Reading and Language Commons^™

Probing And Enhancing The Reliance Of Transformer Models On Poetic Information, Almas Abdibayev

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Transformer models have achieved remarkable success in the widest variety of domains, spanning not just a multitude of tasks within natural language processing, but also those in computer vision, speech, and reinforcement learning. The key to this success is largely attributed to the self-attention mechanism, particularly its ability to scale in performance as it grows in the number of parameters. Extensive effort has been underway to study the major linguistic properties learned by these models during the course of their pretraining. However, the role of certain finer linguistic phenomena present in language and their utilization by Transformers has not been …

Scaffolding Strategies That Benefit And Support Adult English As A Foreign Language Reading Comprehension: A Literature Review, Walkiris Mejia Ortega

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The poor reading proficiency and the lack of reading comprehension strategies have been a major flaw for adult university learners in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts, particularly in the case of English majors at the School of Foreign Languages in the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Research has shown this reading gap can be improved through suitable instructional strategies and assistance referred to as scaffolding. The purpose of this literature review was to investigate how beneficial scaffolding is for EFL adults´ reading comprehension, which scaffolding strategies prove effective in supporting EFL reading comprehension, and how those …

Smarginatura: The Art And Politics Of Elena Ferrante, Ryan A. Lillestrand

Claremont-UC Undergraduate Research Conference on the European Union

In the Neapolitan Quartet, a sprawling epic following the lives of two women in post-war Italy, the author, Elena Ferrante, explores the intimate relationship between politics and art, pushing at the borders we often construct between the two. At a particularly critical moment in the novels, the central character, Elena Greco, a poor girl from Naples who rises to the position of a successful novelist, is told by her more politically radical friends that she is not doing enough, that “this, objectively, is not the moment for writing novels.” But then, when is? The current political climate in Italy is …

Interrogating Silences In The Postcolonial Classroom, Sheema Khawar

Feminist Pedagogy

In this paper I explore my experiences as visiting faculty teaching English language and Feminist Studies courses at a private university in Karachi, Pakistan. While balancing these different fields I aimed to integrate feminist pedagogies (Keating, 2007; Hooks,1994; Swarr and Nagar, 2010) and strategize with other politically aligned faculty to draw out important issues in our courses. I was faced with the challenging task of constructing syllabi attendant to the training of students in the ‘canons’ of the field and finding course content that allowed us collectively to engage with critical conversations on regional issues. Formal academic publication processes have …

On Gary Snyder’S Tradaptation Of Cold Mountain Poems And Its Spiritual Salvation And Literary Enlightenment In Postwar America, Hu Anjiang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Cold Mountain Poems (CMPs), which have been neglected in the history of Chinese literature for ages, captured the attention of most Americans immediately after its being translated into America by the American poet Gary Snyder in 1950s, however. It is Snyder that reconfigured and recreated a sagacious Chinese Chan Buddhist poet Han-shan (literally, Cold Mountain), the acknowledged author of Cold Mountain Poems, in his translation for the postwar Americans in the midst of varied social problems and cultural identity crisis after World War II. Snyder eventually found in his translation of Cold Mountain Poems a back-to-nature remedy of …

Topological Tropology Of V.S. Naipaul’S Islamic Travelogues And Daniel Pipes’ Islamic History: Ahistorical Historicism, Md. Habibullah

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s (1932-2018) first Islamic travelogue Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) contains his experience of a visit from August 1979 to February 1980 to the four non-Arab Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Similarly, his last Islamic travelogue Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998) has a description of another visit to the same countries for five-month in 1995. Concurrently, Daniel Pipes (1949-), an American historian, published his doctoral dissertation, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (1981), which represents Islamic culture as the first instigator of …

Children’S Gothic In The Chinese Context: The Untranslatability And Cross-Cultural Readability Of A Literary Genre, Chengcheng You

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

As an emerging literary subgenre in the twenty-first century, Children’s Gothic challenges and blends the norms of both children’s literature and Gothic literature, featuring child characters’ self-empowerment in the face of fears and dark impulses. The foreignness and strangeness that pertain to the genre haunt the border of its translatability. Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999­–2006), written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, poses a chain of translational challenges due to its linguistic creativity, paratextual art, and mixed style of horror and dark humor intended for a child readership. To investigate the interplay between Children’s Gothic and its (un)translatability …

Translating Literary Ideology From Ancient Chinese Into Modern French: François Cheng’S Francophone Poetry In Double Chant (2000), Gabriel F. Y. Tsang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

François Cheng (1929- ), elected to the Académie Française in 2002, structurally introduced the lexicological, syntactic, and semiotic form of Tang poetry to the French academia via his academic works. In the late 1980s, François Cheng shifted his focus from academic writing to creative writing, both in French, winning the 1998 Prix Femina for his novel Le Dit de Tianyi (1998) and Prix Roger Caillois for his collection of poems Double chant (2000). Focusing on his less-discussed poetry, which reveals higher congruity of his understanding of Chinese literary classics with creative representation, this paper argues that, as an analyst of …

Storytelling As A Way Of Translation: The Rendition Of Taoism In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe Of Heaven, Xiulu Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) is an immensely popular author of numerous science fictions and fantasy classics. A number of critics have noticed the influence of Taoism on Le Guin’s writing.critical insights offered by Translation Studies and Walter Benjamin’s comments on storytelling and translation, this paper argues that storytelling and translation are similar discursive practices that aim at the exchange of experiences, creating knowledge, and shaping culture. Taking Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) as a case study, this paper delves into how her storytelling serves as a unique form of translation, bridging the thought of ancient Chinese Taoist …

Ecopoetry As Method: Reading Gary Snyder As A Cultural Mediator Between China And The World, Winnie L M Yee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Ecocriticism is a field that is inherently cross-cultural, and poetry is an art form that creates bonds across cultural communities. This paper focuses on Gary Snyder, a prominent poet in his own right, who is famous for his translation of the works by Chinese poet Han Shan. His attraction to Chinese classical poetry and Eastern civilization offers an alternative to the Western developmental paradigm, and the ecopoetry he espouses is pertinent to today’s environmental debates. His references to nature do not function merely as reminders that nature should be respected but as an impetus to reflect on the coexistence of …

Poems From The Interval: Violence In Ted Hughes’S Animal Still-Lifes

The International Journal of Ecopsychology (IJE)

In his verbal still-lifes, Ted Hughes reverses the traditional dynamics of scopophilia by putting the human eye under the dying beast’s petrifying gaze. So doing, the poem entwines human and animal into an interval creature entangling human language and animal body, thriving between life and death, in a dimension akin to the bardo—in Tibetan, the “interval between two states” where the shaman is violently put to death by an animal demon to be resurrected as a new lifeform. Hence Hughes’s still-lifes are not only from the interval, but also for the interval period we are going through—the pivotal era known …

How I Read An Article That Uses Machine Learning Methods, Aziz Nazha, Olivier Elemento, Shannon Mcweeney, Moses Miles, Torsten Haferlach

Kimmel Cancer Center Faculty Papers

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Language Status, Community Advice, And Parent Beliefs On Heritage Language Maintenance In The U.S.: A Scoping Review, Jasmine Loeung

University Honors Theses

This scoping review examines the effects of language status, community advice to parents, and parents' beliefs on heritage language maintenance within a U.S. context. A total of 34 articles met the inclusion criteria. Four key themes were identified as follows: (1) status of a language in society affects maintenance, (2) parents' beliefs about the impact of the heritage language affect family language practices, (3) community advice impacts parents' beliefs and practices, (4) other factors affecting maintenance of the heritage language across generations. Overall, HL maintenance was observed as a dynamic relationship between a variety of factors, with individuals as well …

Insights Into Chinese Second Language Acquisition: The Relationship Between Glossing And Vocabulary Recall In Reading, Steven S. Devellis

Masters Theses

Reading enhancement strategies are an important tool utilized by foreign language teachers. One of the most common types of during-reading assistance is the marginal gloss, which provides first language (L1) translations of selected foreign language (L2) terms in the margins of a text.

Glossing is an inherently individual approach to reading. It is predominantly motivation-driven, and provides as much assistance to the learner as he or she is willing to use it. Studies to this point have been largely inconsistent in regards to the exact usefulness of glossing, analyzing many variables such as the size, scope, and type of gloss, …

Linguistic Features Of Metaphor, Metonymy And Narrative Gap In “The Yellow Wallpaper:” A Literary Analysis, Sherry Kaye Ms.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1890, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a piece of fiction that reflected her personal experience for treatment of nervous exhaustion. The story she developed created controversy and comment after it was published and, years later, agitation among feminists who found allegories of truth in its narrative. This thesis explores the use of linguistic features employed by Gilman to establish cognitive connections between physical structures and social institutions, such as marriage and domesticity, that confine women within contractual obligations. Gilman’s use of extended metaphor challenges conventional conceptions of the home, inanimate objects, and institutional authority and her use of metonymy extrapolates …

Supporting Multilingual Learners’ Reading Competence: A Multiple Case Study Of Teachers’ Instruction And Student Learning And Motivation, Melissa A. Gallagher, Jori S. Beck, Erin M. Ramirez, Ana Taboada Barber, Michelle M. Buehl

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

Supporting students’ reading competence (i.e., their comprehension and vocabulary) is complex, particularly when working with multilingual learners, and involves implementing instructional practices to support their behavioral engagement in reading as well as their reading motivation. The purpose of this mixed methods case study was to examine changes in multilingual learners’ reading comprehension, academic vocabulary, reading engagement, and reading motivation after participating in a 7-week intervention called United States History for Engaged Reading (USHER) and then examine qualitative data to explain why these changes may have occurred. We found changes in the reading comprehension of MLs across all four teachers’ classes, …

Language Was My Home: I Had It In My Mind - But Not On My Tongue (Grappling With Aphasia), Corinne Othenin-Girard

Amplify: A Journal of Writing-as-Activism

Language was my home. I had a prolonged aphasic speech and writing block. Felt as if I was in exile. I slowly fought my way back amongst the ‘language owners’. Because of my funny stroke-induced accent, people tend to treat me like a foreigner. I began to write lyrics and prose to improve my language ability and also to show ‘them’, as well as myself, that I can do it. And that I can say again: language is my home.

Back Pages

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

The Language Of English, Sasha Ortiz Bazan

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

This Is Me, Kimberly Piñon

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

Querida Niña, Georgina Cerda Salvarrey

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

Being Part Of The Lgbtq+ Community, Genevive Cerda

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

Nopayele, Cayele Ameyalli Esteva

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

El Primer Dia, Erick Esparza

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

From Roots To Wings, Anonymous Author

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

Here We Stand, Nelsy Ramirez Pacheco, Chelsea Rios Gomez

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

I Am, Kyra Alway

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

I Am Who I Am, Claudia Lopez-Hernandez

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

¡Viva México!, Diego Vega, Georgina C. Salvarrey

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

Mis Motivadores, Eduardo A. Moreno-Ortiz

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.