A Center for Academic Achievement: How Innovative Collaborations Between Faculty and Learning Center Administrators Built Model, Credit-Bearing, First-Year Courses with Embedded Support for At-Risk Students

Establishing a centralized learning assistance program to systematically address the academic challenges of all students was the first priority of the Academic Achievement Center (AAC) at Bridgewater State College when it was formed in 2001. This new, open, bright, comfortable, and inviting place has truly become the heart of the campus, for it is here that abundant human and material resources are available to support all students. In this learning environment, students can access services in advising, testing, disabilities resources, study, research, writing, communication, mathematics, adaptive technology, tutoring, and English as a second language. Primary responsibility for learning assistance lives with faculty directors who plan how to place meaningful assistance in the path of all students. This article describes the challenges and rewards in establishing and sustaining campus commitment to centralized learning assistance programs as well as some of the exciting opportunities for collaborative innovation on learning assistance that have resulted from such a commitment at Bridgewater State College. An additional discussion focuses on the administrative strategies that support this successful model, and the profound professional opportunities presented to faculty, graduate students, undergraduate student staff, and professional staff through this model. Besides the various services provided at the AAC, systemic delivery of learning assistance is meshed through academic courses for at-risk, first-year students. A description and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data point out the observed trends of student persistence and academic standing for each cohort that has benefited from this comprehensive model

Third language acquisition in immersion: A case study of a bilingual immigrant learner

This article reports on a diary study conducted to explore third language acquisition in the immersion setting in Mexico as experienced by a bilingual Russian/English learner of Spanish who had recently immigrated to the USA from Russia. Language learning is approached as a socialization process that involves negotiation of meaning (Vygotsky, 1978) and identities (Gee, 1999; Norton, 2000). The study reveals links between self-assessment, autonomy and identity, documenting how the learner utilized her bilingualism as an important resource in learning Spanish, shifted between languages and cultures and employed a variety of self-assessment techniques. The findings of the study suggest that immersion in a new language could make a powerful impact on how bilingual immigrant learners self-interpret themselves in their first and second language. The study emphasizes the contextual nature of identity and highlights the importance of introspection as an effective method of raising critical language awareness

Joseph Brodsky – A Bilingual Journey

The focus of this project is the investigation of bilingual transformation that Joseph Brodsky underwent during his exile from Russia into the USA. The project provides evidence of the linguistic and psychological complexities involved in bilingual writing through discourse/content analysis of Brodsky’s selected poems, autobiographical prose and interviews. The project redefines adult language learning as a constant process of self-discovery, self-invention and possibly identity change. Using the case of Brodsky as a springboard for further discussion, this project attempts to determine an equitable answer to the question of how writing changes in the second language and what factors influence this transformation. The project underscores the importance of viewing bilingualism as a non-static, evolutionary process that permits additional opportunities for creative self-expression and leads to the reconstruction of the self in the new language

A Sociolinguistic Investigation of Word Borrowing Patterns in Putin’s Russia

In this study, the focus is on the development of word borrowing patterns in the sociocultural climate of Putin’s Russia. In the 1990s, Russia was going through a period of infatuation with western cultures, politically aligning itself with the United States. Simultaneously, the Russian language adopted many loan words from American English (e.g., Ryzanova-Clarke, & Wade, 1999; Stakhnevich, 2003.) Today, the sociopolitical conditions are drastically different. In this project, I explore the longevity of the linguistic borrowings from the 1990s and identify new loanwords through the textual analysis of Russian print mass media. I examine the semantic domains of these borrowings from the standpoint of critical discourse analysis and investigate the loans’ morphological structure and their syntactical role(s). In my interpretation of the results, I rely on the notions from the critical theory to explicate the role of cross-linguistic borrowings in discourse and their connection to social change