Reading and Language Commons^™

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.

Understanding The Differences Between Novice And Experienced Reading Teachers, Katie Anderson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Education researchers have documented that first-year teachers are often less effective at reading instruction than their more experienced peers. Accordingly, this qualitative, comparative case study was designed to assess the instructional skills and strategies utilized by first-year and experienced teachers using Danielson's Framework for Teaching as the conceptual framework. The research questions were used to examine two groups of teachers using the framework and the Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project's defined levels of performance for effective reading instruction. The goal was to identify the instructional differences between the two groups of teachers. Purposeful sampling was used to select 3 …

Effect Of Differentiated Instruction On Reading Comprehension Of Third Graders, Deborah Davidsen

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The performance measures from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study revealed no measurable growth in the U.S. average reading scores of 4th graders for the period between 2011 and 2016. Therefore, the diverse learning needs of students need to be customized if the education system is to accomplish its goal to graduate well-informed individuals capable of sustaining a lifestyle conducive to a democratic society. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of differentiated instruction on 3rd graders' reading comprehension. The theoretical foundation for this teaching approach was Vygotsky's zone of proximal development. The research question focused …

The Effectiveness Of Reading Interventions For Middle School Students With Learning Disabilities, Jennifer Hicks

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Students with learning disabilities are often unable to master reading comprehension and often fail to acquire reading comprehension skills at basic levels as measured on reading achievement assessments. Reading intervention programs Compass Learning and SRA Corrective Reading teach students how to apply strategies to their reading to improve their understanding of written text. The purpose of this quantitative ex-post facto research design was to determine the extent to which the reading intervention programs implemented at the research school improved reading achievement scores for seventh grade students with learning disabilities in reading, and to determine how much scores changed from the …

Situation-Bound Utterances As Main Supporters Of Chinese As A Second Language Learners' Conceptual Socialization, Zhiqi Gong

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Second language learners’ performance in terms of situation-bound utterances (SBUs) to a great extent reflects how well they conceptually socialize in the target speech community and also represents their willingness to abide by the collectively accepted rules of social interaction. That is because second language learners not only have to memorize certain linguistic structures in order to communicate in social encounters, but also have the freedom to select whether and to what extent to use expressions with literal meanings or expressions with metaphorical meanings. The process of conceptual socialization is usually culture-specific and determined by a mixture of factors, such …

The Dmz Responds, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Seo-Young Chu’s “The DMZ Responds” appeared in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea edited by Haerin Shin.

Measuring Third Grade Reading Performance With And Without Using The Study Island Program, Caprice Mitchell

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The low test scores on third graders' Illinois State Assessment Test (ISAT) is a concern in the Allgood Elementary School community. Thirty percent of third graders are retained because they do not meet the standard on the ISAT. A technology-assisted reading program, Study Island, was implemented to increase reading proficiency. The purpose of this study was to determine if there was an improvement in standardized test performance after the implementation of Study Island for the academic school years 2009-2012. Dewey's theory of experience provided the theoretical framework for the study because when students are engaged in hands on experience in …

Nsu Ed.D. In Reading Education 2018, Nova Southeastern University

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education and School of Criminal Justice College Archive

No abstract provided.

Macro Discourse Markers In Ted Talks: How Ideas Are Signaled To Listeners, Kanokrat Uicheng, Michael Crabtree

PASAA

This study investigated the macro discourse markers used by TED speakers to signal ideas to listeners. 150 TED transcripts from six talk genres: technology, entertainment, design, business, science, and global issues were compiled to identify the frequency and distribution of macro discourse markers. This investigation was conducted to confirm the hypothesis that genres of talks did not affect the distribution of discourse markers. The study also hypothesized that a number of macro discourse markers which explicitly containing the word 'idea' or 'ideas' in them could be found. The results confirmed that the occurrences of macro discourse markers were not subject …

Fostering Reflectivity Through Jargon Books In A Teacher Education Context, Yonca Özkan

PASAA

This study, focusing on reflectivity in language teacher education, was conducted with the participation of 35 preservice teachers studying at the ELT Department of Cukurova University, Turkey, in 2017- 2018 academic year. The study examined the effects of jargon books (JBs) on preservice language teachers by delving into levels of reflectivity. The two sets of data of the study were collected from jargon book content and face-to-face semi-structured interviews, and display the very fact that preservice teachers mostly reflected upon course-related issues at the first and second levels, and slightly less at the third, most reflective level. Also, the findings …

Attitudes Towards Code-Switching In An English-Medium Content Classroom, Yinager Teklesellassie, Emily Boersma

PASAA

The purpose of this study was to investigate the attitudes of content subject teachers and their freshman students towards the use of a local language in English-medium content subjects given at Bahir Dar University (BDU), Ethiopia. This study examined whether attitudes towards the use of a local language in English-medium content subjects could be affected by demographic factors like first language background and gender. The participants of the study were content subject teachers and freshman students in three faculties at BDU. Data were collected through questionnaires distributed to both groups of participants. The findings show that both the content subject …

Sharing Vocabulary Size Test Scores With Students: What's The Impact On Motivation?, Jay Tanaka, Patharaorn Patharakorn

PASAA

This study investigates the impact of sharing research findings on lexical coverage and vocabulary size with L2 English students. This practical knowledge can be applied toward reading books and other materials. Research has suggested that knowing approximately 98% of the words in a text can lead to adequate reading comprehension (Hu & Nation, 2000). Such information, paired with knowledge of a student's own vocabulary size (Nation & Beglar, 2007), can potentially aid students in setting L2 vocabulary and reading goals. Ninety-nine university students in Thailand participated in this study. It utilizes a pretest-posttest design, with the sharing of research findings …

The Effects Of Using Corpus Tools On Efl Student Teachers' Learning And Production Of Verb-Noun Collocations, Galip Kartal, Gonca Yangineksi

PASAA

This study investigated the effects of utilizing corpus tools on university EFL student teachers' learning and production of verb-noun collocations. The participants were 60 first-year student teachers in an English Language Teaching Department of a state university in Turkey. The research followed a pre and post-test quasi-experimental research design in which two classes participated in experimental and control groups. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods were used. Quantitative data were collected via a Collocation Knowledge Test which was administered as a pre and post-test. In addition, student teachers' writings before and after the implementation were investigated for tracking the production …

The Effectiveness Of Online And Paper-Based Formative Assessment In The Learning Of English As A Second Language, Paul Joyce

PASAA

This article investigates the relative effectiveness of online and paper-based formative assessment in the learning of English as a second language. For this study, 74 Japanese university second language (L2) students took online quizzes, while 71 were given paper-based quizzes to complete. The quiz content was drawn from learning material found in the class textbook. Both groups were assigned the exercises as homework. At the end of the 15-week study period, both groups were administered a summative assessment that also covered learning points from the textbook. After controlling for the learners' L2 proficiency through their TOEIC test scores, the performance …

Test-Taking Strategies Used In The Reading Section Of The Test Of English For Thai Engineers And Technologists: A Computerbased Esp Test, Thanaporn Waiprakhon, Natjiree Jaturapitakkul

PASAA

This study aims to investigate test takers' strategies for the reading section of the Test of English for Thai Engineers and Technologists, or TETET, which is an innovative computer-based English for Specific Purposes (ESP) proficiency test. Five fourth-year undergraduate students who obtained overall high scores, particularly in the reading section, were selected to participate in the study. A stimulated recall interview and the reading section of the TETET were used as the two main instruments. The strategy rubric by Cohen and Upton (2006) was adopted in order to analyse the data. The results revealed that test-management strategies were the most …

La Aculturación En La Comprensión Lectora De Los Estudiantes Universitarios: La Valoración En El Uso Polifónico De Las Citas, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

El acceso de los alumnos universitarios a los estudios de nivel superior implica un proceso de adaptación y aculturación que encuentra respuesta principalmente en la lectura y en la escritura académica. Esta transformación genera al principio altos grados de ansiedad en los sujetos, quienes en este nivel carecen aún de las coordenadas necesarias para la interpretación de textos científicos codificados en géneros discursivos que en muchas ocasiones han sido expresamente elaborados por escritores expertos para otros especialistas de la disciplina.

El cambio conceptual que se produce en el individuo que trata de integrarse en una nueva comunidad discursiva viene marcado …

Playing And Learning Through Text And Images: Examining Features Of Adolescent Literacy And The Potential Of Graphic Novels As A Supportive Tool, Emily Ann Bushta

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Graphic novels have been making their way into the classroom steadily during the past two decades. Whether their use is for a pedagogical purpose or pleasure, graphic novels are grabbing the attention of adults and youth alike. As general interest arises surrounding graphic novels, increased scholarship discussing their purpose, structure, and use has appeared across a variety of disciplines. Educators, especially those with younger students, are drawn to the genre. Their interest has produced a growing body of literature; however, these publications often lack quantitative data and typically offer qualitative conclusions about the benefits of graphic novels in classroom contexts. …

Reading Achievement Of Middle School Boys In Single-Gender And Coeducational School, Jean Hunter-Batty

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The problem addressed in the study was the lack of evidence on the efficacy of the single-gender educational model as compared to the coeducational model in increasing reading achievement for middle school boys in the local school district. Leaders in the district implemented the single-gender model to address the problem of an ongoing reading achievement gap among middle school boys and girls. The gap has also been noted nationally and leads to limited reading-dependent opportunities for boys. The purpose of this quantitative study was to compare the two educational models to determine whether the single-gender model offered advantages over the …

"Can A Poem Stop A Jail From Being Built?" On Fugitive Counter-Ethics As Prison Pedagogy, Meghan Mcdowell, Alison Reed

Sociology & Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) In 2016, we began facilitating a reading group at the Norfolk City Jail. Once a week during the semester, we met with six to eight men who qualified for "program privileges" and thus were given the option by jail staff to participate in the reading group. Each week we gathered to discuss the day's reading in what passed for a classroom inside the jail: a noisy corridor that connected two cellblocks. Against one wall there were four white picnic tables, bolted down to the floor, stacked one after the other. Though those accommodations were better suited for cafeteria-style …

Elementary Teachers' Perspectives Of The Support Facilitation Instructional Model, Deborah Afolabi

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The problem in an elementary school in Southern Texas was poor reading performance on grade level and progress monitoring tests for students with disabilities (SWDs). SWDs may learn to read proficiently when reading instruction is provided using the support facilitation model (SFM) that features a special educator who helps SWDs in literacy or mathematics in inclusion settings. The purpose of this bounded qualitative case study was to explore the perspectives of special and general education teachers about SFM. The universal design for learning framework, used to plan lessons based on how students learn, guided this study. The research questions focused …

Read Or Perish: Reading Habits Among Students And Its Effect On Academic Performance: A Case Study Of Eastbank Senior High School - Accra., Samuel Kwame Ameyaw, Sylvester Kwabena Anto

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The paper was to examine reading habit among students and its effect on academic performance: using Eastbank Senior High School in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana as a case study.

A questionnaire was employed for data gathering. The Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) was used to analyze the collected data. The findings of the study revealed that 45.19% of the respondents recognized the importance of reading in their studies. The study revealed further that reading habits have affected the majority of students in their learning. The findings reported that the lack of conducive home environment hinders their reading …

The Status Of School Libraries In Migori County, Kenya, Cary Francis Ouma, Joel Nakitare

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Whereas there is a general appreciation of libraries' role in educational performance and literacy development among learners, the status of school libraries still needs to improve. The struggle to secure a workable school library policy in Kenya is far from won. This study investigated the status of school libraries in Migori County by analyzing available resources and giving a framework for their development. Data was collected using questionnaires and Interviews in schools drawn from all the eight sub-counties in the county. The data was analyzed thematically based on parameters that define successful school libraries to arrive at study conclusions. They …

Teachers' Perceptions About Reading Instruction In Elementary Inclusion Classrooms, Elizabeth Ann Kempf

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Researchers argued that special education students should learn alongside regular education students because involvement with peers affects special education students' ability to assimilate information. However, inclusive elementary classroom teachers in a local Texas school were struggling to meet the learning needs of their diverse student populations in reading instruction. The purpose of this study was to explore teachers' perceptions about reading instruction in an inclusion setting and to investigate what teachers believe was needed to improve the effectiveness of their practice. King-Sears's inclusion instructional model served as the conceptual framework to guide this study. The research questions were focused on …

An Analysis On English Comprehension, Samuel Black, Jerry Rylance, Matthew Sielaff, Aaron Gorman

Math 365 Class Projects

Books and Buddies is a program run by Spread the Word Nevada (StWN) designed to help students who struggle with reading. As part of the program, students are given pre and post tests which measure comprehension, accuracy, and words correct per minute (WCPM).

A data set was provided that included students' scores on the pre and post test, as well as some general demographic information. A Python program was created to perform linear regressions on subsets of the data, measured on the three attributes listed above. The data was also divided into various categories for the sake of the regressions. …

Perceptions And Experiences Of Teachers And Literacy Coaches' Literacy Instruction, April Jessup Giddens

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The literacy rate in Louisiana remains lower than the national average. This is especially true at Rosewood Elementary School (pseudonym), a D-rated school on a scale of A-F. The problem is that teachers are unsuccessful in trying to improve students' literacy test scores, despite several targeted efforts to give them tools to make these improvements. The purpose of this study is to explore the literacy practices, beliefs, and professional development of teachers at Rosewood Elementary. The conceptual framework of this study included Clark and Peterson's cognitive process teacher model, which focuses on teachers' thought processes and their behaviors in the …

Elementary Teachers' Beliefs Of Using Guided Reading Pedagogy And Student Data, Ivonne Miranda

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In today's classrooms, many teachers meet students' reading needs by providing guided reading. However, little is known about how teachers combine student data and pedagogical content knowledge to plan guided readings lessons. This study focused on understanding how elementary teachers use guided reading pedagogical content knowledge and student data when planning a guided reading lesson. The conceptual framework was based on Fountas and Pinnell's guided reading framework, and Clay's theory of data collection with respect to literacy processing. The research questions concerned how teachers' use, guide, and reflect on guided reading pedagogical content knowledge and students data when planning a …

Evaluation Of An Adaptive Reading Program At A Title I Public Elementary School, Monica M. Gordon

Theses and Dissertations

This applied dissertation was designed to evaluate the I-station adaptive reading program and determine its impact on reading proficiency of third-grade students. The school of study was a Title I school with proficiency rates for third-grade students of about 40% annually. The district recommendation for student usage mirrored the recommended minutes per week established by Imagination Station, the I-station parent company.

The program evaluation utilized the context-input-process-product model components, measuring process and product. There were two research questions underpinning the study: 1. Process: Is the I-station program being used with fidelity at the school of study to achieve program intended …