Reading and Language Commons^™

Assessing The Language And Reading Abilities Of Students With Mosaic Down Syndrome, Emma G. Conradi

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

Language and reading are important skills for academic and social success, yet individuals with Down syndrome often face significant challenges developing these skills (Abbeduto et al., 2007; Martin et al., 2009). However, almost all the available research on the language and reading abilities of individuals with Down syndrome comes from research focused on individuals with Full Trisomy 21. To date, there has been virtually no research specifically examining the language and reading skills of individuals with mosaic Down syndrome (Buckley & Bird, 2002), a rare karyotype of Down syndrome. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to describe the language …

From Ghorer Golpo To Global Voices: Digital Storytelling As A Decolonial Pedagogy For English Language Learning In Bangladesh, Tamanna Sharmin Kabir

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

From Ghorer Golpo to Global Voices: Digital Storytelling as a Decolonial Pedagogy for English Language Learning in Bangladesh highlights how Digital Storytelling operates as a culturally sustaining and technologically supported approach within Bangladeshi undergraduate English education. Informed by my own navigation of Western and South Asian narrative traditions, the study responds to a longstanding challenge in English instruction: exam-focused, Eurocentric pedagogies often marginalize learners’ cultural identities and lived experiences. The research investigates how participants engaged with Digital Storytelling as a multimodal, technology-enhanced practice that supports language development, identity expression, and intercultural communication.

The study employed an arts-informed case study design …

The Inimitable And Neologistical Dickens, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This article traces the provenance of the adjective Dickensian and argues that Dickens both inaugurated new words, phrases, and idioms, and also popularized many obscure ones that are part of our common lexicon today.

Extracting From The Extracurriculum: Using Extracurricular Composition Practices To Bring Purpose, Voice, And Engagement Back To The English Classroom, Grace N. Ellis

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores how principles and practices from extracurricular literacy spaces and the extracurriculum as a whole can inform and revitalize the secondary English classroom. In response to growing student disengagement, apathy, and disconnection, particularly within highly standardized and product-focused classrooms, this argument investigates how programs such as the Nebraska Writers Collective’s All Writes Reserved program and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Young Writer Camp model authentic engagement, identity exploration and development, and rhetorical agency through creative, student-centered writing practices. Drawing from composition theory, educational research, and experiential data from Nebraska-based writing initiatives, the thesis argues that incorporating choice, safe-risk taking, …

Benefits Of Informal Practical Experiences As A Central Teaching Method In A Literature Of Adolescents Course, Jillian Harpster

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This portfolio includes the course context and organizational format of a junior-level required course for pre-service secondary English teachers. Formatting and context information include teaching methods and course materials. As a central teaching method of the course, students are required to attend a practicum that is additional to their observational practicum (sophomore year) and their clinical practicum (senior year). In this way, the praxis of the coursework and the informal practicum serve as an intentional moment of praxis, while also scaffolding students towards their senior year practicum and beyond (student teaching, early career teaching). Ultimately, the argument of the portfolio …

How A Garden Hoe Changed My Literacy Life: A Story Of Teaching, Coaching, And Becoming, Kelsey J. Walker

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Theses and Other Student Research

In this dissertation, I explore how personal practical experiences teaching reading intervention impacted my own understanding of the role of a secondary literacy coach. Drawing on the concepts of dialogism and adult learning theory, I leveraged learning conversations to grow my own body of knowledge. The methodology of this study was done using narrative inquiry and autoethnography. This methodological blend allowed me to closely study myself as the primary participant with a unique positionality as a scholarly practitioner. I unpack the complexities, contradictions, and tensions of my lived experience through stories and vignettes set in a rural midwestern public school …

Shakespeare’S Early Histories And The Construction Of Government, Paul Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Shakespeare’s first tetralogy has been treated as an account of the reinvention of government, especially a Hobbesian reinvention demonstrating how authoritarian government forces order out of chaos. This article argues that, though Hobbesian elements present themselves, Shakespeare employs subtexts available to his time and place to speak of how orderly government is constituted: that is, he relies on accounts of the Fall from perfection into chaos and the return from it through divinely blessed kingship that are present in syncretic readings of Ovid and the Bible. The two subtexts give order to the progress from Fall into chaos and back …

Music And Word Learning In Children Diagnosed With Developmental Language Disorder, Rebekah G. Sweeney

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

Purpose: This study investigates whether incorporating music into vocabulary interventions improves rate of learning and retention of words in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Emerging literature continues to show the plentiful benefits of music as a tool for intervention in many settings, including the world of speech pathology (Levitin, 2024). However, it is also evident that there is a connection between struggling with language, and struggling with musical elements, such as rhythm and pitch perception, particularly in children with DLD (Boorom et al., 2022; Kreidler et al., 2023). This study seeks to tease out if music is an effective …

Chaucer’S Complaint To His Purse And Authority In The World, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Chaucer’s Complaint to His Purse concerns more than the poet’s financial need under the new Lancastrian administration. It speaks to the limits of Henry IV’s royal authority and, through irony, to the limitations of Chaucer’s purse’s power. Underlining royal limits, Chaucer petitions the king as one who holds office through election and line but not con-quest, which is Henry’s position on his office as well. In speaking iron-ically of the purse’s authority, the poet addresses the gold that the mon-arch might grant him as if it constituted a human or divine patron, but he does so in a hierarchy of …

Toward A Welcoming Classroom: Assessment Of Student Perceptions Of Writing Education In Introductory Honors College Courses, Hilary K. Snow

Honors in Practice Online Archive

This study examines student perceptions of an introductory-level writing program in honors at a large, public R1 university. Author considers the efficacy of pedagogical interventions aimed at identifying gaps in the experience of writing for students from BIPOC and first-generation backgrounds and at developing more inclusive teaching practices. Collective revisions to the program’s writing philosophy, objectives, and rubrics helped instructors gain clarity and consistency across sections. A two-part survey was conducted at the beginning and end of the semester, and metrics were calculated for all respondents (N = 176) and targeted subgroups (n = 37; n = 30). …

Unmasking Male Voices In Woman Hollering Creek: Contributions To Pedagogy And Masculinity Studies, Ramón Javier Guerra, Joan Latchaw

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In teaching Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek to undergraduates, we have developed a sociocultural and historical framework, beginning with the theoretical work of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and the concept of transfrontera feminism. With incidents of seduction and sexual abuse of women, spousal abuse, and patriarchal family structures, the collection of stories strongly indicates the oppressive representation of machismo. Scholars and teachers have drawn important critiques of Cisneros’s work based on destructive sociocultural forces on women. However, in rereading the text with an intended focus on the representations of male characters, we have surmised that Cisneros structured the stories in the …

Zombie Literature: Analyzing The Fear Of The Unknown Through Popular Culture, T. Hnter Strickland

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This paper will focus on how the rise in popularity of zombie literature in the 21st century is reflective of a western cultural need to address the fear of the unknown through popular culture. Through the flesh-eating zombie, we enter a parallel world where everything familiar in our communities becomes evil. The genre reflects the fear in Western society of the neighbor who has turned against you, survival in the midst of government collapse, and the monster within. Zombie fantasy literature allows society a venue to deconstruct what is known while dealing with these fears and the unbridled hate of …

“High Culture As Entertainment”: Hybrid Reading Practices In A Live Book Club, Magnus Persson

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The Bushwick Book Club (BBC) is a live book club in which invited pop musicians perform musical interpretations of a predetermined literary work in a nightclub environment. What can a typical BBC show, with its strong emphasis on popular music and performance, teach readers about the uses of literature? This case study will investigate which reading practices are at work and in what ways they challenge traditional ideas of the forms, functions, and values of reading. Another important aspect concerns how the borders between high and popular culture, and between the printed word and other media are renegotiated. Based on …

Waking Up Before We Die: Aging And Spirituality, Marcelline Hutton

Zea E-Books Collection

In retirement, I have more time for prayer and reflection, to rest in the Lord, and hence to have my spirit renewed. We choose how we interpret our situations. Positive, spiritual aging ideas enhance our sense of well-being. Of course, the loss of loved ones decreases our sense of self-worth at times, but the Spirit can renew us. As Genesis reminds us, God was still working in the lives of Sarah and Abraham in old age, and they can serve as models for us. Indeed, Sarah laughed at the angels and shows us how humor exists even as we age. …

On Province And Empire In My Ántonia And One Of Ours: Cather’S 1922 The Waste Land, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Willa Cather profoundly alters her attitude towards the American experiment, World War I, and the prospect of cultural pluralism in America between her 1918 My Antonia and her 1922 One of Ours. In doing so, she addresses the issue of what kind of culture America should have: a monistic one such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson advocated or a pluralistic one. In My Antonia, set during the period of Great Plains settlement but extending up into World War I, she presents an intact American cultural pluralism: non-English speaking European cultures continuing their positive practices absent the monarchic repression …

Essays On Education And Labor Market Outcomes, Ishita Ahmed

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation focuses on the labor market or educational outcomes using applied microeconomic methods. Chapter 1 investigates the impact of waiting an additional year to start kindergarten on the socioeconomic achievement gap in Nebraska using longitudinal administrative data from the Nebraska Department of Education. I utilize fuzzy regression discontinuity design to find the effect of waiting on test scores. I find waiting a year to improve the test score, and this impact fades away over time. This fading pattern shows a considerable amount of heterogeneity across different demographic groups, suggesting an acceleration of the achievement gap. The study also investigates …

Combined Academic And Behavioral Supports For Struggling Readers With Emotional/Behavioral Disorders, Danika Helen Lang

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

The present study aims to examine the effects of a combination of academic and behavioral supports on students with emotional/behavioral disorders (EBD) who are also struggling readers. A multiple baseline across participants single case design was used to measure the impact of an evidence-based systematic phonics program, in combination with instruction in self-monitoring and self-evaluation via goal setting, on students’ word identification/decoding skills, oral reading fluency, and on-task behavior. Curriculum-based progress monitoring measures in nonsense word fluency and oral reading fluency were used to assess participants’ progress in reading. Momentary time sampling was the behavior recording method used to measure …

Creative Writing Pedagogy: Building Curriculum For High School Students, Elizabeth Lengel

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis serves as a rationale for the creative writing pedagogy I use and how it serves my high school creative writing class. As my school district made the decision to overhaul our English curriculum, the English department decided to add Creative Writing as an English class elective.

The work for planning these new classes was spread around the English Department, and I was assigned to design the curriculum for the new Creative Writing class. Designing an entire class from scratch leaves a lot of room for creativity and innovation. However, as excited for this new course as I was, …

Talking About Writing: Scenes Of Writing Workshops In History And Practice, Erika Luckert

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation envisions the writing workshop as a space where we do essential political and social work—where we can reimagine writing, and the teaching of writing, in more interdependent and inclusive ways. This research responds to the work of BIPOC writers and scholars who have urged those of us in Writing Studies to address the homogeneity of the workshop’s history, and to revise its exclusionary logics. Drawing on interviews and observations of teachers in undergraduate creative writing and composition classrooms across the United States, the author examines what actually happens when students talk together about their in-progress writing. This dissertation …

From Panels To Shelves: The Evolving Intersection Of Comics And Italian Libraries. History, Issues, Perspectives, Andrea Tosti

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Despite comics' popularity and cultural significance in Italy, its integration into Italian libraries has been slow, problematic, and uneven. This is reflected in the scarcity of academic research on the topic, which demands further in-depth exploration.

In the context of Italian libraries, characterized by chronic underfunding and staffing shortages, comics might be perceived as a low priority. However, as essential cultural institutions, libraries must strive to reflect both the contemporary era and the evolving reading habits of their audience. Comics, in this regard, could prove to be – and in part already are – a critical resource, a 'booster' for …

English 890: Advanced Research Methods, A First Benchmark Portfolio, Janel Simons

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

In this benchmark portfolio, I reflect on course design and student learning in a course I teach for incoming Master's students in the English department, ENGL 890: Advanced Research Methods. ENGL 890 is a mini-session course intended to introduce students to various aspects of managing graduate-level research within the discipline of English studies. In this portfolio, I discuss the learning outcomes and goals for the course, highlight some of the assessments I use, reflect on student learning throughout the course, and articulate changes that might improve student learning in future iterations of the course. Given the overarching goals of this …

Pedagogical Alliances Among Writing Instructors And Teaching Librarians Through A Writing Information Literacy Community Of Practice, Zoe Mcdonald, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In this praxis piece, a WPA and a writing instructor describe a writing information literacy community of practice among writing instructors and teaching librarians. Through paying attention to one resulting assignment, a full class annotated bibliography, the co-authors argue this professional development program extended collaborations among the writing program and the library to center contextual notions of authority and metacognition that connect to composition’s democratic political commitments.

Interpretation And Ovidian Myth In Alexander’S Bridge And O Pioneers!, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay describes interpretive strategies widely applied to Ovidian mythic materials during the period of Cather’s early career, especially those operative in Alexander’s Bridge and O Pioneers! The article assumes that widely held conventional interpretations of myths, in this case Ovidian myths, in a specific time and area are part of their semantic content, or iconology, and are tools Cather used in communicating with her audience. The essay then looks at a passage in the 1912 Alexander’s Bridge and two disputed passages in the 1913 O Pioneers! along with extended Bacchic themes in the latter novel that employ conventional Ovidian …

Reflections On The Victorian(Ist) Impulse To Totalize Africa, Adrian S. Wisnicki

Department of English: Faculty Publications

IN this essay, I offer some reflections on how Victorianists might understand nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discursive practices for mapping Africa. In doing this, I respond to what Sukanya Banerjee, our panel organizer, asked us to do in determining the focus for our essays—namely, that we direct “attention to topics in Victorian studies that [we] feel might otherwise be overlooked or viewed differently.” In what follows I introduce and problematize a series of Victorian-era maps or, more specifically, problematize what such maps represent conceptually, then offer some alternate means by which Victorianists might critically engage with cultural and social reality …

The Politics Of Tools, Stephen Ramsay

Department of English: Faculty Publications

A consideration of the political meaning of software that tries to add greater philosophical precision to statements about the politics of tools and tool building in the humanities. Using Michael Oakeshott's formulations of the “politics of faith” and the “politics of skepticism,” [Oakeshott 1996] it suggests that while declaring our tools be morally or political neutral may be obvious fallacious, it is equally problematic to suppose that we can predict in advance the political formations that will arise from our tool building. For indeed (as Oakeshott suggests), the tools themselves give rise to what is politically possible.

Joining A Conversation Research Project, Nicole Green, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Description: This unit is a culminating (end-of-semester) project designed to have students bring together the knowledge they have developed throughout the semester in the service of purposefully joining a real-world conversation, addressing a specific audience (or related set of audiences) who are part of that conversation. This unit has a small number of texts that the whole class reads and/or analyzes together. Instead, a lot of the work happening in this unit is project-driven and process-oriented.

Time Frame: This unit was designed/paced as the last unit of the course (and it followed an earlier unit focused on rhetorical analysis of …

William Shakespeare’S All Is True, Lord Chamberlain’S “Truth,” And Civil Religion, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The first title for Shakespeare’s Henry VIII—All Is True—may reflect standard early modern usage signifying that all is an aspect of ‘troth’ or loyalty, all is common understanding, or all is received from a divine source. In the play, the Lord Chamberlain, Shakespeare’s only character so named, serves the Henrician monarchy’s “truth” by serving Henry’s religious and monarchic goals as the Jacobean Lord Chamberlain similarly served James I’s goals, assuring audiences of the integrity, truth, and legitimacy of the monarchy and its faith. The play shows the Lord Chamberlain working to strengthen the loyalty of Henry’s realm …

Phonics And Spelling Intervention For Children With Intellectual Disabilities, Bridget Leutzinger

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

The current study is a replication and adaptation of Lemons and colleagues (2018) by using an explicit, adapted version of the SPARK curriculum to assess its effectiveness on the literacy outcomes for students with Down Syndrome. The primary purpose was to determine the effectiveness of the explicit reading intervention package (independent variable) on letter-sound knowledge (dependent variable) in elementary students with DS. The secondary purpose was to evaluate whether the explicit spelling intervention of letter-sound correspondence generalized the spelling skills of whole taught and untaught words. Two students, ages 10 and 11, participated in a multiple probe across lessons single-case …

Idiomatic Surrogacy And (Dis)Ability In Dombey And Son, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

To assert that Charles Dickens possessed a mastery of language unique among nineteenth-century novelists for its vernacular inventiveness is hardly controversial. The Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms lists Dickens among its most cited sources (others include the Bible and Shakespeare). Dickens’s use of ordinary, unembellished, and what Anthony Trollope termed vulgarly “ungrammatical” lower-class language sets his novels apart in style and tone from those of his famous peers (249). William Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Thomas Hardy and others – despite their many differences – generally composed their fiction in higher, more formal linguistic registers than …

Shakespeare's Henriadic Monarchy And Chaucerian/Elizabethan Religion, Paul Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Shakespeare, interpreting late medieval English history from the ages of Geoffrey and Thomas Chaucer, gives us a second tetralogy (1595-99) that less defends the "Tudor myth" than creates a lens for viewing the formation of a unitary religious/political culture. Writing near the end of Elizabeth's reign, after serious Catholic insurrection had quieted, he examines how Act of Supremacy sacerdotal monarchy eschews rebellion and decadence, creating eidola paralleling Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales ones. In the latter, Chaucer presented, to the court, narratives of Catholic clerical failure, Jovinian decadence and the possibility of reformed penance. However Shakespeare turns, for his salvific, from honest …