Digital Commons Network^™

Jugando Sin Fronteras: Apoyando El Desarrollo Bilingüe A Través Del Juego, Michaela Henderson

World Languages and Cultures

Jugando sin fronteras is a website aimed at both speakers of Spanish and English within San Luis Obispo county. This project attempts to break down the cultural and linguistic gaps between students of bilingual education systems. Jugando sin fronteras is dedicated to uniting language groups and facilitating intercultural communication by demonstrating the use of both Spanish and English equally in bilingual spaces.

Spanish Culture Club, Emily Taylor

Honors Program: Expanded Learning Clubs

No abstract provided.

A Survey To Highlight Areas Of Focus For Patient Care In Settings Utilizing Medical Interpretation, Azayzel Deregis

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis recounts my personal experience working as a volunteer medical interpreter for the Language and Culture Resource Center at East Tennessee State University. The result of my time spent volunteering as a medical interpreter, shadowing professional medical interpreters, and witnessing patient-provider interactions during interpreted sessions was an inspiration to study medical interpretation further and delve into the challenges faced by patients who require medical interpreters. During my time researching this topic, I found that the United States is severely lacking in Spanish medical interpreters—with some healthcare facilities employing no medical interpreters—even though the size of the Hispanic population is …

Student Centered Language Teaching: A Focus On Student Identity, Rachel Mano

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

This portfolio is a compilation of essays that describe what the writer has come to see as essential topics in second language acquisition. It begins with a professional environment piece, and then a teaching philosophy statement focused on student identity and interaction in the classroom. This is followed by an essay on observations of teaching. The next two sections focus on pragmatic resistance among advanced learners and the importance of preparing learners for peer interaction. The portfolio concludes with an annotated bibliography outlining the main concepts associated with Communicative Language Teaching, a method that is commonly employed in second language …

Measuring The Effect Of Translator Training And Language Education On Translation Competence, Calvin J. Westfall

Theses and Dissertations

This study reviews concepts of bilingualism, summarizes various models of translation competency, and quantifies the difference of translation competency among students and graduates of Brigham Young University. By means of a survey about language history and a translation test from Spanish to English, data from 57 participants was collected and analyzed to measure the effect of formal language education and translation training. Despite numerous proposed models of translation competency (Wilss 1976, 1989; Koller, 1979; Krings, 1986; Lörscher, 1991; Toury, 1991; Pym, 1991, 1992, 2003, 2013; Kiraly, 1995; Fraser, 1996; Neubert, 2000; Kelly, 2005; Hague et al., 2011; Pietrzrak, 2015), few …

El Uso Del Espanglish En Escuelas Como Una Expresión De La Identidad De La Tercera Cultura, Isabella N. Yeager

Global Tides

Este artículo analiza la conexión entre el fenómeno lingüístico del “espanglish” y el concepto sociológico de la identidad de la tercera cultura en el contexto del uso del cambio de código y el translenguaje por parte de los estudiantes de primaria. Busca demostrar que el espanglish es una expresión única de una identidad cultural híbrida, así como un léxico híbrido. Aunque la pedagogía convencional a veces puede buscar compartimentar cada idioma, la investigación que presenta este estudio demuestra que el contacto lingüístico entre el inglés y el español en el aula y más allá a menudo sirve no como una …

Spanish Language Development And Perceptions Of Undergraduate Students During Short-Term Study Abroad, Marissa Baugh

Transformations: Presentation Slides

The purpose of this evaluative case study is to determine how students from a 4-year medium-sized college in the northeast US who participated in a short-term study abroad program in Cuernavaca, Mexico perceived their experience as worthwhile in their education. This research seeks to answer the following questions: 1) How does short-term study abroad impact students’ perceived level of Spanish language proficiency?; 2) What are students’ thoughts about short-term study abroad with respect to their learning beyond their Spanish language development (e.g., financial investment, cultural appreciation, etc.)?; and 3) What are students’ overall perceptions of the short-term study abroad program? …

Language Barriers In The U.S.: Exploring The Protection Of Human Trafficking Victims Whose Native Language Is Spanish, Rachel Klien-Hart

Honors College Theses

Human trafficking exists as a multi-billion-dollar industry that impacts millions of people around the world, mainly targeting vulnerable populations. In the United States, one vulnerable population includes non-English speaking victims trafficked for labor, agriculture, domestic, or sex purposes. Protecting trafficking victims involves providing justice, medical assistance, identification, therapy, rehabilitation, and reintegration tools which often falls within the purview of nonprofit organizations. Research on human trafficking has underscored language barriers as a key obstacle in the protection of trafficking victims. However, little is known about the role of language barriers in the nonprofit sector, and specifically the experiences of nonprofit organizations …

Effects Of Pre-Literacy On High School English Learners (Els) In The Rural Upper Midwest, Maciah L. Lorang

Honors Thesis

The purpose of this research is to catalog the observed effects of pre-literacy on high school English learners (ELs) in the rural Upper Midwest and propose solutions on a local level. A phenomenological research design was implemented for this study. Participants were high school teachers who teach English learners in their classes. Participant demographics include four teachers, one who teaches an EL English course, one who teaches an EL algebra course, one who is an EL teacher, and one who is a Spanish teacher. Participants were interviewed until saturation was reached. The interviews were then transcribed as de-identifiable data (if …

Comparing Measures Of Phonological Development For Bilingual Speech Sample Analysis: A Descriptive Study, Julianna Ciccarelli

Honors Projects

The present study analyzed two common measures of phonology for use within a bilingual (Spanish-English) preschool population. The utilized measures include Percentage of Consonants Correct-Revised (PCC-R) and Phonological Mean Length of Utterance (pMLU) and were selected to avoid sources of bias, often found in standardized, norm-referenced assessments. The scores calculated from these measures were analyzed across language.

“It’S Not Just About Improving My Spanish.” Student Perceptions Of Service Learning, Farah Ali

Global Language Studies Faculty publications

In the last few decades, service learning (SL) has emerged as an instructional model that facilitates connections between learning experiences in and outside the classroom, and highlights the socio-political nature of language use (Grim, 2010; Bettencourt, 2015; Moreno-López et. al, 2017). However, its effective and relevant curricular implementation remains a challenge for educators. This exploratory paper examines how SL impacts advanced learners’ beliefs, attitudes, and motivation towards learning Spanish, as well as their ability to connect their service experiences with course content. Findings show that learners evaluate service experiences through a proficiency-based lens, where the success of their experiences depended …

Non-Argumental Clitics In Spanish And Galician: A Case Study Of The Distribution Of Solidarity And Ethical Clitics, Susana Huidobro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the properties of what traditional grammars call “superfluous elements” or non-arguments, so-called Ethical Dative Clitics (Bello 1954, Seco 1962 among others) and Solidarity Clitics (Álvarez, Rosario, X.L. Regueira & H. Monteaguedo 1986) in Spanish and Galician. This research fills an important gap in the existing formal literature on these forms, providing the first thorough syntactic and typological investigation of the latter phenomenon.

The study of non-argumental datives encounters difficulties at different levels: at a descriptive/empirical as well as at a theoretical level. From a descriptive point of view, there are no, so far in the literature, clear …

Taller Real, Laura Middlebrooks

Open and Affordable Course Content at VCU

The Taller REAL (Recursos Educativos Abiertos y Libres) BETA was created for use in Virginia Commonwealth University's fourth semester Spanish course, SPAN 202, in which students study inclusivity (la inclusividad), health and wellbeing (la salud y el bienestar), career paths and professionalism (las carreras y el profesionalismo) as well as current events (las noticias).

“It Wasn’T Just About Learning How To Speak Spanish”: Engaging Histories Of Oppression And Enslavement In Spanish Heritage Language Education, Tania Avilés, Anthony J. Harb

Publications and Research

We present a curricular intervention in elementary Spanish heritage language in a Hispanic serving institution located in the US Northeast (Bronx, NYC), that aims to contextualize Latinx students’ experiences and perceptions of Blackness within broader histories of oppression and enslavement. Our practice brings together critical Latinx pedagogy and critical approaches to Spanish heritage language education to facilitate sociohistorical consciousness for both language instructors and students through the use of open-access Latinx archival resources. We outline a three-week unit designed using the First Blacks in the Americas online collection curated by the City University of New York Dominican Studies Institute. During …

The Longitudinal Study Of Code-Switching In English-Instructed Spanish-English Bilingual Children, Molly K. Gasior

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The population of bilingual children is growing in the U.S. Code-switching, a common occurrence in bilingual language production, is the use of words in the non-target language (e.g., English) when speaking the target language (e.g., Spanish). There are different approaches within the literature about how code-switching is dealt with. The purpose of this study is to longitudinally track changes in code-switching in English and Spanish narrative retell language samples, verify how code-switching impacts the lexical measure of number of different words, and whether code-switching may be indicative of Spanish language loss. Thirty-seven Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers who attended an English immersion …

Clitic Doubling: The Case Of Nariño Andean Spanish, Jessica Paola Jurado Eraso

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis examines the behavior of clitic doubling in Nariñense, a little-studied Andean Spanish variety spoken in the southwest of Colombia, and compares it to well-studied varieties such as standard Peninsular, Rioplatense, and other Andean Spanish varieties. Its aim is to present novel data about clitic doubling in order to shed more light into the extensive literature about this phenomenon in Spanish. Through spontaneous speech recordings obtained from thirty native speakers of Nariñense, 133 sentences involving clitic doubling were analyzed. Features such as agreement matching between the clitic and the doubled NP, use of the preposition a to introduce the …

Phonetic Feature Size In Second Language Acquisition: Examining Vot In Voiceless And Voiced Stops, Daniel J. Olson

School of Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

Featural approaches to second language phonetic acquisition posit that the development of new phonetic norms relies on sub-phonemic features, expressed through a constellation of articulatory gestures and their corresponding acoustic cues, which may be shared across multiple phonemes. Within featural approaches, largely supported by research in speech perception, debate remains as to the fundamental scope or “size” of featural units. The current study examines potential featural relationships between voiceless and voiced stop consonants, as expressed through the voice onset time cue. Native English-speaking learners of Spanish received targeted training on Spanish voiceless stop consonant production through a visual feedback paradigm. …

Un Estudio Sociolingüistíco Del Español De Hombres Con Descendencia Mexicana Que Se Identifican Como Homosexuales, Víctor Bulfrano Estanislao

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Ciertos rasgos lingüísticos específicos se asocian con hablantes de diferentes grupos. Los investigadores sociolingüísticos han identificado una serie de características lingüísticas como marcadores del habla homosexual en inglés y español; el presente estudio examina si estas características están presentes en el español producido por hombres homosexuales bilingües. Los hablantes examinados son hombres mexicanos de entre 18 y 30 años que viven en Chicago o los suburbios circundantes, son bilingües y se identifican como homosexuales. Los participantes completaron una serie de tareas: un cuestionario del contexto lingüístico, una narración oral y una entrevista sociolingüística grabada con el investigador. Se examinaron los …

Temporal Fluency And Floor/Ceiling Scoring Of Intermediate And Advanced Speech On The Actfl Spanish Oral Proficiency Interview–Computer, Troy L. Cox, Alan V. Brown, Gregory L. Thompson

Faculty Publications

The rating of proficiency tests that use the Inter-agency Roundtable (ILR) and American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) guidelines claims that each major level is based on hierarchal linguistic functions that require mastery of multidimensional traits in such a way that each level subsumes the levels beneath it. These characteristics are part of what is commonly referred to as floor and ceiling scoring. In this binary approach to scoring that differentiates between sustained performance and linguistic breakdown, raters evaluate many features including vocabulary use, grammatical accuracy, pronunciation, and pragmatics, yet there has been very little empirical validation …

Language Maintenance In Utah: Spanish Heritage Speakers' Attitudes And Language Use, Perla Y. Escobar Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

The current study quantitatively and qualitatively investigated Spanish maintenance among 45 Spanish heritage language (SHL) speakers in Utah who completed a survey about their linguistic background, their attitudes toward Spanish, their self-rated Spanish proficiency, and their current Spanish usage. Nine participants were also interviewed to expound on their linguistic experience. Previous studies on language maintenance (Alba et al., 2002; Carreira & Kagan, 2011; Lanier, 2014; Lynch, 2000; Mejías et al., 2002; Potowski, 2004; Silva-Corvalán, 1994; Zentella, 1997) have analyzed different sociolinguistics factors that relate to Spanish maintenance and usage in areas with high Hispanic populations. Nevertheless, little research has been …

Korean Learners’ Acquisition And Use Of Variable First-Person Subject Forms In Spanish, Avizia Y. Long

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Within the scope of research that lies at the intersection of sociolinguistics and second language acquisition, there is a growing body of empirical work on learners’ acquisition of variable subject expression in Spanish. This research has been instrumental for demonstrating that second language (L2) learners acquire linguistic and social constraints on subject form use. The present study extends research on variable Spanish subject expression to an understudied learner population: native Korean-speaking learners. Interview data were examined for the range and frequency of first-person subject forms produced by Korean-speaking learners at four instructional levels as well as linguistic and individual (extralinguistic) …

Power, Policy, Profit: The Spanish Language In The United States, Eva C. Vazquez

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Over the past several decades, the Spanish language has been considered secondary to English, specifically in the United States. However, this paper argues that Spanish is one of the primary languages in the country because it is the second most spoken language, despite efforts to maintain a monolingual nation. Due to the impact of capitalism, if one’s first language is not English, they are separated and viewed as inferior in society. After providing background on the history of Spanish in the United States, this paper explores the impact of power, Americanization, education and cheap work on the Spanish language with …

Learner Development Of A Morphosyntactic Feature In Argentina: The Case Of Vos, Rebecca Pozzi

WLC Faculty Publications and Presentations

Students have been found to improve their sociolinguistic competence, particularly regarding the acquisition of dialectal features, while studying abroad. Nevertheless, most of the research on learner development of morphosyntactic features in Spanish-speaking immersion contexts has examined that of variants characteristic of Peninsular Spanish in Spain, namely clitics and the informal second-person plural vosotros. Since the informal second-person singular, vos, is more prevalent than its equivalent, tú, in several Latin American countries, learner acquisition of this feature also merits investigation. This article explores second-language learner production of vos among 23 English speakers during a 5-month semester in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a …

Features Of Linguacultural Specifics Of Borrowed Phraseological Units, Xurshid Sayfullayev

Mental Enlightenment Scientific-Methodological Journal

This article is devoted to the study of linguoculturological characteristics of phraseological units of the English language, which were borrowed from different sources - elements of the language, which are figuratively store and pass on from generation to generation experience, knowledge, stereotypes and value attitudes of national culture. Linguocultural analysis in phraseology allows you to fully identify the originality phraseological units and describe their role in the linguistic conceptualization of the world. this work considers borrowed phraseological units that are not only figuratively describes what is happening, but at the same time broadcasts symbols, stereotypes, standards, mythologemes, taking over the …

Spanish-Origin Verbal And Grammatical Borrowing In Paraguayan Guaraní, Josefina Bittar Prieto

Linguistics ETDs

Previous work on language change in contact situations has treated lexical borrowing and grammatical borrowing as discrete phenomena (Appel and Muysken 1987, Thomason 2001, Campbell 2013). Claims that lexical borrowing needs to occur before grammatical borrowing (e.g. Thomason and Kaufmann 1988) or that grammar can be borrowed without any lexicon (e.g. Aikhenvald 2002) are often mentioned in the literature. This dissertation explores the interplay between grammatical constructions (in the sense of Goldberg 2006) and lexical elements in intense contact situations. More specifically, it addresses the following research question: Are grammatical constructions borrowed independently from the elements contained in said constructions? …

No Spanish In Cinderella’S Kingdom: A Situated Ethnography Of Disney World’S Engagement With Elena Of Avalor, Diana Leon-Boys

Communication Faculty Publications

Research indicates that Disney theme parks function as sites of ideological negotiation. This study builds on the research by examining Disney World’s incorporation of its first avowed Latina princess, Elena of Avalor. Bringing together discourses of Latinidad, theme parks, and media, this essay focuses on how the park incorporates Elena into its landscape at the level of production, representation, and audiences. I argue that Disney’s inclusion of Elena, and by extension Latinidad, is malleable, situated within the geographic setting, and dependent on various factors seldom disclosed by the conglomerate. Ultimately, Elena exists as an outsider within the Disney park …

Beliefs Of Translators About Medical Spanish Pamphlets, Margaret Coulter

Honors Theses

This paper addresses the beliefs of professional Spanish medical translators regarding the use of dialect variation in medical Spanish translation and the resulting effects on the level of healthcare attained by Spanish speaking patients in the United States. The health gap between English-speaking and non-English patients is explored as it relates to inadequate translation of medical information and instructions leading to poorer health outcomes and higher readmission rates among Spanish speakers.

Service-Learning: A Translation Of Documents Into Spanish On Behalf Of Learning For All, Aidan Posey

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Learning for ALL (LFA) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit based in Omaha, NE. LFA offers resources to adults in the community by offering a variety of classes in literacy, English language, and Adult Basic Education. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the learning at LFA has transitioned to the online learning portal, Burlington English. However, the fact that Burlington English is presented and written in English poses a large barrier to the accessibility of online learning material. Current LFA management utilizes Google Translate to try and translate the steps to log into this platform and while a valuable tool, Google …

A Comparison Of Approval Ratings Of Gender Inclusive Spanish Suffixes Between Learners And Speakers Of Spanish., Chandler Nichols

Honors Theses

The following study aimed to investigate the correlation between varying levels of Spanish learners who had taken different levels of Spanish courses, and fluent speakers and their approval ratings of gender inclusive suffixes in Spanish. The study used a survey in order to gather information and approval ratings. The results indicated that higher level Spanish learners on average had lower approval ratings of the three gender inclusive suffixes included in the survey.

Bye, Bye, Bilinguals: The Removal Of English- Spanish Bilinguals From The Criminal Jury And Latino Discrimination, Ashley Rich

Chicago-Kent Law Review

No abstract provided.