Digital Commons Network^™

Land Back And Justice: Examining Indigenous Land And Water Rights In The United States, Matthew Deveaux

Honors Program Theses

This paper evaluates U.S. policies regarding Indigenous land and water rights in the context of changing global climate conditions and a societal shift towards reparative justice models. Theories from the literature on Indigenous sovereignty and environmental protection at large, as well as the literature on reparative justice and post-colonial theory, are combined with case studies of environmental personhood in Ecuador and New Zealand to examine how a policy model could be created for the U.S. that strengthens Indigenous rights. It is argued that this colonial capitalist process has resulted in oppressive policies that harm Indigenous populations and negatively impact the …

Exploring The Implementation Of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy To Support Black Male Middle School Students’ Success In Math, Shwanda Ifeoma Onwuachi-Robinson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractTeachers’ understanding of the socioeconomic background may result in improved skills at addressing the barriers to the academic achievement for middle school Black male students. However, there is a lack of understanding regarding teachers’ perceptions of barriers and culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) efficacy when educating Black students in the literature. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to gain an understanding of how teachers are implementing CRP to support the academic achievement of middle school Black male students in math. Ladson-Billings’ culturally relevant pedagogy was used as the theoretical framework for this study. This study included research questions regarding …

Teachers' Perspectives Of Implementing Language Modeling In Pre-Kindergarten Classrooms, Gena R. Puckett

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Teachers’ language modeling skills are important for children’s language development and school readiness. However, 34% of pre-kindergarten (pre-K) classrooms score in the low range on the language modeling dimension of the CLassroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) observation tool within the instructional support domain in a southern state. For this basic qualitative study, the purpose and research questions explored pre-K teachers’ perspectives on the challenges of implementing language modeling and the type of support they need to improve language modeling skills in a southern state. The conceptual framework that guided the study was Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, specifically the concepts of the …

Editorial, Isabel Pefianco Martin

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Preface, Maria Luz Elena Nabong Canilao, Robin Atilano De Los Reyes

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Community Spotlight, Angela Hood

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

No abstract provided.

Letter From The Editors, Raven L. Jones, Tanya Upthegrove Gregory, Alexandra M. Sánchez

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

No abstract provided.

Strategic Plan (2023-2028), California State University, San Bernardino

CSUSB Strategic Plans

No abstract provided.

Rapid Prediction Of Verbs Based On Pronoun Interpretation Is Modulated By Individual Differences In Pronoun Processing, Jeffrey Jack Green

Faculty Publications

How quickly can pronoun interpretation affect the prediction of a following verb? Readers were presented with implicit causality contexts in which a specific pronoun and following verb were predictable. N400 and reaction time results indicated that predictable verbs were facilitated relative to unpredictable verbs when following predicted pronouns, suggesting that verbal predictions were rapidly updated based on pronoun interpretation. There was also some evidence for rapid updating of verb predictions after unexpected pronouns, but this was modulated by individual differences. Some readers appear to have placed higher weight on top–down implicit causality predictions to interpret unexpected pronouns, and others on …

Surzhyk: Attitudes & Usage Among Ukrainian People, Kateryna Kravchenko, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

What is Surzhyk?

• refers to a range of macaronic (mixed) sociolects of Ukrainian and Russian languages
• originally meant mixing of two different types of flour (wheat and rye), which is considered a lower grade flour
• there is no unifying set of characteristics
• the term is used for norm-breaking, non-obedience to or non-awareness of the rules of the Ukrainian and Russian standard languages
• it is not Russian-accented Ukrainian

Solving The Cherry-Picking Problem In Legislative History Use – A Corpus-Based Approach For Empirical Intentionalist Legal Interpretation Analysis, Brett James Hashimoto, James Heilpern

Faculty Publications

The use of legislative histories under intentionalist/purposivist theories of statutory interpretation is frequently criticized because it can be easily biased (see, e.g., Scheppele, 2012). To date, corpus-based statutory interpretation has relied almost exclusively on textualist theory of legal interpretation. However, corpus linguistic methods are not necessarily bound to any one theory (e.g., Biber & Reppen, 2015). The present study analyses two legislative histories as corpora and compares them against a general corpus of English to determine if interpretative theory makes a meaningful difference in two example cases (Costello v. United States, 2012; Taniguchi v. Kan Saipan Pacific, 2012). Senses of …

Promoting Intergenerational Harmony At The Dedham Seventh-Day Adventist Church Of The Southern New England Conference, Yves Gerald Francis

Doctor of Ministry Projects

Problem

This field research study explored the prevalence of lack of harmony among first and second-generation Dedham Seventh-day Adventist Church members. Consequently, families may be divided, and hard feelings and lost souls. Thus, a fundamental problem is an intergenerational and cultural lack of understanding.

Method

The research was a qualitative phenomenological study based on small groups and their activities. The Dedham Seventh-day Adventist Church provided a sample of 30 members, who were split into small groups of six each. For two weeks, the researcher and church leaders held small-group activities in the fellowship hall to impart the value of cooperation …

A Leadership Strategy To Identify And Reverse The Effects Of Consumerism On The Commitment To The Mission And Management Of The Village Seventh-Day Adventist Church Members, Ronald Paul Kelly Jr.

Doctor of Ministry Projects

Problem

Low levels of commitment have detrimentally affected many aspects of the Village Church's health and vitality. The present study was developed to see to what degree the leaders of the Village Church had imbibed consumer constructs of identity and ministry and to what degree those constructs could be changed when presented with a biblical construct of identity and ministry.

Method

A week of spiritual emphasis entitled "Built on the Rock" examined the principles of the church growth movement as manifest in the megachurch movement. By contrast, the scriptural paradigm of the church as a family was presented as a …

A Strategy To Improve Contextualization At Hope Channel International, Vyacheslav Demyan

Doctor of Ministry Projects

Problem

Hope Channel International was created by the Seventh-day Adventist Church with the mission “to offer God’s good news for a better life today and for eternity through the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s wholistic understanding of the Bible” (General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists 2019–2020, 459). However, as many other evangelical media ministries in North America who are mainly “preaching to the choir,” creating their own “gospel ghettos” (Woods 2013, 22), Hope Channel’s audience mainly are the members of the Adventist Church. This compromises the scope of the existence of Hope Channel as a media brand. From the structural perspective, Hope Channel …

Qualifying Quantifiers: A Usage-Based, Diachronic Analysis Of Quantifier Constructions, Danielle Miles Angier

Master's Theses

Adnominal quantifiers have been a source of contention in existing research, owing to their unique distributional patterns that do not match those of adjectives or determiners. Traditional accounts have typically focused on one aspect of quantifier behavior without looking at the group as a whole, and existing theories are disparate and inconsistent. This study tackles the problem of quantifier variation from a diachronic, usage-based, constructionist perspective. The goal of this paper is to identify patterns of change that can explain the variation exhibited by quantifiers today, focused on whether they are best classified as adjectives, determiners, or both; why every …

Sustainable Roots: The Environmental Genealogies Of Chicanas And Latinas, Marlene Andrade

Master's Theses

Ingenuity and tending to the land are anything but contemporary to Communities of Color (COC). Even when our communities become targets of environmental racism and experience the brunt of institution-based degradation, COC resist in a multitude of ways. While there is a plethora of documented social movements led by the Chicanx community for civil, educational, and labor rights, there is a paucity of Chicanx presence in environmental discourse. Thus, my scholar-activist commitments are to highlight Chicana/Latina herstories, epistemologies, and praxes that debunk the narrow white-heteropatriarchal male narrative in mainstream environmentalism. This dominant narrative fails to: (a) address the historical and …

Thinking Styles, Conspiracist Belief, And The Mediating Role Of The Dunning-Kruger Effect In Modeling Belief Change, Lucas C. Cusano

Master's Theses

Why can a person believe something for which there is no evidence and yet also fail to believe something for which there is overwhelming evidence? This study develops a structural model of belief change using the latent constructs of thinking styles and conspiracist belief while accounting for the Dunning-Kruger effect (i.e., overconfidence in one’s knowledge the less one knows about a topic) as a mediator. A combined two-hundred and twenty-six participants from both Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and the introductory psychology SONA subject pool were given two knowledge measures on topics of genetic modification and vaccination before and after reading refutational …

Automatic Presentation Slide Generation Using Llms, Tanya Gupta

Master's Theses

Presentation slides are widely used for conveying information in academic and professional contexts. However, manual slide creation can be time-consuming. Our research focuses on automated slide generation, specifically for scientific research papers. Automating the creation of presentation slides for scientific documents is a rather novel task and hence, there’s limited training data available and there also exists the token constraints of language models like BERT, with a maximum sequence length of 512 tokens. In this study, we fine-tune large language models, including Longformer-Encoder-Decoder (supporting sequences up to 16,834 tokens) and BIGBIRD-Pegasus (supporting sequences up to 4,096 tokens). We tackle this …

Exploring An Indian K-12 School’S Experience Of Culturally Adapting Multiple Intelligences Theory, Jessica Richmond

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Many government-run K-12 schools in India struggle to serve their diverse student bodies in a culturally responsive manner that draws from the nation's rich cultural heritage. Academic programs based on Gardner’s multiple intelligences (MI) theory have been utilized internationally to enhance learning, but the implementation has not been explored in a school curriculum based on Indian culture. The purpose of this qualitative case study, which was grounded in MI and Ladson-Billing’s culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), was to explore the methods and experiences of an Indian K-12 school that culturally adapted MI theory to include yogic principles of the Indian culture. …

A Study On Intercultural Communicative Competence Of College Students In Online Learning Contexts, Manli Li, Yan Gu, Weitong Liu

Journal of Educational Technology Development and Exchange (JETDE)

Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) is a crucial issue for the internationalization of higher education. In recent years, intercultural online learning has gradually become a new form of internationalization in higher education, which presents both challenges and opportunities for enhancing students' ICC. This study constructs an analytical framework for ICC within the context of online learning, drawing from existing research on ICC and classroom environment theory. Leveraging the "Global Integrated Classroom Learning Survey" by Tsinghua University's Global Integrated Classroom Teaching Research Group, 141 valid samples were collected and analyzed through descriptive statistics and regression analysis. Two main conclusions were drawn: (1) …

A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Covid-19 From The New York Times And China Daily, Yulin Mai, Andrew Jocuns

Manusya, Journal of Humanities

A multimodal critical discourse analysis of The New York Times and China Daily’s news reports of Covid-19 was conducted to identify the ideologies in Covid-19 news reports. The Covid-19 pandemic was divided into three phases: China’s anti-pandemic phase, first global outbreak, and second global outbreak. The nyt and cd’s Covid-19 news reports not only conveyed facts but also served different ideologies which shifted over each phase. Both the nyt and cd news media employed lexical devices, images, and metaphors to convey different ideologies, shaping people’s perceptions of the pandemic and government measures to control it. The nyt’s Covid-19 reporting …

Classifying “Lao” Ethnic Languages Spoken In Central Thailand Using Tonal Criteria : A Case Study Of “Chachoengsao Lao”, Warunsiri Pornpottanamas

Manusya, Journal of Humanities

In the linguistic literature on the languages of ethnic Lao in Thailand, labels such as “Lao” or “Lao Wiang” are often used to identify local dialects as Lao varieties. This study examines patterns of tonal splits and mergers in the linguistic varieties spoken by the so-called “Lao” ethnic groups in Chachoengsao Province, Thailand, to re-identify and reclassify the so called “Lao” languages collected from 124 participants at 50 locations. This study used the tone box concept (Gedney 1972) as a basic tool to analyse tonal patterns. The results indicate that the “Lao” ethnic languages of Chachoengsao can be classified into …

Ignorance And Cultural Diversity: The Ethical Obligations Of The Behavior Analyst, Alejandro Arango

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

Applied behavior analysis (ABA) has featured an increasing concern for understanding and considering the cultural diversity of the populations behavior analysts serve in recent years. As an expression of that concern, the new BACB’s Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts is more explicit and comprehensive in its inclusion of ethical obligations concerning cultural diversity. The purpose of this paper is to offer a discussion on the limitations of both our capacity and willingness to know and overcome our ignorance about our own and other cultures. We examine different ways in which our ignorance of other cultures plays out even in willful …

Finer Details Of Language Modeling: Text Segmentation, Working Within Resource Limits, And Watermarking, Evan Gordon Lucas

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Language modeling is a vast sub-field of natural language processing and this work focuses on solving some specific problems within that field. Technically, the work falls into a number of sub-categories within natural language processing; how to segment texts, improving sparse transformer performance for summarization tasks, character level models for dialect determination, watermarking of large language models, and a general method of incorporating minimal human feedback for continual or online learning. Despite touching on many small areas, they all connect as being related to the very general problem of handling sequential data. Language and text can be thought of as …

The Effects Of A Genre-Based Writing Assessment-For-Learning Model On Enhancement Of Thai Efl Students’Writing Proficiency, Kasidit Supan

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

Previous research has shown that teaching writing through different genres helps English as a foreign language (EFL) students improve their writing skills (Dickinson, 2013; Taufiqulloh, 2018; Sritakarn, 2019). However, other studies have found that this method does not always help students organize argumentative essays or use the right linguistic features in these essays (Udomyamokkul, 2004; Ka-Kan-Dee, 2015). The purposes of the present study were (1) to investigate the effects of a genre-based writing assessment-for-learning model on enhancement of Thai EFL students’ writing proficiency, (2) to examine the effects of the model on Thai EFL students’ assessment literacy, and (3) to …

Disruption And Emergence: How To Think About Human Rights Futures, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick

School of Peace Studies: Faculty Scholarship

This article suggests that humanity may be approaching a critical juncture, since a confluence of macro-historical changes might—individually or collectively—fundamentally transform the field of human rights, and usher in a second human rights era. In particular, it suggests that the confluence of tectonic geopolitical changes, system-wide shifts in climate and energy, and fundamentally new developments in science and technology might lead to a rupture of the same scale as the cluster of events that heralded the onset of the current rights regime. This argument builds on a number of literatures, especially those focused on norms cycles, rights generations, and what …

Exploring The Barriers To Education And Employment For Hmong Women In Sapa, Vietnam, Connor John Kidd

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

In the mountainous region of Sapa, Vietnam, the Hmong community navigates the complex interplay of preserving their cultural identity amidst immense pressure to modernize. This thesis, centered on Hmong women, delves into their selective adaptation to contemporary challenges, particularly in education and employment. Using document research, a survey, and fieldwork this study draws from both historical data and firsthand accounts. These findings highlight significant disparities in educational attainment and employment opportunities when compared to the national average. Notably, issues of linguistic barriers, cultural priorities, and systemic underrepresentation emerge as primary obstacles. This research illuminates the unique socio-economic dynamics faced by …

กลวิธีการแปลคำที่เกี่ยวกับวัฒนธรรมจากภาษาไทยเป็นภาษาอังกฤษในบทบรรยายใต้ภาพ : กรณีศึกษาภาพยนตร์เรื่อง ร่างทรง, พิมพ์ศุภางค์ เมตไตรพันธ์

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

สารนิพนธ์ฉบับนี้มุ่งศึกษาแนวโน้มการเลือกใช้กลวิธีการแปลเพื่อถ่ายทอดความหมายของคำและวลีในบทบรรยายใต้ภาพภาษาอังกฤษ เฉพาะส่วนที่เกี่ยวข้องกับความเชื่อ ศาสนาและสิ่งเหนือธรรมชาติของไทยที่ปรากฏในภาพยนตร์เรื่อง ร่างทรง จำนวนทั้งสิ้น 52 คำ โดยมีสมมติฐานการวิจัยว่าในการแปลเพื่อถ่ายทอดความคำและวลีที่มีความเกี่ยวข้องกับความเชื่อ ศาสนาและสิ่งเหนือธรรมชาติของไทยจากภาษาไทยเป็นภาษาอังกฤษในบทบรรยายใต้ภาพภาษาอังกฤษของภาพยนตร์เรื่อง ร่างทรง นั้น ผู้แปลมีแนวโน้มจะเลือกใช้กลวิธีการเทียบทางวัฒนธรรมบ่อยครั้งที่สุด จากการวิเคราะห์ข้อมูลทั้งหมด ผู้วิจัยพบว่าผู้แปลมีการเลือกใช้กลวิธีการแปลคำทั้งในระดับคำและระดับประโยค ในระดับคำ ผู้แปลเลือกใช้กลวิธีทั้งหมด 55 ครั้ง โดยเลือกใช้กลวิธีการปรับความหนาแน่น 15 ครั้ง (คิดเป็นร้อยละ 27.27) การคัดลอกคำด้วยการถ่ายทอดในระดับคำ 15 ครั้ง (คิดเป็นร้อยละ 27.27) การเทียบทางวัฒนธรรม 16 ครั้ง (คิดเป็นร้อยละ 29.09) การคัดลอกคำด้วยการถ่ายทอดในระดับสัทศาสตร์ 7 ครั้ง (คิดเป็นร้อยละ 12.73) และไม่พบการแปล 2 ครั้ง (คิดเป็นร้อยละ 3.64) จะเห็นได้ว่าผู้แปลเลือกใช้กลวิธีในระดับคำในจำนวนที่ใกล้เคียงกัน โดยเลือกใช้กลวิธีการเทียบทางวัฒนธรรมบ่อยครั้งที่สุด ในระดับประโยค ผู้เลือกใช้กลวิธีทั้งหมด 14 ครั้ง โดยเลือกใช้กลวิธีการปรับมุมมอง 4 ครั้ง (คิดเป็นร้อยละ 28.57) การจัดเรียงใหม่ 4 ครั้ง (คิดเป็นร้อยละ 28.57) การปรับเปลี่ยนตัวบท 4 ครั้ง (คิดเป็นร้อยละ 28.57) และการทดแทน 2 ครั้ง (คิดเป็นร้อยละ 14.29) จากการศึกษาวิจัยครั้งนี้ ผู้วิจัยพบว่าผู้แปลมีแนวโน้มที่จะเลือกกลวิธีการเทียบเคียงทางวัฒนธรรมบ่อยครั้งมากที่สุดในการแปลคำและวลีทางด้านวัฒนธรรมในส่วนที่เกี่ยวข้องกับความเชื่อ ศาสนาและสิ่งเหนือธรรมชาติเพื่อให้ตัวบทฉบับแปลถ่ายทอดความหมายได้สอดคล้องกับวัฒนธรรมปลายทางซึ่งจะทำให้ผู้รับสารฉบับปลายทางเชื่อมโยงได้โดยไม่จำเป็นต้องอธิบายเพิ่มเติม ทำให้บทบรรยายใต้ภาพมีลักษณะเป็นไปตามข้อจำกัดของบทบรรยายใต้ภาพทั้งในด้านพื้นที่และด้านเวลา ผลการวิจัยครั้งนี้มีลักษณะสอดคล้องกับผลของงานวิจัยเรื่องการแปลคำทางวัฒนธรรมในส่วนที่ศึกษาเกี่ยวกับกลวิธีการแปลข้ามวัฒนธรรมในการแปลสื่อโสตทัศน์ ที่มีผลลัพธ์ว่ากลวิธีที่เน้นไปทางความเข้าใจของผู้รับสารฉบับปลายทาง โดยกลวิธีที่พบบ่อยครั้งมากที่สุดคือกลวิธีการเทียบทางวัฒนธรรมเช่นเดียวกัน

A Defense Of Psalm Singing: Solutions To Contemporary Practice, Philip W. Webb

Theses and Dissertations--Music

The history of singing the Biblical Psalms from the Old Testament goes back thousands of years. Early Jewish worship by the nation of Israel was centered upon singing the Psalms, and this formed the early musical worship of the first-century Christian church as well. Yet today this practice is only observed by a few denominations and has fallen out of style among mainline evangelical churches. There are Psalters being printed, but for the most part they still contain many of the traditional musical and lyrical structures that go back several hundred years. For many, these sacred texts have too much …

Stem And Pre-Health Students’ Diminishing Online Conversation Volume Regarding Majors And Careers Within The Field: Why Higher Education Should Care, Susan Roh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine the STEM and pre-health online mention volume change regarding STEM and pre-health majors, careers, and universities, with the data collection period encompassing August of 2018 through June of 2021. We evaluated if the mention sentiment shifted between academic year periods. The data gathered for this study was procured in collaboration with Campus Sonar and the social-listening tool of Brandwatch, which allowed for specifications of the data collected. Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to determine the means of the majors, careers, and universities mentions and mean sentiment volumes. Changes in not only online conversation …