Russian Demographics

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Mack Whitehead and Dr. Tony Brown, Department of Humanities The goal of the project was to establish correlation between a Russian person’s demographics, their emotional views and reactions regarding nuclear threats in 1999 and 2012. Research will include the interrupting of the data that is already present, and research will include looking into the political […]

Russian Attitudes Toward US Foreign Policy: From the Cold War to Today

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Kelsey Simons and Dr. Tony Brown, Department of German and Slavic Languages In matters of international politics today, Russia is the wildcard. Its history of power on the international stage, along with an impressive military and large sphere of influence give it a commanding presence, even as it still struggles to find its identity after […]

Using Rhetorical Analysis as a Starting Point for Appellate Level Oral Argument Reform

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Jacob Sherman and Dr. Nancy Christiansen, Department of English Introduction The United States court system faces an ever-growing caseload problem. The issue gets aggravated at the appeals court, where fewer judges face a disproportionate volume of cases. Two approaches have historically been taken to address this burden: selecting more judges and streamlining trial procedures. Critics […]

Russian Pronunciation Difficulties for Native Speakers of English: Errors and Meaning Alterations

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Vitalijs Sadovskis and Dr. Grant Lundberg, Department of German Studies and Slavic Languages The major goal of this research was to determine through both theoretical analysis and practical application which Russian pronunciation difficulties for native English speakers result in a misunderstanding of meaning rather than foreign accent. Therefore, it focused on Russian pronunciation errors which […]

Creating Community While Learning Italian: An Experiment in Communitarian Language Learning

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David Sabey and Professor Jennifer Brown, Department of German and Slavic Languages Explanation As a student instructor of an Italian 102 class, I adopted an action-research methodology in hopes to understand more fully how to develop sense of community in a language-learning classroom environment. Thus, my research goal was twofold: 1. I wanted to work […]

Native Speaker Judgments on the Accentedness and Personal Traits of American and Korean L2 Learners of German

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Charles Richards and Dr. Hans-Wilhelm Kelling, Department of German and Slavic Languages Everyday listeners make personal judgments about the people with whom they are speaking based on the accent or voice quality of the speaker. Studies have shown that a person’s speech– independent of accent–can influence a listener to make judgments about the speaker’s intelligence, […]

Marshallese Corpus Project: The Marshallese Language Resource

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Marco Mora Huizar and Dr. Heather Willson, Department of Linguistics and English Language The purpose of the Marshallese Corpus Project (MCP) is to create an extensive online corpus of Marshallese language texts to be used for research and other applications. Currently, there is a severe lack of resources for the study of the Marshallese language, […]

Methods of Manuscript Analysis for the Recovery of Lost Text

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Claire Monson and Dr. Roger Mcfarlane, Department of Classics and Comparative Literature The purpose of my application for an ORCA Grant was to collaborate with Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 950: Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, located in Hamburg, Germany. Using their resources and the expertise of Professor Roger T. Macfarlane, we were able to make […]