Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Implementing Mental Contrasting To Improve English Language Learner Social Networks, Hannah Trimble Brown

Theses and Dissertations

The present study looks at how utilizing mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII), a form of self-regulation, impacts the social networks of English language learners’ in a study abroad (SA) setting. Over 100 English language learners (ELLs) form the treatment and control groups for this study. This research compares the social network measures between students who used MCII and those who did not over the course of one 14-week semester in an intensive English program in the United States. It also examines students' perception of this self-regulation strategy. Additionally, the impact of MCII on students who are in their first …

Sociocultural Identification With The United States And English Pronunciation Comprehensibility And Accent Among International Esl Students, Christinah Paige Mulder

Theses and Dissertations

Sociocultural identity is defined for this study as the element of identity affixed to a social or cultural group. Previous research on sociocultural identity has recognized the need for further study of its effect on second language performance, particularly pronunciation. Previous studies have found contradictory results when studying the relationships between sociocultural identity and various measures of second language pronunciation. This thesis takes a quantitative correlational approach to the study of sociocultural identification with the United States and English pronunciation comprehensibility and accent in a group of 68 international students learning English in the United States. Participants completed a survey …

The Effects Of Repeated Reading On The Fluency Of Intermediate-Level English-As-A-Second-Language Learners: An Eye-Tracking Study, Krista Carlene Rich

Theses and Dissertations

Most would agree that reading fluency is a concern of every L2 teacher. Repeated reading (RR) positively affects fluency development, supported by much research with L1 children. However, relatively little focus has been given to L2 RR. Most research on RR in L2 settings has focused on audio-assisted RR, used insufficient data collection methods prone to human error, and taken place in an EFL setting. In our experiment, we used eye–tracking as a direct mode of measurement of the effects that RR has on early and late reading measures. In this study, 30 intermediate-level English language learners studying in an …

Ideophone-Gesture Composites: Depictive Type, Sensory Class, And Modality, Janis B. Nuckolls, Alexander Rice, Diana Sun, Sarah Hatton, Tod Swanson

Faculty Publications

Ideophones are a class of marked words that are often accompanied by gestures to depict sensory perceptions. Our paper seeks to clarify the interrelations between ideophones and the language-gesture complex through an analysis of a traditional flood story told by 5 different speakers of the Pastaza Quichua dialect spoken in Amazonian Ecuador. Using the typology of depictive gestures outlined by Streeck, we will determine whether there is any significant covariation between depictive gesture type, sensory class, whether visual, auditory, or haptic (involving touch), and a modality distinction we’ve recently identified between speaker internal and speaker external perspective.

Reconciling Perception With Production In Southern Speech, Joseph A. Stanley, Rachel M. Olsen, Michael L. Olsen, Lisa Lipani, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

• Weakening of canonical /aɪ ɔɪ aʊ/ occurs in Southern speech (Thomas 2003)
• /ai/ weakening
• Most prevalent • Triggering feature of the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006) • /ɔɪ/ weakening • Most prevalent amongst African Americans, and older European Americans in the South • For everyone before laterals (Thomas 2008) • /aʊ/ weakening • Widespread in European American Southern English (Thomas 2008)

Expectations And Challenges Of Non-Native University Writers At The Outset Of Discipline-Specific Study, K. James Hartshorn, Norman W. Evans

Faculty Publications

Little is known about how best to prepare non-native students matriculated at universities in the United States to succeed in discipline-specific writing. Whilesome studies have suggested differences in the types and volumes of writing across disciplines, such studies have compared very few disciplines simultaneously and have not always examined the disciplines most commonly studied by international students. Thus, this study seeks to fill an important gap in the literature by examining the perspectives of university professors regarding their expectations and purposes for student writing as well as their observations about the greatest writing challenges their students face within five of …

Designing And Developing An Online Self-Regulated Learning Course, Grant Eckstein, Mariah Krauel-Nix, Norman W. Evans, Benjamin L. Mcmurry

Faculty Publications

The concept of self-regulated learning has been a prominent topic in education and has been researched and applied to various educational fields. In the field of TESOL, self-regulation has been categorized into dimensions and linked with possible application tools to help ESL/EFL students better apply and develop related skills (Andrade and Evans 2013, 2015). Although these applications have seen some success, the administration of one intensive English program felt that its center's self-regulated learning program was ineffective for teachers and students. Therefore, curriculum designers evaluated the center's program, compiled data, and formed design specifications for an improved program. Their specifications …

Increasing English Learners’ Positive Emotional Response To Learning Through Dance, Grant Eckstein, Elizabeth Hanks

Faculty Publications

This study investigates dance as an English Second Language (ESL) curriculum enhancement. The curriculum utilizes kinesthetic learning, which is a method seldom incorporated in formal academic classrooms (Pourhosein Gilakjani, 2011) despite evidence suggesting that it benefits all students, including those without kinesthetic learning preferences (Schumann, 1997). Supporters believe that the benefits of incorporating movement in the classroom include increased student enjoyment, motivation, and confidence in learning. However, these beliefs are merely anecdotal at present. This study analyzes quantitative questionnaires and qualitative feedback from 26 students who participated in a 4-week long Dance ESL curriculum to determine whether dance-based learning can …

Variation In Interrogative Abverbials: Cuán, Qué Tan, Cómo De, And Lo+ Adj./Adv.+ Que, David E. Eddington

Faculty Publications

Cuán, qué tan, and cómo de are used to modify adverbs and adjectives in interrogatives. They are also used in embedded clauses along with lo+adj./adv.+que. Instances of these expressions were extracted from the Corpus del Español. In interrogatives, qué tan was the most frequent. The idea that cuán is archaic or limited to literary usage is not supported by these data. Cómo de is extremely infrequent except in Peninsular Spanish. In embedded clauses the frequency of these expressions appear in this order of frequency: lo+adj./adv.+que > qué tan > cuán > cómo de. In an experiment, speakers from Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico, …

Verbs In Egyptian Arabic: A Case For Register Variation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Michael G. White

Faculty Publications

The limited availability of Egyptian Arabic (EA) corpus resources, especially speech corpora, has left open opportunity for research into such dialect phenomena as register. In this paper we introduce a new two-millionword EA corpus, CALM. We perform a register analysis on EA between two subcorpora of CALM (i.e. Movies and Blogs), showing several features that vary between the two. A discussion follows about how annotation was carried out automatically, how it was handcorrected, and what the prospects are for carrying out similar studies using CALM.

Getting Your Business Communication Research Funded, Jacob D. Rawlins, Sara Doan, Jacqueline Ann Mayfield, Milton Mayfield, Gail Fann Thomas, Yunxia Zhu

Faculty Publications

Conducting original research in the discipline of business communication can be expensive. Travel to research locations, specialized software, tokens of appreciation for study participants, support staff, and transcription services can add up quickly. The C. R. Anderson Research Fund (CRARF) was established to promote excellent research on business communication topics by providing grants to members of the Association for Business Communication. In this presentation, members of the C. R. Anderson Research Fund Committee will introduce the fund and provide specific instructions and feedback on individual proposals in breakout rooms. The goal of this presentation is to help each attendee learn …

Examination Of Manner Of Motion Sound Symbolism For English Nonce Verbs, Janis B. Nuckolls, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

This paper offers cross-experimental verification of a previous study that found that English speakers considered velars, palatals, glides, and high vowels to be sound-symbolic of light and jerky movements. Heavy and smooth movements, by contrast, were associated with affricates, glottals, laterals, and non-high vowels. The present study sought to evaluate these findings through a novel experiment with English speaking subjects, who were asked to choose appropriate sound-symbolically constructed nonce verbs for sentences describing light, heavy, smooth, or jerky manners of motion. Our results support many of Saji et al.’s findings and also offer original insights. We find complex interactions between …

Verbs In Egyptian Arabic: A Case For Register Variation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Michael G. White

Faculty Publications

The limited availability of Egyptian Arabic (EA) corpus resources, especially speech corpora, has left open opportunity for research into such dialect phenomena as register. In this paper we introduce a new two-millionword EA corpus, CALM. We perform a register analysis on EA between two subcorpora of CALM (i.e. Movies and Blogs), showing several features that vary between the two. A discussion follows about how annotation was carried out automatically, how it was handcorrected, and what the prospects are for carrying out similar studies using CALM.

The Effects Of Teacher Background On How Teachers Assess Native-Like And Nonnative-Like Grammar Errors: An Eye-Tracking Study, Wesley Makoto Schramm

Theses and Dissertations

Studies have shown that composition and L2 writing teachers give different scores (Golombek, Weigle, Boldt, & Valsecchi, 2003) and focus on different features (Brown, 1991) when assessing student writing, which is assumed to be due to the differences in their background and training (Santos, 1992; Atkinson & Ramanathan, 1995). Error gravity is thought to be one reason why composition and L2 writing teachers give different scores (Rifkin & Roberts, 1995). Common methods for examining error gravity were to analyze scores and responses given by the raters and to have raters reflect on the rating process and analyze their responses. Only …

The Cognitive Effects Of Late Bilingualism On Executive Functions: Lifelong Benefits, Rachel Casper

Intuition: The BYU Undergraduate Journal of Psychology

Late bilinguals, those who learn a language past the critical period, are often thought to not receive much benefits from their language learning in comparison to their early bilingual counterparts. A large of body of recent research suggests otherwise. Late bilinguals receive the same cognitive benefits as early bilinguals; these benefits are in higher levels of executive functions, specifically in inhibitory control and attentional switching. Higher levels of executive functions assist learners in improving their mental processing and cognitive health over the course of their lifetime. Aging bilinguals have greater cognitive health due to more white and gray matter density. …

Second Language Semantic Retrieval In The Bilingual Mind: The Case Of Korean-English Expert Bilinguals, Janice Si-Man Lam

Theses and Dissertations

The present study aims to explore the relationship between proficiency level and semantic retrieval in the second language. A group of Korean bilinguals who speak English with high proficiency performed semantic relatedness judgement tasks of two hundred English word pairs. Unbeknownst to the participants, half of the words in both the related and the unrelated categories contained a "hidden prime"—a common first syllable shared by the two words, if translated into Korean. Each participant's event-related potential (ERP) was recorded while reading the words. While a former study by Thierry and Wu (2007) found that Chinese-English bilinguals were affected by the …

Approaching Arabic Automatic Speech Recognition With Usage, James Longstaff, Deryle Lonsdale

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this project is to improve Arabic automatic speech recognition (ASR) by distinguishing between different dialects with the use of machine learning. Machine learning is the teaching of computers to recognize and distinguish between categories by themselves. Machine learning works off of statistical and mathematical algorithms implemented with computer programming.

English As A Second Language Speakers’ Ability To Replicate Native Speaker Speech Forms When Engaged In Imitative Interaction, Ariana Avila, Dr. Mark Tanner

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this study was to gather acoustic data aimed at empirically assessing the degree to which non-native English speakers can approximate the linguistic features of native speech when engaged in imitative interaction. The focus of my study was to investigate the degree to which ESL learners living in an English speaking environment can produce linguistic features (variation in intonation, appropriate word and sentence stress, and appropriate use of pausing to delineate meaning units in discourse) in their speech similar to those produced by native English speakers when the ESL learner is trying to imitate what a native speaker …

How Teachers Grade Native And Non-Native Writing: Exposing Biases And Grading Discrepancies, Jenna Snyder, Dr. Grant Eckstein

Journal of Undergraduate Research

With Dr. Grant Eckstein leading our research team, we gathered TESOL writing teachers together to start our data collection. Using an eye-tracker, we monitored the different grading tendencies of 10 different writing teachers. Using this data, we made important observations and applications to writing teachers who teach mixed classrooms of both native English speakers and non-native English speakers.

An Eye Tracking Study: Composition Teachers’ Assessment Of Native And Non-Native, Rachel Casper, Grant Eckstein

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Applied linguists are interested in the cognitive processes of writing teachers within the subfields of both second language writing and writing assessment. Such cognitive insights as how a teacher reads and scores a piece of non-native English speaker (L2) writing can have an impact on the way in which second languages are taught and assessed in writing classrooms. This is particularly relevant as increasing numbers of L2 students matriculate into composition courses traditionally designed for native-English speakers.

Backward Transfer Of Apology Strategies From Japanese To English: Do English L1 Speakers Use Japanese-Style Apologies When Speaking English?, Candice April Flowers

Theses and Dissertations

When learning a second language, there are elements of a learner's native language that can transfer and are exhibited during production in the second language. This can extend not only to the way things are said but even to gestures that are language- and speech-act-specific. However, there is evidence that the same can occur backwards, that is to say that elements of a second language can be exhibited during production of one's native language (Pavlenko and Jarvis, 2002). This study focuses on English L1 learners of Japanese who have spent significant time both in country and learning the language to …

Agency In Action: Exploring User Responses And Rhetorical Choices In Interactive Data Displays, Jacob D. Rawlins, Gregory D. Wilson, Kate Crane

Faculty Publications

n 2014, Rawlins and Wilson proposed a typology of agential interactions between users and designers of interactive data displays. This article tests that typology by studying 20 users working with three different types of interactive data displays and answering questions, which were coded by verb and actor and analyzed for themes. The authors show that rhetorical agency is marked by thoughts, actions, and language. Affordances by the designer open a shared rhetorical space where user and designer are coparticipants. As interactivity increases, participants see themselves as rhetorical agents in a community of rhetorical agents rather than as conduits of information.

Applying The Developmental Path Of English Negation To The Automated Scoring Of Learner Essays, Allen Travis Moore

Theses and Dissertations

The resources required to have humans score extended written response items in English language learner (ELL) contexts has caused automated essay scoring (AES) to emerge as a desired alternative. However, these systems often rely heavily on indirect proxies of writing quality such as word, sentence, and essay lengths because of their strong correlation to scores (Vajjala, 2017). This has led to concern about the validity of the features used to establish the predictive accuracy of AES systems (Attali, 2007; Weigle, 2013). Reliance on construct-irrelevant features in ELL contexts also forfeits the opportunity to provide meaningful diagnostic feedback to test-takers or …

Switch-Reference In Pastaza Kichwa, Alexander Harrison Rice

Theses and Dissertations

Pastaza Kichwa is a Quechuan language spoken in eastern Ecuador. This thesis describes its use of switch-reference which is traditionally understood to be an interclausal cross-referencing feature. Switch-reference is manifested by one of two morphemes that mark a subordinate clause as having either the same or different subject as another clause. Switch-reference has been described for other Quechuan languages and some of these studies present challenges to the theoretical underpinnings of switch reference (Stewart 1988, Dreidemie 2007) others present associated functions of switch-reference morphemes (Cole 1982). This study tests some of the propositions made about switch-reference in other Quechuan languages …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of A Korean Heritage-Speaking Interpreter, Yoonjoo Lee

Theses and Dissertations

The U.S. is a country of immigrants who are non-native speakers of English (NNS), yet its legal system is not always in the favor of them. One of the issues for the NNSs is not being provided with proficient interpreters in legal settings such as police interrogations or courtrooms. There are times when some NNSs are offered qualified interpreters or translators, but others are provided with heritages speakers of needed languages in the local area. The heritages speakers are often thought to have good proficiency in languages, but unfortunately thats not always the case. To investigate the need for qualified …

Cultural Differences In Russian And English Magazine Advertising: A Pragmatic Approach, Emily Kay Furner

Theses and Dissertations

Many American companies looking to increase sales and achieve growth targets consider expanding the reach of their product lines to other countries. However, expansion on a global scale often requires much trial and error as English-speaking companies try to market their goods to a foreign audience. In order to ease this process, localization experts are often hired to "localize" or change advertisements in order to make them more culturally relevant to consumers. Because the field of localization is relatively new, there is little research done on the degree and extent to which advertisements are localized. The purpose of this study …

An Analysis Of Rehearsed Speech Characteristics On The Oral Proficiency Interview—Computer (Opic), Gwyneth Elaine Gates

Theses and Dissertations

The ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines identify memorized words and phrases as a hallmark of novice-level speech. For this reason, research by Cox (2017) found rehearsed content to be a major hindrance to interviewees being rated at higher sublevels on the Oral Proficiency Interview-computer (OPIc). To further investigate, an analysis of these memorized segments to determine patterns of lexico-grammatical and discursive features was conducted. In this study, researchers utilized a Praat analysis to compare prosodic features (specifically, mean length of utterance, number of silent pauses, and articulation rate) of speech segments marked as memorized and those which were not. A qualitative analysis …

Investigating The Perception Of Identity Shift In Trilingual Speakers: A Case Study, Elena Vasilachi

Theses and Dissertations

This is a case study that examines the perception of identity shift in trilingual speakers. The participants were three females from Moldova, a country in Eastern Europe, that have moved to the U.S. Participants responded to open-ended questions during an individual interview and self-report. The questions were about (1) the way they think in their native language, (2) the way they feel in different situations while switching languages, and (3) their interactions with others, depending on their relationships with the participants, the situation, and the language they use at that moment. Primary findings suggest that trilingual speakers perceive a shift …

Pun Strategies Across Joke Schemata: A Corpus-Based Study, Robert Nishan Crapo

Theses and Dissertations

In the linguistic study of humor, research has largely been centered around the formulation of models and theories or the dissecting and categorization of jokes. Because of the often difficult-to-categorize aspects of verbal jokes, much time has been spent trying to create taxonomies for humor types and mechanisms. Linguists such as Raskin and Attardo have sought to categorize all verbal humor according to various functional elements (Attardo & Raskin, 1991). Such elements include, but are not limited to, the logical mechanism that drives the humor in the joke or the situation where the joke takes place. These categorizations are helpful …

Performance Self-Appraisal Calibration Of Esl Students On A Proficiency Reading Test, Jodi Mikolajcik Petersen

Theses and Dissertations

Self-assessment as a placement measure or accurate assessment of skill has been scrutinized in previous research. Findings have shown a general human tendency towards overconfidence in performance (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). This study looks at performance self-appraisals in an ESL population, with participants from varying cultural backgrounds. Performance self-appraisal calibration is a measure of the relationship between an examinee's perceived skill (or confidence) and their actual skill (or ability) on a given exam item (Phakiti, 2016). Being well-calibrated is an indication that test takers know their strengths and weaknesses and thus the difference between confidence and ability is minimal, whereas …