Linguistics Commons^™

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 …

Designing A Russian Idiom-Annotated Corpus, Katsiaryna Aharodnik, Anna Feldman, Jing Peng

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper describes the development of an idiom-annotated corpus of Russian. The corpus is compiled from freely available resources online and contains texts of different genres. The idiom extraction, annotation procedure, and a pilot experiment using the new corpus are outlined in the paper. Considering the scarcity of publicly available Russian annotated corpora, the corpus is a much-needed resource that can be utilized for literary and linguistic studies, pedagogy as well as for various Natural Language Processing tasks.

Language Planning And Its Discontents: Lines Of Flight In Haugen’S View Of The Politics Of Standardization, José Del Valle

Publications and Research

In this article, I claim that, while placing his theory of language, language planning, and standardization within a conceptual and historical framework inspired by Modernity, the emergence of the nation-state and liberal democracy, Haugen carefully mapped sociolinguistic phenomena onto their political treatment. And it was this careful and honest cartography—unafraid of generating internal tensions—that revealed aspects of language planning practice and scholarship in need of a critical treatment. Ultimately, Haugen embraced an understanding of linguistics that revolves around normativity and accepts language’s fundamentally political nature.

La Planificación Lingüística De En La Universidad De Costa Rica: Política Lingüística De Lenguaje Inclusivo De Género, Su Ejecución Y Relación Con Propuestas De Universidades Hispanohablantes, Silvia Rivera Alfaro

Publications and Research

En este artículo analizamos la política y planificación lingüística (PPL) de uso de lenguaje inclusivo de género de la Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR), de su creación al presente, relacionándola con propuestas que surgen en otras instituciones de educación superior del mundo hispanohablante. Con una perspectiva glotopolítica, describimos la PPL (Cooper, 1997) y su instrumento (CIEM, 2004); exploramos la ejecución de la PPL en documentos administrativos y noticias de la Rectoría; y contextualizamos la PPL de la UCR tras analizar las guías de uso no sexista del lenguaje de otras universidades hispanohablantes. Entre los principales resultados, tenemos que esta política …

The Last Of Anything, Malerie V. Lovejoy

Honors Theses

DR. MARCUS HALL BENNETT is lead archaeologist on a site in Northumberland, England dated after the Norman Conquest. The excavation seems standard until the discovery of Artifact XX.46.8.2, a collection of animal skins covered in writing. To translate the writing, Hall calls in DR. QUINN PRESTON, a linguist studying Middle English as a creole. As Quinn begins to analyze the writing, she realizes they have discovered a new pidgin—a perfect storm of changing language during a time of political upheaval. Through months of study, Quinn understands the text as a history of the tribe leading up to their extinction at …

The Digital Dilemma: L1 And L2 Technology Use, Language Learning, And Motivation Among Us University Students Studying Abroad, Aroline E. Seibert Hanson, Melisa Dracos

Modern Languages and Cultures Faculty Work

The study abroad (SA) experience now involves increased learner access via technology to the home (in the L1) and to the host culture (in the L2). L1 technology use could detract from host culture integration and language learning by allowing SA participants to remain immersed in the L1, while L2 technology use could aid in host culture integration by connecting participants to L2-speakers. Given this, it is urgent to determine the nature of the impact of L1 and L2 technology use abroad on motivation, language gains, and host culture integration. In the present study, we analyzed daily technology logs, learner …

Pain Or Gain? How Business Communication Students Perceive The Outlining Process, Matt Baker

Faculty Publications

This study investigates how students perceive the outlining process. Students in two business communication sections completed a survey regarding outlining perceptions and reasons for outlining or not. Using qualitative content analysis and qualitative coding, the researcher and an independent coder analyzed 34 students’ responses regarding outlining process, use, and reasons for outlining or not. Results indicate that students perceive outlining as more useful if their outlining process includes both organization and content exploration and less useful if it excludes organization or content exploration. Notable reasons for not outlining include concern for outlining time and difficulty generating content for the outline.

Beyond A Language Boundary: Encounters With Silence And L1 Spanish-Speakers' Willingness To Communicate In English, John Turnbull

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The descriptive multi-case study asks three adult migrants, first-language (L1) Spanish-speakers from México, about their interpretations of their own and others’ silences as they navigate daily life, jobs, family, and English-language learning in the United States. Subjective opinions about silence, their second-language (L2) acquisition processes, comfort levels in various speaking situations, functions of L2 communication, and affective and social dimensions of language learning are related to participants’ willingness to communicate (WTC), a construct that measures a predisposition to talk, rather than stay silent, in L2 interaction.

The research, through daily language-use surveys and semi-structured Spanish-language interviews with the three English-language …

Morphometric Analysis Of Subfossil Macronycteris Spp. (Chiroptera: Hipposideridae) From Madagascar, Jamie Lynn Alumbaugh

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Macronycteris bats are morphologically conservative between species but demonstrate intraspecific morphological variation between geographic locations and sexes. Two of the four living species of Macronycteris are found on Madagascar, where they are broadly distributed and demonstrate a trend in body size correlated with the latitudinal precipitation cline on the western side of the island. The presence of an extinct species, M. besaoaka, from Anhjohibe Cave in northern Madagascar suggests that Macronycteris was once more diverse, at least with respect to morphology. Since its description, taxonomic and phylogenetic revisions have reshaped our understanding of this genus. On Madagascar, these include the …

Vowel Dynamics Of The Elsewhere Shift: A Sociophonetic Analysis Of The English In Cowlitz County, Washington, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

The Elsewhere Shift is in Washington (and has been for a while).

In Cowlitz County, the Elsewhere Shift is a pull chain, beginning with the (near) merger of LOT and THOUGHT, ultimately triggered and aided by:

• major events and their subsequent demographic shifts
• place reorientation from inward to outward

It didn’t (straightforwardly) spread from California or Canada

• possibly independently developed
• possibly from the same source as California and Canada
• its spread northward helped though

Methodologically, GAMMs illuminated variation and change in trajectories in the Elsewhere Shift.

Bilingualism, Executive Function, And Beyond: Questions And Insights, Irina A. Sekerina, Lauren Spradlin, Virginia V. Valian

Publications and Research

The papers in this volume continue the quest to investigate the moderating factors and understand the mechanisms underlying effects (or lack thereof) of bilingualism on cognition in children, adults, and the elderly. They grew out of a 2015 workshop organized by two of us (Irina Sekerina and Virginia Valian) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, funded by NSF’s Developmental and Learning Sciences and Linguistics Programs (grant #1451631). The workshop’s goal was to bring together researchers whose fields did not always overlap and who could learn from each other’s insights. In attendance were linguists working on …

San Millán De La Cogolla Y La Celebración Pública Del Idioma: Memorialización Prospectiva De La Lengua En La Transición Española, José Del Valle

Publications and Research

Este artículo tiene por objeto contribuir al cuestionamiento de las políticas consensuales que presidieron el periodo transicional en España empleando para ello un ángulo de análisis glotopolítico. Para ello, toma como caso de estudio el metalenguaje desplegado en las celebraciones y efemérides transicionales relacionadas con las famosas glosas custodiadas en San Millán de la Cogolla. Este revela su apropiación nacionalista por parte de distintos poderes académicos, políticos e institucionales.

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.

Investigating The Use Of The Actfl Can-Do Statements In A Self-Assessment For Student Placement In An Intensive English Program, Maria M. Summers, Troy L. Cox, Benjamin L. Mcmurry, Dan Dewey

Faculty Publications

In this study, the authors use a validation framework to evaluate the usefulness of a self-assessment instrument based on the ACTFL Can-Do Statements for student placement in an Intensive English Program. The authors evaluated (a) the design of the instrument by investigating how well the intended item difficulties aligned with the actual item difficulties (ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines) and how well the scale functioned; (b) the assessment instrument itself through evaluating how reliably it distinguished between students with different levels of self-perception, and (c) the interpretation of scores that examined how well the results could be used as a proxy measure …

Real Time Vowel Shifts In Georgia English, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Lab recordings

• 20 UGA undergraduate students (10 female, born 1994–1998)
• Read 300 sentences from COCA.
• ~30 minutes each, 12.5 hours total
• Recorded in 2017 • 24,325 tokens

Is it inappropriate to say the SVS is “receding”?

• What are they reverting back to? 1850s English?

Better interpretation: Young Georgians are adopting the Elsewhere Shift

• The low back merger is (nearly) complete.
• The front lax vowels have retracted.

How has Georgia English changed since the 1890s? All vowels have changed.

What is the trajectory of that change? In the direction of the Elsewhere Shift.

Social Factors In Southern Us Speech: Acoustic Analysis Of A Large-Scale Legacy Corpus, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

Conclusions

Vowels’ acoustics vary by race, sex and age:

• European American speakers have greater /eɪ ɛ/ swapping than African Americans, supporting Thomas’ (2007) characterization of the African American Vowel Shift
• Women have a more diphthongal realization of front /ɛ æ/ than men

Active divergence of Southern speech from other varieties:

• In this historical dataset, younger speakers lead Southern shifting: they have more “swapping” of /i ɪ/and /eɪ ɛ/, more back-vowel fronting, and more dynamic /æ/ and /ɔ/ vowels
• Older speakers are more conservative both in vowels’ relative positioning, and their dynamics

/eɪ ɛ/ are the nexus of shifting in DASS …

Exploring The Use Of Podcasts On Students’ Language Learning And Change Of Students’ Self-Efficacy About The Use Of Podcasts, Silvia Rehulina Ginting

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Similar to other types of mobile technologies, podcasts are believed to provide many advantages for language instruction, including English as a second language (ESL) learners’ listening skills and pronunciation and changes in their self-efficacy from using the podcasts for learning ESL. The convergent parallel mixed methods design used Mayer’s cognitive theory of multimedia learning and Bandura’s self-efficacy as foundations. It used 11 different instruments to collect quantitative data and qualitative data from two sections of an upper-intermediate ESL class at one university in Midwest United States. Quantitative data were collected using a pre-test, a post-test, and the note taking quizzes …

Principals' Perceptions Of Professional Development And Caring Communities For English Learners, Sunny Sue Chang Jonas

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

A growing population of English Learners (ELs) have unique challenges when navigating the American educational system. In fact, there is an achievement gap such that EL students lag behind their native English peers in school outcomes. Accordingly, there is increased demand for professional development (PD) lead by principals to address the needs of the changing population of ELs. To support effective PD aimed at improved achievement for ELs, principals need embrace transformative thinking in their work. Although PD has the potential to be the driving force of change, traditional approaches to PD have limited impact on academic success of ELs. …

How Two High School Teachers Conceive Of Student Voice, Value It, And Foster It, Katherine Mary Mccleary

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative, exploratory study was to examine two high school English teachers’ experience as they worked together to purposefully implement increased student voice in their classrooms. The study focused on how a convenience sample of teachers designed, implemented, and reflected upon classroom assignments and lessons with the intention to increase student voice and ownership in the classroom. Teachers each participated in four individual interviews, four partnership observations and three classroom observations as they related to student voice implementation.

Data from the interviews, partnership observations and classroom observations were analyzed using qualitative methods and through the lenses of …