Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item HOW L2 LEGAL WRITERS USE STRATEGIES FOR SCHOLARLY WRITING: A MIXED METHODS STUDY(2010) Bain Butler, Donna Patricia; Oxford, Rebecca L; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation research fills existing gaps regarding the practices and processes of teaching second language (L2) writers at higher ranges of proficiency in academic domain context. It is a mixed methods, longitudinal, descriptive, classroom-based study. The research purpose was to explore strategic competence as a catalyst for professional proficiency in the scholarly (academic) writing of international Master of Laws (LL.M.) students who need to show analytical thinking and communicative precision in their research papers and law review articles. The theoretical framework views scholarly writing in a second language as developmental learning in two domains, language and law, and as socialized cultural practice. The study showed how scholarly legal writing was both a cognitive and a social-cultural process for participants (N=6) as they shifted from the writer-centered activity of drafting to the reader-centered activity of revising and constructing knowledge. A triangulated, multi-stage design was used to collect the quantitative and qualitative data at recursive stages of writing (that is, pre-writing, drafting, and revising). The instruments developed for collecting the data raised strategy awareness for participants in the study and can be used for teaching. The research contributes to our knowledge of scholarly writing in the professions, helps us understand challenges and strategies for L2 writers in graduate programs, provides a useful way to conduct a mixed-methods writing study, reveals the interface between L2 and L1 academic legal discourse, and offers tested tools for developing professional-level competence in L2 academic writers. The study bridges the L1 research and L2 research literature by exploring how superior language learners used research-based strategies to build on their existing competences for professional-level research writing. This highly contextualized, learner-centered research contributes to several related fields by addressing L2 issues associated with plagiarism, the native-speaker standard, learner self-assessment and self-editing--all of which are issues of cross-cultural literacy. The following six fields are involved in and affected by this study: Applied Linguistics, Content-Based (Legal) English Teaching, English Composition, International (Legal) Education, Teaching English for (Academic and Specific) Legal Purposes, and Professional Development.Item Meeting the Needs of the Nontraditional Student:: A Study of the Effectiveness of Synchronous Online Writing Center Tutorials(2010) Hawkinson Melkun, Cheryl Lee; Donawerth, Jane; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the fall of 2007, 3.9 million students took at least one online course, reflecting an online education growth rate of 12.9 percent. Many online students are nontraditional, possessing one or more of the following characteristics: delayed enrollment, part time attendance, full-time worker, financially independent as related to financial aid, dependents other than a spouse, single parent, a GED or did not finish high school. While these students bring diversity and life experience to the classroom, they are often ill-prepared for college writing. Though they need help, hectic schedules make it difficult to meet with a writing consultant. This study investigates whether synchronous writing center tutorials can effectively address this client population's needs. Currently, there is a dearth of scholarship relating to online writing tutorials, particularly synchronous tutorials. This two-year study of 189 face-to-face clients and 90 online clients employs quantitative and qualitative research to determine (1) the demographic profile of online users, (2) reasons clients meet online, (3) help sought online, (4) online client preparation, (5) client perceptions of online sessions, and (6) advantages and disadvantages of online sessions. Data were culled from a client questionnaire, online session logs, and consultant and client interviews. Statistically significant differences in client demographics between face-to-face and online users were found in age, ethnicity, and gender: online clients are younger, are more likely to be white, and are more likely to be male. Clients meet online primarily for convenience; however, there is no correlation between distance from campus and online client usage. There were no significant differences in client preparation. Spelling was the only statistically significant category in help sought: online clients seek more spelling help than their face-to-face counterparts. Face-to-face and online clients both viewed their sessions as successful with no statistically significant difference between the groups. Over one-third of clients reported technical problems during their session, and some clients expressed a preference for the emphatic cues found in face-to-face consultations. Advantages of online sessions included assistance with word processing features, the ability to make revisions to the working document, and the ability to record the session.Item Emotional Evidence, Personal Testimony, and Public Debate: A Case Study of the Post-Abortion Movement(2010) Brown, Heather; Fahnestock, Jeanne; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates a new movement within the abortion debates in the United States known as the Post-Abortion Movement. Bypassing the stalemate between pro-life and pro-choice, activists in this movement focus on the potential psychological trauma of abortion, and in the last twenty years, they have argued for their views in different forums, grounding their case in the personal testimony of women who have undergone abortions. They have emphasized the validity of their narratives in defining their experience over the authority of medical professionals. This project assembles an archive of this movement, from its early advocacy literature to its professional discourse in journals, to its proliferating presence on websites. While offering a case study of how a movement gets started and has an impact on the public's perception of an issue, the Post-Abortion Movement and its tactics also raise important questions in rhetorical theory concerning the role of personal testimony in arguments. In five chapters, this dissertation gives the history of the Post-Abortion Movement and uses rhetorical theory to analyze its tactics. Its most effective tactic has been the creation of a new diagnostic category: "post-abortion syndrome." In a case study of advocacy, professional, and online genres, this project trace the rhetorical development of this concept and show how stakeholders use women's first-person accounts of their abortion experiences--women whom they identify as "post-abortive." This dissertation argues that Post-Abortion Movement supporters use personal testimonies as both a source of evidence for social science claims in policy arguments and a force for building a community of advocates. While contributing to the growing body of scholarship on narrative and the rhetoric of health and medicine, this dissertation shows how the Post-Abortion Movement's persistent casting of abortion as a potentially negative--rather than therapeutic or liberating--event has significantly influenced the current debate on women's responses to abortion.Item A GENRE OF DEFENSE: HYBRIDITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN'S DEFENSES OF WOMEN'S PREACHING(2009) Zimmerelli, Lisa Dawn; Donawerth, Jane; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores how nineteenth-century Protestant women negotiated genre in order to manage more effectively the controversial rhetorical project of defending women's right to preach. After providing a comprehensive overview of the debate of women's preaching in America, this project presents a genre study of a subset of these defenses: those women who do not adhere strictly to their "home" genres, but rather demonstrate a range of generic blending and manipulation in their defenses of women's preaching. This study further reads religion as an integral identity category that was the seat for other activist rhetorics; by extension, then, women's defenses of women's preaching is an important site of activism and rhetorical discourse. Foote, Willard, and Woosley are rhetoricians and theologians; the hybrid form of their books provides them with a textual space for the intersections of their rhetoric and theology. This study examines three books within the tradition of defenses of women's preaching--Julia Foote's A Brand Plucked from the Fire (1879), Frances Willard's Woman in the Pulpit (1888), and Louisa Woosley's Shall Woman Preach? (1891)--as representative of the journey a genre takes from early adaptation to solidification, what Carolyn Miller calls "typified rhetorical action" (151) and as the containers for an egalitarian theology. Foote adapts the genre of spiritual autobiography to include the oral and textual discourses of letters, sermons, and hymn in order to present her holiness theology. Willard experiments with the epistolary genre in order to present her Social Gospel theology. Woosley includes all of the genres of defenses of women's preaching: sermon, spiritual autobiography, editorial letter, and speech; she also appropriates Masonic rhetoric in order to merge the defense of women's preaching with another kind of defense prevalent at the time: the scriptural defense of women. Significantly, each woman resolves "separate spheres" ideology by suggesting a new religious sphere where men and women participate equally: Foote's sphere is the sphere of holiness; Willard's is her reconceptualized Kingdom of God; and Woosley's is a world of action, where men and women, after ritualized initiation, are responsible for building the temple of God.Item Relevance, Rhetoric, and Argumentation: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry into Patterns of Thinking and Information Structuring(2009) Huang, Xiaoli; Soergel, Dagobert; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation research is a multidisciplinary inquiry into topicality, involving an in-depth examination of literatures and empirical data and an inductive development of a faceted typology (containing 227 fine-grained topical relevance relationships and 33 types of presentation relationship). This inquiry investigates a large variety of topical connections beyond topic matching, renders a closer look into the structure of a topic, achieves an enriched understanding of topicality and relevance, and induces a cohesive topic-oriented information architecture that is meaningful across topics and domains. The findings from the analysis contribute to the foundation work of information organization, intellectual access / information retrieval, and knowledge discovery. Using qualitative content analysis, the inquiry focuses on meaning and deep structure: Phase 1 : develop a unified theory-grounded typology of topical relevance relationships through close reading of literature and synthesis of thinking from communication, rhetoric, cognitive psychology, education, information science, argumentation, logic, law, medicine, and art history; Phase 2 : in-depth qualitative analysis of empirical relevance datasets in oral history, clinical question answering, and art image tagging, to examine manifestations of the theory-grounded typology in various contexts and to further refine the typology; the three relevance datasets were used for analysis to achieve variation in form, domain, and context. The typology of topical relevance relationships is structured with three major facets: Functional role of a piece of information plays in the overall structure of a topic or an argument; Mode of reasoning: How information contributes to the user's reasoning about a topic; Semantic relationship: How information connects to a topic semantically. This inquiry demonstrated that topical relevance with its close linkage to thinking and reasoning is central to many disciplines. The multidisciplinary approach allows synthesis and examination from new angles, leading to an integrated scheme of relevance relationships or a system of thinking that informs each individual discipline. The scheme resolving from the synthesis can be used to improve text and image understanding, knowledge organization and retrieval, reasoning, argumentation, and thinking in general, by people and machines.Item Leveling the Field: The Need for Explicit Instruction of Argumentative Form for 'Struggling' Secondary Students(2009) Bado-Aleman, Jennifer; McCaleb, Joseph; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this essay, a method for explicit teaching of argumentative form is purported, based on the methods of classical rhetoric. Throughout, it argues that the secondary student labeled "struggling" is often one who is a cultural minority and who experiences a cultural mismatch between implicit standards in argumentative writing and that of his own culture. In order to provide culturally responsive instruction for such students, the essay suggests that teachers must make these standards for what constitutes a "well-organized" explicit and teach students methods to self-regulate their thinking during the composing process. In this way, students are granted an opportunity to succeed academically in terms of writing ability.Item Instrument to Evidence to Argument: Visual Mediation of Invisible Phenomena in Scientific Discourse(2008-07-15) Buehl, Jonathan; Fahnestock, Jeanne; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how scientists and scientific editors have approached specific problems related to visualization and visual argumentation in scientific texts. These problems are related to the following research questions: (1) How are new visualization practices established as scientifically credible? (2) How do scientists modify existing instrument output to make new visual arguments? (3) How do scientists use verbal and visual means to transform problematic data into acceptable support for novel claims? (4) What are the practical and ethical boundaries of modifying visual artifacts for scientific arguments? (5) How do scientists refute established (but incorrect) visualizations that have been widely accepted as accurate representations of reality? This project considers these issues rhetorically by examining a number of recent and historical cases. The first three case studies explore how scientists created both compelling and uncompelling visual arguments by mediating the visual output of instruments with rhetorical strategies. These case studies focus on visualizations from physical science: x-ray diffraction photographs, graphics establishing the theory of plate tectonics, and visualizations of atmospheric phenomena. In each case, visualizations articulated invisible phenomena in new ways, transforming unclear or seemingly unremarkable data into convincing knowledge claims. My analysis of these cases explores how scientists integrate visuals into the analogical, causal, transitive, symmetrical, and dissociation arguments that are so essential to the practice of science. The later case studies examine broader concerns regarding ethics, persuasion, and modern scientific visualization. I examine recent issues related to the digital generation and manipulation of scientific images and rhetorical issues related to scientists' increasing dependence on complicated computer algorithms for creating visual arguments.Item Nannie H. Burroughs' Rhetorical Leadership During the Inter-War Period(2008-09-03) Mason, Michele; Gaines, Robert N.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Although frequently praised for her rhetorical abilities and widely recognized as an influential leader in the African-American community, Nannie Helen Burroughs' speeches and writings have been the subject of little scholarly treatment. The quest for freedom and equality in America, Burroughs believed, would be satisfied through individual and collective struggle, and while she never advocated directly the use of physical force, she often evoked martial themes--using terms such as battles, enemies, crusades, weapons, and sacrifice--along with ideas related to movement and progress, to motivate action among African-Americans. These ideas, complemented by her stylistic tendencies, inspired continued action during a time when basic citizenship rights seemed out of reach for many African-Americans. This rhetorical tendency seemed most strategic during the 1920s and 1930s, a time when African-Americans experienced a renewed and seemingly coordinated assault on their identity as American citizens. They found their constitutional right to vote threatened, their social and economic status weakened, and their identity as American citizens undermined. Burroughs would skillfully combine various styles of discourse to match her rhetorical goals and the demands of the audiences she addressed. More specifically, she employed a clear, vivid, energetic style to awaken and enlist African-American audiences, to empower politically, provide vision, and to rehabilitate identity during the period between the two world wars.Item Basic Writing, Binaries, and Bridges: Difference and Power in the Production and Reception of Representations of Students(2008-05-30) Champagne, Maurice C; Logan, Shirley; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Difference and power produce powerful, damaging representations of students. Those representations of students affect representations of teachers, writing instruction, and English studies as a whole. Damaging representations of students come from competing definitions of literacy. Because literacy definitions vary, representations of students vary with some students perceived as the "Other." This study analyzes difference and power in the production and reception of representations of students, especially writing students. It also analyzes competing definitions of literacy, connecting them to conflicting representations of students. Furthermore, this study promotes alternative representations of students through interview with six variously situated teachers and program administrators. This study concludes that before writing teachers can improve the field, they must critically assess the ways in which its least prepared students are represented.Item At the Brighter Margins: Teaching Writing to the College Student with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder(2008-04-26) Cooper, Barbara Graham; Fahnestock, Jeanne; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Composition studies has paid a great deal of attention to student differences in identity, including gender, race, and socio-economic status. It has also considered the generic problems of writing anxiety and of so-called "basic writers." But composition studies has almost completely neglected the problems and needs of college students with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD). This dissertation argues that college students with AD/HD face a unique set of challenges as writers; these challenges need to be acknowledged, explored, analyzed, and addressed. The rhetorical construction of the individual with AD/HD is examined in both contemporary culture and in the document which authoritatively defines the disorder--the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders-IV Training Revision (2000). Results of a qualitative study of four current college students and of six college graduates all of whom have been diagnosed with AD/HD are presented. This study explored six areas of inquiry in personal interviews with the participants: 1) How does the AD/HD identity affect their self-image as individuals and as writers? 2) How does AD/HD affect their writing process? 3) What positive experiences have they had with writing? 4) What negative ones? 5) What coping mechanisms have they developed for the challenges imposed by AD/HD on the writer? 6) What is or has been helpful to them in the college English class? Further, this paper analyzes how impairment in executive functions of the brain affect the writing of college students with AD/HD. Finally, pedagogy, which is based on the principles of Universal Design for Learning, is suggested to address the challenges faced by the college writer with AD/HD.
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