A qualitative study of how first year foreign language students perceive different interactions in an online environment. In depth interviews were conducting with ten students after the completion of an online second semester Spanish course. Individual case studies recorded the unique experiences of each study participant and those experiences were then compared and analyzed for common themes. Emerging themes included the value of explanatory feedback programmed into the course, the use of message boards for making interpersonal connections, the difficulty of conducting online chats, the role and value of announcements and the importance of immediacy behaviors for creating social presence. The themes were then applied to the following research questions: 1) What is the effectiveness of the available interactions in a web-based Spanish course as perceived by community college foreign language learners? 2) How do these interactions work together to facilitate learning based upon their purpose? 3) How do these interactions work together to facilitate learning in an online foreign language learning environment based upon with whom or what the student is interacting? The results of this study included three attributes of effective interaction. The participants indicated a need to make a connection between their personal learning goals and the available interactions. Timeliness was also identified as a key component of effective interactions. Automatic feedback, archives for previous information and a quick turnaround on email correspondence were listed as important aspects that created a feeling of timeliness. The third attribute was identified as a low level of frustration when compared to the potential benefit of an interaction. The study participants indicated a willingness to endure some frustration if they thought it would be worth it in the end. Final recommendations suggested that designers of online foreign language courses should include non-linear instructional activities, carefully designed chat opportunities, quality automatic feedback and reading and listening passages that are level appropriate. Instructors should engage in behaviors that enhance the effectiveness of interactions by making regular announcements, helping learners draw connections between the interactions and their learning goals, maintaining and organizing archives and keeping response times as close to 24 hours as possible. / text

Research in the field of second language acquisition in the past five to ten years has focused on individual variation in language learning, and has examined such learner variables as learning styles, personality characteristics, learning strategies, and learner beliefs about the nature of language learning. Recently, research on individual learners has broadened to include a greater focus on the contexts of language learning and to explore the interactions between individual learners and the socio-cultural environment in investigations of these learner variables.This study has two purposes. The first is to investigate the language learning of novice level second language learners in a language and culture immersion program. The six college-age learners of Spanish who participated in an eight-week language and culture immersion program in Mexico are the focus of the case studies. The research focuses on five areas of learner variation: learner beliefs and philosophies about the nature of language learning, approaches to vocabulary learning, classroom behaviors, speaking for communication, and cultural adjustment.The second purpose of the study is to explore the use of multiple approaches to research on individual variation. The research framework for the study is ethnographic and the study employs a multi-methodological approach to data collection over an extended period of time in several language learning contexts. The research procedures used in the studyinclude participant observation, interviews, language learning journals, questionnaires, retrospective analysis of videotaped clips, and standardized instruments such as the Modern Language Aptitude Test, the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview. / Department of English

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 66-68).

Latin American art song is a genre primarily of the first half of the twentieth-century, when popular folklore served as the voice and inspiration of many poets and musicians. The nationalist movement served as a means of expression, each Latin American country with its own identity. There is great benefit for singers to study Spanish diction at an academic level, since it is a language already familiar to most U.S.A residents. There is a significant amount of unknown repertoire that would be very useful in the singing studio because of the language's open vowels. This repertoire can also serve as a confidence-builder to young Spanish-speaking singers at the beginning of their training. I will be focusing on the (s), (ll), and (y) sounds as pronounced in the diverse regions of Latin America; in particular, why they matter when coaching singers, and the articulators involved in each. The purpose of this study is to discuss diction differences in the repertoire, expound on its benefits for voice pedagogy, all while informing about varied options for recital programming.

The purpose of this research was to use a lexical approach, and information and communication technologies (ICT) as strategies to facilitate learning to students of Spanish as a foreign language, to answer the research questions: (1) if the use of multiword lexical units improves the lexical competence and (2) whether the use of technology is an effective strategy to facilitate learning. A lesson plan with different activities was designed and put into practice with two groups of students (experimental and control) of the intermediate level of the University of North Texas (UNT). The collected data were analyzed using the quantitative paradigm with the variance model ANOVA with repeated measures, and the qualitative or interpretive paradigm to offer a broader perspective of the learning process of multiwords lexical units (collocations and idiomatic expressions). The results of this investigation answered the research questions and confirmed the effectiveness of the lexical approach and ICT in the teaching-learning process and facilitated the student's acquisition of L2.

This study focuses on the clitic pronoun usage by Spanish-Quechua bilingual speakers in Cuzco, Peru when faced with a question that includes a definite article preceding the direct object. Answers are analyzed to determine whether or not the definite article has an effect on the presence or absence of the clitic pronoun. Direct objects tested were both [+human] and [-human] objects to determine if these variables affect clitic pronoun use as well. Speakers who have identified themselves as bilingual in both Spanish and Quechua were given a survey to complete in order to see what factors may contribute to the use or omission of the clitic pronouns.

<p>El trabajo a continuación constituye un estudio investigativo de la política que caracteriza al sistema educacional cubano, en el cual abordaremos temas como los principios fundamentales que lo rigen, los valores ideológicos políticos que lo sustentan y la estructura que lo conforma. Ello dentro del contexto teórico que sostiene el estudio y se limita a las siguientes variables: derechos humanos, democracia y educación. Como la arena en que se desarrolla dicho sistema educacional, se vio afectada por un proceso sociopolítico de medio siglo que ha atravesado por diferentes etapas, influyendo a su vez en los métodos pedagógicos y el contenido de la educación en Cuba, hemos hecho referencia a momentos históricos significativos para la sociedad cubana y para su sistema educacional. La investigación se ha realizado con un enfoque crítico, ya que consideramos que principios universalmente reconocidos como son los derechos humanos, las libertades individuales y la democracia resultan elementos esenciales en el ámbito de la educación. Para ello hemos recurrido a autores reconocidos de la filosofía y las ciencias políticas como Robert Dahl, Jack Donnelly y NorbertoBobbio, quienes constituyen referencias fundamentales a la hora de abordar teóricamente y analizar cómo en una sociedad se violan o se respetan estos conceptos. Asimismo, al analizar la democracia y a otros defensores de ella, hacemos referencia a los trabajos de John Locke, Immanuel Kant y Carlos Alberto Montaner, cuya literatura en relación con la educación es valorada internacionalmente, aunque cada uno ha vivido en épocas y ambientes sociales y políticos diferentes. Hemos utilizado además documentos conocidos y normativos internacionalmente en temas de derechos políticos, económicos y sociales. De ahí las varias referencias a la Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos. La posibilidad de compartir o rebatir las ideas expuestas en este trabajo, nos acercará indiscutiblemente a un conocimiento más cabal del objeto de estudio que constituye el sistema educacional de la República de Cuba.</p>

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the investigation of the semantics and syntax of Negative Words (N-words) in negative concord languages, with a focus on Spanish. An in-depth look into the syntactic behavior as well as into the meaning of terms such as nadie 'nobody', nada 'nothing', nunca 'never', etc., will provide some insight into the controversial nature of these words in the Romance languages as well as a better understanding of their peculiar pattern of distribution. On a larger picture, a thorough investigation of the semantics and syntax of these items will, in turn, contribute to a better understanding of the nature of negative polarity items in general. Thus, as I just anticipated, my conclusion is that N-words are in fact equivalent to negative polarity items, and that the phenomenon of negative concord, by which, in some languages, various negative items contribute only one semantic negation to a sentence, is a subcase of the crosslinguistic phenomenon of negative polarity licensing. In this respect, my analysis of N-words builds on the analyses of Bosque (1980) and Laka (1990). I base my conclusion that N-words are negative polarity items upon an extensive survey of comparative data coming from different Romance languages as well as from English, and I bring up new data and arguments supporting my view on the issue. In addition to arguing for the negative polarity nature of N-words, I also explore the extent to which syntactic operations are involved in the licensing of N-words, and I provide evidence showing that N-word licensing does not directly involve syntactic movement (contra most standard assumptions). Finally, in my investigation of the nature of N-words, I go beyond simply identifying them as negative polarity items. Specifically, I look deeply into the logicosemantic contribution of N-words, and I present arguments and data showing that N-words do not have either negative or any other kind of quantificational force. Rather, as I argue, they are better characterized as logicosemantic variables (in the sense of Kamp 1981 and Heim 1982.) In this regard, I depart from Bosque's (1980) and Laka's (1990) characterization of N-words. My view is more radical than theirs in that I do not just claim that N-words do not have inherent negative content, but also that they do not have any quantificational force of their own at all.

This thesis is a study of the history of the education of Spanish-speaking people in Texas. The study covers a long period of time, from the middle of the seventeenth century to the present time.

This work is dedicated to the study of Spanish language and the influence it has on English in the territory of the United States of America. The main emphasis is put on the variety of Spanglish. The work is divided into four sections. The first part is focusing on the history and the current state of the Spanish language in Northern America. The language is being divided into basic subgroups. The second part consists of the terminology used thorough this subsequent thesis. As for the third part, it is dealing wih Spanglish and its main characteristics. The final seccion is based on a survey that was realized by means of an Internet questionnaire. The thesis is putting stress on the reciprocal influence of the two languages and the comprehensibility of collected data. Key words Spanish, English, variety, Spanglish, bilingualism, lexicon, code switching, questionnaire.