Digital Commons Network^™

Negotiating Liminal Spaces: Purposeful Pedagogy In Diverse Classrooms, Mildred T. Masimira

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

This paper starts with a personal exploration of my life as an African immigrant in North America. I inhabit a liminal space, and this paper explores negotiating life as a person “inbetween” worlds. Notable theories have been put forward concerning liminality (Anzaldúa, 2002, Ledgister, 2001; hooks, 1984). I discuss the origins of liminality and its various permutations with the aim of clarifying what it means to inhabit this space. Liminality represents a powerful vantage point that accords inhabitants, “not just one set of eyes but half a dozen, each of them corresponding to the places you have been…..” (Said, 1988, …

Scientism, Philosophy And Brain-Based Learning, Gregory M. Nixon

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

Since educators are always looking for ways to improve their practice, and since empirical science is now accepted in our worldview as the final arbiter of truth, it is no surprise they have been lured toward cognitive neuroscience in hopes that discovering how the brain learns will provide a nutshell explanation for student learning in general. I argue that identifying the person with the brain is scientism (not science), that the brain is not the person, and that it is the person who learns. In fact, the brain only responds to the learning of embodied experience within the extra-neural network …

Personal, Cultural, And Educational Implications Of Language Loss/Transformation: A Canadian Context, John W. Friesen

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

In this article, the author provides an engaging account of language loss, transformation, and preservation, and the personal, social, cultural implications of language shift. John’s personal reflections on replacing Low German with English as a child, in tandem with a carefully researched account of various language communities in Canada, alerts us to the unique opportunities and challenges teachers face with respect to the multicultural, multilinguistic character of the contemporary classroom. He punctuates his paper with four thoughtful observations with respect to cultural diversity in schools.

Language As Social Context And Literacy Development Of Students From Diverse Backgrounds, Abir R. El Shaban

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

In this article, the author invokes Cummins’ model for social empowerment of minority students to suggest an alternative way of thinking about the empowerment of school communities. This paper explains Cummins’ theoretical framework and suggests implications that might help teachers better understand social language literacy development in terms of Cummins’ (1986-1994) conceptual framework, which is based on the notion that students who are from a diverse background are in need of school literacy learning that attends to “the goals of instruction, the role of the home language, instructional materials, classroom management and interaction with students, relationships with the community, instructional …

An Analysis Of A Suburban School District's Referral, Assessment, And Identification Processes For Gifted Evaluations, Brandie Tallman Arnold

PCOM Psychology Dissertations

A review of the literature pertaining to giftedness reveals a myriad of differing conceptualizations, as well as varied recommendations for procedures within the referral and identification processes. With such diverse frameworks for understanding components of giftedness, as well as competing views about how giftedness is most accurately identified, a universally agreed upon process for defining and identifying giftedness has yet to be achieved. The purpose of this proposed study will be to examine the referral, identification, and outcomes process of one Pennsylvania public school district’s gifted evaluation process. Specifically, this action-oriented research study sets out to determine (1) the demographic …

Exploration Of Gifted Subtypes Differentiated Across Standardized Cognitive Variables, Bridgette M. Vecchio

PCOM Psychology Dissertations

The field of gifted education has evolved through the 20th century, with legislative efforts by the federal government providing the framework necessary to highlight the needs of gifted learners. Gifted and talented learners are not a homogeneous group, to the contrary, they are varied and unique (Reis & Sullivan, 2010). Ideally, researchers and educators could collaborate to compile a conclusive list of characteristics of gifted learners, which could guide identification, teaching strategies, and curriculum selection for this population (Reis & Sullivan, 2010). Little is known about the cognitive profiles of gifted children. This study will review the utilization of the …

Kindergarten Teachers' Perceptions Of And Expectations For School Readiness: Self-Regulation And Success, Latoya Mccrea

PCOM Psychology Dissertations

Early childhood education plays a very important role in influencing the success of a child later in the learning process. Because of this, scholars in the field of education have consistently sought to predict factors that ensure school readiness. Unfortunately, there is not enough information on factors that ensure school readiness and particularly on how teachers perceive school readiness. This study examines teachers' perceptions regarding the specific readiness skills and self-regulation needed by children entering kindergarten, as well as their familiarity with and their training in early childhood learning programs and executive functions. The study reviews the current literature on …

The Flipside Of Discovery: Planned Pueblo Indian Response To The Approach Of The Coronado Expedition, Richard Flint

New Mexico Historical Review

No abstract provided.

Translating The Fashion Story: Analyzing Fashion Captions In Two Women's Magazines, Ehimwenma O. Vosper-Woghiren

LSU Master's Theses

Fashion magazines are the most accessible source for women to learn the latest about fashion and trends. Publishing company Condé Nast owns many consumer fashion magazines including the American editions of Lucky and Vogue. Even though both magazines are classified under the genre of fashion, these magazines are branded differently. Vogue features editorial styling, which is garments arranged lavishly and creatively for the glossy fashion spreads. However, Lucky magazine contains both editorial and lifestyle styling. To reinforce the styled image, fashion magazines place captions in these editorials. Captions transform these garments into written language. Since each magazine uses different types …

A Multifarious Approach To Understanding Rhetorical Fragmentation In Vladimir Nabokov’S Lolita, William S. Tucker

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Keeping It Real: Intensive Instruction And The Future Of Russian Language And Culture In U.S. Universities, Thomas J. Garza

Russian Language Journal

Since the global economic downturn in 2008, few programs in languages other than English in the U.S. have managed to escape the chilling effect of shrinking budgets on academic institutions. With fewer financial resources available to support the educational missions of language departments, many programs nationally have either devolved into smaller, leaner academic units at best, or at worst, have been cancelled entirely. These dire economic times, coupled with a new incarnation of culture wars aimed at the very heart of the relevance and value of a liberal arts education, have compelled some university administrators and program directors to seek …

Bankruptcy Step Zero, Douglas G. Baird, Anthony Casey

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Is The Motherist Approach More Helpful In Obtaining Women's Rights Than A Feminist Approach? A Comparative Study Of Lebanon And Liberia, Crystal Marie Whetstone

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The theory that women gain rights during the social upheaval of war has not held universally. While the debate has traditionally centered over women's participation in fighting and entry into the workforce this paper explores the topic from the form of mobilization, motherist or feminist, that women's organizing takes during war through the use of a longitudinal, comparative study of Lebanon and Liberia. Lebanese women's organizations overwhelmingly employed motherist mobilization and tackled practical gender interests that made no attempt to end women's subordination. In contrast, during the Liberian civil war women's groups were more apt to focus on strategic gender …

A Latent Dirichlet Allocation/N-Gram Composite Language Model, Raymond Daniel Kulhanek

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

I present a composite language model in which an n-gram language model is integrated with the Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic clustering model. I also describe a parallel architecture that allows this model to be trained over large corpora and present experimental results that show how the composite model compares to a standard n-gram model over corpora of varying size.

A Large Scale Distributed Syntactic, Semantic And Lexical Language Model For Machine Translation, Ming Tan

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The n-gram model is the most widely used language model (LM) in statistical machine translation system, due to its simplicity and scalability. However, it only encodes the local lexical relation between adjacent words and clearly ignores the rich syntactic and semantic structures of the natural languages. Attempting to increase the order of an n-gram to describe longer range dependencies in natural language immediately runs into the curse of dimensionality. Although previous researches tried to increase the order of n-gram on a large corpus, they did not see obvious improvement beyond 6-gram. Meanwhile, other LMs, such as syntactic language models and …

Oral Communication Needs Of New Korean Students In A Us Busincess Communication Classroom, Jungyin (Janice) Kim

Global Business Languages

In order for MBA programs in the US to prepare Korean students for international business, an international and interactive learning environment is required. This article examines the role of the interactive lecturing style in a US MBA program in influencing the oral classroom participation of five Korean students in the program. Data for this study come from formal and informal interviews and class observations over the course of one semester. Participants were three male and two female students, enrolled in one core course: business communication. The study shows that several factors informed the Korean students’ oral participation in the classroom. …

Critical Literacy And Intercultural Awareness Through The Reading Comprehension Strategy Of Questioning In Business Language Education, Per Urlaub

Global Business Languages

This article is situated at the nexus between critical thinking, literacy, and intercultural awareness, and its goal is to extend the curricular and methodological repertoire of business language programs and instructors. To that end, the article introduces an instructional technique for business language classes that will elevate the learners’ level of criticality toward second language texts. The approach is based on the reading comprehension strategy of self-generating questions. Instead of responding to questions raised by the instructor or the textbook, students self-generate questions vis-à-vis the assigned texts. After providing a working definition of critical literacy and an outline of previous …

Creating Accessible Spaces For Esl Students Online, Fernando Sanchez

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Graduate Student Publications

This essay responds to the 2012 CCCC featured session, “Access—A Happening,” in which Blackmon et al. focused on “removing barriers and confusing the discipline’s boundaries, with a focus on the bodies and minds that have been excluded.” As a presenter, Paul Kei Matsuda called on instructors and WPAs to create access for ESL students into such spaces. WPAs have long sought out opportunities to allow students to have more of a voice when it comes to policy; in this way, this study examines whether WPA documents—specifically information and support resources available on writing center websites—meet the needs of ESL students. …

An Owl Abroad: A Descriptive Study Of Owl Use In The Efl Context, Joshua Paiz

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Graduate Student Presentations

The project reported on in this presentation at the 2013 East Central Writing Centers Association conference will provide some preliminary findings from a research survey carried out by Purdue OWL staff regarding attitudes towards OWLs in the EFL context. It will conclude with tentative recommendations, as well as by discussing the next steps required for to complete data analysis.

Owls Across Borders: An Exploratory Study On The Place Of Online Writing Labs In The Efl Context, Joshua Paiz

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Graduate Student Presentations

The study reported on in this presentation at the 2013 Symposium on Second Language Writing (SSLW) examined the content creation best practices of four content development teams working on the Purdue OWL. Utilizing focus group methods the study sought to examine what strategies developers utilized to overcome the challenges faced while developing L2 instructional content for a global audience. By examining the various drafts of resources before they finally went live on the Purdue OWL, this study investigated the linguistic and rhetorical choices that developers made in an attempt to create content that would be of maximal user to L2 …

Modes Of Dislocation: Jewishness And Deafness In Elizabeth Bowen, Maren Linett

Department of English Faculty Publications

Late in her life, Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) wondered why critics did not focus more on place in her writing: “Am I not manifestly a writer for whom places loom large?” (Pictures and Conversations 34). Bowen’s powerful concern with location was animated by the instability of her personal life and the life of her century. She felt dislocated by her father’s mental illness and his voluntary incarceration; by her flight to England with her mother at the age of seven; by their peripatetic life in multiple houses and towns; and most of all, by her …

Introduction, Allen G. Wood

Global Business Languages

No abstract provided.

Business Language Studies And Study Abroad In “A Changed World”, Deb S. Reisinger

Global Business Languages

Postsecondary institutions increasingly focus their efforts on internationalization, but foreign language faculty and language and literature departments are conspicuously absent from the great majority of these discussions (Knight 2006, Gerndt 2012). The emerging field of Business Language Studies (Doyle 2012) offers an important path to participating in these decisions and thus to helping shape the discussions about developing our students’ global and intercultural competencies. The purpose of this article is twofold. On the one hand, we will show how BLS aligns with recent pedagogical trends put forth by national associations (MLA, ACTFL, AAUC), underscoring the importance of showcasing its work …

Experimental Pedagogy In A Course On International Business In French, Marie-Pascale Pieretti

Global Business Languages

This article showcases “International Business in French,” a course developed at Drew University, with a special focus on ways in which students use their experience to construct knowledge of the world of business and economics in a variety of Francophone contexts. To illustrate the value experiential pedagogy can add to a business language course, it examines in particular the ways in which a trip to Quebec, the study abroad component embedded in the course, reinforces, challenges, and reveals ambiguities concerning the knowledge acquired in class prior to the trip. In conclusion, it outlines and discusses the challenges such a pedagogy …

Attaining Sustainable Growth Of A Business Chinese Program Through Utilization-Focused Evaluation, Haidan Wang

Global Business Languages

This article presents a research project of utilization-focused evaluation of the Business Chinese Program at the University of Hawai‘i for the purposes of ensuring the program’s quality, demonstrating the program’s values to its stakeholders, and providing the reflections associated with it. This article begins with a review of the program, and then details the evaluation processes, featuring four major phases: planning, data-collecting, analysis, and reporting. The discussion of the results of this evaluation is intended to provide a feasible model of business language program evaluation with tangible evidence of both the merits of the program and its accountability to its …

Contributors

Global Business Languages

No abstract provided.

Blindness And Intimacy In Early Twentieth-Century Literature, Maren Linett

Department of English Faculty Publications

This essay traces an association between blindness and intimacy in J.M. Synge’s The Well of the Saints, Florence Barclay’s The Rosary, and D.H. Lawrence’s “The Blind Man,” suggesting that the association participates in an early twentieth-century devaluation of vision and stems from beliefs about knowledge and communication.

Insight Into Human Brain Evolution Through Phylogenetic Analysis And Comparative Genomics, Amy Marie Boddy

Wayne State University Dissertations

As a species, humans are often considered to be unique among mammals, with respect to their large brain size and enhanced cognitive abilities. Humans are the most encephalized mammals, with a brain that is six times larger than expected relative to body mass. Presumably, it is this high degree of encephalization that underlies our advanced cognitive abilities, including the skills needed for complex language and culture. Understanding how large brains evolved can shed light on what makes the human brain unique and introduce possible mechanism for human specific neurodegenerative diseases. This study takes a both a phenotypic and molecular approach …

Where Are All The Gifted Black Girls? Giving High School Girls Voice Via Qualitative Research Approach And Black Feminist Theory, Mary L. Montie

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

WHERE ARE ALL THE GIFTED BLACK GIRLS?

GIVING HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS VOICE VIA QUALITATIVE RESEARCH APPROACH AND BLACK FEMINIST THEORY

by

MARY L. MONTIE

May 2013

Advisor: Dr. Karen L. Tonso

Major: Educational Evaluation and Research

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Gifted programs in the United States under-represent African American (Black) children (Phi Delta Kappan, 1992). In 1993, African-American students were under-represented by 50% in gifted education, and 60% in 1998 (Grantham & Ford, 2003). Further, some speculate that gifted education programs are the most segregated educational programs in the nation (Ford, 1995). This proves especially true for Black gifted …

Without Content: Rhetoric, American Anarchism, And The End(S) Of Radical Politics, Michael John Ristich

Wayne State University Dissertations

My study suggests there is a homology between the Platonic critique of rhetoric and the critique of anarchism made by both Marxism and liberalism. I investigate this problematic by taking up a genealogical examination of anarchism in America that begins with America's founding and concludes with a discussion of the resurgence of populist/anti-Statist rhetoric(s) in the early twenty-first century. In doing so, I argue that anarchism is a politics "without content;" it is a rhetorical politics that challenges the (re)turns to metaphysics and Marxism in the wake of poststructuralist and postmodern thought. Specifically, in light of the contemporary Tea Party …