Linguistics Commons^™

Promoting L2 Motivation Via Motivational Teaching Practice: A Mixed-Methods Study In The Turkish Efl Context, Zeynep Erdil

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The shift toward bilingualism and multilingualism in historically monolingual societies resulting from globalization has positioned second/foreign language (L2) learning research as a significant field. Extensive research in L2 motivation over decades has demonstrated motivation to be a significant determiner of L2 learning achievement and has yielded many sound L2 motivation theories and frameworks. The latest L2 motivation framework is the L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS) offered by Dörnyei (2005, 2009). Numerous studies have been conducted to validate this theory in different English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts (e.g., in China, Iran and Japan: (Taguchi, Magid & Papi, 2009); in …

The Influence Of Context On L2 Development: The Case Of Turkish Undergraduates At Home And Abroad, Zeynep Koylu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the field of second language acquisition (SLA), the study abroad context (SA) has gained attention as a site that offers the potential of significant second language (L2) development due to high amounts of input and interaction opportunities compared to at home foreign language (AH) and domestic immersion (IM) contexts (Pérez-Vidal, 2014). In previous research, the SA context has been a country where the L2 is the local language (e.g., English in the United Kingdom). However, with the increase of student mobility programs across Europe, such as ERASMUS, and the status of English as an International Language, another study abroad …

An Analysis Of The English Class Discourse In The Iranian High Schools, Reza Khany, Saeedeh Mohammadi

The Qualitative Report

One of the decisive factors of students’ success in second language learning is employing interactive strategies related to Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic discourse. Following Bakhtin’s conceptualization of discourse (1981), monologic and dialogic patterns can be considered as the opposing ends of the teacher’s discourse continuum. Given this, the current research intended to find out whether the Iranian high school teachers maintain a monologic discourse in their classes or a dialogic one. To accomplish this goal, a comprehensive exploration of the related literature carried out to identify the features differentiating monologic and dialogic discourse, which proved to be around thirteen. Afterwards, …

October 6, 2016: "Gunpowder Percy" Reading In Ann Arbor, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

Grace Tiffany will be reading from her novel, Gunpowder Percy, on Wed., October 19th, 7 p.m., at the Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, 124 E. Washington St.

October 6, 2016: Melody Graulich Visit Next Event In Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series featuring Melody Graulich

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

World Languages & Cultures Department Publications

No abstract provided.

Virtual Meatspace: Word Formation And Deformation In Cyberpunk Discussions, Matt Garley, Benjamin Slade

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Powerful Words: An Exploration Of Linguistic Hierarchy In Moroccan Hospitals, Ellelan Degife

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Morocco is a country of distinct diversity, which exists as a result of the settling of multiple peoples and European colonization. As a result of this diversity, many languages are employed in different settings and spaces, and of these languages, French represents remnants of colonialism and continual elitism in the country. One of the spheres that French commands in Moroccan society is medicine, which creates a dichotomy between the educated health care providers and the underprivileged patients in public hospitals. The aim of this paper is to explore the effect of French on the doctor-patient relationship in urban, public Moroccan …

Conceptual Representation Changes In Indonesian-English Bilinguals, Andree Hartanto, Lidia Suarez

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This study investigated conceptual representations changes in bilinguals. Participants were Indonesian-English bilinguals (dominant in Indonesian, with different levels of English proficiency) and a control group composed of English-dominant bilinguals. All completed a gender decision task, in which participants decided whether English words referred to a male or female person or animal. In order to explore conceptual representations, we divided the words into gender-specific and gender-ambiguous words. Gender-specific words were words in which conceptual representations contained gender as a defining feature, in both English and Indonesian (e.g., uncle). In contrast, gender-ambiguous words were words in which gender was a defining feature …

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 …

Talk Shows And Language Attitudes: A Sociolinguistic Investigation Of Language Attitudes Towards Taiwan Mandarin Among Chinese Mainlanders, Chun-Yi Peng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at the effects of media exposure and language ideologies on Mandarin speakers’ acceptability judgments. Although there is a long-standing tradition against citing media exposure as a source of language variation, I show that 1) media exposure to a non-local perceptually salient variant can make people more likely to rate non-local linguistic features as grammatically acceptable, and 2) media exposure shapes people’s language attitudes—a new alignment of attitudes is emerging among the millennials on the mainland.

Data were collected through an online survey consisting of grammaticality judgments, matched-guise tasks, open-ended attitudinal questions, and demographic questions. The data show …

Producing Discursive Change: From "Illegal Aliens" To "Unauthorized Immigration" In Library Catalogs, J. Silvia Cho

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent debates on immigration policies have included a discursive contest over the representation of unauthorized immigrants, in both the news media and the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), a subject indexing system administered by the Library of Congress. Using a mixed methods approach from a critical discourse analysis perspective, I examine the responses of the news media and the Library of Congress to societal pressures for change, showing how the Library’s complex institutional position can constrain its responses. Those obstacles, when combined with the characteristics of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) as a linguistic tool for information …

An Erp Study Of Sensory-Linguistic Processing In The Context Of Asd Research, Larissa R. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis considers the questions of what is hindering the language development of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Tomasello’s (2003) theory of language development by use necessitates adequate pattern recognition, intention reading and use for language development. Within these areas there are many variables where language acquisition could become derailed, from basic attention, perception and memory to higher cognitive functions, as well as processing speed and synchronization. Although there is a wide range of language abilities for children on the autism spectrum, the one consistently under developed area is pragmatics. One of the key aspects of pragmatic processing is …

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, …

Discourses Of "Cruelty-Free" Consumerism: Peta, The Vegan Society And Examples Of Contemporary Activism, Andrea Springirth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper draws upon the principles of critical discourse analysis in order to examine the production of capitalist and consumerist discourses within contemporary nonhuman animal rights activism. The analysis presents evidence to suggest that the discourses being produced via the websites of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and The Vegan Society are consistently being constructed through market-centric ideologies that treat activists mainly as middle-class consumers. This paper argues that the consistent presence of neoliberal discourse signals an instructive entanglement with broader sociopolitical issues. Specifically, there are concerns as to how this discourse relates to what is thought …

An Examination Of Cross-Domain Authorship Attribution Techniques, Maxwell B. Schwartz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent years, Twitter has become a popular testing ground for techniques in authorship attribution. This is due to both the ease of building large corpora as well as the challenges associated with the character limit imposed by the service and the writing styles that have developed as a result. As both false and genuine claims of hacked Twitter accounts have made international news, there is an increasing need for this type of work. For newer Twitter accounts, however, there is little training data. Thus, this study looks to lay the groundwork for cross-domain authorship attribution: training on one source …

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 …

Processing Filler-Gap Dependencies In Mandarin Chinese: An Effect Of Language Exposure?, Stanley Chen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates how speakers of Mandarin Chinese process filler-gap dependencies in potentially ambiguous fronted wh-questions. The study recruited native speakers of Mandarin with different degrees of English proficiency. In the experiment, participants were first presented with a wh-in-situ question and then a wh-ex-situ alteration of it that has the wh-phrase fronted to the beginning of the sentence. Participants were asked to judge and rate whether the two sentences could express a similar meaning or not. The results show that the movement of the wh-phrase zai nali (‘where’) is generally accepted by Mandarin speakers, despite Mandarin being a wh-in-situ language …

Confession, Hybridity, And Language In Gina Apostol’S Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Cecilia Nina Myers

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Gina Apostol creates multiple tensions reflecting the relationship between the United States and the Philippines and among different linguistic codes. Languages mix throughout the text, set in the Marcos Era Philippines, as symbols of fluidity and disorientation. Other characters’ frequent complex linguistic mix proves alienating for protagonist and narrator Soledad Soliman. Apostol renders Soledad as a young girl disoriented by her inability to competently use native Filipino languages because she spent most of her childhood in the United States and simultaneously traumatized by her role as the daughter of a member of former President Ferdinand …