Browsing by Subject "Language and education"
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Item An inquiry into a model for normalista preparation and transfer program to the Texas bilingual education teacher program(Texas Tech University, 2003-05) Salazar, DoraTexas teacher education preparation programs have been unable to supply the demand for qualified teachers to serve the growing numbers of Spanish speaking students. Normalista teachers (so called because their preparation took place in Mexican Normal Schools) can become future bilingual teacher candidates. Typically normalistas have served as teachers in Mexico and are currently recent immigrants employed in jobs that are often unrelated to education. My study provides a description of the experiences shared by normalistas who are seeking certification to practice their chosen career in the state of Texas. Many universities have established partnerships with professional development schools for the purpose of providing pre-service teacher preparation. However, only a few have established similar partnerships with colleagues across the United States and Mexico border, presumably because of language and cultural barriers and limited knowledge in understanding of the different preparation paradigm used in the Mexican educational system. Second, my study will add to the knowledge base about Mexican trained educators, who are part of the post baccalaureate population in our universities, alternative certification programs, and in certification programs provided by the Education Service Centers in Texas. My study explores and addressing the special needs of individuals who arrive with this wealth of knowledge in pedagogical understandings, cultural experiences in the classroom, teaching methodologies and strategies for educating a large under served population. Moreover, my study examines and describes the salient ethical and procedural themes that emerge from the interactions with preparing adult English language leamers to serve the large population of elementary students in which Spanish is their native language. My study provides direction in the use of data acquisition and analyses that is qualitative in nature. More specifically the methodology used is survey research that uncovers the experience of normalista teachers in the transitional phase in preparing for teacher certification in Texas as a bilingual education teacher. Special attention must be paid to the practice of ethical codes, perceptions of adult English language learners, and interpersonal interactions that are exclusive to this context. Methodological inquiry and analysis was guided using three basic frameworks: Ogbu's (1986, 1989) voluntary and involuntary immigrant framework, Gibson's (1988) structural inequalities theory, Cummins (1984) interdependence theoretical framework.Item Effects of rephrasing word problems on sixth-grade ESL and native English-speaking students' mathematics performance and attitudes(Texas Tech University, 1998-12) Tan, JiangOne hundred and four sixth-grade students, 52 native English-speaking and 52 English as a Second Language (ESL) students, participated in this experimental study. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of native language and rephrasing of mathematics word-problems on their performance on mathematics word-problem solving and attitude toward mathematical tasks. It was predicted that rephrasing mathematics wordproblems, by replacing low-frequency vocabularies and restructuring complex sentences to make the problems easy to understand, would positively affect students' performance on the problems and change their attitude toward mathematical tasks. It was also predicted that the enhancing effects of rephrasing of word-problems would be more profound among ESL students than native-English-speaking students. The enhancing effect of rephrasing, as predicted, was evidenced in the study in which students working with the revised version of the mathematics word-problems outperformed those who working with the original version of problems drawn from mathematics textbooks. As revealed in the result of the study, the native Englishspeaking students performed better than the ESL students on the mathematics test. Not supported by the study, however, the interaction effect between native language and rephrasing of word-problems that rephrasing should have had a stronger effect on ESL students than it did for the native English-speaking students. Opposite to the prediction, native English-speaking students working with the revised version of the test performed significantly better than control group students working with the original version. Although ESL students working with the revised version of the test had better score than those working on the original version, they did not perform significantly better than the other group. The pattern of the difference was explained in terms of anguage proficiency of Englishspeaking and ESL students. It was postulated that the rephrasing of the word-problems did not reduce the language difficulty level that was appropriate to some ESL students, especially those who were at the beginning level of a ESL program, but rephrasing benefited native English speaking students who had problems understanding original mathematics word-problems. This explanation implies that extra attention should be given to students' language proficiency in future research.Item The relationship between patterns of classroom discourse and mathematics learning(2008-08) Pierson, Jessica Lynn, 1976-; Martin, Taylor, 1970-By creating opportunities for participation and intellectual engagement, standardized classroom routines are large determinants of the conceptual meaning students make. It is through repeated engagement in patterns of talk and intellectual practices that students are socialized into ways of thinking and habits of mind. The focus of this study is on moment-to-moment interactions between teachers and students in order to describe, identify and operationalize meaningful regularities in their discourse. Using classroom-level measures, I investigate the robustness of relationships between students’ mathematics achievement and discursive patterns across multiple classrooms with the statistical methods of Hierarchical Linear Modeling. Specifically, I investigated two theoretically significant constructs reflected in teacher’s follow-up moves -- responsiveness and intellectual work. Responsiveness is an attempt to understand what another is thinking displayed in how she builds, questions, clarifies, takes up or probes that which another says. Intellectual work reflects the cognitive work requested from students with a given turn of talk. After developing coding schemes to measure and quantify these discursive constructs, statistical analyses revealed positive relationships between the responsiveness and intellectual work of teachers’ follow-up and student learning of rate and proportionality (p=.01 and .08, respectively). Additionally, classroom communities with higher levels of responsiveness and intellectual work moderate the effect of prior knowledge on student learning by decreasing the degree to which pretest scores predict students’ post-test achievement (though neither are statistically significant). Based on these results, I conclude that classroom discourse and normative interaction patterns guide and influence student learning in ways that improve achievement. Recommendations are primarily concerned with ways the educational community can support and encourage teachers to develop responsive, intellectually demanding discursive patterns in their classrooms. In particular, we need to increase the awareness of the power of discourse, provide appropriate and sustained support for teachers to change current patterns, re-examine the design of teacher preparation programs, and develop ways to thoughtfully integrate responsiveness and intellectual work with core mathematics content. There is tremendous and often unrealized power in the ways teachers talk with their students; it is our obligation to help teachers learn how to recognize and leverage this power.Item Toward a typology of Hispanic high school dropouts(Texas Tech University, 2002-12) Miller, EleanoreA lag exists between the reduction in the rate of dropout from high school among Hispanic youth and their rate of growth among the school population. Although researchers have called for the need to discriminate among dropout types, no study to date has succeeded in classifying dropouts, especially Hispanic dropouts. This study used selected data for Hispanic cases from the database created for the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. All data except final dropout status was based on respondents' answers to the first phase of the survey, administered when they were in the 8 grade. Item selection was based on a theoretical dropout model by R. Rumberger. Variables found to be significant in research differentiating dropouts from persisting students were selected for the model. Groups were created using cluster analysis, and verified with confirmatory discriminant analysis. Three distinct groups emerged for Hispanic dropouts, with standardized test scores in reading explaining more than 60% of the variance among groups. Similar results were observed among the subsample of Mexican heritage dropouts, who accounted for more than 74% of the Hispanic sample and had more homogeneous characteristics. Although this was an exploratory study, the results indicate that potential dropouts can be differentiated when they are grouped by similar characteristics. Cluster analysis may be useful for further discrimination among groups, with results used as a basis for developing a dropout diagnosis model similar to medical diagnostic models. A diagnostic tool targeting the educational needs of at-risk students could help schools develop more effective interventions before the potential dropouts enter high school.