Digital Commons Network^™

Meeting The Needs Of Adult Language Learners: A Focus On Communication And Literacy, Jessica Hercules

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This portfolio is a compilation of the author’s perspectives and reflections about teaching and language acquisition during her time in the Master of Second Language Teaching (MSLT) program at Utah State University. The portfolio includes samples of writing on a variety of topics surrounding second language teaching and acquisition developed through study and teaching experience.

This collection of papers begins with the author’s perspectives on teaching, including a description of her desired professional environment, a reflection on her experiences observing other language teachers, and the author’s teaching philosophy statement. In the second section, the author presents two research papers and …

Carrying The Stories Of Las Mariposas: Literacy As Collective And Transformative, Deborah Vriend Van Duinen

Michigan Reading Journal

Literacy is often understood as the acquisition of individual skills and knowledge. In this essay, I explore different approaches to understanding literacy that focus on social meaning-making and action. Drawing on historical examples of literacy learning and my recent experiences in a community-wide reading program focused on Julia Alvarez’s (1994) In the Time of the Butterflies, I use the concept of “carrying stories” to reflect on how literacy learning can be collective and transformative for self and society.

An Interdisciplinary Rendezvous Between Mathematics And Literature: Reflections On Beauty As A Perspective In Comparative Disciplinary Didactics And A Thematic Approach To Interdisciplinary Work In Upper Secondary School, Uffe Thomas Jankvist, Helle Rørbech, Jesper Bremholm

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In this paper we propose a thematic focus on aesthetics in the context of an interdisciplinary collaboration between mathematics and literature (Language Arts) as a way to further students’ reflections on and deeper understanding of what characterizes the two subjects. Furthermore, we argue that approaching aesthetics through the perspective of literacy can potentially strengthen students’ understanding of ways of thinking particular to specific (academic) disciplines; ways of thinking that are otherwise often hidden when teaching focuses on more pragmatic aspects. G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology from 1940 serves as the recurring illustrative example in our discussions of the pedagogical …

(Re) Actualizing Culturally Sustaining Read Aloud Practices: Enriching Latinx Bilingual Learners’ Literacy Development, Isela Almaguer

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

Focusing on culturally sustaining literacy practices, I sought to conceptualize the integration of culturally rich literature as inclusionary practices for the reading and literacy development of Latinx bilingual learners. It is forecasted that by 2036, Latinx students will make up a third of the nation’s 3 to 17 year old learners - our school age population (US Census Bureau, 2010). Recognizing the importance of engaging with culturally sustaining read alouds and the value in learners seeing themselves reflected in the stories allows for increased opportunities for engagement in the literature used in the read alouds. I steadfastly advocate for asset-based …

Literacy, Rhetoric, Tradition, And Truth In The Age Of Bede, Gerard A. Lavin Iii

English Language and Literature ETDs

Despite his own high level of literacy and education, the Venerable Bede (672/3–735) inhabited a world in which nearly all personal, social, educational, and political discourse was conducted orally. A thorough understanding of his works will require an understanding of this discourse, but attempts to apply broad theories of “orality” derived from other cultures to early medieval England have repeatedly foundered. This dissertation establishes a set of guiding principles to produce a more nuanced and localized model of discourse in Bede’s England and observes a variety of ways oral and literate forms of rhetoric were employed by political actors in …

The Texts Matter: Essential Text Characteristics For Comprehension Intervention In The Intermediate Grades, Tia Clasen

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Theses and Dissertations

Results on state and national reading assessments indicate that students in the U.S. overall, and in Minnesota specifically, continue to struggle to comprehend expository texts; only one-third of fourth graders meeting grade level proficiency on state assessments designed to analyze reading achievement. Further, a significant gap persists for fourth grade students based on race, language, and socioeconomic status. Contemporaneously, technology continues to advance rapidly, demanding increased literacy skills and a better understanding of comprehension intervention. This research study aims to identify essential text characteristics of expository texts that will eventually be included in an online, automated reading strategy tutor providing …

¿Qué Es Un Código?: Supporting Emerging Multilingual Learners In Digital Literacy, Ellen Barnett, Karina Mèndez Pèrez, Rocìo Delgado

Education Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Promoting Early Literacy Learning, Margaret Baird

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

This capstone addresses the importance of early literacy exposure for later literacy development and academic achievement. Literacy levels when students enter school have been shown to be related to later reading achievement and academic success. Caregiver involvement is a significant part of early literacy development. The influence of caregiver involvement is the primary focus of the project. The website created for this project provides caregivers of children birth to age 5 with activities to facilitate the development of early literacy, and community resources dedicated to promoting early literacy. The project is intended for anyone who spends an extended amount of …

Multi-Tiered Support Systems For Multilingual Learners: Structures That Inform Reading Instruction And Intervention, Elisabeth Riley

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Multilingual learners (MLLs also known as English Language Learners or ELLs) are a growing population in United States schools. The literature reviewed in this capstone explored the question: How does the research recommend designing a Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) for Multilingual Learners (MLLs) to inform reading instruction? This capstone used the literature reviewed to create a series of three professional development sessions for adult staff in this midwest school to navigate the implementation of a system of support beginning with how data is used. The professional development sessions provided an overview of MTSS, explored culturally responsive teaching methods, investigated …

A Parent Focused Bilingual Literacy Program, Jordan Perkins

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

While theories and methods surrounding English language teaching are continually evolving, the goal is almost always the same: help students acquire the English they need to be successful in their communication at work and the community. Adult ESL programs are often focused on work and community but leave family communication out of the curriculum. Inclusion of the first language (L1) in adult-focused curricula can help improve the language acquisition of the second language (L2) and improve the overall literacy of the learners. Although many family literacy programs are being created or researched to improve child literacy in the home, and …

Exploring Teacher Agency And Literacy Practices In A Border-Region Secondary English Language Arts Classroom, Monica Sifuentes

Theses and Dissertations

Teachers in the 21st century public school classroom are often faced with systemic pressures—from the state and district level—that may influence their instructional practice. With the increasingly globalized country and exponential increase in emergent bilingual students, it has become imperative that teachers reflect on the types of literacy pedagogy employed with their students, especially those teaching in border regions. Teachers must begin to view themselves as agents of change and as facilitators of learning.

This case study takes place in two high school settings that are in the same district and are located roughly 10 minutes from the US Mexico …

Changing Terms, Not Trends: A Critical Investigation Into Children’S & Young Adult Literature Publishing & Its Effect In Curriculum & Pedagogy, Keith Newvine, Sarah Fleming

The Language and Literacy Spectrum

The central argument proposed within this article is that while recent publishing trends in children’s and adolescent literature have changed for the better (Cooperative Children’s Book Center, 2019) and research about the importance of diverse reading experiences for students has become concentrated, centered, and validated (Bishop, 1990; Adichie, 2009; Tschida, Ryan, & Ticknor, 2014; Thomas, 2016; Parker, 2020: Ebarvia, German, Parker, & Torres, 2020), many schools are still struggling with (or hesitant to) changing the texts centered in classrooms with youth. Therefore, this article provides practical steps that practicing teachers can take in order to center the voices and narratives …

Reading The World: American Haredi Children's Literature, 1980–2000, Dainy Bernstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Children’s literature is an important force in building not only linguistic literacy but a literacy of the world, showing the child reader how to make sense of themselves in relation to the many people, objects, experiences, and concepts around them. Haredi children’s texts foster a mode of understanding the world around them as comprehensible through the texts, people, and events of the past. In Reading the World, I demonstrate that Haredi children’s textual culture between 1980 and 2000 fostered a literacy of language, text, time, space, morals, and general knowledge as inextricably intertwined, and that this literacy propelled further …

Using The Transactional Reading Theory To Galvanize The Meaning Of Construction Process And Promote Fourth Grade Students Reading Comprehension, Cognition, And Motivation, Tamara Gatewood-Williams

Theses and Dissertations

The sequential mixed-methods study was conducted to examine the effects of a transactional intervention with emphasis on background knowledge, questioning, and motivation, that galvanize the meaning of the construction process to internalize strategies, promote engaging discussion of the text, and shift students from the observer to the participant, to the mediator. Participants included two fourth grade teachers, thirty-nine fourth grade students, and twelve fourth grade students who were selected from the thirty-nine to participate in the qualitative phase of the study. Quantitative data pre-and post-data were collected to assess student's cognition and motivation. Quantitative data revealed the intervention influenced background …

Integrating News Media Into History Classes To Teach Both Content And Civic Literacy Skills, Eric Martone

The Councilor: A National Journal of the Social Studies

This article provides a practical guide for how secondary education social studies teachers can take an integrative approach to the use of current media articles to develop their students’ (especially English Language Learners) civic literacy skills—reading for information as well as interdisciplinary writing—while enriching the teaching of content in their current history classes.

Liberating Instruction: A Critical Bilingual Literacy Approach For Latinx Students, Anel V. Suriel

Journal of Multilingual Education Research

This article reviews Dr. Carla España and Dr. Luz Yadira Herrera’s En Comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices of Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students. Though a critical bilingual literacies approach, the language practices, experiences and cultural histories of Latinx students are centered for literacy instruction in grades 3-8. Before instruction begins, the authors support educational practitioners in creating equitable educational and language stances that hold students’ language practices in a strength perspective. Each chapter that follows details and explains a thematic unit of student that guides educators in creating lessons based on students’ experiences and are summarized within this review. …

The Conundrum Of (Mis)Information Literacy. A Book Review Of Unpacking Fake News: An Educator’S Guide To Navigating The Media With Students, Nicole Mirra

Democracy & Education

The contributors to the edited volume, Unpacking Fake News, illuminate the complex historical, cultural, and psychological elements of today’s media landscape and exhorts teachers to analyze misinformation with their students. The text offers practical curricular and pedagogical media literacy resources but also raises difficult and unresolved ethical dilemmas for the field of education to consider.

Addressing The Development Of Reading Comprehension In Students With Asd : A Meta-Analysis, Halley Eacker

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The purpose of this study was to synthesize findings from single-case intervention studies on developing reading comprehension in students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A multi-level analysis was used to determine if there was an overall statistically significant effect of these interventions and if the effect was consistent across studies and participants. Results indicated a significant change in trend throughout the intervention phase across studies. Age had a significant impact on the intervention effect. The remaining moderators – study type, design, and quality – were not significant. Implications for practitioners and researchers, as well as considerations for future research are …

It Crits Different: Analysis Of Dungeons & Dragons And Tabletop Roleplaying Games As An Oral, Collaborative, And Immersive Genre Of Literacy, Olivia Haslett

Honors Theses

With the introduction of multimodality enhancements to literature, such as e-books and audiobooks, alongside the resurgence of Tabletop Roleplaying Games such as Dungeons & Dragons, there has been little consideration for how these two seemingly unrelated fields marry into a new opportunity for literary development. These games often have a fundamental purpose: storytelling. Storytelling has long since been an oral tradition which has been converted into its literary form: books. Books tell us their story without the need of company and are often written by a sole author. However, with more and more Tabletop RPGs coming into popularity, storytelling is …

Rewriting Web 2.0 Discourses Of The Local For Socio-Spatial Literacy Theory, Erin Daugherty

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to provide a framework for engaging with two spatial concepts that have been foundational to theorizing literacy across time but have often been taken for granted as passive backdrops to the social action of literacy practice: the notions of “the local” and “the global.” By interrogating the histories, both past and ongoing, of these two spatial concepts as they are interwoven into the sociocultural paradigm of literacy theory, research, and pedagogy, this project identifies new ways that literacy researchers and educators can attend to spatial concepts so as to promote and encourage literacy research and learning that …

Exploring Elementary Pre - Service Teachers Technological Knowledge For Teaching Literacy: A Phenomenological Study, Christy Nicole Grigsby

Theses and Dissertations

As a result of the fundamental changes to education due to COVID-19, this study focuses on the readiness of pre-service teachers to meet the literacy needs necessary in this technology mediated world by utilizing a theoretical framework that consists of a learning framework: Transformative Learning, a literacy framework: Multi literacies, and a technological framework: Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) to include the 2019 addition of another knowledge base: ConteXtual Knowledge (XK). It is this context component of TPACK that is so frequently overlooked that may encompass the cultural aspects of teaching and learning including the primary and secondary Discourses, the …

Poetry Beyond The Page: A Case For Spoken Word Poetry In Florida's Secondary Classrooms, Sarah Matherly

Senior Honors Theses

Florida’s B.E.S.T. Standards, Florida’s most recent K-12 educational standards to promote literacy, lack the rising art of Spoken Word Poetry. However, Florida’s Department of Education should integrate Spoken Word into Florida’s Secondary curriculum. Spoken Word Poetry, by its definition, holds researched benefits that align with the B.E.S.T. Standard’s poetry recommendations and literacy-centered goals. In light of such benefits, Florida’s Department of Education should consider various Spoken Word poets and poems to include in Florida’s Secondary Curriculum, as well as explore the resources and integration methods included in this thesis for both teachers and students.

Culturally Responsive Teaching: Teacher Candidates Identify What’S Important, Jeania Jones, Lindsay Gallon, Kim Cheek

Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research and Scholarship (SOARS)

Honorable Mention Winner

Teacher preparation programs prepare teacher candidates (TC) with clinically rich field experiences. These programs prepare teachers to teach groups of students that are culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse. The TCs that participated in this study were in the first semester of the elementary program and were concerned with an experience that would be remote. COVID-19 impacted the experiences of the TCs by removing the field component during the Fall 2020 semester. The candidates were not provided access in the elementary schools to complete the practical experiences due to the districts’ pandemic guidelines. Due to the lack of …

Spellchecking For Children In Web Search: A Natural Language Interface Case-Study, Casey Kennington, Jerry Alan Fails, Katherine Landau Wright, Maria Soledad Pera

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Given the more widespread nature of natural language interfaces, it is increasingly important to understand who are accessing those interfaces, and how those interfaces are being used. In this paper, we explore spellchecking in the context of web search with children as the target audience. In particular, via a literature review we show that, while widely used, popular search tools are ill-designed for children. We then use spellcheckers as a case study to highlight the need for an interdisciplinary approach that brings together natural language processing, education, human-computer interaction to address a known information retrieval problem: query misspelling. We conclude …

Guided Reading Adaptations For Multilingual Learners, Ashley Morlock

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Elementary educators continue to face the challenge of providing an equitable education for all students. As more multilingual students are seated in the classroom, the challenge to support literacy and language development becomes increasingly important. This capstone seeks to answer the question: How can elementary educators improve guided reading instruction, and what adaptations support multilingual learners? The research concludes that guided reading modifications should be made through the additive approach to language, translanguaging, teacher and student participation, corrective feedback, and assessment. Using these modifications during guided reading can have many positive benefits on a student’s academic achievement and linguistic identity.

Teaching Early Literacy Skills In Preschool And Future Kindergarten Success, Amanda Wehrhan

Master's Theses & Capstone Projects

This literature review examines the importance and the effect of literacy on Kindergarten readiness and future school success for early childhood education, specifically on preschool students. Early Childhood Educators are feeling the pressure now more than ever to have their young students prepared to enter Kindergarten. In recent years there has been a shift away from a play-based classroom to more of a focus on academics. In this literature review, various research studies are examined to determine whether or not the real focus of the preschool curriculum should be play or literacy or both.

Pizza, Pages, And Family Engagement: A Simple Approach To Family Literacy Night, Jennie Baumann

Michigan Reading Journal

Family engagement in schools is a worthy but difficult pursuit. Between scheduling challenges, family needs, and other systemic factors, how can educators encourage family participation? This article details a simple practice using pizza, existing curriculum, and local resources as a way of working smarter to create a culture of family engagement around literacy.

Reinforcement Of The New Islamic Civilization Through Qur’Anic Literacy, Asmaji Muchtar

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This article aims to provide a solution for how the new Islamic civilization in the modern era should be the answer to overcoming the various problems of the world community. Since its emergence, Islam has provided answers related to the role of science as a whole contained in the Qur'an, so it is not surprising that Muslim scientists and their work have become a reference for scientists around the world for 14 centuries ago. However, the literacy of Muslim scholars is too focused on qouliyah verses that contain Sharia, rather than kauniyah verses that contain science. On the other hand, …

The Development Of A Measure Of Orthographic Processing In The Arabic Language: A Psychometric Evaluation, Sana Tibi, Lisa Fitton, Autumn L. Mcilraith

Faculty Publications

Although Arabic is an official language in 27 countries, standardized measures to assess Arabic literacy are scarce. The purpose of this research was to examine the item functioning of an assessment of Arabic orthographic knowledge. Sixty novel items were piloted with 201 third grade Arabic-speaking students. Participants were asked to identify the correctly spelled word from a pair of two words. Although the assessment was designed to be unidimensional, competing models were tested to determine whether item performance was attributable to multidimensionality. No multidimensional structure fit the data significantly better than the unidimensional model. The 60 original items were evaluated …

Simplified But Not The Same: Tracing Numeracy Events Through Manually Simplified Newsela Articles, Ellen C. Agnello

Numeracy

New York-based education startup Newsela has quickly gained popularity with K-12 educators in the six years since its launch. Its website boasts that it serves 90% of schools in the United States including the 1.5 million teachers they employ and their 20 million students. But what makes it so popular? Teachers are drawn to its Common Core-aligned informational texts which facilitate content-area connections while exposing students to important current events. Likely the most appealing aspect of the platform is its compatibility with differentiation, as it makes available five iterations of each article at varying levels of complexity or Lexile which …