The current study demonstrates the reliability of the Hindi translated version of the PEAK-DT assessment tool. The PEAK-DT has been found to be a reliable and valid tool to assess the skill level of children with disabilities. The Hindi translated version was scored and compared with the English version. The participants were parents and professionals who speak Hindi and English fluently and also have children with a developmental disability. A two tailed t test as well as the Pearson correlation found the scores to be highly correlated. The results of this study enables Hindi speaking parents who do not speak English fluently to assess the skill levels of their children to provide professionals with reliable scores from an assessment tool.

abstract: Research in foreign language (FL) acquisition has shown that connectives, a key linguistic element contributing to cohesion and sentence complexity, pose a great challenge for FL learners at all proficiency levels. In spite of the importance of connectives in foreign language acquisition, little research has been conducted to explore how connectives are taught and presented in foreign language classrooms and textbooks. The primary purpose of this study is to examine the presentation and introduction of connectives as well as the pedagogical activities provided for learning connectives in Chinese textbooks for novice to intermediate FL learners. To achieve the purpose of the study, three different sets of widely-used Chinese textbooks were selected and compared. The results show that while the amount of coverage varies greatly among the three sets of textbook, the sequence of presenting connectives in each series of textbooks closely follows the ranks suggested in the HSK Grading Standards and Grammar Outline (HSK is the shortened form for Chinese Proficiency Test). As for the activities, although all three textbooks claim to adopt a communicative approach to FL teaching, they differ considerably in the type of activities provided. In addition, it is evident that more traditional form-focused exercises are included in those textbooks than meaning-focused communicative tasks. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Asian Languages and Civilizations 2015

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<p> This paper is about locating the meaning of a series of games known as the <i>Dark Souls</i> series in relation to contemporary social conditions in Japan. I argue that the game should be thought of as an emblem of the current cultural zeitgeist, in a similar way one might identify something like Jack Kerouac&rsquo;s <i>The Dharma Bums</i> as an emblem of the counter cultural 60s. I argue that the <i>Dark Souls</i> series expresses in allegorical form an anxiety about living in a time where the meaning of our everyday actions and even society itself has become significantly destabilized. It does this through a fractured approach to story-telling, that is interspersed with Buddhist metaphysics and wrapped up in macabre, gothic aesthetic depicting the last gasping breath of a once great kingdom. This expression of contemporary social anxiety is connected to the discourse of postmodernity in Japan. Through looking at these games as a feedback loop between text, environment and ludic system, I connect the main conceptual motifs that structure the games as a whole with Osawa Masachi&rsquo;s concept of the post-fictional era and Hiroki Azuma&rsquo;s definition of the otaku. </p><p>

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This dissertation explores the intersection of literary and economic imaginaries through an examination of the market as both theme and structure in late imperial drama. Theater played a crucial role in helping late imperial subjects make sense of the sweeping transformations that defined China’s so-called silver century (1550–1650), a period of tremendous social volatility in which the intensification of the commercial economy that began in the Song was increasingly and acutely felt throughout the lower Yangzi region. The rapid expansion of mercantile capital, the integration of local economies into global trade networks, and the frequent fluctuations in the availability of currency had far-reaching implications for all aspects of late imperial society. While historians have exhaustively documented the flows of silver and coin, the fiscal mismanagement of the court, and the tax riots that convulsed the lower Yangzi region, less attention has been paid to the multifarious ways in which the commercialization of everyday life was experienced and understood. At the core of my study are a group of playwrights active in mid-seventeenth century Suzhou whose plays map the moral and affective terrains of an increasingly commercialized society. Although these plays were widely read and performed throughout the Qing, they have been largely neglected in modern scholarship, due in part to their unconventional subject matter. In examining the work of the Suzhou playwrights, I am particularly concerned with how the imaginary world of the play self-consciously engages with the material conditions of its own performance. Looking at these plays not just as texts but also as performances that happened within private halls, in temples, and on pleasure boats reveals the ways in which the stage was a site for the performance of commerce itself—both in the dramatization of buying and selling and in the buying and selling of this dramatization of buying and selling. It was precisely through these nested performances in which virtually every strata of society was implicated as producers and consumers that the abstractions of commerce were made legible and the imagination of new loci of power outside the state was made possible. This dissertation asks not only how money, merchants, and commerce were represented on stage, but also how drama itself—its material history, its performance contexts, its conventions and language—informed understandings of money, merchants, and commerce. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation asks how, in the context of elite medieval Japanese painting, matter could constitute meaning. This is attempted through a case study of one of the last great medieval illustrated handscrolls (Jp. emaki) yet to receive full treatment, the Genjō Sanzō-e (Illustrated Life of Xuanzang). Produced by the atelier of the enigmatic court painter Takashina Takakane (fl. ca. 1309–1330), the Genjō Sanzō-e has long constituted the mysterious jewel in the crown of the genre known as kōsōden emaki, or illustrated handscrolls of the lives of eminent monks. The work relates the life of the seventh century Chinese monk Xuanzang (ca. 602–664), who made an epic seventeen year pilgrimage from China to India to obtain sutras for translation into Chinese, thereby changing the course of Buddhist history in East Asia. The Genjō Sanzō-e comprises twelve illustrated scrolls that cumulatively measure almost two hundred meters. It was sequestered for hundreds of years at the spiritual heart of the Daijō-in imperial cloister of Kōfukuji, Nara, where it served as both icon and relic. This history of hermeticism led to the generation of an auratic narrative of a hermetic handscroll that turned on the perverse charisma of the invisible object. Already intellectually quarantined as a “very special object” by virtue of its emaki format, the scroll’s ontological complexity indirectly contributed to its further art historical isolation. Its first ever full exhibition in 2011 catalyzed this study, which interrogates the composition and function of illustrated sacred biography on both the hermeneutic and non-hermeneutic levels, as both text and sacred object. Micro-readings of the scroll texts and paintings against a constellation of self-indicated lexical and pictorial sources reveals that the source of the scroll’s efficacy as a numinous object lies in an exquisitely choreographed analogical mode of explicitly intertextual composition, producing a self-canonizing object that manipulates the expressive plasticity of the picto-textual handscroll format to deliver a customized re-telling of the life of Xuanzang. These findings challenge the conventional history of medieval Yamato-e painting, the category of kōsōden emaki, and Euro-centric conceptions of iconicity and the autonomy of the artifact. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation explores the ethical formation of persons depicted by the 15th century text entitled the Liberation Life Story of Drukpa Kunley (‘Brug pa kun legs kyi rnam thar). My analysis examines the Drukpa Kunley Namthar from a perspective that considers writing as a spiritual discipline akin to other practices of spiritual formation such as prayer, meditation and confession. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Paul Ricoeur, Michel Foucault and Alasdair McIntyre, I argue for a position whereby life-writing functions to form ethical persons. Using Drukpa Kunley’s namthar as an outstanding example of this ethically-formative function of literary activity, I examine the text’s presentation of what it means to be an ethical person and how such persons arise through a particular way of interacting with the world. In considering the Drukpa Kunley Namthar, I explore questions about authorial intent, textual agency, and the readers imagined by the text. In addition, I highlight three principal themes developed within the text: exposure of hypocrisy, joyful acceptance of truth, and an unstinting examination of authority. These themes are expressed through both content and form: the narrator openly discusses them, and the text itself creates an experience for the reader that resonates with these themes through its repeated shifting among diverse literary forms and genres. I refer to this strategy as a cacophony of genres, and my assertion is that this effects an ethic of disruption, a condition that challenges the reader and draws into question conventional ways of seeing and being in the world. Finally, this dissertation explores and advocates for a model of scholarship that approaches the study of a text as an ethnographic encounter. This model, which draws on the work of anthropologist Michael D. Jackson, considers the usefulness of intersubjective practice for scholars of religion and other fields. I propose that this model for studying texts, which engages with a wide range of agents and influences—including our own—can yield deeper and more relevant insights into our objects of study. / Religion, Committee on the Study of

<p> This study aims to understand Asian American students&rsquo; postsecondary STEM education pathways. It examined Asian American students as a whole and as geographical and generational subgroups. It studied postsecondary STEM education as a whole and as five different fields. It examined STEM pathways through six research topics. And, it explored factors that related to Asian American students&rsquo; STEM education pathways. This study contributes to the current research body by focusing on an important matter that needs more exploration, by offering justifiable definitions and classifications of Asian Americans and STEM education, and by suggesting related factors of STEM education. </p><p> An US national representative and longitudinal data set, Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS: 2002), was utilized in this study to explore the intended research topics. SPSS, R, and AM were used for the analyses. Missing data imputation was applied. When analyzing the data, the nested structure of ELS: 2002 was considered. And, both descriptive and inferential analyses were carried out. The descriptive analyses were used both as a preparation for inferential analyses and as ways to answer the research questions. The inferential analyses were realized through stepwise logistic regressions. With three regressions for Asian Americans as a whole and three regressions for Asian Americans as subgroups, six stepwise regressions were conducted for the research topics of postsecondary enrollment, STEM choice as a whole, and STEM completion as whole. Due to the limitation of the analytic sample sizes, the research topics of STEM as an individual major choice, STEM individual major completion, and STEM individual major persistence were not examined by using regressions. </p><p> This study found that Asian American students were generally more likely to receive postsecondary education and major in STEM fields than White students. Among the five STEM fields, Asian American and White students both favored the fields of biological/agricultural sciences and engineering/engineering technologies. Both Asian American and White students were likely to obtain STEM degrees and persist in the same STEM fields they originally chose. More importantly, examination of the within-Asian American differences indicated that basically no difference was found among Asian American subgroups at certain stages of STEM education: receiving postsecondary education, choosing a STEM major, obtaining a STEM degree, and persisting in the same STEM fields. Nevertheless, Asian American subgroup disparities were found in choosing and obtaining a degree in different STEM fields. On the other hand, different stages of Asian American students&rsquo; postsecondary STEM education pathways did not involve the same related factors. Moreover, the same factors did not exhibit the same relative status at different pathway stages. The results imply the importance for future research to examine the within- Asian American and STEM education differences. Also, they have implications for ways to increase postsecondary enrollment, STEM major choice, and STEM degree obtainment.</p><p>

There is some evidence suggesting that the rate of breastfeeding initiation is lower among particular ethnic or cultural groups who have immigrated to Canada and South Asian women comprise one of these groups. Given the evidence that breastfeeding is important in promoting infant health and maternal health, it is important to understand factors that influence breastfeeding initiation among South Asian immigrant women. This descriptive exploratory study investigated the following research question: What are South Asian women's perceptions about the social, socio-economic, personal and acculturation factors that influence their initiation of breastfeeding? The study explored factors that could influence the initiation of breastfeeding among primiparous South Asian immigrant women who have immigrated to Canada. It was informed in part by the conceptual framework used by Kong and Lee (2004), whose study investigated factors that influenced 252 first-time mothers in their decision-making about whether or not to breastfeed. A convenience sample of 15 subjects was interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide with 10 questions. Data were transcribed and analyzed using inductive constant comparative analysis. The following themes emerged: the representation of breastfeeding, vicarious learning about breastfeeding, family influences, spiritual connection, breaking with tradition, resisting the moral mandate, deferring to medical authority, transition to work and cultural mores. With respect to the findings, implications are discussed for nursing research, theory and education. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Nursing, School of / Graduate