 demonstrates, ethnopopulism and political survival provide the most comprehensive approach to predicting the policies of the current Bolivian government.

The resistance to liberalization efforts, the success of redistributive measures and the role identity has had in Bolivia explains why this approach to policy-making has allowed Morales to …

Wj Julian: His Life And Career With Emphasis On His Tenure As Director Of Bands At The University Of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1961 To 1993, John Tilford Martin

Dissertations

WJ Julian served with distinction as director of bands at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Tennessee Polytechnic Institute during his forty-five-year teaching career. The purpose of this study is to compile a biographical sketch of WJ Julian prior to his appointment as director of bands at the University of Tennessee in 1961, to examine his impact on the Tennessee band program, and to show how both Julian and the Tennessee band program rose to state and national acclaim in the American band movement.

The primary source of information for this study was extensive interviews with Julian himself. Secondary data …

Unnecessary Evil: An Examination Of Abu Ghraib Torture Photographs As Postcolonial Resistance Rhetoric, Patrick Gerhardt Richey

Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the rhetorical nature of visual artifacts in a postcolonial context. In order to examine the nature of visual artifacts as a form of resistance against static ideologies and prevailing power structures, the author uses both media and cultural artifacts created in response to photographs taken of abused prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib Correctional Facility. The dissertation adds to scholarly knowledge of communication by addressing the intersections of iconographic visual communication and postcolonial resistance rhetoric. The dissertation provides a scholarly review of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, as well as of literature explicating …

An Examination Of Mature Interpersonal Relationships Among International And American College Students, Bona Aidoo

Dissertations

Educating students to relate harmoniously with people from different backgrounds has become an important agenda for student affairs professional because of the increasingly diverse nature of the American society. The purpose of this study was to assess how American and international college students develop mature interpersonal relationship skills. All the participants were from a mid-sized comprehensive institution in the Southern United States. The two main constructs measured were tolerance and quality of relationships. Attempts were also made to identify other predictors that may influence mature interpersonal relationships: gender, age, educational level, and academic achievement as measured by GPA. Both quantitative …

Extracting And Normalizing Entity-Actions From Users' Comments, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the growing popularity of opinion-rich resources on the Web, new opportunities and challenges arise and aid people in actively using such information to understand the opinions of others. Opinion mining process currently focuses on extracting the sentiments of the users on products, social, political and economical issues. In many instances, users not only express their sentiments but also contribute their ideas, requests and suggestions through comments. Such comments are useful for domain experts and are referred to as actionable content. Extracting actionable knowledge from online social media has attracted a growing interest from both academia and the industry. We …

An Overview Of The Schwartz Theory Of Basic Values, Shalom H. Schwartz

Online Readings in Psychology and Culture

This article presents an overview of the Schwartz theory of basic human values. It discusses the nature of values and spells out the features that are common to all values and what distinguishes one value from another. The theory identifies ten basic personal values that are recognized across cultures and explains where they come from. At the heart of the theory is the idea that values form a circular structure that reflects the motivations each value expresses. This circular structure, that captures the conflicts and compatibility among the ten values is apparently culturally universal. The article elucidates the psychological principles …

Maddy The Mathasaurus: An Interactive Math Game That Introduces The Concept And Properties Of Multiplication And Designed With Consideration For Children With Adhd, Mansi Vora

Theses

ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) is one of the most commonly diagnosed behavioral disorder in kids, and is estimated to affect about 8-10% of school-aged children. Research shows that out of these children about 26% particularly have Math learning disabilities. The cognitive ability to understand and solve complex mathematical problems requires high level of concentration over a longer duration of time. This ability is disrupted in certain children due to ADHD. Therefore these students are likely to receive lower grades or even failure in standardized measures. However, if an educational environment is created that is specifically targeted towards reducing the …

The Expressive Cost Of Corporate Immunity, Gregory M. Gilchrist

UC Law Journal

Is it possible to justify imposing criminal liability on corporations? Two basic aspects of criminal law have no application to corporations: Corporations cannot be jailed and they cannot form mental states. Moreover, there is reason to think that much of the deterrent effect generated by corporate criminal liability could be generated more efficiently by civil liability. Still, the demand for criminal prosecution of corporations remains high. This Article seeks to understand why we have corporate criminal liability, and it concludes that expressivism is necessary to justify the practice. Expressivism justifies punishment by reference to the benefits of a statement of …

The Expressive Cost Of Corporate Immunity, Gregory M. Gilchrist

UC Law Journal

Is it possible to justify imposing criminal liability on corporations? Two basic aspects of criminal law have no application to corporations: Corporations cannot be jailed and they cannot form mental states. Moreover, there is reason to think that much of the deterrent effect generated by corporate criminal liability could be generated more efficiently by civil liability. Still, the demand for criminal prosecution of corporations remains high. This Article seeks to understand why we have corporate criminal liability, and it concludes that expressivism is necessary to justify the practice. Expressivism justifies punishment by reference to the benefits of a statement of …

Educational Genocide: Examining The Impact Of National Education Policy On African American Communities, Christopher B. Knaus, Rachelle Rogers-Ard

The Bridge: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Legal & Social Policy

Abstract This paper clarifies the cumulative impact of the current national education policy on African-American children, which ultimately aims to limit local control of urban schools. The authors argue that urban schools in the United States are increasingly required to rely upon temporary teachers who are trained to implement a curriculum focused on standardized testing. The No Child Left Behind Act and the current Duncan administration’s approach to closing (and re-opening) schools combines to further exclude low-income community involvement in local schools. These efforts to control the development, hiring, and evaluation of local educators further expands educational racism that silences …

Legislative And Jurisprudential Developments In The Energy Sector In 2011, Filip Elżanowski

Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies

No abstract provided.

Military Service: Ou Law Grads Answer The Call, Jonella Frank

Sooner Lawyer Archive

No abstract provided.