Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.

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  Acquisition versus long-term retention of Japanese words and syntax by children and adults: Implications for the critical period hypothesis in second language learning.

  Boswell, Paul Duane; Reyna, Valerie; Brainerd, Charles; Aleamoni, Lawrence M. (The University of Arizona., 1993)

  The critical period hypothesis for second language learning, which states that young children learn additional languages better than adults, lacks unambiguous empirical support as well as a coherent theoretical model. An experimental study was conducted which analyzed child-adult differences in difficulty of acquisition and long-term retention for rules of syntax and words in Japanese, a language unfamiliar to the subjects. The results of this study found no advantage for children over adults either in acquisition or long-term memory. However, relative to the difficulty of acquisition, the children had lower forgetting rates for words than for rules when both materials were learned completely. In the lexical study, the children's performance at retention was closer to the adults' than at acquisition, whereas in the syntax study, the opposite was the case. These results confirm the existence of developmental differences in the forgetting rates of different materials. Such results imply that, if there is an advantage for learning language at an early age, it might be localized in lexical retention.
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  Contextualizing Technology: Designing Indigenous Language CALL Programs

  Kickham, Elizabeth; Zepeda, Ofelia; Alexander, Bri; Gilmore, Perry (The University of Arizona., 2018)

  An astounding number of global Indigenous communities work ceaselessly to reclaim and revitalize their languages after many years of suppression by colonization and dominant societies. Each community and individual learner brings myriad unique needs and desires to heritage language learning, including the need for community and cultural engagement in addition to fluency. With an increase in using technology for language learning, computer-assisted language learning (CALL) programs could be useful resources for Indigenous language learners if first adapted to support Indigenous languages. While CALL allows immense customization of programs to satisfying learner needs and linguistic diversity, BLOOM is the first and only organization to develop an Indigenous language CALL program (i.e., a program built solely for Indigenous languages and to meet the needs of Indigenous communities). Investigating BLOOM, this research analyzes a case study of the developmental process of BLOOM’s first course, including curriculum development, design decisions, engineering challenges, and the experience of partnering with the Cherokee Nation to develop a Cherokee language course. This research asserts that developers must collaborate directly with the Indigenous community during every step of the building process when developing Indigenous language CALL programs, and provides a 10-step Community-Collaborative Building Model to guide the process. The model reveals the importance of building curriculum tailored to the distinct needs of the Indigenous community, working actively and intentionally to build trust with the community, and constantly using the program to empower Indigenous communities via language learning. Overall, when producing Indigenous language CALL programs, CALL developers must adapt to meet the needs of the community, the learners, and those needs in context.
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  Language Policy and Language Planning in Kazakhstan: About the Proposed Shift from the Cyrillic Alphabet to the Latin Alphabet

  Waugh, Linda R.; Dotton, Zura; Waugh, Linda R.; Leafgren, John R.; Combs, Mary C. (The University of Arizona., 2016)

  The dissertation is an analysis of the history, current state, and possible future directions of the development of language policy in the Republic of Kazakhstan. Although language planning in the republics of the former Soviet Union has been a major subject of debate on government nation building agendas over the last two decades, the situation and implementation of language policies significantly differ in Kazakhstan due to the conditions of multilingualism and diglossia, in addition to other geographic and historical factors that resulted in the extended penetration of the Russian language during the Soviet era (Isayev, 1977:20). In the first chapter of the study, I trace the history of language legislation and political practices throughout the period of Russian-Kazakh diglossia (Fishman, 1967), a language situation in which the use of two unrelated languages (Kazakh and Russian) performed as high and low varieties at different levels prestige, and provide an analysis of important aspects of implementing legislative decisions and practices aimed at the development and promotion of the Kazakh language. The second and third chapters of this study are devoted to legislative documents and practices aimed at the modernization of Kazakh, especially with regards to the proposed switch from a Cyrillic to a Latin orthography, and amendments to the trinity of the Kazakh, Russian and English language status policies. This study of "language modernization" (switching from Cyrillic to Latin) is an attempt to define linguistic, literary, and social conditions and challenges, especially in the remote areas. The analysis of the modernization is based on the results of an extensive review of 1) official documents related to language policies; 2) on-line/magazine/newspaper and scholarly articles on Kazakh history, culture, language, education, and politics; 3) interviews with the officials of the educational departments, schools and language specialists.