Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
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 BUILDING BLOCK OF THE WORLD, BUILDING BLOCK OF YOUR IDENTITY: MULTILINGUAL LITERACY SOCIALIZATION OF HERITAGE LANGUAGE LEARNERS(2017) Tigert, Johanna; Martin-Beltran, Melinda; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study investigates multilingual literacy socialization of Finnish heritage language learners (HLLs) in homes and a Finnish heritage language (HL) school in the United States. Participants included eighteen parents, fifteen students, and three Finnish HL teachers. Five HLLs aged 5 to 11 were chosen as focal cases. This study used ethnographic and microethnographic methods, with language socialization as the major theoretical lens and new literacies as a complementary theory. The study conceptualizes language and literacy socialization in an HL context as manifesting in three processes: family and classroom language policies, translanguaging practices, and language and literacy practices across languages and media. Additionally, the study considers HLLs’ construction of multilingual identities. Field notes and videos of language and literacy events in the two contexts, literacy-related artifacts, vocabulary and reading assessments in English and Finnish, and background survey and interview data were considered to understand participants’ language and literacy practices. The study demonstrates that parents and teachers engaged in similar socialization strategies: setting strict Finnish-only policies, curbing students’ translanguaging, and engaging children in traditional, print-based literacies in Finnish. Contextual factors, such as students’ English-medium schoolwork and non-Finnish parents’ lack of Finnish proficiency restricted these efforts. HLLs influenced these socialization processes by renegotiating family and HL classroom language policies, translanguaging in their interactions, and engaging in literacy practices, especially digital literacies, that promoted English at the expense of the HL. Such influences often ran counter to the parents’ and teachers’ efforts. Findings also indicated that learners constructed fluid, multilingual identities within different contexts and situations. The study contributes to socialization research and HL education research by examining a less commonly taught HL, Finnish in the United States. The study corroborates recent scholarship on language socialization, which has begun to uncover children’s strong influence and agency in socialization processes. The study also highlights the importance of digital literacies in young HLLs’ lives. The need for teacher education and P-12 educators to recognize HLLs as part of linguistic diversity in schools, and ways for parents and teachers of HLLs to support HL maintenance while recognizing HLLs’ multilingual, multinational identities are discussed.Item Multilingual Use of Twitter: Language Choice and Language Bridges in a Social Network(2014) Eleta Mogollon, Irene; Golbeck, Jennifer; Geography/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Social media is international: users from different cultures and language backgrounds are generating and sharing content. But language barriers emerge in the communication landscape online. In the quest for language diversity and universal access, the vision of a cosmopolitan Internet has stumbled over the language frontier. Expatriates, minorities, diasporic communities, and language learners play an important role in forming transnational networks, creating social ties across borders. Many users of social media are multicultural and multilingual; they are mediating between language communities. In the microblogging site Twitter, information spreads across languages and countries. How are multilingual users of Twitter connecting language groups? What are the factors influencing their language choices? This research advances a step towards understanding the network structures and communication strategies that enable intercultural dialog, cross-language sharing of information, and awareness of global problems. This dissertation research aims at: (1) exploring the ways in which multilingual users of Twitter are connecting different language groups in their social network; (2) modeling how the network influences their language choices; (3) and exploring what the textual features of their posts can elicit about language choices and mediation between groups. This dissertation goes beyond survey information about multilingualism and provides a deeper understanding about the structural relations between language communities in Twitter. This research work is one of the few that apply social network analysis to the study of sociolinguistic questions on the Internet. Focusing on the social networks of multilingual users, this dissertation contributes an original classification of network types based on the patterns of connections between language groups. Also, it applies the novel idea of modeling the influence of network factors in the language choices of the user. Finally, this dissertation tests the hypothesis that the type of exchange influences language choice, and explores with a theme analysis how other textual features might elicit cross-cultural awareness. These results can inform the design of social media platforms.Item The Light Cast by Someone Else's Lamp: Beginning ESOL Teachers(2004-08-13) Motha, Mary Natasha Suhanthie; Price, Jeremy N.; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study was an in-depth exploration of the year-long journey of four first-year ESOL teachers who were women. The researcher asked about meanings of knowledge, pedagogy, and identity in the context of becoming a language teacher and sought to understand how beginning teachers' ideologies interact with their contexts. The teachers' naming and shaping of their own transformative pedagogies were complicated by the ways in which power and privilege manifested themselves in their schools and the ways in which ESOL students, language learning, and pedagogy came to be institutionally constructed. The teachers chose to neither adhere rigidly to their liberatory ideologies nor to submit to socializing influences. Rather, an ethic of caring towards students compelled them to find ways to integrate their commitments to social justice with sustainable pedagogies that supported students' long-term needs. This study was a critical feminist ethnography. Data sources included transcriptions of afternoon tea gatherings held every two or three weeks over the school year, classroom observations, interviews, and school and student artifacts. Part I explores the development of the teachers' meanings of English language teaching in a world in which English dominates politically. The ways in which Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has been interpreted are problematized, and the connections between grammar and social power are examined. Part II considers the teachers' negotiation of their roles in the shaping of their students' identities and positionalities, seeking to enrich understandings of how various dimensions of difference, particularly race, gender, and ethnicity, interact with a category that permeates all others in the realm of English language teaching, that is linguistic minority status. Part III examines the role the four teachers played in the discursive constructions of their professional identities and the ways in which they supported each others' critical consideration of socializing institutional forces. Two central constructs, becoming and belonging, underpinned the teachers' pedagogical processes and identity construction. These two constructs posed a challenge to traditionally accepted understandings of three intertwined themes: pedagogy, identity, and transformation. The theoretical implications of this dissertation include a need for a redefinition of the ways in which power, identity, and transformation are conceptualized.