Modern Languages Commons^™

Explorando Lo No-Binario: Un Proyecto Sobre El Lenguaje Inlcusivo, Los Pronombres De Género, Y El Género No-Binario En Español, Elijah Michael Sobrien

World Languages and Cultures

En este proyecto, he traducido un sitio web de Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, sobre el uso de los pronombres de género. Además de la traducción, he explicado la razón por la cual es importante traducir este documento y proporcionar acceso a la información a diversas comunidades. La meta de este proyecto es promover el uso del lenguaje inclusivo entre todas personas. La traducción es importante porque para usar lenguaje inclusivo, una persona tiene que educarse sobre los pronombres de género y esforzarse por cambiar su modo de hablar. Este documento puede servir como recurso para personas que quieren aprender …

Afro-Americano: The Transracialization Of The African-American Spanish Speaker, John M. Flanagan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Transracialization is not a biological term connoting the change of one’s skin tone to become a member of a different race. Its definition has its roots in racialization—the ideological process that describes how one assembles ideas about groups based on their race and decides, for example, what a ‘Black’ person is and how ‘Black’ people speak. Thus, transracialization is a linguistic term that describes the political and sociocultural act of recontextualizing one’s phenotype with the use of language, and in so doing, upending the observers’ stereotypical expectations of who one is (Alim 2016). This dissertation deals with how Spanish influences …

Aventuras En Todo El Mundo, Maya G. Blair

World Languages and Cultures

This project is a fictional collection of stories baed loosely off of my own travel experiences during my college years. My goal with this piece of literature is to expose the reader to a wide variety of different cultures around the world. I do this with by recounting events which are loosely based off of my own adventures. I found inspiration for this piece of literature from my adventures for sure, but especially from my friends and all the amazing people who I met on my travels.

By understanding other cultures and people we can collaborate better on a global …

Investigando La Creación De Un Canal De Noticias BilingüE En Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo: Un Estudio De La Representación LingüÍstica, Paige Farris Mcgill

World Languages and Cultures

The purpose of this research study is to determine if there is a desire or demand for a bilingual English-Spanish news outlet at Cal Poly. Spanish is considered the most relevant language because it is the second most frequently spoken language in the community. Results are based on analysis of data collected through an electronic survey and various interviews. Demographics of the university as well as the surrounding community are also factors to consider.

Viral Stories In Spanish And English: A Qualitative Analysis Of Narrative Perceptions Regarding Infant Immunizations Across Major Ethno-Linguistic Communities, Zeynep H. Elshaer

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The intent of this thesis is to analyze the varying perceptions among Hispanic (Spanish-speaking) and Anglophone communities regarding vaccines and more specifically infant immunization practices, in order to identify common or diverging patterns of communication, information dissemination, and narrative discourse. Currently, medical messaging and health policy is largely formulated without thorough attention to the different ways diverse or minority ethno-linguistic communities may interpret the information, thereby leading to deficiencies in effective communication practices between individuals and healthcare providers or policymakers, and outright opposition between informal and formal public health messaging. This evaluation was conducted in order to broaden the current …

The Long-Term Impact Of A Study Trip Abroad On The Acquisition Of Regional Spanish Vocabulary Incidentally, Juan P. Rodríguez Prieto

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This quantitative study investigated the possible gains in the acquisition of regional vocabulary as a result of incidental learning after studying abroad for one semester. Five college students took courses at a language institute in Madrid (Spain) while living with a host family during a semester, while a control group with five participants continued their studies at XXXX, in the US. They took a survey online that contained forty vocabulary items exclusive to Spain (majo, mola, guay and similar) three times: at the beginning and at the end of the program and after three years. Results indicated …

The Impact Of College Students’ Motivational Orientations And The Social Dimension Of Emotional Intelligence In Their Willingness To Study Abroad, Juan P. Rodríguez Prieto

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This study investigated the effect of motivational orientations and the social aspects of emotional intelligence (EI) on L2 Spanish learners’ willingness to participate in a study abroad program. The only significant result was the correlation between an integrative motivational orientation and the Altruism Scale score (N = 68, r = .290, p < .05), indicating that those learners with a higher desire to learn the L2 in order to interact with members of the target community also showed more responsiveness to others as measured by empathy, nurturance, helpfulness, and social responsibility. No additional interactions were found between the motivational orientations and the social aspects of EI. Neither the motivational orientations (integrative/instrumental) nor the social subscales of EI used correlated with the L2 learners’ participation in a short-term (three weeks to Costa Rica, N = 30) or a long-term study abroad program (a full semester to Spain, N = 13). This finding is indicative that those variables do not seem to have an influential effect or predictability on whether participants would ultimately continue their study of L2 Spanish in a foreign country or at home in the near future.

Guiding Language Students To Self-Sustained Learning, Hyrum Boone Checketts

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

This portfolio is a compilation of written pieces which express the author’s beliefs about excellence in second language teaching. The views expressed here have been shaped by the author’s personal experience and by his time in the Master of Second Language Teaching (MSLT) program and are supported by relevant research throughout.

This portfolio contains three sections: (1) teaching perspectives, (2) research perspectives, and (3) annotated bibliographies. The teaching perspective section is centered on the author’s teaching philosophy, which emphasizes communication in the target language, classroom community, and student motivation. The second section consists of three research papers written over the …

Supporting "Pedagogical" Spanish Language Competencies: Bilingual Teacher Education "En La Frontera", Christian E. Zúñiga

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

This autoethnography explores my experience as a bilingual teacher educator on the Texas, United States-Mexico border supporting the development of preservice teachers' pedagogical Spanish language competencies through a course that I have been developing over the last few years. To this aim, I look at my positionality and experiences developing my bilingualism in the same border community and my pedagogical Spanish language competence. My goal is to suggest how teacher education can support the development of bilingual teacher candidates' Spanish language competence in ways that recognize the linguistic diversity of border communities, critically unpack hegemonic ideologies, and prepare teacher candidates …

Encouraging Languages Other Than English In First-Year Writing Courses: Experiences From Linguistically Diverse Writers, Alyssa G. Cavazos

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

First-Year Writing (fyw) courses are ideal writing spaces where students' diverse identities and language resources can flourish for specific rhetorical purposes. While research has focused on multilingual students' language and writing practices, little attention has focused on self-identified multilingual students' perceptions of language difference in fyw. Because fyw courses are an integral space in students' writing experiences and an ideal place to counter English-only ideologies, this article focuses on self-identified multilingual students' perceptions of how they negotiate language practices in academic contexts in higher education and how they perceive the role of languages other than English in fyw. Self-identified multilingual …

Coarticulation In Two Fricative-Vowel Sequences Of Latin American Spanish, Jeff Renaud

Celebration of Learning

Dialectal surveys of Latin American Spanish (Perissinotto 1975, Resnick 1975) describe three main possible pronunciations for fu (fuego 'fire') and fo (foco 'focus') sequences: faithful [f], velarized [x], and bilabialized [ɸ], in order of frequency. While the velar realization has received phonetic and theoretical consideration (Lipski 1995, Mazzaro 2011), little is understood about the voiceless bilabial fricative [ɸ] in Spanish. This paper describes a three-part production study to uniformly account for the unfaithful velar and bilabial realizations.

Mazzaro (2011) explains the velar [x] variant by arguing that, given the acoustic similarity of, e.g., [fu]/[xu], listeners misperceive a speaker's …

El Tango Y La Cultura Popular En La Reciente Narrativa Argentina, Monica A. Agrest

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of this doctoral thesis is to show that Tango as scenario, background, atmosphere or lending its stanzas and language, helps determine the tone and even the sentiment of disappointment and nostalgia, which are in much of Argentine recent narrative. In addition, this thesis aims, to answer questions like: How is it possible for Tango to transform itself into a literary component, and to be considered essential to Argentinean identity? Which of its characteristics allow it to provide literary language, atmosphere and even inspiration to the narrative’s creative process? How is the intertextual dialogue between its lyrics and the …

Late L2 Acquisition And Phonological Memory Development, Madeline Westerhoff

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

The development of phonological memory, a subdivision of short term memory, is crucial to learning and analyzing sequences of sounds to form words and phrases. This process utilizes short term representation and rehearsal to allow for the eventual long term representation of language. Individuals learning more than one language must acquire even more of these language sequences than monolinguals. Previous research agrees that early Spanish-English bilinguals have superior phonological memory to monolinguals, however the impact of second language acquisition on phonological memory remains unknown. This study examined three groups of undergraduate participants studying Spanish as a second language including study …

Agitando Lo Cotidiano. Una Conversación Sobre El Desafío Ⓐnarquista Frente Al Sexismo En El Lenguaje, Mariel Mercedes Acosta Matos, Ernesto Cuba

Publications and Research

Ernesto Cuba entrevista a Mariel Acosta acerca de los hallazgos en sus tesis de maestría, que aborda las propuestas de morfemas de género inclusivo en publicaciones anarquistas de habla hispana, entre las que se halla el uso de " @ " , " x " y otras innovaciones ortográficas que buscan desafiar el sesgo androcéntrico de la lengua. Palabras clave: Lenguaje no-sexista; anarquismo; ortografía; sociolingüística; estudios de lenguaje y género; español.

Ernesto Cuba interviews Mariel Acosta about the findings in hers master's thesis, which addresses the proposals of inclusive gender morphemes in Spanish-language anarchist publications, among which is the use …

Ideology, Access, And Status: Spanish-English Bilinguals In The Foreign-Language Classroom, Michael E. Rolland

Graduate Student Publications and Research

Spanish language teaching in US higher education is today generally divided between ‘foreign language’ courses for novice learners and ‘heritage language’ courses for Hispanic/Latinx students with some knowledge of the language. However, ‘heritage’ students are a linguistically diverse group, and are also often enrolled at institutions where heritage courses are not offered. Little research to date has studied ‘heritage’ speakers enrolled in ‘foreign’ language courses. For this study I conducted semi-structured interviews to explore the affective and ideological characteristics of bilingual students enrolled in elementary Spanish courses. As the literature suggests, I find that these students have a generally low …

Traducciones De Documentos De Los Programas Que Ofrece United Way Del Condado De San Luis Obispo, Courtney Helena Connor

World Languages and Cultures

The intent of this project is to translate various documents used by the United Way of San Luis Obispo County from English to Spanish. Due to the large number of native Spanish-speakers in San Luis Obispo County, there is a great need for information about community resources to be available in Spanish. Due to the nature of languages having many dialects, a significant amount of research was put into determining the dialect and word choice for the translations. Factors considered included region, educational level, socioeconomic status, etc. The translation was completed using a form of Spanish that sought to avoid …

A Linguistic Comparison: Stress-Timed And Syllable-Timed Languages And Their Impact On Second Language Acquisition, Madeline M. Conlen

Honors College Theses

Acquisition of a second language can be a challenging task because no two languages are alike in their structure, syllabification, pronunciation, rhythm, etc. Also, after speaking one language for any amount of time, the speaker becomes accustomed to the specific qualities of that language; therefore, learning to speak another language takes extra effort because it is essentially rewiring the brain to think differently in many ways. One important element of language is prosody, or the patterns of stress and intonation in language (Dilley et al 237). The subsector of prosody that is to be studied is rhythm, explicitly isochrony and …

Una Entrada En La Vida De Las Mujeres Inmigrantes: Una Exposición Visual Para Representar Las Experiencias De Mujeres Inmigrantes De México A Través De Retratos Y Entrevistas, Ashley Ables

World Languages and Cultures

Una entrada en la vida de las mujeres inmigrantes:

Una exposición visual para representar las experiencias de mujeres inmigrantes de México a través de retratos y entrevistas

Ashley Ables

California Polytechnic State University

Intent:

The intent of my project is to research the lives of migrant, farm-working women who have migrated from Mexico and now live and work in California. The other purpose is to present the findings to the Cal Poly and San Luis Obispo communities through interviews and artistic expression.

Methodology:

In order to research and present the lives of these women, I plan to do the following: …

Don Quixote In Russia In The Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries: The Problem Of Perception And Interpretation, Slav N. Gratchev Phd

Modern Languages Faculty Research

This study examines the problem of the perception of Don Quixote in Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By using materials inaccessible to English-speaking scholars, I want to demonstrate that this process of appropriation was a long and a complex one, and there were specific reasons for that. The first modern novel, upon arrival in Russia, received minimal attention and was perceived as a simple, comical book; then, gradually, it started to gain significance. The majority of the materials that are used throughout this text are only available in Russian, are kept in the scientific libraries of Saint Petersburg …

Use Of Student Created Video Podcasts To Promote Foreign Language Grammar Acquisition In Middle School, Sergio Parra

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The use of video podcasts in education has emerged as a phenomenon that has gained a considerable amount of attention over the last few years. Although video podcasting is becoming a well-established technology in higher education, new multimedia instructional strategies such as student-created video podcasts in grades K-12 are under-researched.

The study investigated the effects of video podcasts created by students to promote foreign language grammar acquisition at the middle school level and find how students described such experience. The current investigation was conducted by using the explanatory sequential design, which is a mixed methods research design that occurs in …

A Corpus For Investigating English-Language Learners' Dialog Behaviors, Nigel Ward, Paola Gallardo

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

We are interested in developing methods for the semi-automatic discovery of prosodic patterns in dialog and how they differ between languages and among populations. We are starting by examining how the prosody of Spanish-native learners of English differs from that of native speakers. To support this work, we have collected a new corpus of conversations among college students. This includes dialogs between a nonnative speaker of English and a native, dialogs between native speakers of English, and Spanish conversations.

Ua68/2 Potter College Of Arts & Letters Interdisciplinary Studies, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by and about Interdisciplinary Studies which include:

• African American Studies
• Asian Studies
• Canadian Studies
• Film Studies
• Latin American Studies

Una Exploración Del País Vasco, Carter Goman

Senior Theses

For my senior thesis, I knew that I wanted to explore a topic dealing with the Spanish language. I have been taking Spanish classes for 8 years, and have always loved the language. I completed my minor in Spanish after my sophomore year and was looking for a way to continue improving my knowledge of the language, as well as to learn more about the cultures that speak it. The senior thesis project for the University of South Carolina Honors College provided me with the perfect opportunity to accomplish these goals.

In the summer of 2012, I studied abroad in …

The Roles Of First Language And Proficiency In L2 Processing Of Spanish Clitics: Global Effects, Aroline E. Seibert Hanson, Matthew T. Carlson

Modern Languages and Cultures Faculty Work

We assessed the roles of first language (L1) and second language (L2) proficiency in the processing of preverbal clitics in L2 Spanish by considering the predictions of four processing theories—the Input Processing Theory, the Unified Competition Model, the Amalgamation Model, and the Associative-Cognitive CREED. We compared the performance of L1 English (typologically different from Spanish) to L1 Romanian (typologically similar to Spanish) speakers from various L2 Spanish proficiency levels on an auditory sentence-processing task. We found main effects of proficiency, condition, and L1 and an interaction between proficiency and condition. Although we did not find an interaction between L1 and …

El Uso Del Quechua En El Perú: Una Investigación De Identidad Y Performance Cultural, Theresa A. Renker

Honors Theses and Capstones

Utilizando varias fuentes diversas de campos de estudio diferentes, este trabajo investiga temas de autenticidad y autoridad como son relacionados a los “performances” culturales que tantas personas indígenas son forzadas dar para evitar la discriminación cultural y sobrevivir económicamente. Este proyecto se enfoca en el doble siguiente: la sociedad peruana dominante rechaza el quechua por representar atraso, mientras a la vez frecuentemente idealizándolo como reliquia del imperio inca. Generalmente quechua-hablantes del Perú no tienen el espacio ni la autoridad cultural necesarios para establecer sus propias identidades distintas. Concepciones sociales de sus culturas y formas de hablar son construidas por una …

The Use Of Email Attachments To Increase Reading Compliance In Foreign Language Classes., Juan Rodríguez Prieto

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This is the first quantitative research on reading compliance in foreign language courses. It investigated the effect of email attachments with the assigned readings to promote read­ing compliance of the textbook. Their effect on learning gains was measured by 16 grammar or vocabulary quizzes during a semester. 31 intermediate L2 Spanish students assigned to two group conditions, those receiving the emails and those who did not, also completed a questionnaire at the end of the semester about their preparedness for the quizzes and about their opinions about the email attachments. Results indicated that participants in the email group prepared more …

The Development Of Differential Object Marking In Spanish-English Bilingual Children, Mariluz Ortiz Vergara

Open Access Theses

In monolingual development, the acquisition of differential object marking (DOM) is completed by three years of age (Rodríguez- Mondoñedo, 2008). However, among bilingual speakers, the development and use of the marker at a young age is less predictable. Spanish marks animate and specific direct objects with the preposition-a; English in contrast does not. Based on previous studies documenting transfer in areas where Spanish and English differ, it was predicted that bilingual children would experience difficulties with the use of the preposition both in matrix and left dislocated sentences (CLLD) (Montrul, 2004, Montrul & Bowles, 2009). This study tested 14 simultaneous …

The Acquisition Of Sociolinguistic Variation By Study Abroad Students : The Case Of American Students In Madrid, Kathryn Lee Ringer-Hilfinger

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The current investigation seeks to contribute to the emerging body of research on second language variation in Spanish. A range of dialect-specific variables is considered, both morphological and phonological. Learner acquisition of these variables is measured within a study abroad context through oral and written longitudinal data over the course of an 8-month period. Previous studies conducted in this area have considered pronoun use (Geeslin and Gudmestad 2008a; Salgado-Robles 2012) the use of /theta/ (Geeslin and Gudmestad 2008b; Willis et. al. 2009; Ringer-Hilfinger 2012; Knouse 2012), intonation strategies (Henriksen et al. 2010), and perfective past time reference (Geeslin et al. …

Language, Politics, And History: An Introductory Essay, José Del Valle

Publications and Research

This book chapter examines different articulations of language and history and introduces a new configuration that focuses on the political dimension of language.

The Making And Breaking Of A Language: The French And Spanish Effect Upon The Catalan Regional Language, Margaret Emilyn Cychosz

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Almost four hundred years ago, the French and Spanish governments divided the Catalan border regions located between their respective countries. The subsequent centuries have seen the expansion and development of the Catalan language in Spain and the demise of the Catalan language in France, where it has nearly deteriorated to disuse. Is this a reflection upon the French and Spanish culture or was it simply governmental policy? If so, what did the central governments of Madrid and Paris do in the centuries following the division that resulted in this contrasting development of Catalan? What effect did the usage of Catalan …