The field of Heritage Language has experienced a great deal of advancement in the past few decades. Much research effort has been dedicated to analyzing and understanding different aspects of heritage language speakers, but less work has been done in the topic of pedagogical approaches. The few recent studies on pedagogical approaches have focused…

Dual language (DL) schools provide literacy in students' native languages; however, it is unknown if there is a focus on oral language (OL) development, an essential component for emergent bilinguals'(EB) literacy development. The purpose of this mixed-methods case study is to understand what DL teachers in Virginia know about OL instruction when…

This dissertation explores subject pronoun expression (SPE) in Palenquero Spanish (PL Spanish) and Palenquero Creole (PL Creole), two languages that have coexisted for centuries in San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia), share most of their lexicon, but differ in their grammar. Crucially, this study investigates how the contact between them and the…

From 1890-1914, Argentina received a large influx of Italian immigrants who wanted to "hacer la América," or live the American dream of economic prosperity. With Italian immigrants representing nearly half of all immigrants entering Argentina, the government strived to create a new sense of Argentine pride and nationalism. The objective…

The present study is concerned with language contact between Creole English and Spanish spoken by bilingual West Indians who live in Panama City, Panama. The goal of this study is to examine the speech patterns of monolinguals of Creole English and Spanish and Spanish-Creole English bilinguals in the local communities of this region, by employing…

This dissertation focuses on the works of two well-known African Francophone novelists, Ahmadou Kourouma from the Ivory Coast and Mongo Beti from Cameroon. The objective of this study is to look at the influences of African oral traditions and analyze the literary transposition of semantic structures from African languages and cultures into the…

This study documents and accounts for maintenance and change in dialectal features of Salvadoran Spanish in the United States, especially "voseo", as opposed to "tuteo", terms signifying the use of the second person singular familiar pronouns vos and tu , with their corresponding verb forms. It compares two distinct Salvadoran…

This dissertation compares the phonetic and phonological features of adult non-speakers' productions of words in an endangered Native American language, Oregon Northern Paiute (also known, and hereafter referred to, as Numu), to productions by fluent speakers. The purpose of this comparison is two-fold. The first purpose is to examine the…