Linguistics Commons^™

A Web-Based Tool For Oral Practice And Assessment Of Grammatical Structures, Heather Colleen Torrie

Theses and Dissertations

The grammar course objectives at Brigham Young University's English Language Center (ELC) are a list of grammar structures for each level that students are expected to be able to master. These objectives currently are only measured by pencil-paper grammar tests, providing information regarding receptive grammar ability only. Therefore, there is a need for an oral grammar assessment to measure productive grammar ability, providing diagnostic and achievement information about the specific grammar objectives. This project is a web-based oral grammar assessment tool that enables teachers to assess students' mastery of the structures covered in the ELC grammar classes. The core of …

The Development Of A Literacy Curriculum For Adult Liberian Refugees, Kristen Marie Kohler

Theses and Dissertations

From 2003 to 2006, Tucson, Arizona became the new home of many Liberian refugees. Because of civil war in their homeland and ensuing years spent in refugee camps, these refugees had not had many opportunities for literacy development. Tucson had several literacy and ESL programs available; however, none of these programs was meeting the Liberians' particular needs. For my project, I designed and implemented a literacy curriculum for the Liberian refugees in Tucson. In preparation for developing my curriculum, I not only took coursework but also thoroughly reviewed the literature on literacy learning and instruction for first language learners, second …

Intrasentential Vs. Intersentential Code Switching In Early And Late Bilinguals, Kelly Ann Hill Zirker

Theses and Dissertations

Significant research has been done regarding the influence of age of acquisition (i.e., the age at which one is exposed to a second language (L2)) on L2 learning (e.g., Johnson & Newport, 1989; Bialystock & Hakuta, 1999). Some researchers have shown that bilinguals who have learned their second language early in life may differ in their fluency from bilinguals who learned their second language later in life (White & Genesee, 1996; Flege, 1999). Specifically, studies have suggested that bilinguals who have not acquired their L2 by puberty will never acquire native-like proficiency (Lenneberg, 1967); however, others claim that there is …

Statistical Machine Translation Of Japanese, Erik A. Chapla

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to find ways to improve the performance of a statistical machine translation system that translates text from Japanese to English. Methods included altering the training and test data by adding a prior linguistic knowledge, altering sentence structures, and looking for better ways to statistically alter the way words align between the two languages. In addition, methods for properly segmenting words in Japanese text through statistical methods were examined. Finally, experiments were conducted on Japanese speech to produce the best text transcription of the speech. The best statistical machine translation methods implemented resulted in improvements …

Parents' Perceptions Of Children's Attitude Of The Heritage Language Through Intergenerational Reading In The L1, Ruth A. Aldrich

Theses and Dissertations

Cultural diversity is not a new concept for the United States. In recent years a demographic shift has taken place so that the "language minority" has become the majority in many urban schools. Educational researchers actively seek innovative ways to acculturate new arrivals into North America. They observed that one way to strengthen acculturation is by affirming the heritage languages and cultures. This study involved three educated Afghan-Minnesotan parents reading heritage storybooks to their children at home. Through promoting heritage literacy, I hypothesized that an intergenerational reading program would enhance children's attitude and behavior toward heritage language and culture while …

Hindi "To" And Relevance, Virginia Crowell Phillips

Theses and Dissertations

The morpheme to occurs in the Hindi language frequently, but is difficult to define and difficult for speakers of Hindi as a second language to use correctly. The purpose of this study is to provide insight into how to contributes to the understanding of the utterance that contains it. Relevance Theory, developed by Sperber and Wilson in 1986, is the framework for this study. Relevance Theory makes a distinction between the implicit and explicit content of utterances and between words that encode conceptual representations and words that encode processing instructions. I will consider whether to contributes to implicit or explicit …

Multilingual Phoneme Models For Rapid Speech Processing System Development, Eric G. Hansen

Theses and Dissertations

Current speech recognition systems tend to be developed only for commercially viable languages. The resources needed for a typical speech recognition system include hundreds of hours of transcribed speech for acoustic models and 10 to 100 million words of text for language models; both of these requirements can be costly in time and money. The goal of this research is to facilitate rapid development of speech systems to new languages by using multilingual phoneme models to alleviate requirements for large amounts of transcribed speech. The Global Phone database, winch contains transcribed speech from 15 languages, is used as source data …

Writing System Development And Reform: A Process, Elke Karan

Theses and Dissertations

Orthography issues are complex. Although literature about writing systems has flourished in recent years, issues which preoccupy practitioners involved in orthography design or reform are rarely addressed.

This thesis provides an overview of theory relating to establishing orthographies for unwritten languages and modifying existing systems. It presents principles and recommendations which favor popular acceptance and successful implementation. Introductory chapters explain the recent increased interest in orthography, define terms, introduce pertinent literature, and give an overview of writing system typology. Remaining chapters present linguistic and non-linguistic factors which influence orthography decisions, examine writing system adaptation options, discuss orthography testing, consider motivations …

Holistic Scoring Of Esl Essays Using Linguistic Maturity Attributes, Ronald Millett

Theses and Dissertations

Automated scoring of essays has been a research topic for some time in computational linguistics studies. Only recently have the particular challenges of automatic holistic scoring of ESL essays with their high grammatical, spelling and other error rates been a topic of research. This thesis evaluates the effectiveness of using statistical measures of linguistic maturity to predict holistic scores for ESL essays using several techniques. Selected linguistic attributes include parts of speech, part-of-speech patterns, vocabulary density, and sentence and essay lengths. Using customized algorithms based on multivariable regression analysis as well as memory-based machine learning, holistic scores were predicted on …

Crossing Dependencies In Persian, Jonathan M. Dehdari

Theses and Dissertations

Languages occasionally have syntactic constructions that are difficult, if not impossible, to describe using a context-free grammar. One such construction is a crossing dependency. Crossing dependencies have been well studied for Dutch and Swiss German (Huybregts, 1976; Shieber, 1985), and recently for Tagalog (Maclachlan and Rambow, 2003). In this paper I propose that Persian exhibits crossing dependencies. In this SOV language, a light verb construction in the future tense becomes interrupted by a future auxiliary verb, which agrees with its subject in person and number. The future auxiliary also splits passive constructions in a similar manner. These forms present interesting …

Teaching Writing Through Peer Revising And Reviewing, Kristi Lundstrom

Theses and Dissertations

Although peer review, in which students evaluate each others' papers, has been shown to be beneficial in many writing classrooms, the benefits of peer review to the reviewer, or the student giving the feedback, has not been thoroughly investigated in the field of second language (L2) writing. The purpose of this study is to determine which is more beneficial to improving student writing: receiving or giving peer feedback. The study was conducted at the English Language Center (ELC) at Brigham Young University (BYU). Ninety-one students in nine writing classes at two different proficiency levels, high beginning and high intermediate, participated …

An English For Specific Purposes Curriculum To Prepare English Learners To Become Nursing Assistants, Abel Javier Romo

Theses and Dissertations

This project details the designing and implementation of an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) Curriculum to prepare English learners to become Certified Nursing Assistants (CNA) at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center (UVRMC) in Provo, Utah. UVRMC, which is owned by Intermountain Health Care (IHC), employs a group of about 40 non-native speakers of English. They work as housekeepers and have interest in learning English and consequently acquiring new skills they could use in better jobs to improve the quality of their lives. UVRMC would like these employees to obtain additional education in order to provide them with better employment opportunities. …

Validating The Rating Process Of An English As A Second Language Writing Portfolio Exam, Robb Mark Mccollum

Theses and Dissertations

A validity study can be used to investigate the effectiveness of an exam and reveal both its strengths and weaknesses. This study concerns an investigation of the writing portfolio Level Achievement Test (LAT) at the English Language Center (ELC) of Brigham Young University (BYU). The writing portfolios of 251 students at five proficiency levels were rated by 11 raters. Writing portfolios consisted of two coursework essays, a self-reflection assignment, and a 30-minute timed essay. Quantitative methods included an analysis with Many-Facet Rasch Model (MFRM) software, called FACETS, which looked for anomalies in levels, classes, examinees, raters, writing criteria, and the …

A Grammatical Description Of The Early Classic Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Daniel A. Law

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to describe the grammatical system of Classical Ch'olti', the language of the Classic Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions, as attested in inscriptions of the Early Classic (approximately AD 200-600). Around 300 Lowland Maya Hieroglyphic inscriptions have been dated to the Early Classic or before, nearly one third of these remain unpublished. Previous work on the monumental inscriptions of the Early Classic (Mathews 1985; Proskouriakoff 1950) has examined Early Classic monuments primarily as works of art. Mora-Marin (2001) examined the language of inscriptions found on early portable texts, a small subset of the corpus here examined. In …

A Computer-Based Course To Teach Speech Acts: Prototype For The Technology Assisted Language Learning Program, Laura Morales Dorlando

Theses and Dissertations

The following report discusses the design and formative evaluation of a prototype for a computer-based course to teach speech acts as part of the Technology Assisted Language Learning (TALL) program. The report includes a literature review on speech acts and current methods and strategies for language teaching and instructional design. Next, there is a description of the lessons and the design process, as well as a summary of the formative evaluation. Following is the prototype of the lesson on apologies. The report concludes with a discussion of the project's limitations and suggestions for future research.

Speech Recognition Using The Mellin Transform, Jesse R. Hornback

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to improve performance in speech recognition. Specifically, a new approach was investigating by applying an integral transform known as the Mellin transform (MT) on the output of an auditory model to improve the recognition rate of phonemes through the scale-invariance property of the Mellin transform. Scale-invariance means that as a time-domain signal is subjected to dilations, the distribution of the signal in the MT domain remains unaffected. An auditory model was used to transform speech waveforms into images representing how the brain "sees" a sound. The MT was applied and features were extracted. The …

Interlanguage Coda Production Of Hmong Second Language Learners Of English, Renae L. Caneday

Theses and Dissertations

This paper reports on Hmong speakers' acquisition of English in children ages 9 and 12 on final voiced and voiceless consonants and consonant clusters, none of which occur in Hmong codas except /ŋ/. The learners' production patterns were considered using an Optimality Theory account to understand the conflict between the learner's first language constraints and the learner's target language constraints. The main findings of this study are that the Hmong language and the English language constraints interacted in an ordered fashion allowing predictable patterns in production. The final consonants and consonant clusters were often deleted or changed by the intermediate …

Curriculum Development Of Elang 105: A Ge First-Year Academic Literacy Course For International Students, Tamara Lee Burton Lamm

Theses and Dissertations

Each year more international students enroll in American universities, and administrators nationwide must determine how to meet students' unique writing needs. Compared to similar institutions of higher learning, Brigham Young University (BYU) has a large percentage of international students—4.3 percent of the student body, approximately 2,000 students each year from 112 countries. Prior to Fall 2004, international students were placed in courses offered through the English composition program, which focuses on "mainstream" college writers who compose in their first language (L1) and not on second language writers and their unique needs. As a result, many international students did poorly and …

The Development Of A Certified Nursing Assistant English For Specific Purposes Curriculum: Teaching Materials And Methods, Nancy Waireana Tarawhiti

Theses and Dissertations

After careful review of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Medical Purposes (EMP) literature, I assisted in the development of a curriculum for an ESP Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) Preparation course. The course participants were non-native English speaking employees of Utah Valley Regional Medical Center (UVRMC), currently working in the department of housekeeping, wanting to further their employment opportunities. The ESP CNA Preparation course was 12 weeks duration, three days per week, 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm.

My contribution to the curriculum was the development of teaching materials and methods and I used two guiding questions to assist …

Self-Access Centers: Maximizing Learners' Access To Center Resources, Benjamin L. Mcmurry

Theses and Dissertations

The Self-Access Study Center (SASC) at Brigham Young University's English Language Center (ELC) is a self-access lab where students can work independently to improve their language skills. Although some students have discovered how to use the SASC effectively, the majority of them appear to be unaware of the resources available in the center. Their trips to the SASC end up becoming more like a cyber cafe situation, where friends send email and chat online. If the SASC is used merely as a computer lab, then students are not using the resources available to fine-tune their English skills. The current project …

Computer-Aided Self-Access Pronunciation Materials Designed To Teach Stress In American English, Ann-Marie Krueger Bott

Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, increasing attention has been placed on providing pronunciation instruction that meets the communicative needs of nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English. Empirical research and pronunciation materials writers suggest that teaching suprasegmentals before segmentals to intermediate and advanced NNSs could be more beneficial in a shorter period of time. However, the majority of the materials available that emphasize suprasegmentals are textbook-based, relying principally on classroom settings and teacher feedback. The purpose of Pronunciation Progress: Stress in American English is to provide NNSs with pronunciation materials for self-access and student-directed learning environments. These materials are designed as a series of …

500 Essential English Words For Esl Missionaries, Carrie A. Thompson

Theses and Dissertations

In order to help ESL missionaries teach the gospel from their hearts using their own words, I have developed a 500-word list of core gospel vocabulary in English. To enhance the 500-word list, I included a lexicon with simple definitions, some grammatical information, and examples of the words in context. The resulting product complies with the standards for master's projects established by the Department of Linguistics and English Language. Published literature shows that the development of specialized corpora can be beneficial for students learning another language. Additionally, specialized corpora act as a catalyst for in-depth vocabulary analysis and the development …

Beliefs About The Education Of Children: A Comparison Of Hispanic Immigrant And Anglo-American Parents, Elodie Gisele Martine Bertola

Theses and Dissertations

In light of the fact that the number of Hispanic children enrolled in American schools is dramatically increasing and that these children are at higher risk of academic difficulty than any other group, the present study investigates the educational and child-rearing beliefs held by Hispanic parents. Understanding these beliefs is pivotal in any attempt to improve Latinos' educational attainment since current research recognizes that parental educational beliefs influence home-literacy practices, which in turn influence subsequent academic achievement. The research questions focus on two types of potential differences in terms of educational and child-rearing beliefs: (1)intercultural (Anglo-Americans vs. Hispanics), (2) intracultural …

Developing An Electronic Film Review For October Sky, Farrah Dawn Keeler

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this Electronic Film Review (EFR) Project was to take the feature film October Sky and apply the EFR approach to an ESL setting. By the use of a special EFRaid player, high-intermediate to low-advanced ESL/EFL students access vocabulary and cultural material in short segmented clips in order to improve their listening and overall comprehension of the film. This material was developed and tested by the materials developer of this project.

Preparing Students For Peer Review, Alison Irvine Mcmurry

Theses and Dissertations

In order to enhance the effective use of peer review, I have developed materials to assist teachers in compliance with the standards for Masters' projects enacted by the Department of Linguistics and English Language. Published literature shows that as peer review grows in popularity in both L1 and L2 English writing classes, many researchers and teachers are trying to increase its effectiveness. In some cases it is very effective, while in others it is marginally effective. This has led researchers to ask why. The difference between helpful and less helpful peer review seems to be in the preparation. In studies …

Information Structure In Narrative Texts In Byali (A Gur Language Of Benin), John J. Berthelette

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an application of Knud Lambrecht’s 1994 work, Information structure and sentence form, to Byali, a Gur language of northwestern Benin (West Africa). In particular, it concerns an analysis of how the different focus structures are marked in Byali, according to Lambrecht’s framework.

Given that this is an application of a theoretical framework in order to describe a language, the thesis has three purposes: (1) to provide an overview of Lambrecht’s framework; (2) to provide an analysis of Byali data using this framework; and (3) to evaluate the suitability of Lambrecht’s framework for analyzing Byali focus structure.

A Learner-Centered And Participtory Approach To Teaching Community Adult Esl, Haley Lynn Wiggins

Theses and Dissertations

This MA project examines the creation, implementation, and effectiveness of the guidebook, Moving Forward: A Learner-Centered and Participatory Approach to Teaching Community Adult ESL, designed to help adult English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers base their classes on the specific needs of community adult education students. This guidebook was created in response to the need for lesson plans and activities that help teachers focus on learner needs. The activities in the guidebook are based on the National Institute for Literacy's (NIFL) adult literacy initiative, Equipped for the Future (EFF) because it focuses on the tasks adults must perform …

The Effect Of Teachers' Error Feedback On International Students' Self-Correction Ability, Youngju Hong

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of teachers' error feedback on ESL students' self-correction ability. One hundred and nineteen international students enrolled in ESL composition classes at Brigham Young University's English Language Center participated in this research. The participants were randomly assigned to three treatment groups: (1) a coded feedback group, (2) a non-coded feedback group, and (3) a no-feedback control group. All participants were asked to write an in-class essay and to self-correct their grammatical errors during 20-minute time period. A grammar test and attitudinal survey were administered at the same time.

The Role Of Vocabulary Size In Assessing Second Language Vocabulary, Kevin John Zimmerman

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the role of vocabulary size in assessing learners from various L1 backgrounds and for institutional placement. Participants included native speakers of Spanish, Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin, who took a test that estimated the size of their productive English vocabulary. First, the vocabulary size of students from each language group was compared and the relationship between vocabulary size and institutional placement level was examined. Then, scores were analyzed to determine how cognates and loan words influenced the participants' performance on the vocabulary test. Further, students' vocabulary size scores were correlated with their placement scores that evaluated reading, writing, …

A Formal Semantic Analysis Of Autistic Language: The Quantification Hypothesis, Michael B. Manookin

Theses and Dissertations

Autism is characterized by language dysfunction ranging from mild and peculiar language usage to a total lack of expressive language function. These language oddities are manifest in the form of phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic/behavioral dysfunction. Research suggests that the autistic language deficit is focal—dealing with a specific area of language processing; however, previous research has failed to identify this language enigma. This thesis demonstrates a novel approach to the problem, showing that the autistic language deficit is tied to a particular aspect of language processing—quantification. Quantification is defined and explained in the context of autistic language and behavior.