Norah, an urban voice: [Teaching is not what I expected!] Not at all! I guess I really expected it to be a lot more enjoyable than it has been. I know it has been rough because it is the first year. And it is always going to be rough in your first year. But I never expected it to be like this. I never thought I’d feel so down and so incompetent. It has been very difficult and I think a lot of it didn’t have to happen. A lot of my grief and a lot of my uncertainties about myself as a person, about myself as a teacher, and about the teaching profession—I just don’t think they were necessary…I have always been a go-getter and throughout the I [have] always continued to do my best. But there have been times this year when I felt so small that I couldn’t even scrape myself off the floor. False expectations, shattered dreams, and serious attacks on one’s competence and self-worth— these are the all too common experiences of beginning teachers. Teaching is a demanding and at times debilitating job that requires extraordinary expertise in human relations, tremendous organizational abilities, profound patience, and the wherewithal to makes hundreds of situation-specific decisions over the course of a school day. And, as Norah so vividly illustrates by her comments, the first year of teaching is often an especially trying and even traumatic time for those new to the profession. The difference between a beginning teacher and an experienced one is that the beginner asks, "How am I doing?" and the experienced teacher asks, "How are the children doing?" In Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher's First Year, Esme Raji Codell reports that her own mentor shared that wisdom with her. Probably most teachers would find that the comparison rings true: The survival priority is no joke for those aspiring to join the ranks. What beginners and career teachers have most in common, however, is care for children. To be an effective and a caring teacher, a new teacher must ask many more questions than "How are the kids and I doing?" during the first years. Among them: How do I get their attention; lead a class discussion; keep, but expand, their interests; discipline fairly; organize a classroom; make curriculum and assessments meaningful; value diversity; build character; use technology; and continue learning as a teacher? The list goes on. It will not do for those who want to be master teachers to put off asking questions that do not begin with the how word; from the very beginning, they must attempt to discover whom, what, and why they teach. Besides offering advice and sympathy (a stapler and an aspirin, as one teacher put it), what can the profession of teaching do to support its newest colleagues? That it is becoming increasingly necessary for the profession to do more for beginners than it has in the past is clear. A baby boomlet combined with a retirement boom will result in a need for 2 million new teachers in the next 10 years. The cost of preparing and recruiting teachers grows higher in light of the statistic that tells us that 50 percent of newcomers will quit within their first five years in the classroom. The public is expressing its concerns, too--concern with unprepared teachers, concern with out-of-field teachers, concern that the best teachers are spread too thin. Teaching is one of the few careers in which the least-experienced members face the greatest challenges and the most responsibilities. The problems that beginners experience are intrinsic to the teaching profession and to the conditions of the school environment (Brock & Grady, 2001; Gordon, 1999). Beginning teachers are making decisions and judgments about themselves in their first-year of teaching. What will these decisions and judgments be if they are not given the opportunities to reflect, both personally and professionally about themselves around the following three concepts: 1) competence, 2) performance, and 3) effectiveness (Debolt, 1992). This research looks at the three beginning teachers as they make their way through the first year of teaching. The voices of the beginning teachers studied will provide eloquent and authentic testimony to the importance and vital nature of teaching and the impact of relationships begun, sustained and renewed along the way.

Teacher attrition is costly for districts, both financially and in terms of student achievement. Districts often address teacher attrition by focusing on recruitment practices or by offering induction support for novice teachers. However, new teachers continue to leave the profession at alarming rates. This qualitative case study provides insight into how new teachers cope with the frustrations and challenges of entry-level teaching. The study examines the entry-level experiences of twelve novice teachers from urban secondary schools, including the perceptions of teaching they developed prior to entry, the aspects of teaching they found most frustrating, how they made sense of what was happening to them, and how they adapted their own behaviors in response to what they experienced. Viewed within a theoretical framework for examining the "newcomer experience" developed by Meryl Reis Louis in 1980, the data suggest that traditional group approaches to supporting novices fail to address the highly individual way in which newcomers "make sense" of teaching as they progress through a series of stages from anticipation through adaptation. From the data, implications may be drawn in terms of "what matters" in the design of support systems for new teachers.

The linguistic behaviour of bilingual speakers who have had prolonged exposure to a second language (L2) is different from that of monolinguals. This thesis investigates the extent and source of attrition effects by comparing language representation and processing in adult late bilinguals undergoing native language (L1) attrition and their monolingual counterparts. Based on the previous observation that structures that are sensitive to discourse-pragmatic conditions are vulnerable to attrition (Sorace 2011, Sorace & Filiaci 2006), the thesis examines: i) whether the difference between attrited and non-attrited speakers in L1 use is restricted to structures whose distribution is grammatically underspecified; ii) whether the difference is due more to underspecification of mental representation or to on-line processing difficulties; and iii) to what extent the difference is a consequence of transfer from L2. The case investigated in this study is L1 attrition by Korean immigrants who have lived in an L2 (English or Japanese) environment for a period of 6 to 25 years. Two L2 groups and one monolingual control group were tested on two different types of phenomena in Korean: core binding of the reflexive caki whose felicity is determined by grammar (Experiment 1), and the attachment of the plural suffix tul whose felicity is underspecified by grammar (Experiment 2). Experimental data were collected using an on-line methodology (a self-paced reading task) as well as an off-line one (acceptability judgement task) in order to identify the locus of any non-convergence between attrited and non-attrited speakers with respect to the investigated phenomena. Results from the experiments showed that attrition had an impact on both grammatically specified and underspecified structures, but to a different degree. With respect to core binding of caki, attrited Korean speakers diverged from the monolingual norm in the on-line reading task but not in the off-line judgement task, indicating that their representation of caki-binding was intact. With respect to tul-attachment, on the other hand, the attriters displayed divergence in both the off-line and on-line tasks, indicating that their representation of appropriate conditions for tul, as well as their real-time processing of the conditions was affected due to long-term exposure to L2. In both caki-binding and tul-attachment, the attriters’ non-native performance was largely attributable to influence from their L2. However, the attriters’ divergence also seemed to be attributable, at least in part, to inefficient executive control of two languages. Regarding tul-attachment, the results demonstrated that the distribution of tul in unattrited Korean is regulated by several factors, including animacy, number-specificity and distributivity, and thus the acceptability of tul is largely gradient, rather than categorical. The results also provided evidence for an ongoing change in the distribution of tul and suggested that the change is accelerated by attrited speakers living in an L2 English environment.

Recruiters, under pressure to meet end-of-month goals, often work feverishly to meet their monthly recruiting goals. This thesis uses regression models to examine the effects of day of month of enlistment on Marine Corps Recruit Depot attrition percentages to examine the hypothesis that recruiters lower their standards at the end of the month in a final effort to make their monthly recruiting mission. The Total Force Data Warehouse provided data for over 50,000 recruits who enlisted and shipped to recruit training between October 2003 and May 2005. Of those, over 5,500 (10.62 percent) failed to complete the prescribed training. In the logit regression models, discharge was modeled against demographic variables such as age, gender, race, education level, and AFQT score, as well as variables representing the day of the month a recruit enlists (last day, last week, or last 10 days of the month). Prior research has found that DEP attrition is higher for recruits who enter the Marine Corps at the end of the month. By contrast, the data analyzed in this study show that once a Marine Corps enlistee ships to a recruit training depot, there is no statistical evidence of higher attrition rates in basic training based on the day the recruit enlisted.

The Health Care Specialist Course trains Active Army, Army Reserves, Army National Guard and various international students in basic medical care, culminating in the possession of the EMT-B certification. The course is conducted in a stressful environment where students are required to be successful in both academic and nonacademic domains. Within the last decade, course administrators have noticed a higher rate of attrition and requested assistance with understanding why one-fifth of students fail to graduate with their original unit. A high rate of attrition results in an increased use of resources and it decreases the Army’s ability to provide qualified Health Care Specialists to forward units. The purpose of this study was to understand how noncognitive factors contribute to attirition in the Health Care Specialist Program with students who were within their first six months of training. This study specifically focuses on the experiences of the recyled student. The Modified Noncognitive Questionnarie (NCQ) and the Military Environment Noncognitive Adjustment Scale (MENAS), which focused on measuring noncognitive variables, were used with both passing and recycled students. In addition, an interview was used for recycled students to allow them the opportunity to elaborate on their personal experiences. This mixed methods explanatory research study revealed quantitatively, using the t-test, that a significant difference exists between the passing and recycled groups in their: level of motivation, realistic self-appraisal, battle buddy support, unit support, preference for long-term goals, ability to successfully handle racism, and their level of stress. Logistic regression revealed the following to be predictive of attrition for students participating in this course: low ST score, unrealistic self-appraisal, preference for shortterm goals, low perception of battle buddy support and unit support, a high level of stress and low motivation to complete the course. Qualitative results were consistent with quantitative results and added a deeper understanding of how students negotiated the academic and military environment. The results of this study will contribute to course administrators understanding of the challenges that student’s encounter while matriculating through this course.

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

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect that rote memorization has on language attrition. More specifically, the loss of grammatical aspect markers is investigated. This study measures the general language attrition of a memorized narrative and an open-ended narrative between time one (T1) and time two (T2) measurements. Attrition of the memorized narrative at T2 is compared to how well the subject had it memorized it at T1. The attrition of aspect is then investigated in both the memorized narratives and open-ended narratives. Aspect marker attrition in the memorized narratives is also compared to how well the subject originally had the narrative memorized at T1. Aspect attrition is then compared between the memorized and open-ended narratives to see the effect of memorization on aspect attrition. Lastly, a qualitative investigation examines the effect of telicity on correct and incorrect aspect marking. This study reveals that learners of Chinese who spend time in a Chinese-speaking environment and gain a fairly high level of oral proficiency retain much of their oral production abilities over a 12-year period. Additionally, subjects are able to retain and use syntax and lexicon from narratives they had previously memorized as beginning-level learners. However, significant levels of content and length attrition occur for both types of narratives. Aspect marker -LE is used the most frequently, but it also has the highest percentage rate of error. Other aspect markers are used less frequently, and have lower percentage rates of error. Attrition in type, variety, and usage of aspect markers is significant between T1 and T2. There is not a significant relationship between how well the subjects produced the memorized narrative at T1 and either their performance at T2 or the attrition of aspect markers in either narrative. The subjects tend to mark telic verbs for perfective aspect more frequently and correctly than atelic verbs. Pedagogical implications of this study include suggestions for teaching perfective aspect as well as designing curriculum for students who are re-learning Chinese. Finally, the author invites further attrition research focusing on the effect of memorization on fluency variables.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Western Australia, 2007.

Thesis (M.S. in Management)--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2007. / Thesis Advisor(s): Stephen L. Mehay, Kathryn M. Kocher. "March 2007." Includes bibliographical references (p. 87-88). Also available in print.

The syntax of referential null subjects in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is the topic of much recent work (Kato & Negrão 2000; Ferreira 2000, 2004; Martins & Nunes 2005, 2010; Modesto 2000; Rodrigues 2002, 2004). In light of the Interface Hypothesis (Tsimpli & Sorace 2006), uninterpretable features such as purely syntactical elements should not undergo attrition. This study tests whether this hypothesis is valid in regard to the Null Subject behavior in the production of BP speakers under influence of L2 English. In order to do so, I conducted an experiment with monolingual BP speakers and bilingual (English/BP) speakers to establish a clear-cut comparison. The experiment consisted of an elicited production task and a grammaticality judgment task. The results of the data analysis show that BP speakers under influence of L2 English do seem to indicate attrition, thus encouraging further studies questioning the Interface Hypothesis.