Peace Corps Fellows award for commitment to the community / What are Iskashitaa Refugee Harvesting Network’s roles and objectives in teaching English as a Second Language to adult refugees in the Tucson community? How can we create a classroom environment that builds their language acquisition while promoting self-sufficiency? To inquire into these questions, interviews were conducted with adult refugee students who attend the classes, anecdotal records were kept of the ESL teachers’ weekly reflections and classroom observations were performed. Iskashitaa’s ESL classes should provide a space for English language acquisition, assisting in the acculturation process through introducing material that is based on life-skills, with the teachers serving as a cultural broker, advocate and friend and finally, introducing the adult refugees to the community through volunteer activities with Iskashitaa. There is a need for more inquiry and discussion about the pre-literate refugee population, especially in effective teaching strategies, curriculum ideas and a better understanding of literacy practices within the home. These are matters that merit a larger discussion by people who work in education and with refugees, as feedback would be beneficial from all who work with refugees and can recommend what they have observed, experienced and envision to help in the language acquisition, self-sufficiency and acculturation process for refugees.

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This thesis investigates the evolution of two very different complex systems using network theory. This multi-disciplinary technique is widely used to model and analyse vastly diverse systems of multiple interacting components, and therefore, it is applied in this thesis to study the complexity of the systems. This complexity is rooted in the components’ interactions such that the whole system is more than the sum of all the individual parts. The first novelty in this research is the proposal of a new type of structural perturbation, cluster damage, for measuring another dimension of network robustness. The second novelty is the first application of a community detection method, which uncovers space-independent communities in spatial networks, to airport and linguistic networks. A critical property of complex systems – robustness – is explored within a partial model of the Internet, by demonstrating a novel perturbation strategy based on the iterative removal of clusters. The main contribution of this theoretical case study is the methodology for cluster damage, which has not been investigated by literature on the robustness of complex networks. The model, part of the Internet at the Autonomous System level, only serves as a domain where the novel methodology is demonstrated, and it is chosen because the Internet is known to be robust due to its distributed (non-centralised) nature, even though it is often subjected to large perturbations and failures. The first applied case study is in the field of air transportation. Specifically, it explores the topology and passenger flows of the United States Airport Network (USAN) over two decades. The network model consists of a time-series of six network snapshots for the years 1990, 2000 and 2010, which capture bi-monthly passenger flows among US airports. Since the network is embedded in space, the volume of these flows is naturally affected by spatial proximity, and therefore, a model (recently proposed in the literature) accounting for this phenomenon is used to identify the communities of airports that have particularly high flows among them, given their spatial separation. The second applied case study – in the field of language acquisition – investigates the word co-occurrence network of children, as they develop their linguistic abilities at an early age. Similarly to the previous case study, the network model consists of six children and three discrete developmental stages. These networks are not embedded in physical space, but they are mapped to an artificial semantic space that defines the semantic distance between pairs of words. This novel approach allows for an additional dimension of network information that results in a more complete dataset. Then, community detection identifies groups of words that have particularly high co-occurrence frequency, given their semantic distance. This research highlights the fact that some general techniques from network theory, such as network modelling and analysis, can be successfully applied for the study of diverse systems, while others, such as community detection, need to be tailored for the specific system. However, methods originally developed for one domain may be applied somewhere completely new, as illustrated by the application of spatial community detection to a non-spatial network. This underlines the importance of inter-disciplinary research.

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The current study examined the role of complexity and initial variability of exemplars during learning in verb generalization. Children and adults learned two novel verbs in the context of two novel creatures across two sessions. After a second training session, participants completed a generalization task during which they were required to identify the verbs when presented with seven novel creatures of varying levels of complexity. Performance was compared across age group and condition. Participants who initially learned the verbs in the context of a single, simple exemplar demonstrated a higher proportion of correct responses than participants who initially learned the verbs with both a simple & complex exemplar. These results provide evidence that fewer exemplars during initial training of novel verbs may increase learning in young children, as well as some evidence that complex exemplars may increase the difficulty of learning and generalizing verbs. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 39-42).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toledo, 2006. / Typescript. "A thesis [submitted] as partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in English." Bibliography: leaves 43-46.

Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Portland, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Sept. 22, 2008). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2009. / Principal faculty advisor: Roberta Michnik Golinkoff, School of Education. Includes bibliographical references.