The composition of the United States population and its workforce is changing rapidly with a projected increase from 249 million in 1990 to 355 million by the year 2040. The majority white population is projected to only grow by 25 percent during this time period while the Latino, and Hispanic populations in the United States are projected to increase by 187 percent. Consequently, the current minorities will constitute more than half of the nation's total population by mid century and comprise a disproportionately large segment of the workforce. as a result of these changing demographics and increasing economic globalization, America's educational institutions will be confronted with reforming their curricula to meet new societal needs by promoting knowledge and understanding of different cultures.;The purpose of this study was to determine the levels of multicultural education integrated into the general education courses that are requirements for completion of AAS degree programs. Further, it was designed to identify the factors that influenced faculty members to include multicultural education into their courses.;Levels of integration of multicultural education were determined by personal interviews of faculty and supported by evidence presented in their syllabi, tests, and handouts. Analysis of the interviews provided the factors that motivate faculty members to infuse or not to infuse their classes with multicultural perspectives.;It was concluded that the amount of multicultural concepts infused into the courses vary from none to considerable and is determined by the faculty member's commitment to achieving pluralism. Factors that motivate inclusion are the disciplines, institutional atmosphere, and personal values of faculty.;Further study is needed to determine how much of the multicultural perspective students retain from the general education courses. A comparison between two and four-year colleges is needed to help determine whether only community college instructors are deficient in the amount of multicultural education they infuse into their disciplines.

Multicultural practitioners promote cultural competence among individuals to create awareness and tolerance of others who are culturally different. Yet, current research on cultural competence education primarily focused on practitioners in the traditional school setting instead of individuals in nonschool settings. This basic qualitative study investigated how multicultural practitioners in nonschool settings experience their attempts to develop cultural competence in constituents. Bennett's intercultural sensitivity, Koehn and Rosenau's multicultural competence, and Quappe and Cantatore's cultural awareness models informed the semi-structured interviews with 8 multicultural practitioners obtained via snowball sampling. Data were manually coded and analyzed to develop themes. Results indicated four ways participants conceptualized cultural competency, a five-part approach to cultural competence promotion, seven varying efforts to develop cultural competence, seven challenges that hindered their work, and four areas of success. Future studies might investigate differences in cultural competency efforts used by specific cultural groups and multicultural practitioners' growth as professionals to help to determine professional development programs that warrant implementation. This study will generate interest in developing cultural competence in groups and settings beyond the reach of traditional educational settings, thereby contributing to social change.

Simultaneous interpretation (SI) is a special kind of translation where the interpreter listens to a speaker, processes the spoken (or signed) source language message and produces an equivalent output in a target language, i.e., the interpreter produces one part of the message in the target language while simultaneously listening to the next part of the message in the source language. This thesis examines the process of simultaneous interpretation from an information processing point of view and describes the implications of such an approach for practical SI. Following an overview of research issues in SI literature, a definition of SI is given, pointing out the special characteristics of SI and the features that distinguish it from written translation and consecutive interpretation. A model incorporating various structural and functional components is then used to describe SI in terms of information processing. The focus of this investigation is on the integrative use of bottom-up and top-down processing mechanisms as typical features of human information processing systems. Subsequently the implications of the observations made about SI as an information process are considered within the context of practical SI. The various factors that influence the quality, speed and reliability of interpretation at all stages of the process are examined. Finally suggestions for the training of simultaneous interpreters are made. The thesis is concluded with the observation that SI is indeed a special kind of human information processing. Modelling SI in terms of information processing can contribute to the understanding of this complex process and its components. It is a powerful tool to enlighten the mechanisms and skills involved in SI and to establish efficient training programs for simultaneous interpreters.

acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Sarah Mellman

In 1987, as a matter of utmost urgency and importance, Negara Brunei Darussalam called for a new system of education that emphasized nationalistic commitment: “Languages for Bruneians”. With the era of globalization, the Brunei Ministry of education argued that new patterns of communication were necessary and implemented a bilingual policy where children are taught in Malay until the fourth year of primary school when the medium of instruction changes to English. While the new policy supports Bruneians’ proficiency in two languages, rumour has been magnified through recent established research findings that a large percentage of pupils are underachieving in science. The main focus of this study is the effect of language transfer, from Malay to English as the medium of instruction, on the development of children’s conceptual understanding in science. Two clusters of science concepts, evaporation and condensation and living and non-living, provide the science context through which children’s understanding is explored. The theoretical framework that includes viewing and examining children’s conceptual understanding from conceptual development and epistemological and ontological perspectives of conceptual change informs the analysis of this study. The research design employed a cross sectional case study method involving the administration of interviews to a total of 255 children aged between 6 and 12 years of age. The interviews about the concepts of evaporation and condensation involved two phases. For the first phase, 60 children from each primary level of 1, 3 and 4 (total n = 180) were interviewed. Fourteen months later, 18 children from the same sample were selected based on their fluency in the first interviews and revisited for more detailed interviews. / For the concepts of living and non-living, 75 children were chosen from a wider range of primary levels, fifteen from each level of Primary 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Each participant in this study was asked 2 types of questions; forced-response and semi-structured. For the forced-response questions, scores were entered into the Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS) computer software based on a 5- point scale. For the semi-structured questions, analysis involved initial grouping of responses before entry into the software and quantitative manipulation. The data from the semi-structured interviews also were analysed qualitatively with systematic searches for themes and evidence that supported and disconfirmed the quantitative results. As this study produced qualitative as well as quantitative data, rigour was determined by two sets of parallel criteria. Ensuring rigour for the quantitative data involved the criteria of validity and reliability. Within the qualitative paradigm, the criteria that evolved in response to the quality of the research were credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability. The results indicated a steady progress of conceptual understanding when the pupils’ explanations about the concepts of evaporation and condensation were in Malay. However, the pattern of development of understanding did not reach projected patterns i n Primary 4 when only English responses were analysed. The findings show that the change in language of instruction significantly hampered communication about and possibly conceptual understanding of the cluster of concepts associated with evaporation and condensation. / Similarly, the findings about children’s conceptual understanding of living and non-living suggested that the expected patterns of development were not realised. Closer qualitative inspection of the data revealed that the idiosyncratic nature of the bilingual system perpetuated particular misconceptions specifically related to the nature of the Malay and English languages in both clusters of concepts. The primary conclusion of the study was that the change in language of instruction from Malay to English in Brunei primary schools had a significant, detrimental impact on the children’s expressed understanding of the concepts associated with evaporation and condensation and living and non-living.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 1985. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-155). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Printout. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 275-281) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Language Education, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-04, Section: A, page: 1192. Advisers: Larry Mikulecky; Jerome Harste. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed March 22, 2007)."

The present study examines native and nonnative perceptual processing of semantic information conveyed by prosodic prominence. <br>Five groups of German learners of English each listened to one of 5 experimental conditions. Three conditions differed in place of focus accent in the sentence and two conditions were with spliced stimuli. <br>The experiment condition was presented first in the learners’ L1 (German) and then in a similar set in the L2 (English). The effect of the accent condition and of the length and position of the target in the sentence was evaluated in a probe recognition task. <br>In both the L1 and L2 tasks there was no significant effect in any of the five focus conditions. Target position and target word length had an effect in the L1 task. Word length did not affect accuracy rates in the L2 task. For probe recognition in the L2, word length and the position of the target interacted with the focus condition.