The questions posed in this study were: Are there significant differences among various tasks for eliciting five locative prepositions, and, if so, do tasks vary in their effectiveness according to the age of the children? Sixty children, ten within each of six age groups, aged eighteen to forty-eight months, participated in the study. All the children had normal language and hearing abilities. An investigator-developed assessment, the Test for Comprehension of Five Locative Prepositions, was administered to each child by the investigator. The Test for Comprehension of Five Locative Prepositions involved picture contexts and object contexts of varying sizes, and required manipulation, pointing and self action response modes.

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published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

The evolution of the concept of language interference and how it has been instructionally applied to Spanish English Chicano children in the United States was the central thesis of this work. The study attempted to answer the following questions: (1) What does language interference mean? (2) How is it used? and (3) Why is it used in teaching English to Spanish speaking Chicano students in the United States? The study revealed that: (1) Two implicit paradigms, the languages as habit formation and the languages in contact, explained the meaning of language interference. (2) The guiding assumption operating under the language as habit formation paradigm had never been examined; thus, the wide acceptance of the habit formation theory, which defined interference as differences between two languages causing difficulty and interference. (3) The unexamined assumption in the habit formation paradigm when examined with twelve Spanish English bilingual children in grades 2, 4, and 6 was not valid; thus its instruction practices regarding language learning and language teaching are not valid. (4) Given the new knowledge about language learning and teaching (applied sociolinguistics and applied psycholinguistics), the definition of language interference had to be expanded and redefined; thus a new paradigm emerged--languages in communicative use--but its unexamined assumptions need to be examined now. (5) The wide acceptance of the habit formation definition of language interference was due to racism, prejudice, and elitism in intellectual guise. (6) Given that the habit formation definition of language interference is valid, then changing teachers' perceptions, attitudes, and understanding about language learning and teaching, and bilingualism would necessitate a demythification process. This study was a descriptive, theoretical, and epistemological examination of a phenomena that occurs when two languages are used to communicate. How reality is described depends on one's governing gaze, operating assumptions (both implicit and explicit), logic of reasoning, and theory building. If a theory is built on an unexamined assumption, i.e., has never been tested with reality, then its perpetuation builds an illusion, a myth that people try to make real. The construction and description of reality are challenging tasks in any field of study.

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.

No description available.

No description available.