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The Effects Of Audio Feedback On The L2 Writing Quality Of Egyptian University Students, Omar Abouelazm

Theses and Dissertations

The present study investigates the effects of training ESL students to utilize audio feedback on the fluency, accuracy, content and organization of their writing. It also examines ESL student attitudes and perceptions towards audio feedback and audio feedback training. Audio feedback is an innovative error correction technique in which the teacher records comments on students’ writing and saves them as an audio file. The audio file is then used by the student to revise a piece of writing. Audio feedback training refers to the idea of training ESL students on how to successfully utilize audio feedback in order to reap …

Continuity, Constellation, And Unworking: An Exploration Of Language In Nietzsche, Alicen L. Beheler

College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations

This project is an investigation of language in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. The framing question is whether Nietzsche’s treatment of language as an explicit philosophical theme in published work and notes of the early 1870s is in fact only an early interest abandoned by the later work and notes in which the treatment of language as such does not assume such a central role. I suggest that if we consider language not as a unitary concept but as a constellation, a network of shifting thematic nodes, we find that language remains a chief interest throughout the Nietzschean corpus, but …

Programming Generality Into A Performance Feedback Writing Intervention, Bridget Hier

Dissertations - ALL

Substantial numbers of students in the United States are performing below grade-level expectations in core academic areas, including mathematics, reading, and writing (Aud et al., 2012; National Center for Education Statistics, 2012). National estimates suggest that these deficits are greatest in the area of writing (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012; Persky, Daane, & Jin, 2003), presenting a clear need for research efforts that focus on the development of effective writing interventions. Although performance feedback procedures have been shown to produce promising short-term improvements in elementary-aged students' writing fluency skills (Eckert, Lovett, Rosenthal, Jiao, Ricci, & Truckenmiller, 2006), evidence of …

Transitioning To Writing About Writing: A Consideration Of The Metawriting Teaching Approach At The University Of Arkansas, Katie Michelle Smith

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses case studies of six Teaching Assistants and Instructors to analyze the curricular and pedagogical shift from a writing-through-literature model to the Composition II course to a metawriting approach during the 2014 spring semester at the University of Arkansas. The administrative decision from the Program in Rhetoric and Composition to make this transition came in response to the 2007 article by Elizabeth Wardle and Douglas Downs in College Composition and Communication outlining a "Writing about Writing" approach to teaching composition.

Voices From The Classroom: Elementary Students’ Perceptions Of Blogging, Ewa Mcgrail, Anne Davis

Georgia Educational Researcher

Blogging appears to be a promising instructional strategy which may provide solutions to some of the challenges in traditional writing instruction; however, few studies explore elementary students’ views on blogging. This qualitative case study gives elementary students voice as it examines their perceptions of blogging and their views of themselves as writers, readers, and learners. The researchers drew from multiple data sources, including student and teacher interviews, student and teacher blog writing, and classroom observations, to ascertain young writers’ perspectives. The findings indicate these student bloggers’ reader awareness and appreciation of the reader-writer relationship. Student bloggers also benefited from emotional …

An Investigation Of Teachers' Self-Reported And Actual Written Feedback Practices In Egyptian Esl Classes, Lidya Magdy Ibrahim Farag

Theses and Dissertations

There have been ongoing investigations on whether providing corrective feedback on grammatical errors in L2 writing is effective or not since the debate first emerged between Truscott (1996) and Ferris (1999). Research has focused mainly on students' performances and preferences as well as teachers' perceptions and beliefs regarding error correction. However, limited research has compared teachers' actual practices to their self-reported practices. Therefore, this study focused on written feedback practices in a university context in Egypt, where the researcher investigated how teachers actually corrected grammatical errors as compared to what they reported in the survey. The major error correction strategies …

The Benefits Of Outlining And Freewriting For People With Different Self-Monitoring Styles, Lisa B. Mintz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Writing is a skill that is highly individualized in terms of style and method of practice. Individual differences in writing strategy preferences have been demonstrated, but little is known about what factors contribute to the development of these preferences. Previous studies have demonstrated a relationship between self-monitoring, planning strategy type, and idea generation. However, there is little research that has investigated the effects of planning strategies and self-monitoring on essay cohesion. The current thesis investigates the relation between self-monitoring and essay planning strategies in essay cohesion and idea generation. Participants were administered the Snyder Self-monitoring inventory and were assigned to …

Tracing Development In College Students' Writing In Oman: A Contrastive Corpus Analysis, Houda Said Al-Habsi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

My dissertation focuses on ESL writing development of Omani students' writing at college level. More specifically, I am interested in tracing the students' development in college writing across three levels. My research questions are: are 4th year students' essays more complex than 2nd year students' essays? Are 2nd year students' essays more complex than foundation students' essays? If so, what features of language are driving these differences? My main hypothesis is that 4th year essays will show more linguistic features than 2nd year and foundation year essays and 2nd year essays will show more linguistic features than foundation year. This …

The 'Literacy' Idea, Ross Turner

Assessment GEMS

A central reason why researchers and practitioners refer to domain literacy is to draw attention to the kinds of things students learn in the domain. In a traditional learning domain the focus might be on the acquisition of discrete facts, skills and procedures that have little obvious connection or utility. In a learning domain with a literacy orientation, the focus is on applying the domain’s facts, skills and procedures to support creativity and inventiveness, to solve novel problems and to deal with the kinds of challenges that life presents outside the classroom. In the case of mathematics, for example, a …

Quiet On The Set!: Writing Socially In An Elementary After-School Video Club, Charles Jurich

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

The research presented is a qualitative case study of an after-school video club for elementary age students. The focus of the project revolved around one main question: how do students socially read and write videos? The broader goal of the question was to understand how students socially read and write multimodal texts with video as a subset. The study was approached from sociocultural approach to literacy that recognizes videomaking as a new literacies practice. As a literacy practice, videomaking incorporates multiple authors, multiple communicative modes (visual, spatial, aural, gestural, and linguistic), and involves complex and dynamic social interactions between both …

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Sign Language Ability In Young Deaf Signers Predicts Comprehension Of Written Sentences In English., Kathy N Andrew, Jennifer Hoshooley, Marc F Joanisse

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

We investigated the robust correlation between American Sign Language (ASL) and English reading ability in 51 young deaf signers ages 7;3 to 19;0. Signers were divided into 'skilled' and 'less-skilled' signer groups based on their performance on three measures of ASL. We next assessed reading comprehension of four English sentence structures (actives, passives, pronouns, reflexive pronouns) using a sentence-to-picture-matching task. Of interest was the extent to which ASL proficiency provided a foundation for lexical and syntactic processes of English. Skilled signers outperformed less-skilled signers overall. Error analyses further indicated greater single-word recognition difficulties in less-skilled signers marked by a higher …

Digital Praxis: A Model Owl For Critical Intervention In The Digital Environment, Kyle Larson

Theses & ETDs

This thesis proposes the creation of an online writing lab (OWL) for critical intervention in the digital environment. In particular, I construct an OWL that utilizes the distinct characteristics and possibilities available in the digital medium rather than merely reproducing the conventions of the print medium. For this purpose, I build a theoretical foundation that informs the OWL’s development, create a model OWL, and analyze the model OWL as a rhetorical construct. The theoretical foundation builds upon social constructionism and poetics to address the epistemological soundness of critical pedagogy and the unethical nature of banking education. The theories in this …

Texting And The Friction Of Writing, Lindsey P. Gustafson

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Learning To Retell Stories Through Comparative Teaching: Writing And Drawing, Rachel L. Lindle

Theses and Dissertations--Art and Visual Studies

Students who are emergent readers and writers are often difficult to assess, as they are unable to communicate understanding in writing. From my observations, these students communicate ideas best through concrete forms of expression, rather than the abstract formation of letters and writing that is unfamiliar to them. Drawing provides an alternate form of expression from writing. Based on information found in literature review and personal experiences from working with students who are emergent readers and writers, pictures and drawings are a bridge to communicate ideas with these students. This form of expression and communication may be a useful assessment …

Understanding The Effect Of Formulaic Language On Esl Teachers' Perceptions Of Advanced L2 Writing: An Application Of Corpus-Identified Formulaic Language, Alison Youngblood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A quantitative study was conducted to determine if the amount of formulaic language influenced ESL teachers' perceptions (n=102) of non-native writing skill, as evidenced by composite and sub-scale scores on the ESL Composition Profile (Jacobs et al., 1981). Formulaic language was operationalized as 25 three-word strings sampled from the writing sub-list of the Academic Formulas List (Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, 2010) and further validated as frequent in the Michigan Corpus of Upper Level Student Papers. The target formulaic sequences were divided into three experimental groups representing a low, mid, and high amount of formulaic language. Four advanced non-native writers generated argumentative, …

Teachers Adapting Common Core Informational-Text Writing Instruction For Students With Mild To Moderate Disabilities, Diana Hawley

Doctoral Dissertations

With the adoption of the Common Core State Standards, students must now become skilled at using different types of writing to help them critique text and process information. They also are required to write informational text. Informational-text writing is challenging for students with mild to moderate disabilities, including students with language-learning disabilities, who often struggle with aspects of language necessary for learning to read and write. These students show striking challenges with productivity, grammatical and spelling accuracy, and sentence complexity, with differences in performance by genre (Koutsoftas & Gray, 2012; Scott & Windsor, 2000; Troia, Lin, Cohen, & Monroe, 2011). …

Sisyphus Rolls On: Reframing Women's Ways Of “Making It” In Rhetoric And Composition, Kristin Bivens, Martha Mckay Canter, Kirsti Cole, Violet Dutcher, Morgan Gresham, Luisa Rodriguez-Connal, Eileen Schell

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

This is a multi-vocal, multi-institutional piece that examines ways women "make it" in rhetoric and composition. It is in the spirit of being more inclusive that we present our ideas about women's ways of making it in rhetoric and composition. This inclusiveness includes a written transcript of our audio narratives. Humbly, we present our work in this piece after four years of writing and revising in the work spaces we all know so well and offer several glimpses of the work women do as writing teachers. We honor all of the women who teach writing -- those who have made …

Text Messaging: An Analysis Of Concise Strategies Of Politeness, Jessica Evans, Dr. Wendy Baker

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The findings of this study have both theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, this study helps in expanding our understanding of how new mediums such as texting differ from traditional forms of speech and writing (Baron, 2008). One of the important practical implications of this research is a better understanding of the appropriate uses of texting, which is important especially for non-native English speakers to understand. We hope that the findings of this study will help improve our understanding not only of how such mediums are used (especially how they relate to more traditional forms of speech and writing) but also …

Does Completion Of Quantitative Courses Predict Better Quantitative Reasoning-In-Writing Proficiency?, Nathan D. Grawe

Numeracy

Using data from Carleton College, this study explores the connection between students’ completion of a range of quantitative courses and the quality of their quantitative reasoning in writing (QRW) as exhibited in courses throughout the undergraduate curriculum during the first two years of college. Because the assessment takes place in the context of a campus-wide initiative which has improved QRW on the whole, the study identifies course-taking patterns which predict stronger than average improvement. Results suggest QRW is not exceptionally improved by taking courses in statistics, principles of economics, or in the social sciences more broadly. QRW performance is, on …

A Biliteracy Dialogue Approach To One-On-One Writing Instruction With Bilingual, Mexican, Immigrant Writers, W. Jason Stegemoller

Faculty Publications

This interpretive study explores the writing and writing experiences of 2 bilingual, Mexican, immigrant undergraduates at a US university. Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester’s (2003) continua model of biliteracy situates writing interactions to understand how students explore and draw on their bilingual and bicultural resources as they develop academic writing in English in the university. Data include questionnaires, literacy history interview-conversations, text-based conversations, student writing, course syllabi, and assignment sheets. Biliteracy dialogues demonstrate how students approached writing. The 1st student, Diego, focused on negotiating what he perceived as appropriate to include in his writing, while the 2nd student, Nicolas, connected to academic …

Using Self-Regulated Strategy Development With At-Risk Writers With Asperger Syndrome, Lindsay M. Booker

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of implementing the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model of instruction (Graham & Harris, 2005; Harris & Graham, 1996) with a population of middle school students with Asperger syndrome (AS). A multiple-baseline design across participants was used to examine the effectiveness of the SRSD instructional intervention on writing skills and self-regulation, attitudes, self-efficacy, and social validity. Each participant was taught SRSD story writing strategies, and wrote stories in response to story prompts during the baseline, instruction, post-instruction, and maintenance phases. Stories were assessed for writing quantity (TWW), writing quality (%CWS), and …

"Game Recognize Game": How Hip-Hop Rhetoric Affects Perceptions Of Composition In College Freshmen, Ages 18-24, Veronica Nanette Williams

Theses and Dissertations

In an effort to help justify hip-hop as a valid example of rhetoric, this project is an informal investigation of how the hip-hop rhetoric affects perceptions of composition in college freshmen ages 18-24 using a small survey sample of first-year composition students. The resulting data indicates that hip-hop rhetoric does affect the perceptions of composition in hip-hop oriented students, specifically, hip-hop rhetoric's emphasis on ethos, or authenticity, seems to influence those students' assessments of their college compositions in terms of classical rhetorical aims.

Arts & Humanities News, Georgia Southern University

Arts & Humanities: News & Publications (2009-2023)

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Dyslexic Writers : What Educators Can Do To Improve Writing For Dyslexic Students, Ann Myers

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Writing is a complex task that is required in nearly every academic subject area. Often, it involves using a multitude of language based skills such as spelling, vocabulary usage, fine motor skills (physical writing), comprehension of ideas, sequence of concepts, and text organization. Dyslexic students will spend some much of their time in mainstream classrooms performing a variety of writing tasks, such as sentence, paragraph, or essay writing. Students with dyslexia often have weaknesses in these foundational skills that can, at times, impair their ability to succeed in writing. Research suggests that implementing support in the form of academic support, …

Remix Perspective: Transdisciplinary Insights For The Art Of Writing, Marianne Rogoff

English and Creative Writing | Faculty Scholarship

How do creative writers transform the complexity of life into literature? Remix Perspectives presents a bricolage synthesis of transdisciplinary insights for workshop leaders and creative writers, appropriated from selected artistic and literary voices from more or less the last hundred years. Seminal concepts from arts such as painting, poetry, dance, music, and photography are gathered here as they inform the arts of literary fiction and creative nonfiction. Thinkers from philosophy, psychology, literary theory, complexity, and metaphysics address the inner and outer realms where the work of the writer is generated and goes forth.

Effect Of Brief Mindfulness Meditation On Expressive Writing, Alvin Poon

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

An impressive body of research indicates that expressive writing, which encourages participants

Writing Affects The Brain Network Of Reading In Chinese: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study, Fan Cao, Marianne Vu, Derek Ho Lung Chan, Jason M. Lawrence, Lindsay N. Harris, Qun Guan, Yi Xu, Charles A. Perfetti

Faculty Articles, Papers, and Other Scholarship

We examined the hypothesis that learning to write Chinese characters influences the brain’s reading network for characters. Students from a college Chinese class learned 30 characters in a character-writing condition and 30 characters in a pinyin-writing condition. After learning, functional magnetic resonance imaging collected during passive viewing showed different networks for reading Chinese characters and English words, suggesting accommodation to the demands of the new writing system through short-term learning. Beyond these expected differences, we found specific effects of character writing in greater activation (relative to pinyin writing) in bilateral superior parietal lobules and bilateral lingual gyri in both a …

Universal Reading Processes Are Modulated By Language And Writing System, Charles A. Perfetti, Lindsay N. Harris

Faculty Articles, Papers, and Other Scholarship

The connections among language, writing system, and reading are part of what confronts a child in learning to read. We examine these connections in addressing how reading processes adapt to the variety of written language and how writing adapts to language. The first adaptation (reading to writing), as evidenced in behavioral and neuroscience data, is achieved through a universal constraint that language places on writing and through the tuning of reading procedures imposed by specific features of writing systems. Children acquire skill in reading through increasing specialization of procedures tuned to their writing system, while also acquiring more general (universal) …

The Service-Learning Writing Classroom: A Safe Haven For Articulating Difficult Stories About Whiteness And Race, Adam Webb

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Service-learning is an educational method that is usually examined for its practical applications and outcomes, and can help instructors and students to realize the connective aspect of classroom discussions, assignments, activities and discourses that occur within the community. In this respect, "connective" refers to more than just bridging the distance between the classroom and community using service-learning. Instead, it acts like the "connective human tissue" that unites individuals together. Individuals as biological beings themselves are the connective tissue that unites them linguistically, physically and emotionally. In essence, the connective human tissue that unites individuals together creates an intertwined community through …