Linguistics Commons^™

Academic And Language Socialization Of Russian Ma Tesl Students At Us Universities: Struggles, Triumphs, And New Identities, Marina Lepekhova

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Each year a great number of students leaves their home countries to study abroad. As a result, international students constitute a considerable portion of student body in us universities and around the world. For many students, study abroad is a holistic and a life-changing experience. Life in a foreign country and everyday exposure to new social and academic cultures make international students undergo an uneasy academic socialization process and re-imagine themselves through the use of second language (l2). This process is simultaneously coupled with academic and language socialization practices that construct novices as certain kinds of situationally organized persons, with …

Experiments In Idiom Recognition, Jing Peng, Anna Feldman

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Some expressions can be ambiguous between idiomatic and literal interpretations depending on the context they occur in, e.g., sales hit the roof vs. hit the roof of the car. We present a novel method of classifying whether a given instance is literal or idiomatic, focusing on verb-noun constructions. We report state-of-the-art results on this task using an approach based on the hypothesis that the distributions of the contexts of the idiomatic phrases will be different from the contexts of the literal usages. We measure contexts by using projections of the words into vector space. For comparison, we implement Fazly et …

The Push And Pull Of Language Ideologies : Multilingual Communicative Practices Among Youths In An Indonesian City, Kristian Tamtomo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis deals with the use of Javanese, Bahasa Indonesia and English in the spoken and written communication of high school youths in the city of Semarang, Central Java. The thesis aims to understand the patterns in which youths make use of these languages in various communicative contexts and the way youths use languages to either enact or negotiate the polycentric "push and pull" of the various language ideologies associated with local, national, and global language. Data collection was conducted using ethnographic methods, which involved participant observation, recordings of conversations, collection of texts, as well as interviews with youth groups …

The Teachability Of Situation-Bound Utterances In Modern Chinese As A Foreign Language Context, Shu-Han Yeh

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The purpose of this study is to investigate the teachability of Situation-Bound Utterances (SBUs hence) in a Modern Chinese foreign language classroom. Specifically, the basic question to be examined is this: to what extent two instructional paradigms--explicit versus implicit instruction--affect learners’ knowledge and ability to use SBUs. For this study, SBUs were defined by Kecskés (2000) as “highly conventionalized, prefabricated pragmatic units whose occurrences are tied to standardized communicative situations” (p. 606). SBUs consist of strings such as “I’ll see you later,” and “You can say that again,” which are used predictably by native speakers in certain contexts.

Examining The Role Of Corrective Feedback On Learners' Modified Output Of The Spanish Past Tense In Face-To-Face And Telecollaboration Contexts, Arnaldo Robles

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) there has been a demand for further research to look into how corrective feedback (CF) can aid adult second language (L2) learners’ language performance and development. More specifically, to what degree elicitations with prompts (i.e., a form of explicit correct feedback) can affect the modified output of adult learners of Spanish during task performance. Additionally, how face-to-face and telecollaboration environments might play a role in learner’s modified output. Therefore, this dissertation study examines the effects of elicitations with prompts by measuring learners’ modified output in producing the Spanish past tense – the …

Latin Nominatives With And Without Verbs, Joseph C. M. Davis

Publications and Research

Although the nominative case has typically been viewed as a syntactic device marking the subject of the verb of a sentence, that case in Latin must instead be understood as a communicative tool operating at the discourse level if its entire distribution is to be accounted for. Attested instances of the Latin nominative case without any verb force this shift. Nominatives with and without verbs alike can be accounted for if concentration of attention at the discourse level is treated as the operative factor. Once the function of the Latin nominative case is properly understood, its distinction from other grammatical …

Substance And Structure In Columbia School Linguistics, Joseph C. M. Davis

Publications and Research

In the debate over the proper roles in linguistics of substance and structure, the Columbia School has taken an explicit position: that both substance and structure are required for a successful analysis. In a particular linguistic problem, the relevant phonetic or semantic substance must be identified, and the structural, or value, relations within it must be specified, for an accounting of the distribution of forms in discourse. The rationale for this position was given by the founder of the school, William Diver, in 1974, and the position has guided research since then. Ongoing research reported here on the Italian clitic …

The Washback Of The Toefl Ibt In Vietnam, Melissa Barnes

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Washback, or the influence of testing on teaching and learning, has received considerable attention in language testing research over the past twenty years. It is widely argued that testing, particularly high-stakes testing, exerts a powerful influence, whether intended or unintended, positive or negative, on both teachers and learners. This article investigates the washback effects of a high-stakes English language proficiency test, the Test of English as a Foreign Language Internet-Based Test (TOEFL iBT), in Vietnam. Vietnam, a developing country whose educational philosophies differ from those underpinning the TOEFL iBT, provided a unique context to explore the test's washback. In the …

Mormon Metaphors Of Restoration: Pathways To Identity And Understanding, Dallin D. Oaks

Faculty Publications

The important role of metaphors in interfaith understanding has received significant attention. The pervasiveness of certain metaphors in the lives of members of a religious community is especially significant when they are incorporated into sacred texts. This would seem to be the case not only for Judaism, Islam, and mainline Christianity, but also for Mormonism, a distinctive branch of Christianity. Officially known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), Mormonism shares some root metaphors with other Christians but differs in important ways in its development and use of these metaphors. In this paper we discuss the journey, …

The Systematic Stretching And Contracting Of Ideophonic Phonology In Pastaza Quichua, Joseph A. Stanley, Janis B. Nuckolls, Elizabeth Nielsen, Roseanna Hopper

Faculty Publications

This paper analyzes systematic differences between sounds used in ideophones and sounds used in the non-ideophonic or “prosaic” lexicon of the Pastaza Quichua language of Amazonian Ecuador. We compare a digitized corpus of vocabulary items with a list of ideophones identified from field observations. We find that if a sound, syllable structure, or stress pattern is distributionally restricted in Pastaza Quichua, it is likely to be normalized and expanded within ideophones. The overall system is also stretched among ideophones by the addition of new sounds to the obstruents. These expansions are complemented by an overall contraction among sonorant sounds within …

Business Communication Practices From Employers’ Perspectives, Tina A. Coffelt, Matthew J. Baker, Robert C. Corey

Faculty Publications

This study investigates the meaning of communication skills from employers’ perspectives. Students enrolled in a business communication course were asked to contact potential employers in their fields of interest, requesting information about important communication skills in those fields. Using content analysis, two coders familiar with business communication analyzed 52 of the resulting open-ended responses. The analysis of 165 skills suggests employers recall oral communication more frequently than written, visual, or electronic communication skills. Of oral communication subskills, interpersonal communication was mentioned more than other workplace communication skills.

Constructing A Russian Elicited Imitation Exam, Troy L. Cox, Jennifer Brown, Jacob Burdis

Faculty Publications

A Russian student wants to know if it is worth the expense to pay for an official ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI). The director of a flagship program wants to measure the improvement of the oral proficiency of students returning from their in-country experience. A university department needs to provide evidence that their students are meeting learning objectives as part of accreditation. In each of these cases, a cost-effective, scalable solution to measuring oral proficiency would be helpful.

Assessing speaking ability in a foreign language has traditionally been a difficult and time-intensive task. A traditional method of measuring oral language …

Marginal Models: An Alternative To Mixed-Effects Models In Sociolinguistic Research, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

Sociolinguistic studies generally gather multiple instances from a single speaker. This introduces repeated measures that need to be taken into account when carrying out statistical analysis in order for the outcome to be statistically valid. One way of doing this is to apply a mixed-effects model. In the workshop, I present a lesser-known, but equally valid method for dealing with repeated measures—marginal models.

Kiezdeutsch: Perceptions Of A Metropolitan Dialect Of German, Emily Claire Krauter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I explain perceptions of the German dialect Kiezdeutsch. The basis for the research came from four recorded interviews of male and female Kiezdeutsch speakers. I used the Kiezdeutsch recordings to perform research at the University of Mississippi by interviewing nine different German students who were studying abroad for the semester. The interviewees were separated into three different focus groups. I then performed a pilot study of perceptual dialectology folloby an open discussion. Although my sample size proved to be too small and limited to yield any statistically significant results, the data was regardless intriguing. This study focuses …

Attention Control And The Effects Of Online Training In Improving Connected Speech Perception By Learners Of English As A Second Language, Burcu Gokgoz-Kurt

Theses and Dissertations

One of the aspects of L2 English phonology which poses a challenge for L2 learners is learning how to decode the language, especially as spoken by native speakers. This difficulty may be due to the way the native speakers speak by ‘draw[ing] [the sounds] together’ (Clarey & Dixson, 1963), which results in realization of consonants and vowels differently than when uttered in isolation. This process is referred to as connected speech (e.g., pronouncing ‘want to’ as [wɑnə], and ‘going to’ as [ɡʌnə]). The challenge in teaching and learning these forms is that they lack perceptual saliency, requiring extra attentional resources …

Actitud De Los Ciudadanos Andaluces En Cuanto Al Empleo Del Dialecto Andaluz En Los Medios De Comunicación Audiovisuales, Victoriano Pimentel Rivas

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This study presents regulations and linguistic awareness respecting the use of Andalusian dialect on television, radio, and cinema among others to provide a full description of the subject. The qualitative method will reveal aspects more fine-grained through data collection of the different habits and reactions of participants with TV, radio, internet or another audiovisual platform. For example, this research concludes, among other factors, that young Andalusians are more in contact with their dialect than older ones. Empirical and statistical data reflects that the young individual is open to different audiovisual platforms apart from TV and radio. Finally, this thesis leads …

Pragmatic Quality Assessment For Automatically Extracted Data, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Scott N. Woodfield, Stephen W. Liddle, Tae Woo Kim, David W. Embley, Christopher Almquist

Faculty Publications

Automatically extracted data is rarely “clean” with respect to pragmatic (real-world) constraints—which thus hinders applications that depend on quality data. We proffer a solution to detecting pragmatic constraint violations that works via a declarative and semantically enabled constraint-violation checker. In conjunction with an ensemble of automated information extractors, the implemented prototype checks both hard and soft constraints—respectively those that are satisfied or not and those that are satisfied probabilistically with respect to a threshold. An experimental evaluation shows that the constraint checker identifies semantic errors with high precision and recall and that pragmatic error identification can improve results

Building Communicative Competence: An Evaluation Of The Effectiveness Of An Intensive Japanese-Language Program, Yukiko Konishi

Doctoral Dissertations

Even though language-program evaluations provide educators with various types of information on teaching practices and the programs in which they work, insufficient literature discusses issues related to language-program evaluation. This mixed-methods study examined the effectiveness of a Japanese-language program offered at a government-sponsored Institute located in northern California on language-program evaluation and developing communicative competence at postsecondary schools.

Data comprised two sets of surveys, six individual interviews, and one group interview. Survey respondents were 35 former students of the institute and 12 Japanese instructors who are currently teaching Japanese or have taught Japanese at the Institute. Of the 35 students, …

Predicting Second Grade Listening Comprehension Using Prekindergarten Measures, Crystle N. Alonzo, Gloria Yeomans-Maldonado, Kimberly A. Murphy, Beau Bevens, Language And Reading Research Consortium (Larrc)

Communication Disorders & Special Education Faculty Publications

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine prekindergarten predictors of listening comprehension in second grade. Methods: Within a large, 5-year longitudinal study, children progressing from prekindergarten to second grade were administered a comprehensive set of prekindergarten measures of foundational language skills (vocabulary and grammar), higher-level language skills (inferencing, comprehension monitoring, and text structure knowledge), listening comprehension, working memory, and nonverbal processing, as well as second grade measures of listening comprehension. Results: A prekindergarten measure of listening comprehension-the Test of Narrative Language-and a prekindergarten measure of foundational language skills and working memory-the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-4 Recalling …

Investigating Profiles Of Lexical Quality In Preschool And Their Contribution To First Grade Reading, Kimberly A. Murphy

Communication Disorders & Special Education Faculty Publications

This longitudinal study investigated profiles of lexical quality domains in preschool children and the extent to which profile membership predicted reading comprehension in first grade. A latent profile analysis was conducted to classify 420 preschool children on lexical quality domains, including orthography, phonology, morphosyntax, and vocabulary. Regression analysis was used to determine whether profile membership was associated with first grade outcomes across reading comprehension and its components (i.e., listening comprehension and word recognition). Results revealed five profiles of lexical quality which were predictive of all three outcomes in first grade. Children in low lexical quality profiles performed more poorly on …