Applied Linguistics Commons^™

Defining Antisemitism Or Activism?: An Analysis Of Congressional Debate Over The Antisemitism Awareness Act Of 2023, John Carpenter

University Honors Theses

Introduced amid widespread campus protests against the Israeli militarys actions in the Gaza Strip, the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023 (AAA) directs the Department of Education to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism during investigations of potential discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. This study investigates congressional debate on the AAA using the Discourse Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis to assess how members of Congress portray the victims and perpetrators of antisemitism and whether these portrayals align with the stated aim to "improve safety and security for Jewish Communities." Findings reveal that …

Translating Legalese: Deconstructing Lease Language For New Renters, Erin Clarke

University Honors Theses

This thesis investigates the relationship between legal English and the general public, focusing on the challenges laypersons encounter in reading contract language. By examining specific linguistic features of legal writing, along with the systems and practices of US law, this research highlights the problematic disconnect between the complexity of legalese and the fluency level of average citizens in this specialized variety of English. This issue is particularly salient in the realm of rental agreements for housing, given the mounting housing crisis and historically high eviction rates in the state of Oregon. The culmination of this research is a digital guidebook …

Rationality And Discomfort: Stance In "The End Of The Altaic Controversy" And "In Defense Of The Comparative Method, Or The End Of The Vovin Controversy", Logan Mcdowall

University Honors Theses

This study will use corpus linguistics techniques and Hyland's framework for stance in academic discourse to analyze authors' discoursal roles in different framings of a famous controversy in historical linguistics: the classification of the Altaic language family. Two significant pieces of discourse in this debate include "The End of the Altaic Controversy" by A. Vovin and "In Defense of the Comparative Method, or the End of the Vovin Controversy" by A. Dybo and G. Starostin. Despite the importance of these works, no one has analyzed how these authors use stance to position themselves within it. After performing a corpus word …

Seeking Common Ground With A Conversational Chatbot, Judit Dombi, Tetyana Sydorenko, Veronika Timpe-Laughlin

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Conversational AI is advancing rapidly, enabling significant improvements in chatbots’ conversational abilities. Currently, available conversational chatbots (e.g., Snapchat’s MyAI) appear to generate fairly realistic, often human-like output. As collaboration between humans and machines becomes more common, and AI systems are increasingly viewed as more than just tools, understanding human communication in such contexts is crucial. Despite the vast array of applications and the increasing number of human-bot interactions, research on how humans interact with conversational chatbots is scarce. One possible reason for this gap is that studying human-computer communication may require adaptations of existing pragmatic frameworks, due to the unique …

Lsp Needs Analysis In The Context Of International Minor League Baseball, Julia Moore

University Honors Theses

Examining the language and cultural needs of international minor league baseball players through the lens of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) this study utilizes applied linguistics and sports sociology and aims to inform player development strategies to enhance on- and off-field communication. Survey data was gathered on language use preferences, focusing on players' attitudes and behaviors in professional settings. Ethical considerations included surveys in English and Spanish and voluntary participation, with data collected at the Oakland Athletics Complex in Mesa, Arizona, from 18 out of 20 players.

Findings reveal that players recognize the importance of English proficiency for effective gameplay …

Openings And Closings In Human-Human Versus Human-Spoken Dialogue System Conversations, Judit Dombi, Tetyana Sydorenko, Veronika Timpe-Laughlin

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Although conversation openings and closings are ritualized speech acts (House & Kádár, 2023), they do require interactional work (Schegloff, 1986). Thus, they are important elements of interactional competence (Roever, 2022) and have been studied extensively in L2 interactions, including various types of technology-mediated communication contexts (e.g., Abe & Roever, 2019; 2020). However, to our knowledge, no research on openings and closings has been conducted with newer technologies such as spoken dialogue systems (SDS). To address this gap, this study compares conversation openings and closings across two modalities: a role-play with a human interlocutor versus with a fully automated agent. We …

Talking Yourself Up: Multimodal Conversation Analysis Of Status In An Improvised Setting, Aubrey Lewarne

University Honors Theses

A single-case analysis looked at two individuals performing a scripted exercise during an Applied Improvisational workshop. The analysis examined how performers modify their linguistic and embodied actions in order to perform an assigned status role. The analysis was undertaken to better understand how social status can be constructed in everyday talk-in-interaction. I first outlined the three major theoretical frames that are relevant to the analysis: Applied Improvisation as a pedagogical approach, the use of Conversation Analysis (CA) for the analysis of language in educational contexts, and the concept of status from a sociological perspective. I then present a single-case study, …

Cultivating Connections: Future Approaches To Tourism Esl Pedagogy, Kelly Abrams

Student Research Symposium

My poster will display my research that investigates the pivotal role of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in Cuba's tourism sector and its broader implications for global tourism contexts. Through qualitative methods including written questionnaires and oral interviews with people working in the tourism industry in Cuba, I examined the significance of language proficiency, particularly English, in various industry roles within Cuba's tourism and hospitality sector. Findings highlight how ESP facilitates effective communication, elevates service standards, and fosters career progression for individuals working in the sector. Furthermore, my research underscores the interconnectedness of language and tourism, emphasizing the importance of …

My Father's Story: An Ethnography About Language Loss, Ariel Wilsey-Gopp

Student Research Symposium

War disrupts everything, including a child’s developing language and cultural identity. My father grew up in both Serbia and Germany during the post-WWII political upheaval. By the time he was an adult, he knew five languages, yet lacked his own language and languaculture (Agar, 1994).

It benefits us to understand more completely the effects of language loss as political borders continue to shift and human migration increases. Research in social sciences, psychology, and biology all examine the effects of trauma, the brain, and child development. Applied linguistics examines language loss in relation to Second Language Acquisition (Altarriba & Heredia, …

Prosodic Analysis Of Wh-Indeterminate Questions In L2 Korean, Jung In Lee

Student Research Symposium

Wh-indeterminate questions, particularly wh-questions and yes-no questions, in Korean are ambiguous due to the limited morpho-syntactic markers in the sentence. The absence of these markers leaves two questions syntactically identical, leading to lexical ambiguity. The disambiguation of these two questions relies primarily on prosodic cues. Drawing from previous studies in the L1 Korean context, this study examines the intonation patterns of English learners of Korean in producing and perceiving wh-questions and yes-no questions and explores if there is any sign of L1 influence from English. Five English learners of Korean, who received formal instruction in Korean at a U.S. university, …

Adults’ Reading Engagement And Wellbeing In Aotearoa New Zealand, Stephen Reder

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Education and literacy have long been associated with a range of economic and social outcomes in industrialized societies. Recent research based on large-scale national and international surveys has examined effects of education and literacy on individuals’ social and economic outcomes. This paper takes a further step in understanding the importance of literacy for individuals’ economic and social outcomes by disentangling the effects of two different aspects of literacy, literacy proficiency as measured by standardized tests and reading engagement as measured by self-reports of everyday reading activities. Using recent nationally representative survey data from New Zealand, multivariate regression models estimate the …

L2 Learners’ Pragmatic Output In A Face-To-Face Vs. A Computer-Guided Role-Play Task: Implications For Tblt, Veronika Timpe-Laughlin, Judit Dombi, Tetyana Sydorenko, Shoko Sasayama

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Accomplishing oral interactive workplace tasks requires various language abilities, including pragmatics. While technology-mediated tasks are thought to offer many possibilities for teaching and assessing second language (L2) pragmatics, their effectiveness – especially those facilitated by an AI agent (artificial intelligence agent) – remains to be explored. This study investigated how 47 tertiary-level learners of English as a second language (ESL) performed on an oral interactive task that required them to make requests to their boss in two distinct modalities. Each participant completed the same task with a fully automated AI agent and with a human interlocutor in a face-to-face format. …

Media Portrayals Of Wildfire Displacement And Homelessness With Maude Hines And Janet Cowal, Maude Hines, Janet Cowal

PDXPLORES Podcast

In this episode of PDXPLORES, Portland State professors Maude Hines (English, Black Studies, Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative) and Janet Cowal (Applied Linguistics, Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative) discuss their recently published article, "Natural/Disaster: Differential Media Portrayals of Wildfire Displacement and Homelessness in Portland, Oregon," co-authored by Idowu (Jola) Ajibade, Emily Leickly, Marta Petteni, and Stefanie Knowlton. The research explores media coverage of the 2020 wildfires in Oregon and the differential language used to cover those affected by the devastating blazes.

Click on the "Download" button to access the audio transcript.

Science Education Research On Student To Student Discourse: A Literature Review With An Applied Linguistics Lens, Abbee A. Mortensen

University Honors Theses

Science education researchers have increasingly been using discourse analysis to research small group discussion while doing course related activities. This literature review examined studies from that discourse community to see what analysis methods were used and if they connected to applied linguistics theories or methods. Two of the most common discourse analysis frameworks used were Toulmin's Argument Pattern and grounded coding schemes that looked at the design and specific contents of the discourse. Studies covered will also include education scholars using theories of conversation analysis and normative pragmatics to make a more explicit connection to applied linguistics. Orienting and drawing …

Common Ground, Cooperation, And Recipient Design In Human-Computer Interactions, Judit Dombi, Tetyana Sydorenko, Veronika Timpe-Laughlin

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

In recent years, the number of human-machine interactions has increased considerably. Additionally, we have evidence of linguistic differences between human-machine interactions and human–human conversations (e.g., Timpe-Laughlin et al., 2022). Therefore, it is reasonable to revisit theoretical frameworks that conceptualize interactional language use and investigate to what extent they still apply to technology-mediated interactions. As a first attempt at exploring whether pragmatics theories apply to human-machine interaction, we examined how well Kecskés's (2013) socio-cognitive approach (SCA) focusing on asymmetric interactions (e.g., between interlocutors of different language backgrounds) applies to the asymmetry of human-machine interactions.

Using examples from experimental data, we present …

English Language Learner Labels: Institutions And Identity, Saylor B. Eames

University Honors Theses

In recent discussions of identity work, an underexplored issue has been how different labels impact the self-identity of multilingual students. Critics have argued for new labels and have shown how the ELL label supports a deficit view. However, they have not considered what labels are used by different institutions because they participate in different discourse communities. In my work, I explore what labels are used in the institutions of government, education, and linguistics in order to synthesize the potential identity impacts on multilingual students. I acknowledge that other researchers have contributed to our understanding of labels and identity. I will …

Yay…, ��, And #Sarcasm: Exploring How Sarcasm Is Marked In Text-Based Cmc, Brontë G. Gordon

University Honors Theses

Sarcasm is a complex phenomenon of indirect speech, when we intend a meaning different from that of the literal words we use. In face-to-face settings (FtF), facial expressions, body language, and prosodic cues can be helpful indicators of sarcasm. It becomes even harder to decipher when these physical cues are removed as in any written setting. This paper explores what text strategies are used to mark sarcasm in text-based English language communication online. Through a systematic literature review, the similarities and differences of irony and sarcasm were explored, as well as the issues these parallels and distinctions create in delineating …

When Enthusiasm For Learning Isn’T Enough, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

21CLEO Research Blog Post No.26

The Little Things Add Up, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

21CLEO Research Blog Post No.25

Case Study In Activist Applied Linguistics: Working With The Oregon Judicial Department For The Accessibility Of Domestic Relations Information, Amandalyn R. Wayland, Jamal R. Ford, Abbee A. Mortensen

Student Research Symposium

How are students of applied linguistics able to contribute to community efforts in increasing access to justice? Activist applied linguistics (AAL) (Cowal & Leung, 2021) is defined as utilizing applied linguistics in coordination with community partners to address wicked problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973). AAL provides a framework for engaging university students with communities outside of their campus and has been utilized to further work in water justice (Haeffner & Cowal, 2019) and to increase the Oregon State Bar website’s comprehensibility (Anesa, Cowal, & Pulju, 2022). In this poster, we present an AAL case study in which students of applied …

21cleo Research Team Draws On Critical Race Theory For New Peer Reviewed Article, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

21CLEO Research Blog Post No.24

Ecosystem Of Workplace Education And Training: Where Do Learners Fit?, Kathy Harris, Jen Vanek, Jill Castek, Gloria E. Jacobs

21CLEO Presentations and Publications

Presentation Agenda

● Background on study design and theoretical approaches

● What’s a learning ecosystem?

● Who are the learners?

● Insights gleaned from critical analysis of learner interview data & discussion with key stakeholders (employers, WFD practitioners, educators)

● What’s next in our research

Chinese Word Order: A Look Into Svo And Sov Arguments, Shelley E. Tennison

University Honors Theses

In this paper, the issue of Chinese word order is weighed, and findings in the field are presented. First, looking into the historical background and offering a brief introduction to Greenberg's linguistic universals, I will break apart various arguments concerning the word order in Chinese. I will examine many sources, albeit the focus will rest heavily on Sandra Li and Charles Thomson's SOV argument and Timothy Gívon and Chaofen Sun's SVO argument. The two sides of this argument are considered regarding X-bar theory, constituent test, morphological limitations, and syntax.

Examining The Perspectives Of Adult Working Learners And Key Stakeholders Using Critical Race Theory, Gloria E. Jacobs, Jill Castek, Kathy Harris, Jen Vanek

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Purpose: This article reports on a critical race theory (CRT) analysis of the perspectives of providers of employer-supported educational opportunities and adult learners, who identified as Black, indigenous or as a person of color, and were employed in service industries. Design/methodology/approach: A review of the literature was used to shape an initial interview protocol. Data were collected from working learners in retail, hospitality, restaurants and healthcare industries. An “a priori” coding scheme that drew from CRT was applied to transcripts during analysis. Findings: Analysis revealed that working learners' skills, experiential knowledge, learning mindset, language flexibility and knowledge gained from previous …

Many Voices: Participants As Research Partners, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

No abstract provided.

Working Learners In An Workplace Learning Ecosystem, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

No abstract provided.

“My Background Is A Little Bit More Than What I Am Now", 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

No abstract provided.

The Role Of The Direct Supervisor: Insights From Research Partners, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

Part of our research process has been to engage the voices of individuals involved in employer-supported education and training initiatives or otherwise impacted by the issues we have been investigating. To this end, we hosted a series of convenings to discuss our findings and invited a group of12 interested parties who represented a range of backgrounds and experience in the workforce development system to respond to our initial observations, to make sure that we are doing things that were relevant and useful, and to identify things that we had missed or that we didn't get right.

What Do We Mean By Learning?, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

There is no one way a working learner interacts in the workplace to learn. Nor is there just one set of initiatives in the field that promote learning. Learning is a set of interactions that depend on the context, the conditions, the learner, and the learner's goals.

Missing Persona: Insights From Research Partners, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

No abstract provided.