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From Pages to Pedagogy: Studying Fictional Social Justice English Teachers in Young Adult Literature
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Saguisag, Lara. Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics. Rutgers UP, 2018. 248 pages. ISBN: 978-0813591766.
Get PDFAmos, Yukari Takimoto and Daniel Miles Amos, eds. Children’s Literature from Asia in Today’s Classrooms: Toward Culturally Authentic Interpretations. Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. 122 pages. ISBN: 978-1475843675.
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Open at the Close: Literary Essays on Harry Potter
No full textWhile philosophers, historians, theologians, sociologists, educators and children’s literature specialists, even business professors have take on Harry Potter in single-author studies and essay collections, literary scholars have yet to give these novels the careful attention they deserve. This book, “Open at the Close: Literary Essays on Harry Potter,” attempts to remedy that by assembling a series of scholarly articles on the Harry Potter novels from a variety of literary perspectives
Tone mergers in spontaneous speech and gaps in the tone inventory
No full textWe investigate the status of three ongoing tone mergers, comparing Heritage Cantonese in Toronto and Homeland Cantonese in Hong Kong, using conversational recordings from the Heritage Language Variation and Change (HLVC) Corpus (Nagy 2009). The mergers, which have been reported from experimental tasks in several Cantonese dialects (cf. Bauer et al. 2003, Mok et al. 2013, Zhang 2018) are: T2/T5 忍 jɐn35 / 引 jɐn23; T3/T6 印 jɐn33 / 孕 jɐn22; and T4/T6 仁 jɐn11 / 孕 jɐn22. In connected speech, many contextual variables influence the acoustic value of a tone in a given syllable (cf. Stanford 2016), so each token extracted from Labovian sociolinguistic interviews is coded for the segmental value of its onset, nucleus and coda, its position in the utterance, whether it is in a compound word, and the tones of the adjacent syllables. We have 7,495 tokens from 32 speakers (12 Generation 1, 12 Generation 2, 8 Homeland), but our most robust analysis moves forward with 2,400 tokens, excluding tokens that appear only in contexts where the other tone of the pair is not found. After normalization of syllable duration and speaker mean pitch, and conversion to semitones to account for differences in speaker pitch ranges (Zhu 1999, Edmondson et al. 2004), we find that two measures best represent the extent of each merger: (a) pitch at the 90% duration mark of each token and (b) the slope of the pitch track from 10% to 90% duration. Mixed Effects Models are fit to the data with, e.g., T2 vs. T5 as a binary dependent variable, the pitch measurements and the above-mentioned contextual factors as fixed effects, and word and speaker as random effects. If pitch emerges as significantly distinct for the two tones when contextual factors are thus controlled for, there is no merger. Comparing models fit to the data from each generation group, we determine whether the same social and/or linguistic factors condition the tone merger and measure how merged eachtone-pair is. Preliminary analysis shows the merger to be more advanced in the two heritage generations (which do not differ from each other) than the homeland group for T2/T5 and T4/T6. We are eager to discuss possible connections between gaps in the tone inventory (e.g., no T4 with /d/ onset, no T6 with /t/ onset) and mergers in progress. Are the previously reported mergers, based only on minimal pairs where both tones occur with the same onsets over- or under-stating the status of the merger? Do the gaps indicate mergers completed long ago
The om/op ~ am/ap merger in Cantonese: Acoustic evidence of a not quite completed sound change
No full textAccording to Bauer & Benedict (1997: 419-420), descriptions of Cantonese published before the 1940s describe a contrast between the om/op and am/ap rime groups (ex: gom2, ‘thus, so’, 噉vs. gam2, ‘embroidered’, 錦). They say that “one presumes that these earlier scholars were making a distinction that actually existed in the Cantonese language of their time; nonetheless, it was one which eventually disappeared from standard Cantonese” (1997: 420). This presentation addresses two questions about this purported contrast by analyzing sociolinguistic interviews (spontaneous speech samples) from speakers born between 1922 and 1998: (1)Is there acoustic evidence of this contrast among Cantonese speakers born before 1940? (2)Does this distinction persist among any speakers born after 1940?Acoustic evidence comes from Lobanov normalized (Thomas & Kendall 2007) midpoint F1 and F2 measurements of 32 speakers (including 24 from Toronto and 8 from Hong Kong), recorded as part of the Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto Project (Nagy 2011). Words identifiable in Eitel’s (1877) dictionary as containing either om/op or am/ap were analyzed. This amounted to a grand total of 1321 usable vowel tokens (510 tokens of om/op and 811 tokens of am/ap). Pillai Scores (Nycz & Hall-Lew 2015) were calculated for each individual speaker. Speakers with a score of 0.300 and below are considered merged while speakers above 0.300 are considered not merged in vowel production (following a rough guideline set in Hall-Lew 2009).Results show speakers born before 1940 (n=4) with scores ranging from 0.444 to 0.783. Thus, the oldest speakers examined all produce a distinction. 15 of the remaining 28 speakers born after 1940 have scores above 0.300 and thus also produce a distinction. In fact, the speaker with the highest Pillai Score (0.855) was born in 1969. Nevertheless, results from a Pearson Correlation Test show a significant inverse correlation (r = -0.493, p \u3c 0.01, n = 32) between Year of Birth and Pillai Score. Thus, there is still a gradual trend towards merger of the two rime groups.To conclude, this talk presents acoustic evidence of the am/ap ~ om/op merger in Cantonese spontaneous speech. The merger appears to have developed some time after 1940 and has since become a sound change still in progress (affecting both Hong Kong and Toronto Cantonese)
The Impact of Nonviolent Communication in an Early Childhood Montessori Environment
Get PDFThe researcher examined how Nonviolent Communication (NVC) incorporated into a Montessori primary classroom would impact student’s social-emotional learning. The students participating in this research came from multiple ethnic groups and nine were non-English speakers. Some showed evidence of trauma that resulted from living in home environments that experienced instability. The researcher modeled NVC communication in her interactions with students whenever possible and then observed and documented their reactions and behaviors during lessons on social skills in 15-minute intervals over 3 weeks. She observed students engaged in describing their feelings and concluded that NVC can be effective with consistency and guidance from the educator in a culturally competent classroom. Further research is needed to determine if NVC can be useful in enriching SEL competencies in early childhood classrooms with ELL students and students with varying degrees of trauma. This research aimed to fill the gap