Reading and Language Commons^™

All Writers Welcome: An Exploratory Study Of The Potential Value Of Academic Writing Center And Adult Community-Based Literacy Center Partnerships, Allison Bennett

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

Writing center practices have been widely accepted as beneficial for literacy development, especially given the ubiquitous nature of writing. However, many off-campus communities lack writing support as visible, organized, and well-documented as that available to those on-campus through writing centers. Further, while evidence of writing center community-engaged initiatives exists anecdotally, research identifying the possible impact of such efforts on specific community partners and populations is limited. Hence, this study explores how literacy is supported in university/college writing centers and adult community-based literacy centers. Survey and interview data suggest the potential value that community-engaged projects between the two are likely to …

A Blend Of Absurdism And Humanism: Defending Kurt Vonnegut’S Place In The Secondary Setting, Krisandra R. Johnson

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

This essay argues that Kurt Vonnegut blends a unique humanist stance into his absurdist plots and characters, ultimately urging readers to confront the absurd with a kindness and human decency his protagonists often find rare. As a result of this absurd and humanist synthesis, I defend and promote Vonnegut’s place in the secondary English curriculum, despite his rank on many banned books lists, since his characters’ journeys correlate thematically with the growth and process of postmodern adolescents and encourage moral responsibility without sentimental manipulation.

Focusing on Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse-Five as primary sources, specifically …

“There Must Always Be A Thor”: Disruption Of Super Heroic Masculinities In Marvel’S Thor: The Goddess Of Thunder (2014), Kiera M. Gaswint

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies (2015-2021)

As the popularity of the superhero film genre continues to grow, more attention is being drawn towards the genre as a way to enter cultural conversations regarding representations in popular culture of gender, sexuality, race, and class, among other things. This popularity of the genre among differing age ranges and demographics calls for an investigation and analysis of the comic book genre, superheroes, and representation. Given the popularity of this genre, I plan to argue that Thor: The Goddess of Thunder (2014) offers a unique reading of gender constructs and masculinity.

Whereas characters come and go within their respective universes …

Acquisition Of Word Spellings And Meanings During Reading In Nonnative Chinese Speakers, Yang Liu

Dissertations

This dissertation explored the acquisition of word spellings (orthographic learning) and word meanings (incidental word learning) during reading in adult nonnative Chinese speakers. Two studies were designed for this dissertation. In Study One, 45 Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners at intermediate and advanced proficiency levels participated and completed a character learning experiment in a self-teaching paradigm. Results indicate that CFL learners were able to use the phonetic regularity and semantic transparency of radicals to learn the spellings and pronunciations of new characters after limited exposures to the characters in a story context. In Study Two, 72 CFL learners …

Ivy Leaves, Volume 93, Ivy Leaves Editorial Staff

Ivy Leaves

The 2018 edition of the Anderson University journal of art and literature, Ivy Leaves.

The names of the known editors for this issue of Ivy Leaves were Haley Schvaneveldt, Olivia Strickland, Ruthie Snow, Rachael Barfield, Jacob Cavett, Claire Foxx, Ana Kate Barker, Sarah Teague, Caleb Flachman, Sheridan Vance, Michaela Staon, Tara Stewart, Jayne Small, Lauren Swathwood, Jennifer Jefferson, Logan Chapman, Shelby Argo, Lizzie Todd, Lindsay Higgins, Blair Nedderman, Haley Williams, Teresa Jones, and Tim Speaker.

Lewis In The Rye: An Approach To Controversial Literature, Abigail Griffiths

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis aims to coalesce literary criticism with Christian theology to provide a guideline for how Christians, who uphold a certain moral logic, should interact with literature that sparks controversy among readers. An analysis of J.D. Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye (1951) will be considered through the lens of C.S. Lewis’ commentary on good reading, good critique, and good art. Catcher in the Rye, an American novel, contains elements of derogatory language, promiscuous scenes, and insinuations of nihilism. How would C.S. Lewis, a British novelist and a prominent figure in Christian thought, read Salinger’s work: would he find …

The Victorian Body, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The nineteenth century is extremely important for the study of embodiment because it is the period in which the modern body, as we currently understand it, was most thoroughly explored. This was the era when modern medical models of the body were developed and disseminated, when modern political relations to the body were instantiated, and when modern identities in relation to class, race, and gender were inscribed. While questions about the distinctions between personhood and the body were studied by the ancients, nineteenth-century developments in technology, economics, medicine, and science rendered such categories newly important for Britons who were the …

Contemporary Proposals About Reading In The Digital Age, Matthew K. Gold, Rachel Sagner Buurma

Publications and Research

Recent ideas about reading in literary criticism have centered around a fundamental question: what are the limits and affordances of human reading? Not all of these re-visitings of reading name technology as a central figure, yet they are all to varying degrees shaped by recent cultural attention to the emerging possibilities of machine reading and the reading of digitized and born-digital texts.

Disoriented Nationalist Discourse Of The Wenxuan Group Amidst Manchukuo’S Anti-Modern Chorus, Chao Liu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Disoriented Nationalist Discourse of the Wenxuan Group amidst Manchukuo's Anti-Modern Chorus" Chao Liu analyzes the proposal of "native-land literature" made by left-wing Chinese writers in occupied northeast China. As it turns out, inheriting the nationalist discourse of the May Fourth Movement and further radicalizing it via a "new romanticism," those writers over-emphasized the socio-political function of literary production and took native-land literature as the most effective tool for nationalist mobilization. Accordingly, they repelled modern civilization as it was associated with the colonists, relying instead on natural wilderness and primitive force and thus adopting subject matters as well …

Pantheism And Escapism In Abu Madi's 'Enigmas' And 'The Evening' From English Romanticism Perspectives, Yasser K. R. Aman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Pantheism and Escapism in Abu Madi's 'Enigmas' and 'The Evening' From English Romanticism Perspectives" Yasser K. R. Aman investigates and analyses the possibilities of pantheism's encirclement of escapism in Elia Abu Madi's two poems from English Romanticism perspective. The article compares Abu Madi's fluctuating attitude towards escapism and pantheism to William Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour July 13, 1798," Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," highlighting the affinities and differences. The …

Frame, Preference, And Memory In Literary History Narration, Guoqiang Qiao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Frame, Preference, and Memory in Literary History Narration" Guoqiang Qiao analyzes the frame, preference and memory in literary historiography from a narratological and cognitive perspectives. He maintains that literary history is of multileveled narration that includes not only the perceptualized literary events, literary figures, and literary works, but also the conceptualized spirit of the time, national culture, and personal and collective memories. Qiao employs the basic concepts of frame, preference, and memory to suggest a cognitive approach to the narration of literary history. To illustrate the complex construction of literary historiography, he provides examples from Chinese literary …

Ground Provisions, Tonika Sealy Thompson, Stefano Harney

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The authors discuss autonomous organisations, black metaphysics and the politics of reading together.

Running Records And First Grade English Learners: An Analysis Of Language Related Errors, Allison Briceno, Adria Klein

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Effective Instruction For English Language Learners With A Learning Disability In Higher Education In Egypt, Rania M Rafik Khalil

English Language and Literature

There is a large number of students with learning disabilities (LD) today in many private higher education institutions in Egypt. It is fair to say that their challenges although have gained some attention from academics and researchers that they are still under-studied. Many of those students also happen to be English language learners (ELLs). This complicates matters even more not just for the student with the learning disability, but for the untrained instructor in the classroom. Research indicates that ELLs with LD are less likely to engage actively in classroom tasks and are more prone to failing. Providing an inclusive …

The Book Of Thesis Books, Elizabeth Leeper, Jennifer Liese, Center For Arts & Language

Thesis Writing

89 pages : color illustrations ; 18 x 23 cm."This guide is intended to help future thesis writers understand the range of approaches to and content in RISD thesis books, locate some especially strong examples in the Library's vast thesis collection, and imagine and plan their own theses." - from the introduction. "Introduction by Jennifer Liese" - Colophon. Contents: Academic thesis -- Monograph -- Project document -- Mosaic essay -- Artist's book. "Designed by Elizabeth Leeper (MFA Graphic Design 2017). Set in Parry and Parry Grotesque, by Artur Schmal, and printed by Lulu."--Colophon.

The Progressive Distribution Of Sentences Containing Relative Clauses In Japanese Textbooks Of English, Risa Nakagawa

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Relative clauses have been researched and found to be one of the more difficult English grammar items for people who speak English as a Second Language (henceforth, ESL) and people who use English as a Foreign Language (henceforth, EFL). In particular, objective relative clauses are one of the most challenging items for English learners. (Gibson, 1998; Gordon, Hendrick, & Johnson, 2001; Mellow, 2006; Hawkins, 1994; King & Just, 1991; Otsuka & Aburai, 2003). By examining the frequency of subjective and objective relative clauses in six English textbooks which are being used in middle schools and high schools in Japan, the …

A Meaning-Based Approach To The Language Of The Toefl Test And Japanese Efl Textbooks: A Functional Analysis Of Patterns Of Lexico-Grammatical Meanings And Structures, Koshin Fukuyoshi

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The primary objective of this research project is to show varying degrees of textual and semantic contributions that semantic density and grammatical metaphors make in the way that TOEFL iBT reading sections and Japanese EFL textbooks are used. This research is conducted from two theoretical perspectives within the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The first analysis is to investigate logical and semantic relationships within clause complexes in order to identify structural variations and their textual distributions. The second analysis focuses on the use of ideational and interpersonal grammatical metaphors and on the way that they further compact or untangle textual …

A Development Of A Game-Based Supplementary E-Learning Program For English For Veterinary Profession I, Satita Watanapokakul

PASAA

This study focuses on the role of edutainment at the tertiary level. The context is the teaching and learning of English for Veterinary Profession I (ENG VET PROF I) for second-year university students in Bangkok, Thailand. This course focuses on improving students' listening and speaking skills in the veterinary field. In order to make the materials relevant and attractive to Net Gen learners, a gamebased supplementary e-learning program considered an alternative pedagogy adaptable for Net Gen. The purposes of the study are to develop an effective gamebased supplementary e-learning program, called CULI ZOO, for students in English for Veterinary Profession …

The Notions Of Language Proficiency And Language Dimensionality, Suthathip Thirakunkovit

PASAA

This study is a literature review on the findings of different studies on the dimensionality of language proficiency. It aims to particularly analyze the assumptions and the statistical findings of relevant research since it has always been an endless debate among linguists and language teachers about whether language proficiency is organized as a unitary ability or multiple divisible competences. For this objective, it is necessary to begin this study by defining the notions of language proficiency. By clarifying the theoretical meanings of language proficiency, I investigated how different researchers discuss the relationships between different language sub-skills and the overall language …

La Variedad De Los Cráneos, Michael Wheeler

Open Access Books

La variedad de los cráneos was written and illustrated in 2018 by Michael Wheeler. The original text was edited and translated by Mackensy Asbell and Madeline Strelec. New, original illustrations were created by Rina Sato.

Un Cumpleaños Colorido, Tejas Kandharkar

Open Access Books

Un cumpleaños colorido was written and illustrated in 2018 by Tejas Kandharkar. The original text was edited and translated by Mackensy Asbell and Madeline Strelec. New, original illustrations were created by Rina Sato.

Willa Cather On A “New World Novelist”: A Newly-Discovered 1920 Vanity Fair Essay, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The ability to quote from and publish Willa Cather’s letters is a relatively recent development for scholars. However, the republication of her critical prose began shortly after her death, when Cather’s partner, Edith Lewis, appointed literary executor in her will, facilitated the publication of Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (1949). In line with Cather’s own approach to her early career, which she often dismissed or mischaracterized, this volume collected only her critical prose published from 1920 forward, including magazine essays, prefaces, and one previously unpublished fragment. This volume supplemented Cather’s own collection encompassing critical …

Reading Curriculums And Interventions, Andrew P. Johnson

Elementary and Literacy Education Department Publications

This paper describes some ideas for designing and implementing research-based reading interventions for struggling readers (mild, moderate, and severe).

Applying Communities Of Practice Theory To Applied Linguistics Research, Julia Kimura

PASAA

If you are reading this, as a child, you probably went to school to learn. However, as we enter adulthood, we do a great deal of learning informally after we have completed compulsory and formal schooling. Although early theories of learning fell under the quantitative paradigm, new qualitative and social theories of learning have now been proposed. Communities of practice theory can help explain how this informal learning is largely a social endeavor. This theory was developed not as a replacement to existing theories of learning, but as an alternative and complementary explanation of how learning is accomplished. In this …

Book Review Language Learner Autonomy: Theory, Practice And Research, Muthita Chinpakdee

PASAA

Language Learner Autonomy: Theory, Practice and Research is a collection of theoretically-driven research findings on learner autonomy, an educational construct defined by Holec (1981, p. 3) as "ability to take charge of one's own learning". Since its introduction to the field of language education in the 1980s, learner autonomy has continually attracted wide interest in the field due to its association with language proficiency and skills in learning management. The concept of the learner taking charge of her learning is, however, inextricably linked with Western ideologies such as democracy, empowerment and liberation. Despite the research interest the topic has received …

Los Códices: An Exhibit Of Illustrated Books From Indigenous Mesoamerica, Jacob S. Neely

Hispanic Studies Student Research

This is an exhibit of facsimile codices housed in the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center.

The exhibit is on display in the Great Hall on the second floor of the Margaret I. King Library at the University of Kentucky from September 17, 2018 to November 9, 2018.

The exhibit is also available online.

Sharing Englishes & Social Media, Catalina F. Florescu, Chloe Richards

Student and Faculty Research Days

This year-long grant-funded project examined the intersection of culture and class with use of the English Language, and explored the concept of multiple Englishes rather than one, monolithic, "correct" version of the language.

“Always Up Against”: A Study Of Veteran Wpas And Social Resilience, Shari J. Stenberg, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay reports on an interview-based study of ten veteran WPAs, whose three decades of service spans neoliberalism’s growing influence on universities. Our findings trace their enactment of social resilience, a dynamic, relational process that allowed them, even in the face of constraint, to act and to preserve key commitments.

Like most compositionists, and especially WPAs, we feel the restrictive impact of austerity. This sense is reflected in a growing body of research in our field, and most recently in a CCC special issue, where Jonathan Alexander reminds us that “one of the things we know about writing and the …

From A Distance “You Might Mistake Her For A Man”: A Closer Reading Of Gender And Character Action In Jane Eyre, The Law And The Lady, And A Brilliant Woman, Gabrielle Kirilloff, Peter J. Capuano, Julius Fredrick, Matthew L. Jockers

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This research examines and contributes to recent work by Matthew Jockers and Gabi Kirilloff on the relationship between gender and action in the nineteenth-century novel. Jockers and Kirilloff use dependency parsing to extract verb and gendered pronoun pairs (“he said,” “she walked,” etc.). They then build a classification model to predict the gender of a pronoun based on the verb being performed. This present study examines the novels that were categorized as outliers by the classification model to gain a better understanding of the way the observed trends function at the level of individual narratives. We argue that while the …

The Humanities: Our Human Journey, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Life. The miracle of human life. Scientists believe that our incarnation as anatomically modern humans–homo sapiens–began on African soil about 200,000 years ago, as we started walking erect on two legs instead of four. We wandered upon our planet, a tiny, beautiful, blueish speck almost literally in the middle of nowhere, traveling elliptically around our sun within the cold, dark immensity of the universe.