This thesis documents the action research study done to investigate the perceived challenges and benefits of a project-based language learning (PBLL) approach in a high school Spanish classroom. The research involved four high school Spanish 3 classes taught by the same teacher. Two classes formed an experimental group and were taught one thematic unit using a PBLL approach, while the other two classes formed the control group and were taught by the same approach that had been used the rest of the year. Two of the objectives of the study were to see how the PBLL approach affected the achievement and writing performance of the experimental group and how the students liked it in comparison to the teaching approach that had been used in the other units during the school year. The third objective was to identify effective steps in setting up project-based language learning in a high school classroom and its possible obstacles. The results from this study found that a PBLL approach possibly affected achievement in grammar in vocabulary from the pre-test to the post-test, but that the writing performance was unaffected. In this thesis, steps to setting up a PBLL unit are documented as well as possible obstacles. The thesis concludes with suggestions for overcoming these obstacles and for further research and collaboration in setting up PBLL units.

In the field of world language education, it has long been affirmed that language and culture are inseparable. It has also often been asked how teaching language and culture in an inseparable way is to be accomplished. One solution that has been proposed is ethnographic interviews. Other studies have demonstrated that interviewing native cultural informants is beneficial for language students. This study examined whether such interviews are also beneficial to the native informants. The participants in this project, sixteen native speakers of Spanish, were each interviewed three times by a pair of Spanish students who employed ethnographic techniques as a part of the interview process. The native speakers answered two brief questionnaires, one before and one after the interviews, and many of them participated in one-on-one interviews with me, the primary researcher, to follow-up on their answers to those questionnaires and their experiences with the interviews. I found that the participants perceived the project as beneficial in multiple areas including, but not limited to, the chance it gave them to talk about their culture, the interest they perceived in their culture and their viewpoints, and the opportunity it gave them to confirm, modify, or strengthen conclusions they had made from previous cultural experience. A small percentage of the native speakers either did not understand or appreciate the ethnographic techniques that were employed. However, after initial interviews, I gave the students of Spanish feedback on how to better make use of those techniques in order to improve the students' and native speakers' experiences with the interviews and a large majority of the native speakers observed how the subsequent interviews improved. Therefore, similar projects might benefit from making use of this information. Specifically, it might be useful to explain ethnographic techniques not just to interviewers, but also to interviewees, so that both groups might better understand and appreciate the purpose of those techniques. It might also be useful to give feedback to those who use ethnographic techniques to interview native culture informants.

Este trabajo examina cómo la ausencia de la facultad expresiva puede inhabilitar el uso de la memoria, tanto individual como colectivamente y traer como consecuencia el trauma, específicamente en los grupos de mujeres prisioneras que lucharon contra el franquismo durante la época de la posguerra. A la vez, con todos los estudios hechos por eruditos como Freud y los estudios modernos, podemos concluir que hay una vía para evitar tales episodios y asegurar un futuro mejor con el apoyo social y comunitario. En la obra de la escritora Dulce Chacón La voz dormida encontramos personajes que construyen dichos episodios y que serán el eje del desarrollo de este trabajo.

Este proyecto pretende el análisis de dos obras de ciencia ficción de la escritora española Rosa Montero, Lágrimas en la lluvia y El peso del corazón. Teniendo como eje principal el proceso de obtención de la identidad de una posthumana, la protagonista de ambas obras literarias, Bruna Husky. Si bien la naturaleza posthumana ha desafiado y quebrantado la noción de identidad en sus individuos, mediante la experiencia de una vida alrededor de otros que pueden formar una parafamilia se obtiene un espejo visionario de sí mismo necesario para la obtención de dicha identidad. En el primer libro, esta posthumana se halla en los demás y comienza un proceso de aceptación que culmina con el segundo libro a través de la expresión de sus sentimientos. Bruna Husky se va descubriendo, aceptando y se llega a querer en todo este proceso. Mediante el análisis de estas obras de ciencia ficción hemos trazado los confines necesarios para hallar la plenitud emocional en un individuo al buscar su identidad.

This study evaluated the efficacy of Dynamic Written Corrective Feedback (DWCF) on advanced students' writing accuracy of Spanish. This method focuses on manageable, meaningful, timely and constant feedback. Previously, DWCF was studied in the context of English as a second language. The current study investigated the efficacy of DWCF in the context of students who were enrolled in an advanced Spanish grammar class at the university level. A comparative study was conducted measuring students' writing accuracy who received the DWCF against students' writing accuracy who did not receive this feedback methodology. Results showed that there was not a significant difference in writing accuracy between these two groups of students. However, both groups improved their writing accuracy over time. This study also provided a list of the most frequent writing errors made by 28 students in an advanced Spanish class. The results show that the most frequent linguistic errors for learners of Spanish are accent marks, prepositions, gender and number, punctuation, and word choice.

No description available.

Emilio Carballido (1925-2008) es uno de los dramaturgos más destacados de México y de más prestigio del teatro occidental. Ha escrito una gran cantidad de obras teatrales, novelas, cuentos, obras infantiles y pedagógicas—dirigidas para docentes—, guiones teatrales y ha tanto formado como patrocinado una multitud de jóvenes dramaturgos en el país. Dos de sus primeras piezas, La zona intermedia: auto sacramental y La triple porfía, que datan de 1948, no han sido estudiadas con interés o en detalle por los críticos literarios, pese al prestigio con el que fueron recibidas en el momento de su presentación. L. Howard Quackenbush, uno de los pocos estudiosos sobre estos dos autos sacramentales, ha sostenido que son dos obras en una; la primera es el auto largo y la segunda es su loa, una es la continuación de la otra. Lo que se desarrolla en esta tesis es un análisis profundo de estos dos autos y su aplicación al género del auto, así como su aportación innovadora al mismo; se exponen la deshumanización de los personajes, así como la solución carballidesca para que los mismos recobren su humanismo o, al menos, trascienden a un nivel más allá de su desesperación existencialista. Se plantean las falacias socio-religiosas, así como las nuevas visiones—soluciones que aporta el autor y el impacto que transmite a su receptor, a través de la mirada cosmogónica del Nahual. Para fines del estudio de la tesis, emplearé fuentes como crítica literaria de L. Howard Quackenbush, Las razones del caos y Devotas irreverencias, diferentes estudios sobre existencialismo y Filosofía náhuatl, igualmente, me basaré de los estudios psicológicos de Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents; por último, para estudios del Nahual, emplearé recopilaciones de relato oral que una profesora de la (UAT) México hizo, al igual que de algunos estudios históricos y literarios, básicamente. Se describen las aportaciones literarias, especialmente su aporte al teatro mexicano (y mundial) contemporáneo y culturales que proporcionan estas obras carballidescas para resaltar el porqué la crítica teatral debería darles más importancia, como muestra de la creatividad perenne de Carballido.

This research consists of three separate studies, which examine these texts in the order they were written, exploring the myriad cultural, political, religious and legal forces situated in the time and place where the texts were created to determine what forces may have influenced their authors in depicting the Jews the way they did. In the first study of the epic Poema de mio Cid, I focus on the legal quandary about whether the Cid should have repaid the two Jewish moneylenders from Burgos who gave him a loan for his military campaign. I examine the anti-Jewish canon and secular laws from this era, particularly those dealing with usury, and explore how the Castilian kings’ flouting of these laws created hostility and, in one telling instance, violent attacks against Jews from Christians who were angry about royal favoritism of the Jews. I compare the twelfth century attacks against an unpopular king and his royal property – the Jews – to the Cid’s deception of Raquel and Vidas, arguing the Campeador’s trick was also a way of inflicting harm on an unpopular king and his royal property, the Jews. I also examine the interrelationships between the increasingly hostile anti-Jewish laws and the Christian’s anti-Jewish social stances and attitudes, exploring how both the legal context and social and cultural contexts could have informed the poet in his portrayal of the two Jews in the text. In the second study, I focused on the various Jewish messianic prophecies detailed in the writings of twelfth century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides that existed in Spain during the time the Toledan liturgical drama Auto de los reyes magos was written and performed to see if they may have influenced how the unknown author negatively depicted the Jewish rabbis and members of Herod’s court in the play’s final two highly original scenes. The portrayals of the Jews’ eschatological confusion, I show, may have been created to stop Jews, considered vital to Toledo’s growth and stability, from following contemporary messianic prophecies and migrating to the Holy Land. In the final study, I focus on Gonzalo de Berceo’s caustic representations of Jews in Milagros de Nuestra Señora to determine if his harshly negative portrayals of Jews were a way to deflect attention from the papal-sanctioned clerical reforms that targeted heresy, including clerical abuses in the Benedictine Order, and caused Berceo’s beloved “black monks” to lose substantial funding and power in the Church. By portraying Jews and their behavior as real heresy and as the biggest threats to Christianity, Berceo underscores that clerical abuses and sins of the flesh are less problematic and pardonable.

This dissertation examines constructions of femininity in three male-authored Latin/o American comics: Gabriel Vargas' La Familia Burrón (Mexico, 1948-2009), Quino's Mafalda (Argentina, 1964-1973), and Love and Rockets (Los Bros. Hernandez, 1981-1996; 2000-present). After first establishing an analytical context from which to explore these works, discussing contemporary trends in national comics production as well as the ways in which femininity has been prescriptively constructed in each particular time and place, I then analyze the ways in which each author questions, challenges, and/or completely reconstructs their own version of "graphic femininity." As the following chapters will show, each articulation of femininity as constructed within the three serial comics under examination here takes different forms in each comic under analysis; while female characters in one title might embody a socially idealized model of femininity such as the "angel in the house," or the cult of "true womanhood", characters in other comics (or even within the same title) might play inverse roles, defying the mandates of the role assigned to them by contemporary society and ideological institutions such as compulsory heterosexuality or patriarchal power. A variety of models of feminine behavior and subjectivity are present in the panels of these comics, but in contrast with other contemporary constructions of femininity in cultural texts, products and sociopolitical discourse, they are presented critically rather than prescriptively, depicted in ways that disrupt the limits of femininity as it has traditionally been construed and, in some cases, offer visions of alternative, liberating paths.

This dissertation analyzes how three female artists of Greater Mexico (the Mexican cabaret artist Astrid Hadad, the Mexican-American singer Lila Downs and the Chicana digital artist Alma López) construct and represent national, ethnic, and gender identity in their performances within a border and/or transnational context. I explore how their choice of art form facilitates the construction of their own identities. My theoretical methodology embraces a cultural-studies approach to dramatic, visual and performative texts. All of these play an important role in redefining female Chicana/Mexican- American/Mexicana identity as a site of cultural and political contestation and struggle. The interdisciplinary character of this project corresponds to the nature of performance itself and to the search for female identity formation within Greater Mexico. I use the term Performing Nation to focus on how these artists embody and enact specific regional and national identities through, among others, costume choice, vocal inflection, song choice and imagery. The Mexican cabaret singer Astrid Hadad ironically performs Mexico through cabaret. Her humorous critiques of Mexican gender norms encourage her audience to envision a more egalitarian future for Mexico. The Mexican- American pop singer Lila Downs performs Greater Mexico through folk culture. I discuss how her oscillation between the new and the "authentic" promotes the idea that folklore is malleable and willing to change. The Chicana visual media artist Alma López performs a queer Greater Mexico in cyberspace through digital art. I show how her play on female dualisms found in Mexican and Chicano culture helps open a space for the contemporary Lesbian Chicana. In their work these artists play with iconography from the Post-Mexican Revolution period. Astrid Hadad highlights female figures such as La Soldadera, La Muerte, Coatlicue, La Virgen de Guadalupe and Frida Kahlo that are important to Mexican culture. Downs incorporates imagery through myth and storytelling, both central to her performances. Alma López plays on indigenous and Chicano art in her digital prints. Through the absorption of symbolic, religious and popular iconography these artists construct mobile identities that extend the Mexican cultural sphere across the northern border into the U.S. The porous nature of the border enables these northern identities to circulate back to Mexico. By participating in this cross-border identity building process, Hadad, Downs and López situate themselves as public figures, as women artists, within the Greater Mexico that they are reshaping.