UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 14
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    DOES MODALITY MATTER? AURAL AND WRITTEN VOCABULARY IN SECOND LANGUAGE LISTENING AND READING COMPREHENSION
    (2024) Iizuka, Takehiro; Hui, Bronson; Second Language Acquisition and Application; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study examined the significance of the mode of delivery—aural versus written—in second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge and L2 comprehension skills. One of the unique aspects of listening comprehension that sets it apart from reading comprehension is the mode of delivery—language input is delivered not visually but aurally. Somewhat surprisingly, however, this difference has not always been considered, and in fact L2 listening studies are more often accompanied by written tests (of, e.g., vocabulary knowledge) than by aural tests. Few studies have systematically examined the impact of modality on comprehension skills and linguistic variables such as vocabulary either, despite the long-standing view of language skills being multimodal. In this study, therefore, I first examined the degree to which aural and written vocabulary is separate constructs. Then I examined how each of those constructs explains listening and reading comprehension skills differently. By using latent variable modeling, I also addressed limitations in previous studies, including undue influence from measurement error and unique characteristics of particular tests.One hundred eighty-five adult Japanese learners of English took four aural and four written English vocabulary tests, with parallel test formats across the modalities to allow for comparison. The effect of words was averaged out by counterbalancing eight property-matched sets of words. The participants also took listening and reading comprehension tests. The dimensionality of vocabulary knowledge was examined by comparing one-factor and multi-factor models. The unique contribution of aural and written vocabulary knowledge to listening and reading comprehension was evaluated by latent variable path analysis. The difference in the sizes of aural and written vocabulary knowledge was examined by latent means modeling. The results of the study were nuanced. Modality effects were observed in the sense that (1) a two-factor model of vocabulary knowledge with aural and written vocabulary had a significantly better fit to the data than a one-factor model, (2) aural vocabulary knowledge uniquely explained some variance in listening comprehension skills, and (3) the participants’ aural vocabulary size was significantly smaller than their written vocabulary size. However, the effects of modality were limited in the sense that (1) the aural and written vocabulary knowledge factors were very highly correlated and (2) the common part of the two factors—general vocabulary knowledge—explained much more variance in each of listening and reading comprehension skills than modality-specific knowledge. These results suggest that, although aural versus written test modality effects do seem to exist in L2 vocabulary knowledge and comprehension skills, its practical impact is small compared with that of general vocabulary knowledge at least in the context where words are presented in isolation as in the present study.
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    Examining Narrative Language in Early Stage Parkinson's Disease and Intermediate Farsi-English Bilingual Speakers
    (2022) Lohrasbi, Bushra; Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study aimed to examine procedural aspects of language (grammaticality, syntactic complexity, regular past tense verb production), verb use, and the association between motor-speech, language abilities, and intelligibility in Early Stage Parkinson's Disease (PD) and Intermediate Farsi-English Bilingual Speakers (L2). Ullman’s Declarative-Procedural Model (2001) provided this study with a dual-mechanism model that justified a theoretical comparison between these two populations. Twenty-four neurologically healthy native speakers of English, twenty-three Parkinson’s Disease participants, and thirteen bilingual Farsi-English speakers completed three narrative picture description tasks and read the first three sentences of the Rainbow Passage. Language samples were transcribed and analyzed to derive measures of morphosyntax and verb use, including grammatical accuracy, grammatical complexity, and proportions of regular past tense, action verbs and light verbs. The results did not show any evidence of morphosyntactic or action verb deficit in PD. Neither was there any evidence of a trade-off between morphosyntactic performance and severity of speech motor impairment in PD. L2 speakers had lower scores on grammatical accuracy and a measure of morphosyntactic complexity, but did not differ from monolingual speakers on measures of verb use. Overall, these results show that language abilities (morphosyntax and verb use) are preserved in early stage PD. This study replicates the well-documented finding that morphosyntax is particularly challenging for late bilingual speakers. The results did not support Ullman’s Declarative-Procedural (2001) hypothesis of language production in Parkinson’s Disease or L2 speakers.
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    SELECTIVITY IN LEXICAL ACCESS AMONG BILINGUALS OF ORTHOGRAPHICALLY DISTINCT SCRIPTS AND THE ROLE OF EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS
    (2020) Al Thowaini, Buthainah M; Jiang, Nan; Second Language Acquisition and Application; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    A fundamental inquiry within bilingual processing research addresses the underlying mechanisms of lexical access. Research involving bilinguals of orthographically similar scripts has revealed that cross-language activation is non-selective, which supposedly causes the bilingual brain to regularly manage the activation of two languages. Such continuous management of two languages has led some researchers to argue that the bilingual experience contributes to enhanced executive control. The research on selectivity in lexical access, nevertheless, has overwhelmingly involved bilingual speakers of orthographically similar scripts, with a scarcity of studies involving bilingual speakers of orthographically distinct scripts. Additionally, while active management of both languages is expected for bilinguals, little is known about whether language selectivity is related to individual variation in executive control. Instead, research investigating executive functions (EFs) in relation to bilingual processes has primarily been conducted within the context of switch costs, which has been associated with methodological issues. In light of the issues outlined above, the current study investigated selectivity in lexical access among bilinguals of orthographically distinct scripts and the relationship between the degree of selectivity and EFs (i.e., top-down goal maintenance, interference resolution, and working memory capacity). In addition to adopting an individual differences approach to lexical access, the study manipulated the degree of language task demands (comprehension and production). The study employed alternative non-switch tasks to investigate the relationships between EFs and cross-language activation. One hundred and thirty-eight Arabic-English bilinguals, 25 English native speakers, and 24 Arabic native speakers participated in a phoneme monitoring task and a masked primed lexical decision task involving monolingual materials. Bilingual participants also completed non-verbal visuo-spatial and visual single n-back tasks, as well as an AX-CPT task. The analyses revealed non-selective lexical access in language production but were inconclusive for language comprehension, where participants varied in the degree of selectivity. In addition, the results, although preliminary, demonstrated that top-down goal maintenance partially accounted for some of the variances in the degree of selectivity in language comprehension and production. The results suggest that selectivity is influenced by task-dependent variables as well as individual differences in executive functions.
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    Immigrant Literacies: Language and Learning in the African Diaspora Novel by Twenty-First Century Anglophone African Writers
    (2019) Okereke-Beshel, Uchechi Ada; Nunes, Zita C; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    “Immigrant Literacies: Language and Learning in the African Diaspora Novel by Twenty-First Century Anglophone African Writers” examines the fiction of contemporary African Diaspora writers that introduces new tropes of reading and writing in narrating the experiences of African migrants to Europe and the United States. The writers who are the focus of this dissertation—Teju Cole, Chimamanda Adichie, Brian Chikwava and NoViolet Bulawayo— grapple with the difficulties of migration and its impact on preconceived notions of the self and the world. Each writer links the different pathways that their immigrant characters must take to multiple forms of teaching and learning, demonstrating that literacy is a contextual cultural practice that fosters social connections across the African Diaspora, even as it takes power relations into account. Using the work of Brian Street and other New Literacy theorists, I explore four versions of literacy as a socially embedded cultural practice in novels mainly about Nigerian and Zimbabwean immigrants in the United States and Britain. These theorists are key to my understanding of how revised attitudes to self in an expanded community are being developed in the contemporary African novel because they enable a shift in attention from learning to read and write in order to master a stable and transferrable set of skills to teaching and learning to read and write using a range of codes that characterize hybrid environments. Early criticisms of the African novel focused on the integration of written and oral forms in literature that would nurture a nationalist and postcolonial agenda. Twenty-first century African Diaspora literature expands these goals in demonstrating the transnational and transcultural evolution of both writing and orality. My dissertation organizes each chapter around an exemplary novel to argue that contemporary African novelists writing in English and living in and outside of Africa address the defining question of literacy they have inherited from previous generations by suggesting that multiple and fluid forms of literacy characterize the experience of Africans in the context of migration in the Diaspora.
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    Investigating the Stories of Success of Students who are African American and Male in AP English
    (2019) McArdle, Erin E; Turner, Jennifer D; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Students who are African American and male living in the United States have been marginalized from gifted and talented and Advanced Placement (AP) classes in public education. Students who have enrolled in specifically AP English and have taken an AP English exam have been shown to outperform other types of students in college (Barnard-Brak, McGaha-Garnett, & Burely, 2011; Cech, 2008; Chajewski, Mattern, & Shaw, 2011; Hargrove, Godin, & Dodd, 2008; Keng & Dodd, 2008; Mattern, Marini, & Shaw, 2013; Mustafa & Compton, 2017; Patterson & Ewing, 2013). Attending college and earning a collegiate degree offers a multitude of benefits; however, “college entrance and matriculation for African America students remains critically low,” especially for males (Curry & Shillingford, 2015, p. 14). This research study examined how students who are African American and male came to enroll in an AP English course, how they maintained their success in an AP English course, what and who influenced them along the way, and what later impact AP English had on their lives, especially as collegiate scholars. The researcher was the participants’ high school AP English teacher and relied on her personal experiences in teaching AP English to frame her research. The participants attended a high school where the ethnicity demographics of students closely mirrored the ethnicity percentages of the U.S. population. The school is well-funded, well-staffed and serves a middle class socio-economic population. Despite this, African American male students who attend this school continue to be underrepresented in AP English courses and in completing and passing AP English exams. Using a cross-comparison of eight distinct case studies following qualitative research protocol, the researcher was able to interview and create narratives of the participants’ experiences in AP English. This dissertation analyzes and synthesizes findings from the interviews to establish how the participants enrolled in AP English and maintained success. Additionally, the study focused on the influences on their success and the later impact on their lives. The findings from this study suggest that for the participants, college acceptance and completion as a “nonnegotiable” significantly influenced their conviction for taking AP English. The participants determined that AP English would influence college acceptance, which is part of the “educational game” students are aware of when attempting to market themselves for college enrollment. Teachers, family members, and peers in G.T. and AP classes were described as influential on enrollment and success. This study led to the discussion of how to include more students who are African American males in AP English class. It also contributes to educational policy that continues to weigh the pros and cons of offering AP English courses.
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    English Teacher as Dungeon Master: Game Design Theory Meets Course Design in Rhetorical Education
    (2018) Frankos, Rick James; Wible, Scott; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Traditional pedagogical practices—lecturing, standardization, product-based quality grading—do not promote deep, critical learning. Addressing the deficiencies of traditional pedagogy, gaming pedagogy is a branch of critical pedagogy that identifies the effective design principles of games and then applies these principles to course design. In doing so, gaming pedagogy reproduces the experience-based, autotelic, intrinsically-motivating properties of games within the classroom, making education more fun and effective. In this document, I apply gaming pedagogy specifically to rhetorical education, which is uniquely advantaged to benefit from game design principles. In what follows, I present an objective definition of play and game, identify the overlapping design goals of games and education, identify the useful experiential qualities of games and explain how they apply to rhetorical education, summarize and analyze useful course design praxes from the perspective of gaming pedagogy, and conclude with an application of gaming pedagogy to my own first-year writing classroom.
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    Living in the Constellation of the Canon: A Phenomenological Study of African American Students Reading Great Books Literature
    (2017) Prather, Anika Prather; Hultgren, Francine; Wiseman, Donna; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In this phenomenological study, I take a journey into the lived experiences of African American students reading Great Books literature. The research question that guides my study is “What are the lived experiences of African American students reading Great Books literature?” In order to unpack the enlightenment gained through this study on the students’ lived experiences, I call upon the phenomenological writings of Martin Heidegger, Hans George Gadamer, Max van Manen, Edward Casey, John O’ Donohue, and David Abram. African American educators and philosophers speak into the journey, such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Marva Collins, Anna Julia Cooper, Gloria Ladson-Billings, James Baldwin, and others. My research path follows the methodological guidance of Max van Manen. Years ago, I taught a Great Books literature class for 6 years at a small private school in Southern Maryland. Twenty-two African American students came through my class years ago and 5 of those students were able to participate in this study where I explore their lived experience reading Great Books literature. For this study, we all met around a table, just as we did years ago for the Great Books class that I taught. The five former students who participated in this study and I went away for a weekend retreat to engage in conversation about their lived experiences. Upon careful review of the transcripts from these conversations I identified themes that reflected their progression through the course. The themes are the following: The Flickering Light, When the Flame Catches, Being in the Light, and The Lived Experience Shining into the Present. These themes reveal how students started out struggling with embracing and internalizing the books, but then progressed to transformative insights they brought forth—even allowing the lived experience of reading the literature to affect their current lives as adults. As a culminating event, the participants created and performed a play, entitled “The Table,” which provided a visual representation of their lived experiences reading Great Books literature. They chose the title “The Table” because as we all reflected on the lived experience, they realized that my classes were only taught around a table and from the unity created around the discussions at the table, something happened to their inner selves. The play was performed at St. John’s College during President’s Day weekend and Frederick Douglass’ birthday. After the play, the former students responded to questions from the audience, expressing their journey into reading Great Books literature and also provided insight as to how teachers can help African American students engage in the literature. This was included as a part of my study as well, in order to bring to the light how the students’ present lives were affected by their lived experience reading Great Books literature. The insights gained from this study are a guiding light for me as I move forward as an educator of primarily African American students, especially in the area of literacy education (literary and cultural literacy). The school I opened is a way for me to put into practice the insights gained in this study. In addition, my interests in forming multi-age Great Books literature circles of all races, backgrounds, etc.; round table discussions with educators, parents, etc. on these matters; and teacher training sessions where these insights can be shared, have become more illuminated for me.
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    Similarity in L2 Phonology
    (2013) Barrios, Shannon L.; Idsardi, William J.; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty producing and perceiving non-native phonological contrasts. Even highly proficient bilinguals, who have been exposed to an L2 for long periods of time, struggle with difficult contrasts, such as /r/-/l/ for Japanese learners of English. To account for the relative ease or difficulty with which L2 learners perceive and acquire non-native contrasts, theories of (L2) speech perception often appeal to notions of similarity. But how is similarity best determined? In this dissertation I explored the predictions of two theoretical approaches to similarity comparison in the second language, and asked: [1] How should L2 sound similarity be measured? [2] What is the nature of the representations that guide sound similarity? [3] To what extent can the influence of the native language be overcome? In Chapter 2, I tested a `legos' (featural) approach to sound similarity. Given a distinctive feature analysis of Spanish and English vowels, I investigated the hypothesis that feature availability in the L1 grammar constrains which target language segments will be accurately perceived and acquired by L2 learners (Brown [1998], Brown [2000]). Our results suggest that second language acquisition of phonology is not limited by the phonological features used by the native language grammar, nor is the presence/use of a particular phonological feature in the native language grammar sufficient to trigger redeployment. I take these findings to imply that feature availability is neither a necessary, nor a sufficient condition to predict learning outcomes. In Chapter 3, I extended a computational model proposed by Feldman et al. [2009] to nonnative speech perception, in order to investigate whether a sophisticated `rulers' (spatial) approach to sound similarity can better explain existing interlingual identification and discrimination data from Spanish monolinguals and advanced L1 Spanish late-learners of English, respectively. The model assumes that acoustic distributions of sounds control listeners' ability to discriminate a given contrast. I found that, while the model succeeded in emulating certain aspects of human behavior, the model at present is incomplete and would have to be extended in various ways to capture several aspects of nonnative and L2 speech perception. In Chapter 4 I explored whether the phonological relatedness among sounds in the listeners native language impacts the perceived similarity of those sounds in the target language. Listeners were expected to be more sensitive to the contrast between sound pairs which are allophones of different phonemes than to sound pairs which are allophones of the same phoneme in their native language. Moreover, I hypothesized that L2 learners would experience difficulty perceiving and acquiring target language contrasts between sound pairs which are allophones of the same phoneme in their native language. Our results suggest that phonological relatedness may influence perceived similarity on some tasks, but does not seem to cause long- lasting perceptual difficulty in advanced L2 learners. On the basis of those findings, I argue that existing models have not been adequately explicit about the nature of the representations and processes involved in similarity-based comparisons of L1 and L2 sounds. More generally, I describe what I see as a desirable target for an explanatorily adequate theory of cross-language influence in L2 phonology.
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    Towards Cross-Border Hispanic Theatre: Breaking Barriers of Language, Space, and Time - Bilingual Website (English-Spanish) www.hispanictheatre.org
    (2013) Morales Chacana, Lina J.; Messinger Cypess, Sandra; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The need for critical reflection and dissemination of cross-border Hispanic theatre is the main focus of this research. Through this work I explore the influence of the paradigm shift from modernity to postmodernity in Western and Hispanic drama. I also delve into the impact of the new systems of representation of history and interdisciplinary studies on Hispanic theatre. In addition, I address the interconnections between history and literature, which have modified dramatic narrative processes and techniques as well as the construction of characters. In conclusion, I present a bilingual (Spanish-English) web site, www.hispanictheatre.org, devoted to cross-border Hispanic theater. This is a type of theatre that, in essence, reconstructs history, revises canons, problematizes discourses, establishes relationships between local and global issues, and takes into account the audience context; it is a transmedia creation produced by collaborative efforts, and is committed to breaking barriers of language, space, and time.
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    ACADEMIC SPOKEN ENGLISH STRATEGY USE OF NON-NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKING GRADUATE STUDENTS
    (2011) Ma, Rui; Sullivan, Denis F; Oxford, Rebecca L; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Currently there is a lack of investigation into the language learning and language use strategies of non-native English speaking students at the graduate level. Existing literature of the strategy use of the "more successful" language learners are predominantly based on student data at the secondary school or college levels. This dissertation research project will use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods ("mixed-methods" research) to examine academic English listening and speaking strategy use patterns of non-native English speaking (NNES) graduate students and also to investigate those students' relevant metacognitive thinking and its impact on their strategy use. First, this research project will investigate what kinds of strategies are being employed and how they are being employed to help those students achieve communicative competence in oral academic English. Descriptive statistics based on a large-scale database of questionnaire responses will be provided. Secondly, this project will investigate what factors have significant effects on the strategy use of this particular student group. Statistical tools such as the multiple regressions and path analysis are used to determine the effects of gender, academic fields, regions of origin, degree level, and other factors. Thirdly, this project examines students' metacognitive thinking and how it impacts their strategy use. The guiding theory related to this line of investigation is that students' metacognitive thinking is closely related to their strategy use patterns. Finally, this project also aims to validate a new assessment tool (a questionnaire) for investigating non-native graduate students' academic English listening and speaking strategy use. Results of the study are expected to eventually help build a descriptive model of listening and speaking strategy use of NNES graduate students and will inform learner-centered instructional design and curriculum development. The ultimate benefit will also be to help many NNES graduate students achieve at a much higher level in graduate school because of their improved English listening and speaking skills.