First and Second Language Acquisition Commons^™

A Handbook And Materials For Ilead: An Intercultural Communication Program Between Intensive English Program And Teacher Education Students, Sharon Tjaden-Glass

Center for International Programs Publications and Presentations

iLEAD is an intercultural communication program for university students that focuses on developing intercultural competence through guided conversations and shared activities. iLEAD stands for “International Language Exchange and Dialogue.” It was developed through a partnership between the Intensive English Program and the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Dayton.

The educational context: There is a stark difference in how domestic and international students experience the university. The majority of university students fit into the description of traditional, residential students. However, many international students do not fit the traditional, residential student demographic. Many of our international students who come …

Linguistic And Conceptual Metaphors Of ‘Heart’ In Learner Corpora, Aurora Mathews Adams

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This corpus-based study examined English and Spanish learner language for ‘heart’ metaphors. Gutiérrez Pérez (2008) compared ‘heart’ metaphors across five languages and that study served as a reference framework for the work presented here. This work intended to find evidence of metaphor transfer and/or new metaphor learning in second language writing. Conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and linguistic or lexical metaphors (Falck, 2012) from both languages were considered in the analysis. This work analyzed ‘heart’ metaphors taken from two learner corpora, the Cambridge Learner Corpus and the Corpus de Aprendices de Español. Results were compared to the findings of …

Scalar Implicature In Chitonga-Speaking Children, Jodi Reich, Kelly Nedwick, Teodora Niculae-Caxi, Yang Liu, Elena L. Grigorenko

Communication Disorders Faculty Publications

Research on the acquisition of scalar implicature (SI) has provided evidence that young children interpret SI differently from adults. However, results have varied, and there is now mounting evidence that around six years of age, children are able to derive the pragmatic inferences associated with SI (Foppolo, Guasti, and Chierchia, 2012). Variability in results across studies could be due to factors such as data collection methods and language-specific differences. In order to add to the growing body of literature in a meaningful way, this research investigated the interpretation of sentences that include SI by Chitonga-speaking children (7-15 years old) in …

Executive Control Mechanisms In Bilingualism: Beyond Speed Of Processing, Klara Marton, Mira Goral, Luca Campanelli, Jungmee Yoon, Loraine K. Obler

Publications and Research

The question of interest in this study was whether bilingual individuals show superior executive control compared to monolingual participants. Findings are mixed, with studies showing advantage, disadvantage, or no difference between bilingual and monolingual speakers. In this study, we used different experimental conditions to examine implicit learning, resistance to interference, monitoring, and switching, independently. In addition, we matched our monolingual and bilingual participants on baseline response time. Bilingual participants demonstrated faster implicit learning, greater resistance to interference, more efficient switching compared to monolingual participants. The groups did not differ in monitoring. In conclusion, depending on task complexity and on the …

Early Foreign Language Education And The Effect On State-Mandated Standardized Testing Scores, Kaitlyn Elizabeth Duda

Honors Theses

Early foreign language education has been shown to have a positive effect on the performance of students on state-mandated standardized scores. This work gives an overview of the history of foreign language education, as well as a description of a specific program at an elementary school in North Texas. In order to analyze the effects of early foreign language immersion education on the performance of students enrolled in the program at Bedford Heights Elementary school, a statistical evaluation was performed using the STAAR scores of 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students enrolled in both the foreign language immersion program and …

Heritage Language Maintenance: A Mexican American Mother's Success With Raising Bilingual Children, Maria E. Estrada-Loehne

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

This is a single case study of an octogenarian Mexican-American single mother who raised her children bilingually in the United States, creating diglossia—with Spanish spoken at home and church and English spoken in school and community as recommended by Hakuta and others. Trained as a teacher in Mexico, this mother brought her children to full cultural literacy as well as bilingualism by practicing heritage traditions and speaking the heritage language exclusively with them. Through extensive interviewing this past year, I report on the themes in her stories, analyze the decisions she made, and discuss the success of her children. The …

Similarities And Differences Between Simultaneous And Successive Bilingual Children: Acquisition Of Japanese Morphology, Yuki Itani-Adams, Junko Iwasaki, Satomi Kawaguchi

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This paper compares the acquisition of Japanese morphology of two bilingual children who had different types of exposure to Japanese language in Australia: a simultaneous bilingual child who had exposure to both Japanese and English from birth, and a successive bilingual child who did not have regular exposure to Japanese until he was six years and three months old. The comparison is carried out using Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann 1998, 2005) as a common framework, and the corpus for this study consists of the naturally spoken production of these two Australian children. The results show that both children went through …

Wiki-Based Collaborative Creative Writing In The Esl Classroom, Rima Elabdali

Dissertations and Theses

Despite the growing number of L2 studies examining digitally-mediated collaborative writing, the vast majority of these studies have focused on academic writing tasks. This study examined the dynamics and perceptions of groups of ESL students who used wikis to write collaborative short stories. The study also compared the short stories written in groups with posttest short stories written individually in terms of creativity, accuracy, and complexity. The study involved nine students taking a Creative Writing course in an intensive English program at a large university in the U.S. It followed a multiple case study design; the students were divided into …

The Qualities, Practices, And Theories Held By Award-Winning Second Language College Teachers, Leendert Van Beek

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

It is important for second language college teachers to know what kinds of teaching and learning approaches are most effective for their students. This basic qualitative study presents the perspectives exceptional second language teachers have regarding their own qualities of excellence, practices, philosophies of teaching, and theories of learning. The purpose of the study was to identify, describe, and understand these perspectives. Sixteen of such teachers, all of whom had won one or more awards of excellence from professional organizations, were interviewed, and the collected data were analyzed through three levels of coding. The main research question regarding the perspectives …

Subject Pronoun Expression In Second Language Learners: Differentiating Paths Of Acquisition, Falcon Restrepo-Ramos

World Languages & Cultures Department Publications

No abstract provided.

Native Language Adaptation To Novel Verb Argument Structures By Spanish-English Bilinguals: An Electrophysiological Investigation, Eve Higby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilinguals have to learn two different grammatical systems. Some aspects of these grammars may be similar across the two languages (for example, the active-passive alternation) while others may exist in only one of the two grammars (for example, the distinction between recent and distant past). This dissertation investigates the degree to which grammar information specific to only one language is available when processing the other language. In particular, the current study focuses on the application of grammatical structures from the bilinguals’ second-learned language to their first-learned language, a direction of language transfer not often investigated. Based on a Shared Syntax …

Literacies Of Bilingual Youth: A Profile Of Bilingual Academic, Social, And Txt Literacies, Michelle A. Mcsweeney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation identifies three types of language skills that urban Spanish/English bilingual youth possess (academic, social, and texting language), and reports on their relationship while documenting and analyzing the features of text messaging among this population. The participants in this study are Spanish-dominant bilingual young adults enrolled in a high school completion program in New York City. They are in the process of developing both Spanish and English academic literacy skills, and it is well known that they tend to perform below the grade they are enrolled in. For this reason, they are often referred to as being “language-less” (DeCapua …

An Evaluation Of Pos Taggers For The Childes Corpus, Rui Huang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project evaluates four mainstream taggers on a representative collection of child-adult’s dialogues from Child Language Data Exchange System. The nine children’s files from Valian corpora and part of Eve corpora have been manually labeled, and rewrote with LARC tagset. They served as gold standard corpora in the training and testing process. Four taggers: CLAN MOR tagger, ACOPOST trigram tagger, Stanford parser, and Ver. 1.14 of Brill tagger have been tested by 10-fold cross validation. By analyzing what kinds of assumptions the tagger made about category assignment lead to failing, we identify several problematic cases of tagging. By comparing the …

Lengua Y Racismo-Motivación, Competencia Y Conciencia Lingüística En La Clase De Español Como Segunda Lengua: Integración De Contenidos Relacionados Con La Dimensión Socio-Política Del Lenguaje En Un Acercamiento Content-Based, Jose Magro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dentro de un modelo de instrucción lingüística basado en la transmisión de contenidos (content-based instruction), esta disertación trata de averiguar cómo influye en la conciencia lingüística, motivación y competencia lingüística de estudiantes de cursos avanzados de español como segunda lengua, la integración en el programa de contenidos relacionados con la dimensión socio-política del lenguaje (CSP). Desde la perspectiva epistemológica de la lingüística crítica aplicada, se hará un estudio cualitativo apoyado con componentes cuantitativos. Se desarrollarán e integrarán en el programa del grupo experimental materiales con CSP destinados a observar si influyen en el desarrollo de una conciencia lingüística explícitamente antirracista, …

“We All Is Teachers”: Emergent Bilingual Children At The Center Of The Curriculum, Ysaaca D. Axelrod

Occasional Paper Series

Incorporating data from an ethnographic case study of a bilingual (Spanish/English) Head Start program serving the children of Dominican and Mexican immigrants, Axelrod explores the tensions in parents’, teachers’, and administrators’ beliefs about language use and the role of play.

Book Review: Mitchell, R., Tracy-Ventura, N., & Mcmanus, K. (Eds.). (2015). Social Interaction, Identity And Language Learning During Residence Abroad., Roswita Dressler

Comparative and International Education / Éducation Comparée et Internationale

No abstract provided.

The Post-Sojourn In Study Abroad Research—Another Frontier, John L. Plews

Comparative and International Education / Éducation Comparée et Internationale

No abstract provided.

Formulaic Sequences In L2 Legal Writing, Lindsey M. Kurtz, Alissa J. Hartig, Olesya Kisselev

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Extended Instruction On Passive Voice, Reduced Relative Clauses, And Modal Would In The Academic Writing Of Advanced English Language Learners, Audrey Bailey

Dissertations and Theses

As more international students who are not expert users of English come to the United States to study at university, the field of teaching English for Academic Purposes grows. There are many important skills these international students must learn to become successful university students in America, but writing for academic purposes is of particular importance for these students to join the academic conversation in their respective disciplines. Corpus research has identified the grammatical features which are frequently found in different registers, and from this work it is known which structures are important in different types of academic writing. Grammatical structures …

Contextualized Recognition Of Fingerspelled Words, Campbell Mcdermid, Lynn Finton, Alexis Chasney

Journal of Interpretation

Fingerspelling, an aspect of American Sign Language, is difficult for second language English-speaking adults to learn (Bahleda, 1998), yet mastery is required by professional ASL-English interpreters. This study compared novice and expert interpreters’ interpretation of fingerspelled words under the assumption that exposure to priming material in their L1, English, would enable the interpreters to recognize those terms when fingerspelled in their L2, ASL. In this study, participants (15 novices, 15 experts) were asked to interpret an ASL text with 25 “carefully” fingerspelled words embedded. Ten subjects were not given priming materials, ten a list of words in printed English that …

A National Bilingual Education Policy For The Economic And Academic Empowerment Of Youth In St. Lucia, West Indies, Gabriella Bellegarde

Capstone Collection

This campaign portfolio argues the case for a national bilingual education policy on the island of St. Lucia, where youth speak both St Lucian Creole and St. Lucian standard English. The portfolio consists of a policy paper and brief, an advocacy plan, a communications plan, monitoring and evaluation plan. The Bilingual Education Taskforce (BET), made up of teachers, parents and principals, is an advocacy organization that discovered the need for a bilingual education intervention when they observed, assessed and analyzed the written work of struggling readers at their school, the Anse la Raye Infant School on the west coast of …

Fact Or Fiction? Exploring Assumptions About Esl Writers, Alissa J. Hartig

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Bilingual Latino Middle Schoolers On Languaging And Racialization In The Us, Sarah Hesson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores bilingual Latino middle schoolers’ articulated understandings of their language practices as well as the links between language practices and processes of racialization and discrimination in the US. The research was conducted in the context of an after-school program whose explicit aim was to not only document students’ experiences, but to use those experiences as a basis for generating individual and collective critical understandings among participants. The findings of this case study center on the ways youth understand processes of racialization, translanguaging, and translation in the context of an English-dominant society, and how these understandings are connected to …

Ideology, Access, And Status: Spanish-English Bilinguals In The Foreign-Language Classroom, Michael E. Rolland

Graduate Student Publications and Research

Spanish language teaching in US higher education is today generally divided between ‘foreign language’ courses for novice learners and ‘heritage language’ courses for Hispanic/Latinx students with some knowledge of the language. However, ‘heritage’ students are a linguistically diverse group, and are also often enrolled at institutions where heritage courses are not offered. Little research to date has studied ‘heritage’ speakers enrolled in ‘foreign’ language courses. For this study I conducted semi-structured interviews to explore the affective and ideological characteristics of bilingual students enrolled in elementary Spanish courses. As the literature suggests, I find that these students have a generally low …

Transmigration Experiences Of Newcomers In The Context Of An English-Only Education: Sense-Making By Former Newcomer Ells, Elizabeth Paulsen Tonogbanua

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

This qualitative interpretive study explored how former newcomer English Language Learners (ELLs) in Boston Public Schools (BPS) made sense of their transmigration experiences through a digital storytelling project. The study fills a gap on transmigration experiences in the context of English-only learning environments, with a particular orientation toward the value of students’ home languages, and in turn, cultures within an urban school setting. The immigrant student population in BPS continues to increase and teachers must be able to understand and plan for newcomers’ specific needs. To this end, my conceptual framework drew on four areas: general educators and their urban …

Performing Language And Identities: Adult Immigrant Students And The Creation Of A Play, Kathleen R. Mcgovern

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis presents findings from a yearlong study of a classroom of adult immigrants studying English as a Second Language (ESL) in the U.S., who collaboratively created and performed plays based on their life experiences. This research is rooted in poststructuralist theories of identity in second language learning (e.g., Norton, 2000; 2013), a view of language pedagogy as a form of liberation (Freire, 1970), and the notion that theater can be used by non-actors to critically engage with issues of relevance to the community (Boal, 1979). The teacher-researcher of the class used ethnographic investigation informed by autoethnography and action research …

Veiled Incivilities: International Students And Campus/Classroom Climate At Predominantly White Universities, Ann E. Roemer

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

This dissertation adds to the literature on campus climate in higher education in the United States, by 1) focusing on international students, especially those from China and Saudi Arabia, and their perceptions of the classroom climate as the racialized Other, in particular, their feelings of being welcomed or not welcomed; and 2) examining their perceptions of, and reactions to, pedagogical practices and peer behaviors that marginalized and/or included them. The mixed-methods study was conducted at three predominantly White institutions in the Intermountain West, utilizing the theoretical framework of campus climate and the White racial frame. Qualitative and quantitative data found …

Spanish For Heritage Speakers: Instructional Module #1, Gabriela C. Zapata

Activities and Assignments Collection

By the end of this module, students should be able to:

1. Identify and name characteristics of the narrative genre;

2. Identify the rules for and correctly use the preterite and imperfect;

3. Identify the rules for the accentuation of palabras agudas and esdrújulas and correctly apply them;

4. Write a narrative of at least 300 words;

5. Understand the rules behind the production of visual "texts";

6. Produce a visual narrative using images and video.

¿Vera O Verra? Using Principles Of Task-Based Language Teaching To Practice Spanish Rhotics, Avizia Long

Faculty Publications

Research on task-based language teaching and learning has demonstrated that tasks may encourage second/foreign language development, specifically by facilitating conditions believed to engage processes that are important for second language acquisition to occur (Robinson, 2011; Skehan, 2014). Recent studies conducted by Solon, Long, and Gurzynski-Weiss (2014, 2015) have demonstrated that tasks designed to make pronunciation task essential do encourage learner attention to pronunciation, and increasing task complexity leads to greater accuracy in the production of the Spanish vowels [o] and [u]. This micro-teaching lesson, inspired by Solon et al., will showcase a task designed to make the pronunciation of the …

Effects Of Parent Child Interaction And Language Stimulation On Children's Language Development, Rachel E. Timm, Helen Raikes

UCARE: Research Products

Research Questions:

• Does parent positive regard relate to a child’s receptive language development?

• Does language stimulation relate to a child’s receptive language development?

• Does parent bookreading behavior (reading fluency, reading intonation/animation, comfort level, and child involvement) relate to a child’s receptive language development?

Measures:

• Preschool Language Scale-5 (PLS-5)
• Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-4 (PPVT-4)
• HOME Language and Literacy Scale
• Video Codes from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care

Results:

• Positive regard was not significantly related to the PLS-5 or the PPVT-4.
• The HOME Language and Literacy Scale was a significant predictor of the PPVT-4 and was related to the PLS-5 …