PhD (Linguistics)) / Department of Communication and Applied Language Studies

Si bien ha estado tradicionalmente asociado al acceso a espacios físicos, el concepto de accesibilidad comprende también la integración social y cultural de las personas con discapacidad. Una manera de lograrlo es mediante la accesibilidad a productos audiovisuales. En países como Estados Unidos, España o Finlandia, se han registrado propuestas y estudios de subtítulos para personas con discapacidad auditiva tanto en la televisión, el cine y los videojuegos, pero muy pocas en el teatro. En el Perú, tanto las propuestas como los estudios de traducción para la accesibilidad en cualquier ámbito son escasos. Recientemente, en el año 2019, el Teatro Británico ha empezado a ofrecer funciones de teatro inclusivas para personas con discapacidad auditiva. La difusión de productos culturales accesibles en el Perú es un servicio nuevo y no existen estudios al respecto. Por ello, el presente estudio busca analizar la recepción de los subtítulos para personas sordas de la obra teatral Hedda, producida por el Teatro Británico. Nuestra investigación tiene un enfoque cualitativo, pues busca describir la recepción de esta obra accesible por un grupo de diez participantes con discapacidad auditiva. A través de una encuesta, se conocerá su perfil sociocultural y sus reacciones y comprensión frente a la obra subtitulada. De esta manera, se busca establecer un diálogo entre las perspectivas de la teoría sobre el estudio de la recepción del subtitulado para sordos de obras teatrales y los resultados de su aplicación en la práctica desde la perspectiva de la comunidad sorda. / Although it has traditionally been associated with access to physical spaces, the concept of accessibility also includes the social and cultural integration of people with disability. One way to achieve this is through accessibility to audiovisual products. Proposals and studies regarding subtitles for the hearing impaired have been registered in countries such as the United States, Spain or Finland, both on television, movies and on video games, but very few in theater. In Peru, both the proposals and the studies of translation for accessibility in any field are limited. In 2019, El Teatro Británico has started offering inclusive theater performances for people with hearing impairment. The dissemination of accessible cultural products in Peru is a new service and there are no studies on it. Therefore, the present study seeks to analyze the reception of the subtitles for the hearing impaired of the play “Hedda”, produced by El Teatro Británico. Our research has a qualitative approach, as it seeks to describe the reception of this accessible play by a group of ten participants with hearing impairment. Their sociocultural profile, reactions and understanding of the subtitled play will be known through a survey. In this way, it seeks to establish a dialogue between the perspectives of theater subtitling for the deaf theory and the results of its application from the perspective of the deaf community. / Trabajo de investigación

The study discussed investigates the range and variability of cultural and linguistic diversity as represented in interdisciplinary text sets for science read-alouds in Grades K–3. Presenters share their analysis, discuss implications, and offer alternatives for locating texts that include culturally and linguistically relevant depictions of target topics.

Current events and social movements aimed at bringing awareness to oppressed groups have reminded us that the United States has still not achieved justice and equality for all. Social and political tensions have become inescapable in our increasingly connected world. Therefore, students need to learn about diverse ways of knowing and being in a pluralistic society. Since publishing and education companies compete for business, the amount of digital and print resources available to teachers can be overwhelming. Because a vital component of a multicultural education includes diverse materials that authentically portray views and experiences from a wide range of cultures, traditions, and values, it is necessary to critically analyze the curricular content that teachers are expected to use in their classrooms. The purpose of this study is to analyze the literature that is included in district-approved book lists for public schools to determine how these texts support the principles of multiculturalism and multicultural education in sixth-grade classrooms. The tenets of critical multicultural analysis (CMA) guided this critical content analysis. Because teachers in these districts are limited to choosing books from approved lists to read with their students, the texts for this study were selected from approved literature lists that were provided by three public schools in North Texas. Although previous research on curricula and textbook analysis is available, little of that research analyzes approved literature lists in public schools. Since school districts are preparing to teach changing demographics and are striving to become more equitable, this study can offer insight into how the chosen texts align with broader district goals for meeting the academic, social, and emotional needs of each student.

Between 1977 and 1980 I collected a nuber of texts on the northern Kenya coast Most were tape recorded by myself fiom oral performances, a few were written down or recorded by others Most of the current collection consists of texts gathered so, plus: the Mwiini material, provided by Chuck Kisseberth, originally provided or recorded in Barawa by M I. Abasheikh, and the Bajuni \"contemporary\" verse, taken form a publicly available cassette-recording by AM. Msallarn in the 1970.

This thesis project proposed the building of a website as a repository of authentic texts in video format for teaching foreign or second languages. The project planned the building of a minimal viable product or MVP with authentic videos both in English and Spanish, organized by the ACTFL levels with particular attention to the Intermediate level. Data were collected from a survey of 42 respondents in the United States and 89 combined from Spain and Mexico. The responses collected suggest that there is a need for this MVP. Additionally, the data indicated which features were most wanted by these teachers. These features included lesson plans, turn on and off captions, tag and save videos, and a dashboard for teachers. As a result, these features were included in the MVP.

The world is growing more connected through the use of online communication, exposing software and humans to all the world's languages. While devices are able to understand and share the raw data between themselves and with humans, the information itself is not expressed in a monolithic format. This causes issues both in the human to computer interaction and human to human communication. Automatic language identification (LID) is a field within artificial intelligence and natural language processing that strives to solve a part of these issues by identifying languages from text, sign language and speech. One of the challenges is to identify the short pieces of text that can be found online, such as messages, comments and posts on social media. This is due to the small amount of information they carry. The goal of this thesis has been to build a machine learning model that can identify the language for these short pieces of text. A long short-term memory (LSTM) machine learning model was built and benchmarked towards Facebook's fastText model. The results show how the LSTM model reached an accuracy of around 95% and the fastText model used as comparison reached an accuracy of 97%. The LSTM model struggled more when identifying texts shorter than 50 characters than with longer text. The classification performance of the LSTM model was also relatively poor in cases where languages were similar, like Croatian and Serbian. Both the LSTM model and the fastText model reached accuracy's above 94% which can be considered high, depending on how it is evaluated. There are however many improvements and possible future work to be considered; looking further into texts shorter than 50 characters, evaluating the model's softmax output vector values and how to handle similar languages.

The aim of this study is to investigate the approaches to teaching fictional texts that are exercised by English teachers with the intention of gaining an insight to the purpose of fictional texts in the Swedish EFL classroom. The levels in focus are the lower and upper secondary schools. The study was conducted by using a qualitative approach, and the data was collected through interviews with eight currently active English teachers in the Swedish school system. The results of the study reveal that the participants find selecting fictional texts for classroom, as well as student use, arduous to some extent. Correspondingly, the findings also show that the purpose of using fictional texts in the EFL classroom is to develop students’ social and cultural awareness by reading literary works with the following themes: post-colonial areas, arranged marriages, war zones, divorce, friendship, bullying, love and gender, religion, racism and death.

"In From Eden to Dystopia: An Ecocritical Examination of Emergent Mythologies" "in Early Los Angeles Literary Texts, ecocriticism and critical regionalism were utilized" "alongside other American Studies practices to analyze nineteenth- and early-twentieth-" "century depictions of nature in Los Angeles. Specifically, these tools were applied to" "travel guides and narratives of the 1870s and 1880s, the turn-of-the-century magazine" "The Land of Sunshine, Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1926) and Raymond Chandler’s The Big" "Sleep (1939), and other non-fiction publications of the 1920s and ’30s to track an" "evolving narrative of Los Angeles as a paradise and later as a place perched on the edge" "of ecological ruin. Key themes included nature as aesthetic or health-related amenity vs." "exploitable resource, along with both subtle and overt class- and race-based" "environmental exclusions. The chief aim of this thesis was to elucidate how Los Angeles" "went from a “new Eden for the Saxon home-seeker” to the place where its river was" "paved with cement and virtually forgotten for decades. This thesis concluded that with" "the Los Angeles River’s recent revitalization efforts, there could be future gains made for" "other aspects of the city’s environment, with the hope that uncovering past idea-shaping" "narratives of nature in Los Angeles may help illuminate how current ideas of Los" "Angeles as a place without nature came to be and how that city-versus-nature dichotomy" "can be both damaging and false."

Les textes procéduraux, qui disent de faire et comment faire, jouent un rôle important dans la vie quotidienne et, pourtant, il n'existe que peu d'études sur ce sujet alors que mieux les connaître permettrait de les rédiger avec davantage de rigueur. Cette thèse est à la croisée de plusieurs disciplines : l'anglais de spécialité, la linguistique de corpus, la linguistique appliquée et l'analyse de genre.La première partie de la thèse décrit l'état de la recherche réalisée sur les textes procéduraux ainsi que la méthodologie choisie pour les analyser qui est appliquée à l'étalon de référence, la recette de cuisine. Dans la deuxième partie, il est procédé à une étude des niveaux linguistiques et organisationnels de différents textes compilés dans des corpus composés respectivement de règles du jeu, de protocoles de travaux pratiques en sciences, de notices explicatives et d'instructions de sécurité : ces différents corpus sont comparés à l'étalon de référence puis entre eux. Le but de cette recherche est de déterminer les microgenres procéduraux les plus prototypiques et d'établir si leur caractère spécialisé ou non influe sur leur degré de prototypicalité. Nous obtenons ainsi une échelle de prototypicalité que nous questionnons dans la troisième partie et qui prend en compte la présence, ou l'absence, de caractères prototypiques comme le nombre majoritaire de formes verbales conjuguées à l'impératif, l'importance des ellipses, la longueur des textes et de leurs phrases, le respect d'un ordre chronologique, la présence d'explications, une organisation en deux sections minimum (liste du matériel et partie procédurale) et le type de traitement cognitif. / Procedural texts play an important part in daily life and yet, studies in this domain are lacking. It is posited that a better knowledge of how they work would help people to write them better. Work on procedural texts is generally done at the crossroads of several disciplines: English for Specific Purposes, Corpus Linguistics, Applied Linguistics and Genre Analysis.Starting with the state of the art on procedural texts, a study of the organizational and linguistic levels of texts compiled in several corpora composed of cooking recipes (considered as the reference), gaine mies, science lab protocols user's guides and safety instructions is carried out. These are then compared with one another in the third part. The aim o: this research is to determine which procedural microgenres are the most prototypical and to establish if the specialised or the non-specialised nature of the text has an influence on its degree of prototypicality. This entails the creation of a scale of prototypicality which takes into account the presence, or absence, of protypical features such as a preponderance of imperative verb forms, the frequency of ellipsis, the length of the texts and of their sentences, the adherence to chronological order, the presence of explanations, a two-part structure (elements used and procedural part) and how the mind processes this sort of text.