Publications - DO NOT EDIThttp://hdl.handle.net/10106/112012024-03-29T07:06:45Z2024-03-29T07:06:45ZWho builds it, who benefits? Deepening student and faculty knowledge about wikipedia’s scholarly valueStvan, Laurel Smithhttp://hdl.handle.net/10106/310632023-10-31T14:30:54Z2023-02-01T00:00:00ZWho builds it, who benefits? Deepening student and faculty knowledge about wikipedia’s scholarly value
Stvan, Laurel Smith
**Please note that the full text is embargoed** ABSTRACT: Students and faculty can jointly play a role in how Open Educational Resources are created and deployed by assigning students to expand Wikipedia pages. By producing re-usable OER materials, these assignments provide students with transferable research skills and collaborative learning opportunities, face-to-face or remotely. By taking part in the production of open-access materials, students practice sharing knowledge with a larger community and receive feedback from interested readers beyond their instructor and classmates. In addition, introducing more students to Wikipedia editing tools can increase the diversity of editors and topics in gender, language, ethnicity, and region. At the same time, learning about Wikipedia editing standards can provide instructors with evidence of Wikipedia’s validity for practising and vetting scholarly research. Seeing Wikipedia be revised, annotated, and expanded helps demonstrate content gaps in a discipline’s materials, highlighting choices about which topics are included and which count as notable. In supporting the OER curriculum, WikiEdu’s training provides instructors with a structure for helping students master Wikipedia rules and interfaces while still learning class content. In addition, for instructors who are more familiar with single-authored textbooks or science communication posts, Wikipedia editing can help address hesitations about the quality of multi-authored, crowdsourced OERs and provide another venue for increasing public awareness within instructors’ fields. Using instructor and student reflections on integrating Wikipedia editing assignments in five American linguistics classes, I show how these small OERs can allow groups and individuals to incrementally affect the coverage of a growing global reference work.
2023-02-01T00:00:00ZInferring New Vocabulary Using Online TextsStvan, Laurel Smithhttp://hdl.handle.net/10106/310092023-10-31T14:28:24Z2005-01-01T00:00:00ZInferring New Vocabulary Using Online Texts
Stvan, Laurel Smith
**Please note that the full text is embargoed** ABSTRACT: Through small-scale sampling of relevant specialized texts to craft hands-on inferential vocabulary tasks, both students and teachers can benefit from corpus linguistic information. By discovering ways to collect and access real data, second-language teachers can create topic-specific corpora and use software to sort and highlight the data to create more rich and revealing classroom materials for improving vocabulary learning. This student-centered, data-driven learning can be easily adapted for different levels of reading students. Free or purchased software, as well as features of existing programs, can be put to use to access online texts
2005-01-01T00:00:00ZThe functional range of bare singular count nouns in EnglishStvan, Laurel Smithhttp://hdl.handle.net/10106/310082023-12-12T15:54:26Z2007-01-01T00:00:00ZThe functional range of bare singular count nouns in English
Stvan, Laurel Smith
**Please note that the full text is embargoed** ABSTRACT: One overlooked and highly polysemous English noun phrase form is the bare singular, i.e. a null determiner with a singular count noun complement. Occurring in all grammatical positions, this constituent shape is used in English for multiple functions. Examination of naturally occurring English data shows the conditions under which bare singulars are used as generics (with a meaning like bare plurals), as components of a predicate conveying a stereotypical activity (with an indefinite meaning), and as markers of an identifiable referent (like nouns with definite articles, demonstratives, and possessive determiners). While generic and indefinite meanings are well documented for bare forms, the reading that picks out an identifiable referent is unexpected for a bare nominal. This range of meaning-based distinctions suggests additional theoretical consequences for cross-linguistic noun interpretation and DP-internal syntactic structure.
2007-01-01T00:00:00ZSemantic incorporation as an account for some bare singular count noun uses in EnglishStvan, Laurel Smithhttp://hdl.handle.net/10106/310072023-10-31T14:29:16Z2009-01-01T00:00:00ZSemantic incorporation as an account for some bare singular count noun uses in English
Stvan, Laurel Smith
**Please note that the full text is embargoed** ABSTRACT: This work investigates inter-related syntactic and semantic issues concerning bare singular count nouns (BSCNs) in English. I explore differences in interpretation, distribution, and possible underlying nominal structure to investigate how BSCNs fall out when considered as semantically incorporated nominals. By examining their interaction with discourse anaphora, number neutrality, and modification, I conclude that some uses of English bare singulars show the behavior of full referential DPs, while others are best explained as semantically incorporated nominals fused with a preposition or intransitive verb.
2009-01-01T00:00:00Z