Digital Commons Network^™

Visual Analysis Of E-Textbooks For Senior High School In Indonesia, Ouda Ena

Dissertations

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the visual images used as illustrations in the English electronic textbooks for grades ten, eleven, and twelve in Indonesia. Qualitative visual content analysis was employed as the methodology of the research. The analysis focused on whether these e-textbooks accommodated the religious, gender, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity of the students. These four aspects of cultural diversity that influenced students learning in Indonesian contexts were crucial to examine because the students were so diverse as results of the geographical conditions and historical background of Indonesia. Eight English e-textbooks were examined. First, the result showed …

Acculturative Stress And Coping Strategies Used By Asian Indians Living In The United States: A Quantitative And Qualitative Inquiry, Ritu V. Thaker

Dissertations

The present research addressed acculturative stress experiences and coping strategies used by Asian Indians residing in the United States. The organizing research question was "What are the acculturative stress experiences and coping strategies used by first generation Asian Indians living in the United States?" The research question was explored through fourteen hypotheses.

A mixed method approach was employed. For the first phase, 54 first-generation Asian Indians were recruited from four sites using a purposive convenience sampling method, the SAFE-R standardized questionnaire was used to measure acculturative stress, the COPE scale to measure coping strategies, and a culturally grounded Socio-Demographic Information …

Thinking Through Teacher Talk: Increasing Target Language Use In The Beginning Russian Classroom, William J. Comer

Russian Language Journal

In July 2012, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) adopted a position statement calling for instructors and learners to use the target language (TL) for 90% plus of instructional time. ACTFL’s recommendation applies to all levels of instruction (K-16) and makes no distinctions for the degree of difference of the TL from the learners’ first language (L1). Implementing this recommendation means that no more than five minutes of a 50-minute class hour should take place in the L1 of the learners, whether that class is the first day of high school Russian or a college class …

Introduction

Russian Language Journal

On behalf of the editorial team of the Russian Language Journal, it is with great pleasure that we present Volume 63. The current issue of RLJ sees a number of changes to the editorial team as well as an expansion of the kinds of materials we publish; we hope that these changes serve both the profession and our readers. Starting with this issue, we will include review articles, as well as a section of shorter book reviews. Michael Gorham, our Associate Editor, leads this effort for the RLJ. As well, there are two new appointments to the Editorial Team: Dr. …

A Cognitive Grammar Approach To Teaching The Russian Case System, Carlee Arnett, Diana Lysinger

Russian Language Journal

This study examines modern Russian cases within a Cognitive Grammar framework. Grammatical case, as one of the fundamental language categories, has always interested linguistic researchers. In languages that possess case systems, virtually no utterance is possible without taking into account grammatical case. This grammatical category is very complex and its acquisition is an enormously arduous task for learners whose native language does not possess a case system or a case system that is not as pronounced as it is in the target language. According to Janda (2002), “the meanings of grammatical cases are probably the biggest obstacle faced by students …

Местоименные Игры: Конструкции «Не Ты Ли» И «Не Я Ли» В Русском Языке, Елена Маркасова, Павел Клюшин

Russian Language Journal

Общеизвестно, что местоименные игры в коммуникации способны как объединять, так и разъединять адресата и адресанта1. Элементарными примерами такого воздействия в повседневном общении являются внезапные переходы от официального «Вы» к фамильярному «ты», от дружеского «ты» к отстраненно- официальному «Вы», или от «ты» дружеского к «ты» фамильярному. Местоимения часто позволяют понять, насколько характерны (или не характерны) для коммуникантов эмпатия, склонность к манипуляциям или агрессивность.

The Writing Of Students With Asperger's Syndrome, Christine Zrimsek

Master's Theses and Capstones

The writing of 5 adolescent boys with Asperger's syndrome between the ages of 13 - 18 was examined relative to age and gender-matched typically-developing children. The investigator collected writing samples across three genres: narrative, expository, and persuasive. The samples were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively using a variety of measures. Consistent with the investigator's expectations, results indicated that, relative to controls, students with Asperger's syndrome performed significantly poorer on higher-order aspects of writing: coherence, cohesion, and perspective-taking while not significantly different on spelling, a lower-order aspect. An unpredicted finding was that the children with Asperger's syndrome made significantly more grammatical …

John Paul Ii On The Development Of Doctrine, Christopher Kaczor

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Intergenerational Dynamics And Political Outcomes, Joshua J. Poulette

Theses and Dissertations--Public Policy and Administration

This dissertation explores the relationship between intergenerational dynamics and politics outcomes in several distinct contexts. It is motivated by the remarkable demographic shifts exhibited by people in advanced countries over the past several decades. Individuals on average have longer lives and fewer children than ever before. Combining these shifts with the large intergenerational public policies that exist in many such states (education, old-age social welfare, healthcare) provokes several distinct yet related research questions addressed in the chapters below. First, do political traits matter for fertility behavior? If so, could the presence of differential fertility behavior across political groups lead to …

Neiu Academic Catalog, 2013-2014, "Community, Empowerement Through Learning, Access To Opportunity, Excellent, Diversity, Integrity", Northeastern Illinois University

Course Catalogs

No abstract provided.

In Memorian: Edward A. Mearns, Jr., Melvyn R. Durchslag

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

Saving Prince Peach: A Study Of “Gaymers” And Digital Lgbt/Gaming Rhetorics, M. William Macknight

Open Access Dissertations

This study looks at the tensions surrounding the inclusion and increasing presence of LGBT performances within video games, their surrounding industry and culture, and their related internetworked cyberspaces – an assemblage referred to in this research as the “game-sphere.” By analyzing the rhetorical activity performed within a specific LGBT game cyberspace (the Reddit subforum r/gaymers), this study offers insight into gaming and LGBT culture by answering the following research question: What rhetorical action is performed by LGBT video game players within r/gaymers? Data were collected over a period of two weeks, wherein screen-captures were taken and saved twice a …

Responding To Ethnic And Religious Conflict In The New Arab Order: The Promise And Limits Of Rights, Omar M. Dajani

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

Intercommunal conflict has marred the political transitions unfolding in a number of states in the Middle East, raising questions about the status and protection of ethnic and religious minorities in the region's evolving political order. In view of the transnationalc haracter and regional scale of the problem, this Article considers the efficacy of one potential regional response-the development of an Arab convention on minority rights. The Article begins by describing three types of "minority problems" that have been sources of conflict in the Middle East: (1) religious minorities and Islamist majoritarianism; (2) nationalist minorities and territorial disputes, and (3) politically …

Barriers To Group Therapy For Latino College Students In The United States, Michelle C. Stoyell

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

While group therapy appears to be gaining popularity at University Counseling Centers, scant research has been done on Latino students' group therapy participation. The present study examined the barriers that Latino college students face in considering whether to join group therapy. Participants (N=81) completed three measures. The first measure was a demographic questionnaire. The second measure was a modified version of the Barriers Scale, originally developed by Harris (2012), a 44-item survey in which participants were assessed in terms of: their willingness to consider group therapy, group therapy modality preferences, expectations of group therapy, expectations of group members, expectations of …

Mindfulness-Based Interventions And Processes Of Change: A Conceptual Model For Clinicians, Shalagh A. Frantz

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Mindfulness-based interventions are receiving a great deal of attention from clinicians and researchers and research in this field is increasing dramatically in the past decade. Much of this research is consistent with positive psychotherapeutic outcomes for a wide range of presenting clinical issues. As with any seemingly successful psychotherapeutic treatment, it can be helpful to understand the processes of change underlying mindfulness-based interventions that are responsible for observed positive outcomes. In doing so, the effective components of an intervention can be refined and perfected, while components deemed unneeded can be appropriately discarded. This dissertation critically reviews the literature's current understanding …

Cooperative Interactive Distributed Guidance On Mobile Devices, Gregory Burnett

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Mobiles device are quickly becoming an indispensable part of our society. Equipped with numerous communication capabilities, they are increasingly being examined as potential tools for civilian and military usage to aide in distributed remote collaboration for dynamic decision making and physical task completion. With an ever growing mobile workforce, the need for remote assistance in aiding field workers who are confronted with situations outside their expertise certainly increases. Enhanced capabilities in using mobile devices could significantly improve numerous components of a task's completion (i.e. accuracy, timing, etc.). This dissertation considers the design of mobile implementation of technology and communication capabilities …

Natural Language Document And Event Association Using Stochastic Petri Net Modeling, Michael Thomas Mills

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to design and implement a new methodology that captures the natural language understanding of events from English natural language text and model it using Stochastic Petri Nets. To establish a baseline of recent natural language processing (NLP) and understanding (NLU) research, two surveys are presented. One is a general survey in NLP and NLU methodologies for processing multi-documents. It summarizes and presents methodologies in terms of their features, capabilities, and maturity. The second survey focuses on graph-based methods for NL text processing and understanding and analyzes them in terms of their functional descriptions, capabilities …

Semsos : An Architecture For Query, Insertion, And Discovery For Semantic Sensor Networks, Joshua Kenneth Pschorr

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

With sensors, storage, and bandwidth becoming ever cheaper, there has been a drive recently to make sensor data accessible on the Web. However, because of the vast number of sensors collecting data about our environment, finding relevant sensors on the Web and then interpreting their observations is a non-trivial challenge. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) defines a web service specification known as the Sensor Observation Service (SOS) that is designed to standardize the way sensors and sensor data are discovered and accessed on the Web. Though this standard goes a long way in providing interoperability between sensor data producers and …

Adaptive Semantic Annotation Of Entity And Concept Mentions In Text, Pablo N. Mendes

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The recent years have seen an increase in interest for knowledge repositories that are useful across applications, in contrast to the creation of ad hoc or application-specific databases.

These knowledge repositories figure as a central provider of unambiguous identifiers and semantic relationships between entities. As such, these shared entity descriptions serve as a common vocabulary to exchange and organize information in different formats and for different purposes. Therefore, there has been remarkable interest in systems that are able to automatically tag textual documents with identifiers from shared knowledge repositories so that the content in those documents is described in a …

Expressing Future Time In Spoken Conversational English: A Corpus-Based Analysis Of The Sitcom Friends, Brandon Harris

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Far from being simply will, a survey of English grammar textbooks revealed that a multitude of expressions exists in the English language to express the future time. These expressions include, but are not limited to, will, be going to, the simple present tense, modals, the future perfect tense, and the present progressive tense. With so many choices and with a lack of direct relationship between tense and time, a language learner may certainly have difficulties in choosing which expression to use when attempting to produce a future utterance. A corpus-based approach to analyzing real language has been demonstrated to be …

Parental Beliefs And Attitudes On Enrollment In A Dual Language Program At An Elementary School, Leah Delorenzo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the 2010-2011 school year, there were almost a quarter of a million English language learners (ELLs) enrolled in Florida public schools (Florida Department of Education, 2011), most of whom were placed in mainstream schools with segregated language remediation. Dual language education (DLE) programs offer developmental opportunities in two languages that mainstream schools cannot. The purpose of this research was to identify parental attitudes toward immersion programs and define the reasons that parents enroll their children in DLEs. Sixty participants completed a questionnaire sent home from their student's DLE. The study data included biographical information, statements depicting the reasons for …

The Effect Of Input Modality On Pronunciation Accuracy Of English Language Learners, Marcella A. Farina Phd

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The issues relative to foreign accent continue to puzzle second language researchers, educators, and learners today. Although once thought to be at the root, maturational constraints have fallen short of definitively accounting for the myriad levels and rates of phonological attainment (Bialystok & Miller, 1999, p. 128). This study, a Posttest-only Control Group Design, examined how the pronunciation accuracy of adult, English language learners, as demonstrated by utterance length, was related to two input stimuli: auditory-only input and auditoryorthographic input. Utterance length and input modality were further examined with the added variables of native language, specifically Arabic and Spanish, and …

Dangerous Feminine Sexuality: Biblical Metaphors And Sexual Violence Against Women, Lisa M. Ewing

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

This analysis responds to an ongoing debate between feminist and traditional readings of sexually violent (SV) metaphors in the prophetic texts of Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and the New Testament book of Revelation. Whereas feminist scholars have often argued that such metaphors are built upon the exploitation of women's sexuality, traditionalist scholars have insisted that the metaphors are merely literary devices that should only be read within their historical and literary contexts. Taking a moderate position, this analysis uses the cognitive metaphor theory to explain that the SV metaphors depend on cognitive associations of dangerous feminine sexuality to relate to …

The Effects Of Text And Hybrid Graphic-Text Formats On Pilot Performance Using Flight Deck Data Communication Displays, Ricardo Daniel Muñoz Da Costa

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Air Traffic has shown a steady increase since the institution of commercial aviation in the first quarter of the last century, and the use of the United States National Airspace System (NAS) is expected to increase by 45 percent more passengers by the year 2015 (Smith, 2004). The increasing demands of the NAS require preventive measures in order to preserve the safety of operations. NextGen is a transformative program expected to enhance the safety and effectiveness of NAS operations. One of the ways that it will achieve these goals is by improving air-ground communications.

In the current system, communications between …

A Semantic Situation Awareness Framework For Indoor Cyber-Physical Systems, Pratikkumar Desai

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Recently, the domain of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) has emerged as a successor to the traditional embedded systems and the wireless sensor networks. The relatively new cyber-physical domain offers tight integration of control, communication and computation components to develop advanced web based application in various heterogeneous domains such as health care, disaster management, automation and environment monitoring. The applications of indoor CPSs include remote patient monitoring, smart home, etc. with focus on situation awareness via event identification from context information. The principal challenges associated with the development of situation awareness applications include uncertainty in contextual data, incomplete domain knowledge, interoperability between …

Stability Of A Fuzzy Logic Based Piecewise Linear Hybrid System, Aaron W. Seyfried

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Complex cyber-physical systems are difficult to model and control. However, humans are capable of accomplishing these tasks by constantly adapting and redefining the rules to control these complex systems. Fuzzy logic provides a means of encoding human inference into a control methodology. However, the fuzzy logic controllers are nonlinear and their stability is difficult to verify. Therefore, the widespread usefulness of fuzzy logic controllers is limited. It has been proven that fuzzy logic controllers can be implemented as piecewise linear switched controllers. It has also been shown that the piecewise linear system can be implemented as a hybrid system. Piecewise …

Spatialized Audio And Landmarks In Team Navigation, Andrew Hampton

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Using data collected from a prior study that established the benefit of spatialized audio on team navigation, the current paper examines the underlying mechanisms by which that benefit arose. With linguistic measures extracted from trial transcripts, I study emergent patterns of conversation for four dyads as they attempt to rendezvous in an immersive virtual environment. Spatialized audio is compared to landmarks, traditionally viewed as integral to navigation tasks, on the basis of coordination and strategy. Analyses reveal that spatialized audio creates a decreased need to speak overall. Paired with the performance advantage, this creates a more linguistically efficient task structure. …

Empirical Validation Of Reading Proficiency Guidelines, Troy L. Cox, Ray Clifford

Faculty Publications

The validation of ability scales describing multidimensional skills is always challenging, but not impossible. This study applies a multistage, criterion‐referenced approach that uses a framework of aligned texts and reading tasks to explore the validity of the ACTFL and related reading proficiency guidelines. Rasch measurement and statistical analyses of data generated in three separate language studies confirm a significant difference in reading difficulty between the proficiency levels tested.

Factors Influencing Social, Cultural, And Academic Transitions Of Chinese International Esl Students In U.S. Higher Education, Akiko Ota

Dissertations and Theses

The U.S. is the leading nation for international students to pursue higher education; the majority of whom are from countries with significant differences in culture and language from American students. As such, many international students start higher education in ESL support programs. While on the surface international students supposedly add cultural and linguistic diversity to American higher education by contributing to the internationalization of campuses, international students' transition into U.S. life and academe is often fraught with challenges including culture shock, adjusting to the new environment and society, adjustment to norms of academic performance, acquisition of academic and language skills, …

From Preparation To Practice: An Applied Sports Broadcasting Course, Marney Rae Mathiasen

Communication

This project establishes the immense popularity of sports and explores the connection between sports and society, while establishing past weaknesses of broadcast education. It provides evidence of previous philosophical differences that existed between journalism educators and journalists, and explains the benefits of an applied learning course that emphasizes strong writing skills. This project provides details on sixteen weeks of course content, addresses both student and course assessment, and summarizes the overall strengths and weaknesses of the proposed course.