Linguistics Commons^™

Self-Efficacy In Low-Level English Language Learners, Laura F. Blumenthal

Dissertations and Theses

Accounting for differences in second language proficiency attainment is an important area of inquiry in the study of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Accounts of the language acquisition process have generally come from cognitive or psychological perspectives, which view language learning as primarily an internal mental/emotional process, or from sociocultural or critical perspectives that emphasize the influence of the learner's social environment. Research on variability in language learning has also failed to take into account the learning experiences of low-level learners.

This study adopted a social-psychological perspective on language acquisition that focused on the role of self-efficacy in learning, and applied …

A Review Of The Routledge Encyclopedia Of Second Language Acquisition, Avizia Long

Faculty Publications

A review of The Routledge encyclopedia of second language acquisition, by Peter Robinson (Ed.). New York, NY: Routledge, 2013. Pp. xxiv + 756.

Hoisan-Wa In Jest: Humor, Laughter, And The Construction Of Counter-Hegemonic Affect In Contemporary Chinese American Language Maintenance, Genevieve Leung

Rhetoric and Language Faculty Publications and Research

This research examines the language and cultural maintenance of Chinese Americans of a specific heritage: Hoisan-wa people. Hoisan-wa is one of the languages linking nearly all early Chinese immigrants in the U.S., but this language background has been pushed aside by the presence of other Chinese languages in America, such as Standard Cantonese and Mandarin. It has also been perpetually omitted from research for the last 150 years.

Drawing from 93 sociolinguistic interviews with Hoisan-wa heritage people, I explore instances of humor and laughter as these participants talk about their cultural and linguistic heritage. Home and family remain two of …

Lateralización De /ɾ/ Implosiva: La Conciencia Fonológica Y Sus Manifestaciones En El Español Puertorriqueño Oral Y Escrito (Lateralization Of Syllable Final /ɾ/: Phonological Consciousness And Its Manifestations In Oral And Written Puerto Rican Spanish), Antonio Medina-Rivera

World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

This study examines the process of lateralization of syllable final / r / in Puerto Rican Spanish. In addition to analyzing the process in oral speech, this study takes into consideration written registers as well. The results show that the process of lateralization goes beyond oral registers among Puerto Rican Spanish. However, the manifestation of the lateral variant does not only occur as a result of neutralization or confusion between 'r' and 'I.' There seems to be a ludic function and evident intentionality in the use of lateral variant, that in some ways shows a mark of identity among Puerto …

L2 Perception Of Spanish Palatal Variants Across Different Tasks, Christine Shea, Jeffrey Renaud

Spanish: Faculty Scholarship & Creative Works

While considerable dialectal variation exists, almost all varieties of Spanish exhibit some sort of alternation in terms of the palatal obstruent segments. Typically, the palatal affricate [ɟʝ] tends to occur in word onset following a pause and in specific linear phonotactic environments. The palatal fricative [ʝ] tends to occur in syllable onset in other contexts. We show that listeners’ perceptual sensitivity to the palatal alternation depends upon the task and exposure to Spanish input. For native Spanish listeners, the palatal alternation boosts segmentation accuracy on an artificial speech segmentation task and also reduces latencies on a phonotactically-conditioned elision task. L2 …

Linguistic Advocacy As A Bridge Between Disciplines, David Bowie, Clare Dannenberg

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

Linguistics involves, at its core, advocacy for a key part of human existence: No matter our linguistic specialty, we advocate for human language on a variety of different levels from the social and political to the scientific. Certainly, as educators, our position as advocates leaks into our pedagogy as we try to instill in our students both the rote knowledge of our discipline and also the responsibility of utilizing that knowledge in the “real world.” Many of us even create assignments that engage our students to become real-world advocates, and yet these assignments may remain within the silos of our …

Linguistic Foundations For L2 Pronunciation Teaching, Kathy L. Sands

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

In this session I present a course I am proposing (and will pilot in short form this summer in Mongolia) entitled “Linguistic Foundations for L2 Pronunciation Teaching.” This course is designed to provide language-teaching majors with key linguistic foundation in phonetics and phonology to be able to analyze the linguistic source of pronunciation errors accurately and provide students with clear explanations and effective, individualized coaching. For non-native speakers of the language they will be teaching, the course is designed as well to strengthen their own pronunciation. A major component of the course will be hands-on working with L2 speakers, chosen …

Language, Gender, And Culture, Janie Rees-Miller

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

At a small college with no linguistics department and no major or minor, all linguistics courses must satisfy some general education requirements or major/minor requirements in another discipline. The course Language, Gender, and Culture was designed to satisfy the GE requirement for a course in diversity and/or global perspectives and may also be used for the Gender Studies minor. In order to satisfy these various requirements and to appeal to the broadest spectrum of students, the course has been constructed so that course content and readings include data from a variety of languages and cultures, concepts of gender and the …

Teaching To The Teachers: Secondary Education English Students In The Introductory Linguistics Course, Julie S. Amberg, Deborah J. Vause

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

Non-linguistic majors can benefit from well-designed lessons in the introductory linguistics course that raise issues students will need to know about in their future careers. At our institution, the introductory linguistics course is populated by students majoring in English Literary Studies, Secondary Education English, and Professional Writing. Secondary Education English (SEE) majors take Language and Linguistics because they must fulfill requirements mandated by the state: knowledge of morphology, phonology, syntax, history of the English language, and so on. In addition to these required subjects, we introduce other issues as well that we feel are essential to developing these particular students’ …

Linguistics And Tesol At Suny Oswego, Jean Ann, Bruce Long Peng

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

We are linguists with tenure homes in a School of Education (SOE). We were charged with (i) reviving a languishing undergraduate Linguistics major, and (ii) creating a new TESOL Program for undergraduate students destined for NYS certification to teach English to speakers of other languages (ESOL) in K-12 settings. We argued for a subset of courses in the linguistics major to serve as the arts and sciences concentration for the TESOL major. We advise and teach both the TESOL and Linguistics majors. Our teaching loads are about half in the School of Education (SOE) and half in the College of …

Linguistic Weeds: Popping Up Everywhere, Lynn Burley

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

The study of language is a part of a dozen other disciplines on any average sized campus, and should be a part of every general education program precisely because it is a part of so many other disciplines. Our job is to not only provide students with exceptional undergraduate and graduate linguistics degrees, but to ensure that students are exposed to linguistics in their general studies and that students have the opportunity to take linguistics courses as appropriate for their other majors and minors. The University of Central Arkansas (UCA) linguistics faculty is doing this by offering interdisciplinary programs, creating …

Transitioning From Serving Others’ Students To Serving Our Own, Julie Roberts

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

The current study focuses on a linguistics program in the unusual situation of having emerged from another department. Therefore, the program began by creating classes that would be of interest and relevance to other fields, and, only after the formation of the stand-alone major (2008) and minor (2006), began to fill in with classes that are important to linguists but less “marketable” outside that program. The presentation will focus on the following strategies for maintaining and expanding our relevance to other majors and to the university as a whole and the success and challenges of each:

1. Use of cases/examples …

Weaving Linguistics Into A Range Of Fabrics, Sharon Klein

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

No linguist is ever at a loss to understand how attention to any aspect of language as an object of inquiry can contribute to the context where the piece might be found. But linguists rarely get consulted, because what is also true is that virtually no one beyond the landscape of linguistic study is likely even to know that such a perspective on language exists, much less that it might truly be useful. Waiting for this state of affairs to change is fruitless—surely frustrating—and many of us choose to ignore the views “out there” keeping our individual and collective focus …

The Logogenesis Of Writing To Learn: A Systemic Functional Perspective., Perry Klein, Len Unsworth

Education Publications

Writing to learn has become an important practice in science education. How is scientific knowledge constructed during writing? To investigate this question, we examined the process through which four university students constructed written explanations of either projectile motion or buoyancy. The analysis, informed by systemic functional linguistics, focused on the mapping of semantic elements to grammatical choices, and the way in which this mapping unfolded throughout the course of each text. The texts began largely congruently; grammar mapped closely to experience. Gradually, each text shifted toward greater use of grammatical metaphor. Nominalization allowed propositions and sequences of events to serve …

Revisiting Pragmatic Abilities In Autism Spectrum Disorder, Jessica De Villiers, Brooke Myers, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

In a 2007 paper, we argued that speakers with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) exhibit pragmatic abilities which are surprising given the usual understanding of communication in that group. That is, it is commonly reported that people diagnosed with an ASD have trouble with metaphor, irony, conversational implicature and other non-literal language. This is not a matter of trouble with knowledge and application of rules of grammar. The difficulties lie, rather, in successful communicative interaction. Though we did find pragmatic errors within literal talk, the transcribed conversations we studied showed many, many successes. A second paper reinforced our finding of a …

The Sociolinguistic Situation And National Identity Of Cape Verde, Melissa Oquendo

Undergraduate Review

Cape Verde is a West African country located in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Senegal. The archipelago is composed of 10 islands, 9 of which are populated (Santo Antão, São Vicente, São Nicolau, Sal, Boa Vista, Maio, Santiago, Fogo, and Brava). Santa Luzia is the only uninhabited island. Cape Verde was colonized by the Portuguese and therefore includes a rich mix of Portuguese and African cultures.

Because today’s Cape Verdeans are descendants of both the Portuguese and West Africans, there are elements of both in their languages, traditions, history, and development as a nation. These Portuguese and West …

A Study Of Refusal Strategies By American And International Students At An American University, Hiroko Tsuiki Moaveni

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Refusals are delicate speech acts for non-native speakers to negotiate because they require negative responses to an interlocutor's invitation or request. In addition to cultural variation, variables such as gender and modes of communication (e.g., emails) add dimensions to the complexity when performing refusals. The main objective of this study is to investigate the difference in refusal strategies between American and international college students as well as gender variation. Using a written Discourse Completion Task, six situations were developed and grouped in two stimulus types eliciting refusals to an invitation and a request. Each stimulus type involved an email refusal …

Swahili Word Order Choices: Insights From Information Structure, Mohamed Yusuf Mwamzandi

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Cross-linguistic pragmatic studies have shown non-canonical word order can often be explained if information structure is taken into consideration. This dissertation explores word order variation in Swahili (SVO, Bantu) adnominal demonstratives and reciprocal constructions under the auspices of information structure. I investigate how the notion of topic may explain word order variation in these two structures.The term `adnominal demonstrative' refers to demonstratives that co-occur with nouns such as huyu mtu `this person' as distinguished from pronominal demonstratives such as huyu `this'. The issue to be determined is what influences the demonstrative use in pre or postnominal position. The data consists …

The Adaptation Of Native Language Construal Patterns In Second Language Acquisition, Loraine Obler, Eve Higby

Publications and Research

First language attrition occurs when a bilingual’s native language shows evidence of language change due to the predominant use of a second language. Recent research in first language attrition has shown that lexical retrieval and word choice are more vulnerable to reduced native language use than are grammatical constructions. However, some research has shown that grammar can also be affected, especially for constructions which exist in both languages but have different distributions in their usage. Taking concepts from cognitive linguistics, we attempt to describe how this research may provide insight into how language construal from the second language can affect …

Strategic Deployments Of ‘Sisterhood’ And Questions Of Solidarity At A Women’S Development Project In Janakpur, Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

Linguistic uses of ‘sisterhood’ provide a window into disparate understandings of relationality among virtual and actual interlocutors in women’s development across vectors of caste, class, ethnicity and nationality. In this essay, I examine the trope of ‘sisterhood’ as it was employed at a women’s development project in Janakpur, Nepal, in the 1990s. I demonstrate that the use of this common signifier of kinship with culturally disparate ‘signifieds’ created a confusion of meaning, and differential readings of the politics of relationality. In my view, ‘sister,’ as used at this project, was a multivalent, strategically deployed, and divergently interpreted term. In particular, …