English Language and Literature Commons^™

Effect Of Directed Study Of Mathematics Vocabulary On Standardized Mathematics Assessment Questions, Adel Marlane Waite

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The problems under investigation included (a) Did a directed study of mathematics vocabulary significantly affect student performance levels on standardized mathematical questions? and (b) Did the strategies used in this study significantly affect student performance levels on standardized mathematical questions? The population consisted of eighth-grade pre-algebra students from two different middle schools in southern Indiana. This quasi-experimental study was of a quantitative, repeated-measures design, using a population of approximately 140 eighth-grade students with a control sample of 37 and an experimental sample of 52. I performed a repeated measures ANCOVA to analyze scores from a mathematics vocabulary posttest for each …

Key Performance Indicators Of Part-Time Employees Teaching Online, Mark L. Alexander

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Online learning has caused a seismic shift in higher education since its rise beginning at the turn of the century. A portion of that impact has been on the ascent of the part-time employee teaching online. Adjunct instructors account for the overwhelming majority of the faculty providing education to these online learners. Because an instructor’s performance impacts students’ learning and their resulting end of course evaluation has such a bearing upon that person’s employment, it is imperative to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) of employees teaching online. The problem addressed by this study was to determine the factors that affected …

With Great Power: Examining The Representation And Empowerment Of Women In Dc And Marvel Comics, Kylee Kilbourne

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Throughout history, comic books and the media they inspire have reflected modern society as it changes and grows. But women’s roles in comics have often been diminished as they become victims, damsels in distress, and sidekicks. This thesis explores the problems that female characters often face in comic books, but it also shows the positive representation that new creators have introduced over the years. This project is a genealogy, in which the development of the empowered superwoman is traced in modern age comic books. This discussion includes the characters of Kamala Khan, Harley Quinn, Gwen Stacy, and Barbara Gordon and …

Bibliography For Victorian England Holiday Display, Kristin Laughtin-Dunker

Library Displays and Bibliographies

A bibliography of materials in the Leatherby Libraries related to the celebration of winter holidays in Victorian England, with a particular focus on the works of Charles Dickens.

Bohemians: Greenwich Village And The Masses, Joanna Levin

English Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"This chapter traces the convergence of 'the revolt against puritanism' and 'the revolt against capitalism' in the 1910s, focusing on the most celebrated American bohemia Greenwich Village - and on The Masses, the Village periodical that provided the most influential expression of the double-edged bohemian revolt. The effort to combine the personal and the political, the artistic and the social helped fuel a host of interconnected movements and alliances within the bohemian milieu, and the bohemians called upon both Marx and Freud in the effort to promote revolutionary change. Often riddled with internal contradictions and susceptible to forces of …

Jittery Gauges: Combating The Polarizing Effect Of Political Data Visualizations Through Uncertainty, Bethany Blaire Hardy

Theses and Dissertations

Since the late 1800s, public data visualizations displaying election forecasts and results—such as the red and blue map of the United State—have presented an irreparably divided country. However, on November 8, 2016, the New York Times published a data visualization on their live presidential forecast page that broke over a century of visual expectations, inspiring many to tweet reactions to what popular media has dubbed the "jittery gauges." Not surprisingly, the tweets about this unique and difficult-to-interpret display were mostly negative. This paper argues, though, that the negative feedback indicates that the gauges, while imperfect, represent an important step away …

Distributed Computing In Internet Of Things (Iot) Using Mobile Ad Hoc Network (Manet): A Swarm Intelligence Based Approach, John Selvadurai

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Internet of Things (IoT) is a fast-growing technological trend, which is expected to revolutionize the world by changing the way we do things. IoT is a concept that encourages all the electronic devices to connect to the internet and interact with each other. By connecting all these devices to the internet, new markets can be created, productivity can be improved, operating costs can be reduced and many other benefits can be obtained. In IoT architecture, often sensors and aggregators collect data and send to a cloud server for analyzing via the traditional cloud-server model. This client-server architecture is not adequate …

A Study Of The Factors Influencing Last Mile Residential Fixed Broadband Pricing In Kentucky, Michael Ramage

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ever since the first telegraph, a technology management challenge has existed to expand the availability of communication services farther into rural and unserved areas, while maintaining the affordability of those services to residential users. Over the years, that challenge has transformed from telegraph to broadband communications or high-speed Internet access. The challenge of affordable expansion of broadband services is seen all across the United States including the Commonwealth of Kentucky. This study examined the extent to which community and provider-related supply and demand factors among last mile residential fixed broadband service areas impact the non-promotional advertised price of last mile …

Interdisciplinary Collaboration And Metacognitive Reflection: A Case Study Of Faculty Teaching In Learning Communities, Melissa Perry

English Dissertations - Archive

This qualitative case study examines the nature of faculty collaboration within the context of academic learning communities using third generation activity theory as an organizing framework. First, this study investigates how faculty collaborate across disciplinary lines to create and implement curriculum for paired and team-taught interdisciplinary learning community courses. Furthermore, this study seeks to understand whether these collaborative practices provide opportunities for discipline-based metacognitive reflection. Through the analysis of semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and course documents, the study findings confirm that learning communities do, in fact, create opportunities for faculty to become more self-aware of their own disciplinary conventions and …

Devotion, Domesticity, And Healing Among Early Modern Women: Writing Religion And Medicine In Personal Manuscripts, Jana Jackson

English Theses - Archive

The establishment of the Church of England in the sixteenth century instigated a period of turbulence as religious practices transitioned from medieval Catholicism to post-Reformation Protestantism. Protestant theology idealized proficient domesticity as an essential signifier of piety for women. In practice, daily spiritual examination, moral purity, competence in managing a household, and the efficacious administration of domestic medicine largely defined a pious Protestant woman. Consequently, women validated their piety by leaving evidence of these practices in diaries, autobiographical writing, and receipt books. Religious meditative writing and recipes occur side by side in early modern pious women's manuscripts intentionally because each …

African American High School Students’ Perceptions Of Their College Counseling Experience, Latonya M. Turner

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study looked at high school African American students’ perceptions of their college counseling experiences. Much research has been done to highlight the views and/or perceptions of various stakeholders regarding college counseling with respect to African American students (Cabrera & La Nasa, 2000; Hossler & Stage, 1992; Ng, Wolf-Wendel, & Lomardi, 2014). A few examples of stakeholders are administrators, teachers, parents or guardians, and college-going organizations. However, little research exists on the views and or perceptions of college counseling from the student’s perspective (Howard, 2003). Knowing the perceptions of students provides a better understanding of how African American students in …

What Is The Influence Of Form-Focused Instruction Of Copula And Auxiliary (Be) On Esl Learners?, Abdulaziz Ibrahim Alraddadi

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explored the influence of form-focused instruction (FFI) in teaching English copula and auxiliary (be) to English as a second language (ESL) learners. Following the noticing hypothesis, FFI, and the basic principles of curriculum and instruction theory, this study investigates if ESL learners make omission, misuse, or misjudgment errors while acquiring English as a second language. Also, the study examined whether ESL learners show significant improvement in their knowledge of English copula and auxiliary (be) after receiving FFI. Previous copula and auxiliary (be) research (Jishvithaa, Tabitha, & Kalajahi, 2013; Muftah & Eng, 2011; Unlu & Hatipoglu, 2012) has shown …

A Study Of The Material Inspection Record And Quality Systems: A Case In The United States Department Of The Navy, Larry W. Brown Jr.

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Defective products and services are a part of every industry, sector, and organization. Minimization of those defects is essential for business success. The later those defects are found, the more they cost the business and consumer. This study investigated the impact having an accredited Quality Management System (QMS) had on the acceptance of delivered product. The study focused on the products delivered to the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) and Naval Supply Systems Command (NAVSUP) organizations. This study investigated the statistical significance between the means of the groups within size and number of accreditation. The dependent variables were Material Inspection …

The Effectiveness Of Concurrent Design On The Cost And Schedule Performance Of Defense Weapons System Acquisitions, Randolph B. Robertson

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the impact of concurrent design on the cost growth and schedule growth of US Department of Defense Major Defense Acquisition Systems (MDAPs). It is motivated by the question of whether employment of concurrent design in the development of a major weapon system will produce better results in terms of cost and schedule than traditional serial development methods. Selected Acquisition Reports were used to determine the cost and schedule growth of MDAPs as well as the degree of concurrency employed. Two simple linear regression analyses were used to determine the degree to which cost growth and schedule growth …

Dreadful Reality: Fear And Madness In The Fiction Of H. P. Lovecraft, Phillip J. Snyder

Honors Theses

The effectiveness of H. P. Lovecraft’s horror relies on an atmosphere of dread in his stories. Both the verisimilitude of Lovecraft’s stories and the dilemma many of his protagonists face in losing their sanity or being perceived to have lost their sanity play a large role in creating this atmosphere. By viewing Lovecraft’s fiction through the lens of recent psychological research on fear, this project shows how his intuitive understanding of fear and his vivid imagery and sensory descriptions conform to our understanding of unconscious automatic threat avoidance behaviors. Because Lovecraft’s behavioral descriptions accurately reflect these behaviors, they increase the …

Understanding The English Bible: A Comparative Analysis Of Four Bible Versions, Michael R. Coats

Honors Theses

Scholarship pertaining to the Bible accounts for a great deal of research. A search for “the Bible” on just the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries website archive results in 549,075 hits, and specifying “English Bible versions” only reduces those results to 70,000. My largest difficulty in discussing the Bible lies not in finding a conversation but in finding which part of the conversation to enter. In the past fifty years, one of the largest emphases has been on using the best translation style for the Bible, a topic that has dominated the field of biblical scholarship (Ryken, Understanding 15). I …

The Many Masks Of A Writer: A Dramaturgical Approach To Composition Pedagogy And Literature Analysis, Kathryn Quesenbury

English Dissertations - Archive

Audience theories discuss many aspects of the entity of audience, from specific, concrete individuals to general, abstract readers. Composition pedagogical approaches to audience, however, seem limited. Writers, at times, are directed to have a concrete reader in mind, and other times, writers hold certain expectations for those readers and provide textual clues for them to follow. Which approach to take varies on the situation, but teaching writers this type of discernment can be challenging. Erving Goffman provides a possible solution in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.Goffman analyzes how individuals portray themselves differently depending on the social situation, and …

Incorporating Lean Non-Value Added Variants Into A Method Of Determining Stakeholder Salience For First-Line Manager Decision Making, Bruce H. Bader

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research brings together two streams of thought for first-line manager decision-making. The first is the quality system model, in particular, Lean operations. The second is Stakeholder Theory. Both streams have been identified as ways to improve value of the organization. Previous studies disagree regarding whether Lean and Stakeholder theory can work together. The potential problem of having a poor balance of Stakeholders and Lean waste is that exclusive focus on one may result in less awareness of the other, in which case value can be lost by the organization. This research investigates if both Lean waste and Stakeholder salience …

Development Of A Quality Management Assessment Tool To Evaluate Software Using Software Quality Management Best Practices, Kishore Erukulapati

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Organizations are constantly in search of competitive advantages in today’s complex global marketplace through improvement of quality, better affordability, and quicker delivery of products and services. This is significantly true for software as a product and service. With other things being equal, the quality of software will impact consumers, organizations, and nations. The quality and efficiency of the process utilized to create and deploy software can result in cost and schedule overruns, cancelled projects, loss of revenue, loss of market share, and loss of consumer confidence. Hence, it behooves us to constantly explore quality management strategies to deliver high quality …

“They All Write About Some Woman In Their Poetry”: The Heroines Of Ulysses And As I Lay Dying, Elizabeth O'Malley

Senior Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

16th Century Shakespeare And 21st Century Students, Sheridan Lynn Steelman

Dissertations

Drawing on examples from the author’s and colleagues classrooms, this dissertation shows how an historical approach to teaching Shakespeare, drawing on primary documents from the period, opens meaningful interpretations, issues and questions for secondary students. Chapter One reviews current pedagogical approaches to teaching Shakespeare, close reading, reader response, and performance to set forth the rationale for teaching Shakespeare using primary documents. Chapter Two highlights ninth grade students studying Romeo and Juliet and includes classroom stories about engagement with documents about gender, sexuality, violence, and potions. Chapter Three describes two general English 11 classes and their successes and challenges with Hamlet …

The Broadsheet- Issue 22, Merrimack College

The Broadsheet

Merrimack College's English Department newsletter.

This issue features:

• English Career Night: Recalibrating Dream Job Expectations
• Remaining Open to All Possibilities: English Alumni Offer Their Wisdom
• The Impact of Button Poetry: Olivia Gatwood Inspires Generations of Women
• An Interview with Dr. Christy Pottroff

Idioms Or Open Choice? A Corpus Based Analysis, Kaitlyn Alayne Vanwagoner

Theses and Dissertations

The ambiguous nature of idioms has been a persistent challenge for English language learners and researches alike. Problematic issues include identifying which idioms are most pertinent for study, and the question of how frequently idiom forms found in dictionaries and other canonized resources actually function as idioms in real language use. This study differentiates between idiom forms used idiomatically (idiom-principle) versus literally (open-choice principle), and provides quantitative data to assess this difference. The data was obtained through a corpus analysis of 1,000 randomly-selected idioms in 10,000 randomly-selected contexts (10 contexts per idiom), and revealed that the majority of idiom forms …

Transnational Uses Of Mafia Imagery In Zadie Smith’S White Teeth, Andrea Ciribuco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Transnational Uses of Mafia Imagery in Zadie Smith's White Teeth" Andrea Ciribuco discusses the literary representation of multiculturalism in Zadie Smith's first novel, White Teeth (2000). The novel focuses on multicultural encounters in Great Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on one site for these encounters: the character of Millat Iqbal, who joins a gang of teenagers and subsequently a radical Islamic group in his problematic search for identity and belonging. This search is characterized by Millat's tendency to define himself by reference to well-known pop-cultural Mafia figures, whom he …

Coding The Discourse And Translingual Strategies Of Collaborative Writing Of Secondary Education Students, Zane Lee Arredondo

Theses and Dissertations

Kenneth Bruffee used collaborative writing pedagogy to help reacculturate students’ discoursal identities to help them adhere to the expectations of the academic community. Although studies have shown that reacculturation may not exactly happen, Collaborative writing pedagogy still has maintained its presence within Composition studies since then and has been adapted into being implemented into digitally shared spaces. However, one aspect has been overlooked about physical shared spaces, the conversations themselves being studied. This study explores Kenneth Bruffee’s constructive conversations among secondary students within collaborative writing pedagogy. The collaborative sessions are recorded and viewed with a translingual lens applying Johnny Saldana’s …

Projecting Culture Through Literary Exportation: How Imitation In Scandinavian Crime Fiction Reveals Regional Mores, Bradley Hartsell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reexamines the beginnings of Swedish hardboiled crime literature, in part tracking its lineage to American culture and unpacking Swedish identity. Following the introduction, the second chapter asserts how this genre began as a form of escapism, specifically in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Roseanna. The third chapter compares predecessor Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep with Roseanna, and how Sweden’s greater gender tolerance significantly outshining America’s is reflected in literature. The fourth chapter examines how Henning Mankell’s novels fail to fully accept Sweden’s complicity in neo-Nazism as an active component of Swedish identity. The final chapter reveals …

You're A Genius All The Time: Analyzing The Effectiveness Of Kerouac's Spontaneous Prose On Empowering English Language Learners, Robert Casas

Theses and Dissertations

The engineer of the Beat Movement, Jack Kerouac, began his writing career as an ELL. Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose helped him navigate through language acquisition to establish rhetoric in English, and empowered other Beat Writers to expressively develop their thoughts. Spontaneous Prose can also help other ELLs develop their own rhetorical agency. For ELL writers, writing in English often makes them feel disenfranchised, disempowered, and discouraged. However, Spontaneous Prose as a pedagogical tool empowers ELL writers to begin the process of transculturally repositioning themselves in using writing as a form of rhetorical expression. This study investigates the pedagogical effectiveness of Spontaneous …

Medieval Literature And Young Adult Fiction: A Comparison Of Chaucer And Sarah J. Maas, Dana Cuadrado

Honors College Theses

The medieval works of Geoffrey Chaucer and the contemporary works of Sarah J. Maas employ three of the same themes: forbidden love, insta-love, and love triangles. These themes are based in the medieval literary tradition of courtly love as first written by Andreas Cappellanus in the twelfth century. Sarah J. Maas is a contemporary author of the young adult fantasy series A Court of Thorns and Roses that follows a young girl who by magical circumstances becomes romantically involved with two male faeries. This modern series portrays the same themes that Chaucer’s works of Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury …

"To You I Give Myself, For I Am Yours": Editorial Giving And Taking In Shakespeare's As You Like It, Jennifer Jean Thorup

Theses and Dissertations

In As You Like It 5.4.107-08 we receive Rosalind returning as herself”a woman”no longer in the guise of Ganymede, the boy page. Her first lines upon returning are repetitive: To you I give myself, for I am yours [To Duke Senior] / To you I give myself, for I am yours [To Orlando]. However, comparing Folio versions of these lines produces a provocative variant. In the third and fourth folios, these lines are no longer a repetitious patriarchal pledging, but a tender dialogic exchange "much like vows" between Rosalind and Orlando. While none of our modern Shakespeare editions make a …

Thinking Before You Act: A Constructive Logic Approach To Crafting Performance-For- Development Narrative, Angela Duggins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The intent of this thesis was to test the feasibility of constructing performance-for-development narrative using a constructive logic approach. I created an equation which expressed the sum of non-human-elements as the sum of a narrative with each element serving as a variable. I used a review of persuasion literature to provide insight into the selection and manipulation of each variable. I provided my family as a hypothetical example and used my knowledge of their preferences and communication styles in conjunction with the literature and the equation to craft a narrative which might increase pro-school attitudes in other families like my …