Theses and Dissertations

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Open Access
A Burkean analysis of the Common Core State Standards: revealing motive by analyzing the agent-purpose ratio and critiquing the standards with a postcolonial lens
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Lemming, Megan C., author; Kiefer, Kathleen, advisor; Coke, Pamela, committee member; Aragon, Antonette, committee member
Public schooling in the United States undergoes frequent, large-scale reforms based on current political, social, and economic conditions. Such conditions influence the demand for students to master particular literacies and discourses. The Common Core State Standards, a recent educational reform measure that has been adopted by forty-six states, indicate what students need to know and be able to do at the end of each grade level in certain content areas. Examining particular aspects of the Common Core State Standards, such as the agents involved and their purpose in creating and implementing the Standards, helps to reveal implicit motives driving the implementation of the Common Core State Standards. This thesis seeks to reveal such motives in order to illuminate which literacies, literacy practices, and discourses are privileged in public schooling today. My findings indicate that the Common Core reinforces a Western, hegemonic, patriarchal discourse, which has the potential to Other non-dominant discourses and alienate students belonging to marginalized populations. Space exists, however, for teachers to employ pedagogies and methods that challenge this discourse, which ultimately can increase student agency and promote the democratic ideals of public education.
Open Access
A corpus-based analysis of English vocabulary input provided in K-12 textbooks used in Saudi Arabia
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Alhudithi, Elham, author; Nekrasova-Beker, Tatiana, advisor; Becker, Anthony, committee member; Vogl, Mary, committee member
The importance of a textbook becomes greater when it is the major source of foreign vocabulary input as is the case in Saudi Arabia with the English language. Given the fact that numerous studies indicated that Saudi EFL learners have a very limited vocabulary size (Albogami, 1995; Alhazemi, 1993; Alsaif, 2011), the present study is concerned with the extent to which input from textbooks contributes to building the learners' lexicon. Through utilizing range and concordance programs to analyze a corpus of 252,517 tokens, the researcher concluded that great opportunities were offered to learn the most frequent words in English, in which they had a relatively low type-token ratio, indicating a great deal of repetition and coverage. The findings obtained from the case study analysis also demonstrated that a sufficient variety of collocations, derivations, and inflections were provided to assist in deepening the learners' vocabulary knowledge. Although the learning of words goes hand-in-hand with the number of occurrences, where the more words that are repeated the greater the learning, the textbooks surprisingly denoted a shortcoming in the repetition of words. More specifically, at least 74% of newly-introduced words appeared four times or less. Another shortcoming was attributable to the distribution of newly-introduced words, where it contradicted with the literature by introducing as high as 30 new words per hour of schooling. Based on what the researcher found, several pedagogical implications were suggested for teaching vocabulary in EFL settings, varying from providing more repetition opportunities for abstract concepts that carry the central meaning in a given context to following a data-driven approach through the lexical analysis of concordance lines to promote students' noticing and long-time learning.
Open Access
A fandom framework: critical digital media literacy in first-year composition curriculum
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Wigginton, Brook, author; Amidon, Timothy R., advisor; Szymanski, Erika, committee member; Diffrient, David Scott, committee member
Critical digital media literacy is an important factor in everyday life and in academia, but it has failed to gain momentum in first-year writing studies as a necessary literacy for students to develop. A comparative analysis of two first-year composition programs and the inclusion of autoethnographic examples is done to explore how critical digital media literacy is valued in current curriculum and to showcase its potential. Findings indicate that, while critical digital literacy is, in fact, a major part of first-year composition curriculum, it is not overtly named as such. The power in naming the literacies composition instructors expect students to enact and learn should not be underestimated, and composition scholars must renegotiate how we teach students to navigate our increasingly digitally mediated world. An example of how a fandom framework might name and develop those literacies is offered.
Open Access
A more-than-human life: rethinking the good life
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Wich, Manda, author; Szymanski, Erika, advisor; Palmquist, Mike, committee member; Schmidt, Jenne, committee member
Recently, within disabled discourses, there have been conversations surrounding who is considered worthy of participating in society and who is not. Additionally, those conversations have included how exhausting it can be to fight for the ability to participate in society. Lauren Berlant's concept of the good life acts as a way to understand why this feeling of exhaustion emerges in these conversations. However, it may not account for all ways of being and participating in the world. Therefore, in this thesis, I examine how a posthuman lens can help us rethink not only the broader normative ways of living a good life, but also the concept of the good life. I do this through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the subreddit r/disability. Additionally, I examine if the discourse of the subreddit employs good life ideals or if cripistemologies emerge in the discourse. In analyzing the subreddit, I find that that while some of the conversations reflects good life ideals and normative ways of being, other conversations challenge normative ways of being and express alternate ways of being in the world. These alternate ways of being align with the posthuman lens I employ in this thesis and allow for ways of rethinking the good life through proposing pluralistic, interdependent ways of being in the world. From the findings of this CDA of r/disability, I aim to bring attention to pluralistic, interdependent, crip ways of knowing/being that can provide alternate ways of being for both disabled and non-disabled people alike, blur the boundaries between disabled/non-disabled, and challenge those normative ways of being.
Open Access
A pilot study on the effectiveness of pronunciation teaching to EFL learners through focus on forms and focus on form instruction
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Chiba, Kaya, author; Flahive, Douglas, advisor; Ehlers-Zavala, Fabiola, committee member; Beecken, Masako, committee member
Ten Japanese university students participated in a 12-week English pronunciation instruction, in which the learners practiced segmentals and suprasegmentals in controlled activities with a focus on the accuracy (focus on forms) and practiced them in meaningful communication contexts while paying attention to the pronunciation (focus on form). They received the total of 20 hours of pronunciation instruction. The participants read a diagnostic passage before and immediately after the instruction. Ten Japanese EFL students were employed as a control group. Ten native speakers of English rated the comprehensibility (ease of understanding) and the accentedness (how different from NS's norms) of the utterances produced before and after the instruction by the learners in the experimental and the control groups. The results showed that the experimental group improved in terms of comprehensibility while the control did not. As for accentedness, neither group showed any improvement.
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A small tally of future regrets
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Pipe, Meghan, author; Levy, EJ, advisor; Doenges, Judy, committee member; Alexander, Ruth, committee member
These eight short stories, told mainly but not exclusively from the perspectives of young women, portray work and relationships at a moment of cultural shift, at the start of the twenty-first century in America, when women are increasingly enfranchised, educated, and no longer defined by or economically dependent on relationships with men. In these stories, relationships among women—mothers and daughters, sisters, friends—take center stage as economies and gender norms change, while men are often relegated to a supporting role. As traditional scripts fail in this uncertain, often perilous world, these characters must look for new ones, even as they recognize the comforts of history and of structures that endure, from Granada's Alhambra to a still-working Long Island grist mill. Troubling the boundary between autobiography and fiction, these stories are told in a confessional, intimate voice in the tradition of Amy Hempel and Lorrie Moore, delighting in the tension between fact and fiction in a moment of transformation.
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A study of light in a small town
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Cotten-Potter, Cory, author; Doenges, Judy, advisor; Altschul, Andrew, committee member; Bernasek, Alexandra, committee member
This collection of work contains stories that explore the relationships that individuals have to their familial and cultural pasts. They ask what it means to embrace tradition or eschew heritage, and how to honor family connection or romantic love in a societal landscape that is often under threat. The stories are populated by the surreal and the supernatural, agents that act both with and against these characters as they attempt to articulate to themselves a system for coping with the chaos that surrounds them.
Open Access
A suggestion to use codeswitching as an L1 resource in the students' written work: a pedagogical strategy
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Jalal, Runeela, author; Ehlers-Zavala, Fabiola, advisor; Flahive, Douglas E., advisor; Gudmestad, Robert H., 1964-, committee member
Pakistani English has marked its presence in all genres and poses pedagogical implications for both teachers and students. Most students in English as Foreign Language (EFL) settings are unaware of how and when to use code-switching (CS) as an L1 resource in their written work to convey local social meanings as no common standard has been established for teachers and students. This situation negatively affects uniformity in instructional and assessment procedures. While the use of CS in academic settings is still a relatively new area of research, recent studies advocate the use of L1 as a resource in the classroom. This focused study provides an overview of previous CS research centered on its importance as a discourse tool in the oral and written work of multi/bilingual persons who use CS to convey social aspects which cannot be appropriately communicated through the target language (TL). Some studies observe the CS patterns found in teacher talk during instruction and advocate its use as a potential L1 resource, but they fail to address how it can be regulated in students' written work without hindering TL learning. This study fills in the gap by suggesting the use of bi-directional translation methods in conjunction with acceptability judgment tasks in order to instruct students in identifying how and when CS should be used as an L1 resource. The study is conducted with the pool of 36 students in a local university in Lahore, who read four English newspaper articles and code-switched in Urdu in pre and post-instruction stages. Paired t-test results showed significant improved results for the acceptance rates and number of attempts by the participants in the post instruction. This suggests that students can use L1 as a resource to convey concepts in the TL when properly instructed and that further research in this connection can be useful for FL learning settings.
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A version
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Wesely, Nicolas D., author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Cooperman, Matthew, committee member; Jazz Harvey, Madeline, committee member
At surface level "a version" enacts a poetic exploration of form and its myriad influences on creative intent and execution, with particular interest in that mysterious echo of formal play—the sestina. A deeper investigation of the thesis reveals the intricate movement of how poetic self might be realized through the navigation of these various, highly active, literary lineages, which themselves arrive as echoes of past, present, and future writings, experiences, and hopes, here largely circling military history, myth, family, physical body, and love. This thesis exhibits the movement toward, and simultaneously away from, the constraints of form, asking how it is that creativity enters into free flowing abundance through formal parameters; highlighting those moments when repetition deviates from defined meaning and achieves a polyvocality of authorial lineage; a version of a version that has always been and never been before. Here the sestina is pushed into sprawling forays of liturgical praise and negation. It assumes forms and roles meant for other times and spaces, and by so doing, shows its adaptability (and so too our own) toward an immediate presence of modern poetics.
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Acceleration
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Witthohn, Alec, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee member
Acceleration is a novel following a week of events in the life of Cameron Noh, a model from New York City who travels to Milan for fashion week as labor tensions among transit workers boil in the background. He meets with his agent, Simone, and a wealth of other characters as he debates whether or not to move to Paris. This work is written in the style of the weak novel, as described by Lucy Ives in her article "The Weak Novel," publish in the Baffler 2022. Its content is, more or less, plotless, filled with symbols such as snails, eyes, clothes, darkness and light as Cameron meanders from fashion shows to after-parties, in a kind of hedonic depression, searching for something that might fulfill him. Acceleration is also a comment on capitalist consumption and the culture that surrounds it, the way it generates this searching in all of us under capitalist rule. Eventually, the situation with the transit workers becomes untenable, resulting in what might be an act of terrorism focused on Milan's La Scala Theater.
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Aleph
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Goldenberg, Tirzah, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Moseman, Eleanor, committee member
The manuscript begins with poems sifted from the language of the Dead Sea Scrolls--poems pre-written, gathered into new song. The "speaker" (collective anonymity, a sect) seems to speak from the ruins of the scriptorium, from the archaeological site, from the caves, from the jars within the caves. The physicality of the scrolls, their furled and unfurled form, their being hidden, the remainder that is read out of the absence from which it came, finds parallel meaning in the Kabbalistic notion of the simultaneously revealed and concealed Godhead, or Thou, the addressed. These poems (siftings) are the roots, and the pages that make up the second half of the manuscript are grown from them, rooted in pre-written song--words are imagined as artifacts, ostraca, signatures with roots in the hereafter.
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All at once, just once
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Peats, Ryann, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Souza, Caridad, committee member
All at Once, Just Once is a collection of poems structured to reflect the cyclical nature of the calendar year as someone who identifies as queer. The first and last sections introduce & explore themes of grief, coming out, defining the self in familial, interpersonal & domestic spaces, and tracing violence in the world. The three center sections include poems of a quieter and concise register that work through explorations of the feminine, nurturance, definitions of "woman," the multiplicity of queer bodies, being in a love relationship, and exploring violence against queer bodies in moments of crisis and healing.
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All things occur in the heights
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) Casolo, Amanda, author; Levy, E. J., advisor; Doenges, Judy, committee member; Vasudevan, Ramaa, committee member
This thesis submission is a novel-in-progress written during a three-year period of M.F.A. study at Colorado State University. Written in polyphonic omniscient point of view, the novel applies a modular narrative design, following the lives of four characters from 1945 through 2010. The setting is Waterbury, CT, a diverse city, and the location of Holy Land, a now abandoned Catholic amusement park. As the city and its people struggle to define themselves in personal memory, in history, from corruption and poverty, the park's sixty-foot illuminated cross shines out across the city every night and casts its looming shadow over every day.
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American feral: a novel
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Freedman, Benjamin, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Altschul, Andrew, committee member; MacKenzie, Matt, committee member
At its core, this novel centers around Pep Olsen, a fifteen-year-old boy living in the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State in 2004. He navigates his overactive mind and anxiety, absence of his dad who works on a nuclear submarine, seeking popularity in school, adolescent relationships, burgeoning bicurious desire, and fascination with a stranger who has recently been going around town, violently killing and displaying animals. Eek! The backdrop to this local violence is the Iraq war. A different sort of violence, but no less gruesome. The war has taken over the consciousness of the community and is usually present, humming in the background of the novel. Pep navigates his own still-forming thoughts on the U.S. and its invasion of Iraq, which is put in conversation with other main characters—Grandma Bee, Ken Olsen, and Vice Principal Sanders—who each see the horror of war but react in radically different ways. Often times, characters like the Vice Principal, Clint Shackton, and others act or say things with direct allusion to historical events or speech. There's also some philosophical references and literary allusions going on, though I hope it's not too heavy-handed. I think there's also this recurring theme of human and animal, how slippages between the two can occur, and how this period makes "animals" out of folks, and what that allows to be viewed as "legitimate." The way in which stories are constructed, how the media describes violence, and the mythmaking of war are all important. It's probably worth mentioning that I also recently read a ton of weird, early 20th century American political thinkers like Walter Lippman and Edward Bernays, who sort of professionalized and developed the idea of propaganda as a "necessary" means of controlling public opinion. Those ideas are present throughout, as I see a direct intellectual through line between that era and how the Bush administration riled up war support. Grandma Bee's leftist political tendencies are a nice foil to this. It also pretty explicitly deals with the somewhat uniquely American phenomenon of both being one of the most destructive, violent international forces, and yet almost uniformly not viewed as such within the country. Delusion and how such a picture of the world is formed seem to be important questions. Thematically, one of the things I attempted here was put the early aughts nostalgia of boyhood and dial-up internet and old video games and high school culture in direct proximity to the horrors of this period. I try and let the two bounce off one another, and hopefully this helps contribute to the slightly eerie, off-kilter atmosphere of the book. On a craft level, there's a few things I tried. First, the whole book takes place over roughly two and a half days, so naturally there is a lot of expansion of moments here, living inside the head of Pep and others. There's also an abundance of dialogue, at times spanning pages. I wasn't expecting this when I started, but it quickly grew to become an essential part of the pacing of the book as well as deepening the characters. And it was also, well, fun as hell to write. There are also some bigger ideas I played with—reality and distortion, the function of language, and what the line between mind and world is when you're writing from the perspective of within someone's head, etc.
Open Access
An analysis of discourse markers and discourse labels as cohesive devices in ESL student writing
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Yuhas, Brandon J., author; Delahunty, Gerald, advisor; Reid, Stephen, committee member; Kaminski, Karen, committee member
This study analyzes the use of two types of cohesive device, discourse markers (Fraser, 2005) and discourse labels (Francis, 1994), in the academic arguments of native-speaking (L1) Chinese English as a second language (ESL) first-year composition (FYC) students. Discourse markers (DMs) are lexical expressions which signal that a semantic relationship of elaboration, contrast, inference, or temporality holds between adjacent discourse segments. Discourse labels are a type of nominal group lexical cohesion which makes use of unspecific abstract nouns to label and organize stretches of discourse. Using a qualitative text analysis, the use of these cohesive devices is examined in each case in terms of the discourse requirements of the text in question. An analysis of native speaker (NS) writing is used for comparative purposes to determine possible gaps between these two groups of student writers in the ability to use these devices to construct cohesive texts, as well as to determine potential similarities and/or differences in instructional foci for these two groups of student writers. The result of this study suggests that these ESL student writers do not tend to have problems using DMs or retrospective labels, but that they do tend to underuse advance discourse labels in their writing. Underuse of advance labels was not found to be a problem in the NS arguments analyzed. These results indicate that a knowledge gap does in fact exist between these non-native speakers (NNSs) and NSs with regard to the tools available to them in English for constructing cohesive academic texts. Annotated examples from the samples analyzed and specific teaching suggestions are provided to help FYC instructors address this knowledge gap.
Open Access
An analysis of the developing se passive construction with a por-phrase
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Rauch, Jacwylyn Laci, author; Delahunty, Gerald, advisor; Grim, Frédérique, advisor; Pedrós-Gascón, Antonio, committee member; Berry, Nancy, committee member
This research proposes to characterize a particular type of se construction as a developing se passive construction with a por-phrase and attempts to address what linguistic niche it inhabits. The construction addressed has an argument as its subject that is the patient of the clause and a por-phrase that contains either an instrument or an agent that contributes to the event denoted by the verb phrase. In this paper, I give an overview of the different se constructions, followed by a discussion of voice. Next, I review literature on the passive and adopt a working characterization of the Spanish passive. I then look at development of the passive over time and the constraints typically associated it. For this research, I use a corpus to get a data set of fifty entries that I analyze qualitatively and compare using simple percentages. Those data entries are then analyzed using three separate analysis tools that were adapted from Hopper and Thompson's transitivity categorization and Dowty's Proto-Agent Properties. Those tools allow me to develop theories on the niche that the developing se passive with a por-phrase inhabits with respect to the periphrastic passive. This research suggests that the developing se passive construction with the por-phrase fills some gaps left by the periphrastic passive. For that reason, it does not seem unlikely that the developing se passive construction with a por-phrase will become more common over time. Whether or not it will become a part of every variety is yet to be seen, but at the very least it is becoming a part of some varieties.
Open Access
An autoethnography of local music culture in northern Colorado
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Schicke, Joseph Andrew, author; Doe, Sue, advisor; Lamanna, Carrie, committee member; Banning, Jim, committee member
The following thesis investigates common ideologies as manifested in the rhetoric of local musicians, musician employers and musician advocates. I use an autoethnographic method in which I use the interview data of local music culture participants along with my own accounts of my experience as a local musician in order to come closer to locating and describing the experience of local music culture. Through constant comparative analysis of interview data, I located six problematic themes related to the rhetorics of the music community, musician recognition, musician identity, music as a leisure activity, musicians as workers, and musicians as part of a wider industry. I put forth the argument that these areas are of great importance in an understanding of the ways that rhetoric and ideology disempower local musicians. In addition, I argue for a more complex awareness of music ideology by introducing affect theory. Finally, I suggest how community literacy may be used in order to advance the ideas brought forth in this thesis.
Open Access
An epistemological approach to literature: creating a paradigm for literary study in the IB Language A1 classroom
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Hunt, Tiffany J., author; Reid, Louann, advisor; O'Donnell-Allen, Cindy, committee member; Carlson, Laurie A., committee member
This study arose from one educator's interest in finding a way to help students more fully understand both what they are being asked to do in an International Baccalaureate Higher Level Language A1 course, and the principles on which these expectations are founded. The desire to clarify this for students rests on a foundational assumption that students are likely to perform better when aware of the philosophical guiding principles of a discipline and where they are to locate themselves among a number of possible ways to analyze literature. The study is primarily concerned with presenting these philosophical underpinnings to students in a manner that is accessible and achievable given the many other demands of the course, and whether this framework is useful in furthering student achievement. As a classroom teacher, I conducted action research to this end, using initial and exit surveys to measure student perception and whether these perceptions changed. I also observed students in class and in individual conferences, and conducted a case study of three students' major written work for the course, coding for evidence of different ways of analyzing literature. The study ultimately revealed that students did not fully understand, at the beginning of the school year, what modes of literary analysis were most appropriate for achieving well in the IB Language A1. Students' understanding improved over the course of the school year, evident both in the survey findings and in student work, though it remains unclear what role the framework, or paradigm, may or may not have played in this. More research, conducted with a greater number of students in a wider array of contexts, is necessary to more meaningfully explore the value of the paradigm and best practices for helping students to understand fully what exactly they are being asked to do in analyzing literature.
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An harm we none: memoir of a veterinary medical education
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Ring deRosset, Susan, author; Thompson, Deborah, advisor; Doe, Sue, advisor; Holmquist-Johnson, Helen, committee member
The veterinary profession, we First-Years were told during orientation, is the white-collar demographic with the highest addiction, depression, divorce, and suicide rates in the country. Despite these warnings and all the heavy baggage I was coming in with—as an older student and an ecofeminist Nature gal with limited resources, a spinal disease, and unresolved grief and hauntings—I gave vet school my best shot: It was my Big Dream. Part One of this book-length memoir, my creative nonfiction thesis, covers personal events in 1998, from the January acceptance letter from Colorado State University and the summer before classes started, through fifteen weeks of rigorous academics, with little to no sleep, all the way to our first final exams in December. Like most authors of contemporary veterinary memoirs, including Loretta Gage, Allen Schoen, and Suzy Fincham-Gray, I also share where my passion for animals and the ambition to become a doctor probably originated; the vet-clinic work, volunteer hours, and GPAs we needed to rack up before we even applied; our first euthanasia experiences as well as inspiring scenes with mentor-veterinarians; and how intense vet school interviews and taking out around a hundred-thousand dollars of federal student loans can be. I also begin to explore the complicated relationship between humans and nonhuman animals from inside the veterinary institution.
Open Access
An investigation of English language learners' motivation, imagined communities, and identities in an Intensive English Program in the United States
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Howard, Sarah Marie, author; Nekrasova-Beker, Tatiana, advisor; Becker, Tony, advisor; Ehlers-Zavala, Fabiola, committee member; Anderson, Sharon, committee member
This study investigates three aspects of language acquisition that may be influenced by studying abroad at an Intensive English Program (IEP) in the United States: the English Language Learners' (ELL) motivation, imagined communities, and identity. More importantly, this study investigates how the interplay of ELL motivation, imagined communities, and identity factor into Second Language Acquisition (SLA) within the confines of Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory in an IEP. Sociocultural Theory perceives language acquisition as a product of interaction between students' social and cultural environment and academic material which consequently builds upon the development of their higher psychological function (Kozulin, 1998, 2003; as cited in Poehner, 2008). This naturalistic case study aims to investigate the qualities of language learning motivation, imagined communities, and identity. To record the development of these phenomena, a series of interviews, observations, and reflections were administered. The goal of this study is to provide insight to IEP instructors and English instructors within the field of Applied Linguistics on the complexities that students experience during study abroad. In order to bring awareness of these three concepts in relation to language acquisition to inform teaching practices.