Six hundred sixty-six students were queried at the University of North Texas. The appropriate use of nonverbal behaviors of international and U.S. American TAs was surveyed. An eleven item questionnaire (Teacher Nonverbal Measure) was utilized. These questions were tested by an ANOVA. Data indicated that international TAs are less likely to use appropriate nonverbal behaviors than U.S. American TAs. Thus, it is possible to assume that international TAs are more likely to be perceived as using inappropriate nonverbal behaviors than U.S. American TAs. Also, communication competence was investigated. The Communication Skill Rating Scale was utilized and tested by ANOVA. Results indicate that international TAs are viewed as significantly less competent than U.S. American TAs.

M.Ed. / During the political dispensation of separate development, differentiation between cultural groups was based on skin colour (racial criteria), and contact between these different groups was inhibited by law. The same applied for the educational system - even the training of teachers was aimed at monocultural education. The present political dispensation provides for a multicultural educational situation where learners are admitted to a school, regardless of race, language, or culture. Language and cultural differences between teacher and learner may lead to problems in classroom communication. Communication entails verbal as well as nonverbal communication which can be distinguished, but not separated from one another, and an understanding of both contributes to effective facilitation of learning and acquisition of skills. Nonverbal communication, however, takes place on an unconscious, non-intentional level, and it is this aspect of communication which may lead to major misunderstandings in the classroom. Black learners in large numbers are admitted to schools where the educational context is predominantly white. Considering the limited contact which used to exist between the different racial groups, and the monocultural training of some teachers, the question has arisen as to how teachers as educators experience the nonverbal communication of black learners. As this research is aimed at gaining insight into the world of experience of these teachers, a qualitative approach has been used. Collection of data was done by means of in-depth (phenomenological) interviews and direct observation, and the data was analised by means of an inductive-descriptive method (the constant comparative method of data analysis).

Learning, and potentially thought itself, is an inherently social process, whether directly from other humans, such as teachers, parents, or mentors, or indirectly from the artifacts other humans create. However, the social nature of the learning process doesn't come without its social learning, as opposed to cognitive learning, challenges. Sometimes we disagree with, offend, or otherwise harm one another in the learning process, or simply don't know one another enough to engage with and understand each other. How does social development, and specifically the development of dyadic teacher-student relationships impact individuals' learning processes? Here, I apply a multivariate time-series approach to understand how teacher-student dyads, randomly assigned to partners they know or have never met, differ in their nonverbal communication behavior, and how these differences impact student learning processes. Through a custom-built online portal, open-source computer vision software, and a newly-derived state-of-the-art multivariate time series analysis, I show how teacher-student dyads from an undergraduate institution benefit from familiarity, nonverbal coordination, and their development, and how this development improves students' scientific reasoning performance. I also show how the degree of nonverbal coordination that enables high performance in the reasoning tasks develops over as little as 10—15 minutes of dedicated face-to-face interaction. Three implications of the work are highlighted. First, the results imply that social interaction processes are crucial to individual reasoning in face-to-face online contexts. Second, a potentially necessary route to improving STEM education at the undergraduate level may be more dedicated face-to-face time between students and their instructors. Finally, the step-by-step guide provided by the work to apply multivariate techniques to non-stationary diachronic processes illuminates the value of combining evolutionary correspondence analysis with locally stationary vector autoregression. The combination of methods reduces the complexity of high-dimensional datasets to explanatory latent factors, and then quantifies the linear predictability of each original dimension on all of the others within each explanatory latent factor. In the current analysis, I identify familiarity and affect-attention tradeoff effects as the two most explanatory latent factors, and quantify how both familiarity, and the tradeoff between affective and attentive signalling between the dyads evolves over the course of 20-25 minute teacher-student interactions. Thus, beyond the implications for dyadic reasoning and STEM learning processes, the methodological implications could be applied to any high-dimensional diachronic processes, such as two bodies, or brains, interacting in other teacher-student contexts, as well as parent-child, therapist-client, and manager-employee environments in order to simplify the complexity of social interactions and uncover their impacts on individual change processes.

Thesis (DAppLing)--Macquarie University, Faculty of Human Sciences, Dept. of Linguistics, 2009. / Bibliography: p. 208-233. / Introduction -- Conceptual frameworks: language competence and the acquisition of modality -- Generic frameworks: speech, writing and electronic communication -- Linguistic frameworks: modality and related concepts -- Research design and methodologies -- FTDs in the ACAD and BB corpora -- Learner's use of FTDs in discoursal context and their individual repertoires -- Conclusions and implications. / While natural interaction is one of the important components that lead to successful language learning (Vygotsky 1978, 1986), communication in classroom practice in Thailand is mostly teacher-centered and not genuinely interactive. Online group communication is different because it allows learners to exercise interpersonal communicative skills through interaction and meaning negotiation, as in reciprocal speech situations. At the same time it gives learners time to think and produce language without having to face the kind of pressure they feel in face-to-face classroom discussion. The language learner's competence is thus likely to be enhanced by opportunities to communicate online, and to be more visible there than in academic contexts, although there is a dearth of experimental research to show this. One way of investigating the pedagogical potential of bulletin board discussions is to focus on the interpersonal linguistic devices used in textual interactions (Biber 1988). -- The purpose of this research is to find out whether students communicating online in bulletin board writing will exercise their repertoires of linguistic fine-tuning devices (hedges, modals, and intensifiers) more extensively than when writing academic essays. This was expected because hedges, modals and intensifiers are likely to be found in interactive discussions (Holmes 1983), while academic tasks do not create such an environment. Though hedges and modal devices are also found in academic genres (Salager-Meyer 1994, Hyland 1998), those used tend to be academic in function rather than communicative. -- In order to compare the frequency and variety of the fine-tuning devices used by learners in the two mediums, data was gathered from 39 Thai students of English at Kasetsart University, from (1) their discussions in online bulletin boards and (2) their academic essays. Tasks were assigned on parallel topics in three text types (narrative, explanatory, argumentative) for both mediums. The amount of writing was normalized to create comparable text lengths. Measures used in the quantitative analysis included tallying of the types and tokens of the experimental linguistic items, with the help of the AntConc 2007 computer concordancer. Samples of written texts from the two mediums were also analyzed qualitatively and compared in terms of their discourse structure (stages, moves and speech acts), to see which functional segments support or prompt particular types of pragmatic devices. -- The findings confirm that in electronic bulletin boards the students exercise their repertoires of fine-tuning devices more frequently, and use a greater variety of pragmatic functions than in academic essays. This is probably because online discussion fosters interactions that are more typical of speech (Crystal 2006), and its structure allows for a series of interpersonal moves which have no place in academic tasks. Text-type also emerged as a significant factor: writing argumentative texts prompted greater use of modals and intensifiers than the narrative and explanatory ones. Thus students' communicative competence showed itself most fully in the argumentative online assignments, and was not so evident in academic and expository essays. Frequent use of modal and intensifying elements was also found to correlate with the students' English proficiency grades, and how regularly they wrote online. This incidentally shows the importance of exposure to L2 in language acquisition, and that lower-proficiency learners need more opportunities to exercise their L2 resources in interactive discourse, in order to develop competence in using them. -- These research findings support Long's (1996) 'Interaction Hypothesis', that learners learn best in situations that cater for interaction; and Swain's (1985) 'Output Hypothesis', that learners need the chance to exercise their language naturally in a variety of contexts -through academic tasks as well as social interactions, which are equally important for language education. Extended performance opportunities undoubtedly feed back into the learner's communicative competence. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / xi, 389 p. ill

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / To access interactive systems, blind and visually impaired users can leverage their auditory senses by using non-speech sounds. The current structure of non-speech sounds, however, is geared toward conveying user interface operations (e.g., opening a file) rather than large theme-based information (e.g., a history passage) and, thus, is ill-suited to signify the complex meanings of primary learning material (e.g., books and websites). In order to address this problem, this dissertation introduces audemes, a new category of non-speech sounds, whose semiotic structure and flexibility open new horizons for facilitating the education of blind and visually impaired students. An experiment with 21 students from the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (ISBVI) supports the hypothesis that audemes increase the retention of theme-based information. By acting as memory catalysts, audemes can play an important role in enhancing the aural interaction and navigation in future sound-based user interfaces. For this dissertation, I designed an Acoustic EDutainment INterface (AEDIN) that integrates audemes as a way by which to vividly anticipate text-to-speech theme-based information and, thus, act as innovative aural covers. The results of two iterative usability evaluations with total of 20 blind and visually impaired participants showed that AEDIN is a highly usable and enjoyable acoustic interface. Yet, designing well-formed audemes remains an ad hoc process because audeme creators can only rely on their intuition to generate meaningful and memorable sounds. In order to address this problem, this dissertation presents three experiments, each with 10 blind and visually impaired participants. The goal was to examine the optimal combination of audeme attributes, which can be used to facilitate accurate recognitions of audeme meanings. This work led to the creation of seven basic guidelines that can be used to design well-formed audemes. An interactive application tool (ASCOLTA: Advanced Support and Creation-Oriented Library Tool for Audemes) operationalized these guidelines to support individuals without an audio background in designing well-formed audemes. An informal evaluation conducted with three teachers from the ISBVI, supports the hypothesis that ASCOLTA is a useful tool by which to facilitate the integration of audemes into the teaching environment.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Recent technological applications have made the life of people too much dependent on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and its applications. Understanding basic level science is a must in order to use and contribute to this technological revolution. Science education in middle and high school levels however depends heavily on visual representations such as models, diagrams, figures, animations and presentations etc. This leaves visually impaired students with very few options to learn science and secure a career in STEM related areas. Recent experiments have shown that small aural clues called Audemes are helpful in understanding and memorization of science concepts among visually impaired students. Audemes are non-verbal sound translations of a science concept. In order to facilitate science concepts as Audemes, for visually impaired students, this thesis presents an automatic system for audeme generation from STEM textbooks. This thesis describes the systematic application of multiple Natural Language Processing tools and techniques, such as dependency parser, POS tagger, Information Retrieval algorithm, Semantic mapping of aural words, machine learning etc., to transform the science concept into a combination of atomic-sounds, thus forming an audeme. We present a rule based classification method for all STEM related concepts. This work also presents a novel way of mapping and extracting most related sounds for the words being used in textbook. Additionally, machine learning methods are used in the system to guarantee the customization of output according to a user's perception. The system being presented is robust, scalable, fully automatic and dynamically adaptable for audeme generation.