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Beyond "English Language Learner": Second Language Writers, Academic Literacy, And Issues Of Identity In The United States High School, Christina M. Ortmeier-Hooper

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the writing experiences of U.S. adolescent second language writers and considers how students' identities as ""English Language Learners (ELL)" contributes to their learning, their sense of self, and their academic writing. Within the perspective that writing is a socially-embedded activity, I conducted five case studies documenting the academic writing experiences of immigrant students from various countries (Nigeria, Taiwan, Dominican Republic and El Salvador) during their first year of high school.

During the year-long study, I collected data from sources, including: student interviews, classroom observations, students' writing samples, students' social influence maps, and community/school artifacts. Using a theoretical …

On Miranda And Misinterpretation: A Look At The Rights Of Native American Defendants, S. Meredith Morris

Student Thesis Honors (1996-2008)

In this paper, I posit that the Miranda ruling from the infamous case Miranda v. Arizona, when poorly applied, results in profound and blatant Eracism. I will begin Part I by stepping back in history to look at the evolution of Miranda and the cases that followed. Next, I take a look at the 2000 Census data and address the relatively current minority population percentages. Then, in Part II, I dissect Miranda, revealing what "custody" and "interrogation", the "right to an attorney" and "valid waiver" mean according to the Supreme Court. In Part III of this paper, I take a …

Participant Reactions To Two-Way Immersion (Twi) Programs, Brett Frayseth, Carrie Lewis Miller, James Livermont, Melissa Siebke

IT Solutions Publications

The purpose of this study was to elicit participant reactions to two-way immersion (TWI) programs in the United States of America. A large number of recent studies have focused on instructor views and perspectives of two-way immersion programs, so this study aimed to gain insight from students who are, or who have, participated in TWI programs throughout North America.

One hundred fifty-one TWI schools throughout the United States were contacted and asked to participate in this study. Two similar surveys were developed, one for current TWI students, and another for former TWI students. Students from these two groups were asked …

Introduction To Volume 56

Russian Language Journal

In his recent study of the linkage between corpus and status planning in language policy formation, Joshua Fishman observes that “languages are increasingly viewed as scarce national resources (not unlike flora and fauna, agricultural or environmental resources, and all other such improvable or alterable resources whose quality can be influenced by planned human intervention).” Given the particular history of language policy development in Russia and the former Soviet states in the 20th century, the appearance in mid-2005 of the new Law on the State Language of the Russian Federation is an event of considerable potential impact on the study and …

On Miranda And Misinterpretation: A Look At The Rights Of Native American Defendants, S. Meredith Morris

Student Thesis Honors (1996-2008)

In this paper, I posit that the Miranda ruling from the infamous case Miranda v. Arizona, when poorly applied, results in profound and blatant Eracism. The Miranda Rule was created to protect the citizens of America; it was to protect suspects from coercion during custodial interrogations. Miranda was written by economically privileged justices, to be most often applied to poor and under-privileged suspects who are often minorities and many times uneducated people who know next to nothing about the legal system in the United States. I will begin Part I by stepping back in history to look at the evolution …

Indians And Immigrants: Survivance Stories Of Literacies, Joyce Rain Anderson

Doctoral Dissertations

This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

This project stems from my mixedblood heritage and from a community of mixedblood scholars. In this text, I relate stories of the early colonization of Southern New England, of the zones of contact between whites (primarily English) and Indians (primarily Massachusett or Wampanoag). I offer perspectives on competing views of literacy and explored texts translated from Massachusett Algonquin to see how Indians used writing to enact rhetorics of survivance which challenged the prevailing assumptions of the dominant culture. Within these texts we see how Indians continued to define themselves in …

Bad Writing: Some Thoughts On The Abuse Of Scholarly Rhetoric, Jethro K. Lieberman

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Online Language Learning Environment: New Roles For The Humanist, James S. Noblitt

Russian Language Journal

Thomas Edison played an important role in improving the technologies needed for the telephone. He was said to have been excited about the educational potential of the new instrument and speculated that it would soon be found in every classroom.

Well, he was right about the educational potential of information and communication technology, but he was wrong about the form the new technology would take.

This chapter raises questions concerning the role humanists will play in determining the development and implementation of information and communication technologies for educational purposes.

Adaptation Of The State Trait Anxiety Inventory In Arabic: A Comparison With The American Stai, Qutayba A. Abdullatif

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The main goal of the present study was to develop an Arabic adaptation of the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI, Form Y, Spielberger, 1983). In addition, cultural and linguistic influences on the experience and expression of anxiety were assessed. The American STAI and fifty initial Arabic items were administered to 286 university students at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. The American STAI was also administered to 336 university students at the University of South Florida.

Item and factor analyses were conducted on responses of the calibration sample to obtain the final set of Arabic items, which was validated using …

A Study Of Technological Literacy In Writing Programs., Katherine V. Wills 1957-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation empirically studies computer-assisted writing administration as a site of agency for social change by inquiring how writing program administrators (WPAs) use their agency and power when developing and maintaining computer-mediated spaces (CM) or computer-assisted instruction (CAI). This study asks, What are the results when individual agency meets technological literacy in the academic workplace? Numerous articles have examined WPAs as agents of social change (R. Miller, C. Selfe, M. Pemberton); few have used empirical data as their grounds. To date, no articles have examined the WPA's agency with technological literacy in computer-mediated environments. This study utilizes triangulated and multi-modal …

The City As A Point Of Transition In The Lives Of Esmeralda Santiago And Judith Ortiz Cofer., Monica Michelle Joiner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

United States capitalist development efforts, known as Operation Bootstrap, created an economic need for Puerto Ricans. Two authors, Esmeralda Santiago and Judith Ortiz Cofer, are both women of Puerto Rican decent who lived through this historic period.This thesis examines the lives of both "puertorriquenas" and their experiences in the cities of Paterson, New Jersey and Brooklyn, New York respectively. Becoming a woman in an urban environment stands as a unifying experience of both Ortiz Cofer and Santiago. Chapter one examines trauma as a normal part of the urban experience. Chapter two focuses on bilingual and bicultural identity and its use …

Reading The Personal: Toward A Theory And Practice Of Self -Narrative In Student Writing, Megan Fulwiler

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines students' personal essays as rhetorical projects of self-representation. The debate over the role of personal writing in composition studies has created a binary opposition between a modernist transcendent notion of self and a postmodern discursive subject. As a result, the complex issues of self and representation in student work is often dismissed in favor of what is traditionally called "academic discourse." The concept of "narrative identity" provides a way to identify the strategies that student writers use to establish ethos, assert agency, and negotiate codes of belonging within multiple social communities. Chapter 1, "Situating Personal Writing," considers …

The Nature And Scope Of Intra-Cultural Variation On Psychological Dimensions, Anu Realo, Jüri Allik

Online Readings in Psychology and Culture

Much of the research in cross-cultural psychology is done using countries (national cultures) as main units of comparison, disregarding other important characteristics of the participants such as their ethnicity, language, religious or territorial affiliation. Thus, despite the fact that there exist clearly distinguishable sub-cultures within many countries or national cultures, they are often regarded as uniform and homogenous entities in cross-cultural research. In many cases, as we will argue in this paper, such approach is rather justifiable. In doing so, however, one should always be aware of large intra-cultural diversity which can be found in many countries all around the …

Aboriginal English Genres In Perth, Ian G. Malcolm

Research outputs pre 2011

Aboriginal Australia has a unique heritage of oral literature and Aboriginal people of all ages take delight in yarning. Despite the richness and contemporary relevance of this heritage, little is known in the wider Australian society about the oral discourse skills that are taken for granted in Aboriginal communities.

Although the art of oral narrative has developed over countless generations and by medium of Indigenous languages, previous studies (Malcolm 1994a, b; Malcolm and Rochecouste 2000; Rochecouste and Malcolm 2000) have shown that it is vigorously maintained in Aboriginal English.

The lack of general awareness of the verbal art of Aboriginal …

Conceptual-Associative System In Aboriginal English : A Study Of Aboriginal Children Attending Primary Schools In Metropolitan Perth, Farzad Sharifian

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

National measures of achievement among Australian school children suggest that Aboriginal students, considered as a group, are those most likely to end their schooling without achieving minimal acceptable levels of literacy and numeracy. In view of the fact that many Aboriginal students dwell in metropolitan areas and speak English as a first language, many educators have been unconvinced that linguistic and cultural difference have been significant factors in this underachievement. This study explores the possibility that, despite intensive exposure to non-Aboriginal society, Aboriginal students in metropolitan Perth may maintain, through a distinctive variety of English, distinctive conceptualisation which may help …

Spaceball (Or, Not Everything That's Left Is Postmodern), Dennis W. Arrow

Vanderbilt Law Review

Given law-school postmodernism's epistemo/ontology of juvenile antirealist agnosticism, its commitment to Gadamerian and/or Derridean notions of linguistic indeterminacy, its mono- maniacal dedication to centrifugal end-justifies-the-means Lefty politics, its abhorrence of commonly recognized conceptions of neutral principle, its concomitant disrespect for the very notion of truth, and its inextricably intertwined obsession with names and propensity for linguistic doublespeak, Professor Arrow confesses to initially wondering what it might "mean" to take anything uttered by a postmodernist "literally," or at "face value." But undaunted by that 'paradox," Professor Arrow not only takes up Feldman's challenge to "critique postmodernism on its own terms" (by …

Embodied Narratives: Ways Of Reading Student Literacy Histories, Stephanie Diane Paterson

Doctoral Dissertations

When asked about their former experiences and attitudes towards reading and writing first-year students often begin with statements like, " I don't know how to write," or "I'm not a big reader," or "I'm not creative." Behind these facile and familiar sentences is a world of experience we know very little about and are hard-pressed to explain.

Students are situated on a precarious fault line within the academy and their narratives function like maps of this treacherous terrain. Their stories do not simply reflect personal, private crises but cultural phenomena---including taken-for-granted issues surrounding the "necessity" of discipline and an almost …

Literature And The Arts As Antisubordination Praxis: Latcrit Theory And Cultural Production: The Confessions Of An Accidental Crit, Pedro A. Malavet

UF Law Faculty Publications

I attend LatCrit conferences to be educated on what I regard as the most exciting legal scholarship being produced today. Therefore, I naturally jumped at the opportunity to help organize the Fourth Annual LatCrit Conference and to chair one of its Plenary Panels. I have penned this Essay for the purpose not only of joining Critical Race Theory ("CRT") discourse, but also to create a recorded history of LatCrit travels.

In Part I of this Essay, I will describe the process that led the Planning Committee to include the Literature and Arts as Antisubordination Praxis: LatCrit Theory and Cultural Production …

Tuned In: Television And The Teaching Of Writing, Bronwyn Thomas Williams

Doctoral Dissertations

College writing teachers often consider the reading and writing experiences students have had in elementary and high school classes as their only relevant discursive influences. When they do so they risk ignoring what is perhaps the most powerful and ubiquitous form of public discourse and communication in our society: television. This dissertation explores how the pervasive discourse of popular culture on television influences the ways in which incoming college students perceive and engage in writing and reading when they enter a first-year composition course. Through interviews with students and observations of them watching television, I have studied the skills students …

Indeterminacy In First And Second Languages: Case Studies Of Narrative Development Of Chinese Children With And Without Language Disorder, Bee Hong Lo

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Bilingual children with specific language impairment (SLI) from non English speaking background (NESB) present a major diagnostic problem to speech pathologist and educationist in an English speaking country. There has been no known study on the simultaneous narrative development involving bilingual Chinese children with and without SLI. This longitudinal case study examined the relationship of Chinese (L1) and English (L2) in narrative development in a child with no language difficulty (Child LN) and a child (Child L1) diagnosed as having SLI. The hypothesis posed for this study was that Child L1 has the same developmental profile for narrative skill in …

Promoting Phonological Awareness In Young Children Through At-Home Activities: A Video Curriculum, Kathleen A. Kwak

All Graduate Projects

Research relating phonological awareness, beginning reading acquisition, and parental involvement in children's literacy development was read, evaluated, and summarized. A positive relationship between phonological awareness and learning to read was indicated from this review, and a correlation between parental literacy activities and children's language and reading acquisition was found. Studies suggesting the existence of a developmental sequence of phonological skills were examined. The literature review provided a rationale and design for phonological awareness instruction. A research supported curriculum containing a teacher's manual, take-home interactive video activities and activity sheets, and assessments was created.

Performing Dracula: A Critical Examination Of A Popular Text In Three Sites Of Performance., Jonathan Matthew Gray

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Dracula is a significant example of a popular phenomenon with a long and ongoing history of productive circulation in Anglo-American culture. While theorists of popular culture often use the term "performance" in their explanations of the popularity and meaningful operations of such phenomena in a culture, they do not always provide concrete definitions of what they mean by performance. This study provides an analysis of the roles performance plays in a specific popular culture phenomenon. Identifying Bram Stoker's Dracula as a nexus for a broader cultural activity, this study examines articulations of Dracula in performances and texts that both precede …

Near Misses, William I. Miller

Articles

I was recently invited to give a keynote address for a small academic conference whose advertised theme was "Near Misses, Contingencies, and Histories." I have a rough and ready understanding of the near miss, the same kind of understanding we have of most words and phrases that spill out effortlessly in normal conversation. I use it and have heard it used by myriad others to describe a certain style of disappointment and regret. It is a concept generally available to us all, but when coupled with contingencies and histories, as in the title of the conference with its vague suggestions …

Issues Of Engendered Entitlement: Who Owns The Classroom? Who Owns Knowledge?, Dorothy Radius Kasik

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the ways in which first year female college students have been prepared by educational systems in our culture to handle knowledge and the acquisition of knowledge during the first year of college experience. It is the contention of the author that women are not actively encouraged in our culture to take ownership of educational concepts in the same way as men. This happens for two reasons, first that because women's methods of interaction in the classroom might differ from men's those methods might not be perceived as acceptable or taken seriously; and second that a woman's discomfort …

Constructive Texts: Theory, Practice, And The "Self" In Composition, Deborah Lynne Hodgkins

Doctoral Dissertations

The influence of postmodern theory on studies in composition and rhetoric has led to important questions for the teaching of writing: In light of/after postmodernism, what role does/should theory play in classroom practice and how can it best inform pedagogy? In writing and in the world at large, how do we define and where do we locate agency?

I argue that the goal of composition courses should be to help students learn to use discourse to represent the interests of themselves and others and effect change in a postmodern world--to become active citizens by becoming better rhetoricians. In order to …

[Review Of] Toyotomi Morimoto. Japanese Americans And Cultural Continuity: Maintaining Language And Heritage, Kumiko Takahara

Ethnic Studies Review

Japanese language schools in California are chronicled from the early twentieth century until the eve of World War II based mainly on the UCLA Japanese American Research Project Collections, Japanese language newspapers, and literatures by Issei (first generation Japanese immigrant) educators. Chapters two through five which follow a brief overview of the ethnic language schools of various immigrant groups illustrate Japanese immigrants' effort in transmitting their linguistic and cultural heritage to Nisei (American-born) children by supplementing their public school education with a Japanese language school curriculum in a hostile socio-political climate. The thematic coherence of the book is disrupted unfortunately …

Language, Play, And Toy Sharing In Infancy, Lisa A. Newland

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Toy sharing between 97 infants and their mothers was used to measure shared reference, mother and infant attention-directing strategies, and maternal and infant responsiveness. The association of toy sharing with early language and symbolic play was assessed. Infants were videotaped in a 10-minute free-play session at 11 months. Videotapes were coded for frequency of toy exchanges and level of infant symbolic play. Language was assessed at both 11 and 14 months. Maternal responsiveness to infant-initiated toy exchanges was positively related to symbolic play at 11 months. Maternal responsiveness was also related to Productive, Receptive, and Total Language scores at 14 …

Composition As A Mode Of Being: Politics, Ethics, And History In The Writing Classrooms Of Postmodernity, Lance Michael Svehla

Doctoral Dissertations

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. once commented that while he did not "deny the importance, on the level of theory, of the (postmodern) project," such a project did not help him when he was "trying to get a taxi on the corner of 125th and Lenox Avenue" (Loose Canons 37-38). The postmodern project lacked what Gates calls "practical performative force." The purpose of this dissertation is to establish postmodernity's practical performative force for the composition classroom. It addresses four central questions: What is postmodernity? What is its relationship to composition? Why should composition teachers and students care about this relationship? How …

Bodily Discourses: When Students Write About Sexual Abuse, Physical Abuse, And Eating Disorders In The Composition Classroom, Michelle Marie Payne

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes student texts about bodily violence written for Freshman English and advanced writing courses at the University of New Hampshire between 1994 and 1996. All the volunteers were white women, most aged 18-21. The project addresses four central questions: Why are students writing about these experiences? How are they writing about them? What assumptions inform teachers' responses to such essays? What larger cultural contexts shape how such experiences are represented and understood by students and teachers?

The primary materials are twenty-five student essays; interviews with students, teachers, and campus personnel; and observations of classrooms and staff meetings. Information …

This Is Gonna Hurt Like Hell: A Pentecostal Student Enters The Academy, Stephen R. Barrett

Doctoral Dissertations

The little that has been written about expressions of religious experience in the field of Composition Studies focuses on the many ways religious belief places its adherents at a disadvantage in writing classrooms. We discuss in our journals and staffrooms only those religious conservatives who are most expressive of their beliefs. Many others sit in silence during discussions that may reveal anything of their beliefs, fearing to offend teachers and peers or to expose themselves to offenses from others. Unfortunately, these silent students contribute little or nothing to our understanding of the abilities of faith-centered students. Many are writing with …