Digital Commons Network^™

Full-Service Community School Intervention: Case Study Of Somali Parent-School Engagement Within A Rural Midwestern School District, Anne Leland

The Interactive Journal of Global Leadership and Learning

The purpose of this three-stage qualitative phenomenology case study was to characterize Somali refugee parents’ understanding of their role in school-parent relationships and investigate the impact of a research-based parent involvement intervention model adapted for use with this study. Research questions included: 1) What are Somali refugee parents’ understanding, perceptions, and expectations of school parent involvement; and 2) Did the adapted training intervention, designed to enhance school-parent relationships and parent engagement behaviors among Somali refugee parents, succeed? Following an initial interview stage, Epstein’s School-Family-Community Partnership Model (2019) was adapted and used to design a training intervention that was delivered as …

Social And Emotional Development To Foster Academic Growth In English Language Learning Preschoolers, Donna Mangone

Graduate Teacher Education

The fastest growing population of students entering preschool classrooms are English language learners (Winsler et al., 2014). Not only is the population of English language learners growing (Winsler et al., 2014), but there is a steady increase in the academic achievement gap. Further, the growth of ELL students corresponds with the gap. Related to both is social and emotional development. Social and emotional skills provide the apparatus for all learning. The early childhood educator is well-versed in teaching these skills. Therefore, an early childhood educator teaching social and emotional development to English language learners provides opportunities to remedy the academic …

Press Release - Brownsville The Herald Code Switch, The University Of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Corpus Bilingüe Del Valle

Corpus Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa) - News Releases

No abstract provided.

Community Asset Inquiry: A Model For Esol Teacher Praxis In Family And Community Engagement, Felice Atesoglu Russell, Amanda Richey

Excelsior: Leadership in Teaching and Learning

In this article, we present findings from our qualitative, self-study research on the development and implementation of two course assignments (community asset maps and oral histories) designed to support practicing teachers’ praxis in working with English learner (EL) students within the context of family and community engagement. Providing an example of how English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teacher praxis might be developed, findings are framed by our Community Asset Inquiry model. This model, grounded in equity literacy and transformative family and community engagement supports teachers’ development of praxis in support of an asset-based approach, deep knowledge of …

Interacting With The Other: Culturally Responsive Approaches Toward Intercultural Competence, Tamara Devine

MA TESOL Collection

Traditional language teaching approaches assume a strong focus on linguistic proficiency, syntax, and grammar. This thesis makes the case that culture and language must be given equal consideration in a language curriculum, and educators must approach their work with a critical eye for the cultural identities of each of their students. The author examines the ways that learner identity, most notably as it pertains to race and sexual orientation, is a crucial element to consider as teachers build in areas of representation to mirror their learners. The author lays out the theoretical foundation of culturally responsive teaching and points out …

Impacts Of Positioning, Power, And Resistance On Efl Learners’ Identity Construction Through Classroom Interaction: A Perspective From Critical Classroom Discourse Analysis, Wenwen Tian, Remart Padua Dumlao

The Qualitative Report

In this study, we explored how positioning, power, and resistance might have possible impacts on learners’ identity construction. We conducted this study in a 6-month language and culture program from August 2018 to January 2019 involving one teacher and 24 English major undergraduate students at a public university in Thailand. Using Kumaravadivelu’s (1999) Critical Classroom Discourse Analysis (CCDA) as an analytical framework and Braun and Clarke's (2006) thematic analysis approach to analysing data , we found three themes that illustrate how participants demonstrated positioning, power, and resistance: (a) learners’ choice of code as passive resistance, (b) circulating power in interaction …

Kinesthetic Language: A Dialect Of Kinesics, Terrill Suzanne Corletto

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Human communication requires the disciplines regarding physical fitness, codified language, and the performing arts to overlap, and exist symbiotically. Within the realm of artistic performance, the three disciplines working together deliver a deliberate message in a way unique to performing artists. The general tendency to compartmentalize sports, communication, and the performing arts into their pigeonhole categories of Kinesiology, Linguistics, and Theatre Arts is impractical, particularly for performing artists simply because all of the disciplines are mutually dependent in the context of all kinesthetic communications.

The purpose of this paper is to define and discuss several concepts and the ways in …

Critical Period Controversies For Second Language Acquisition: Implications For Language Teaching, Randy Lucio

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

It was proposed by Eric Lenneberg (1967) in Biological Foundations of Language that implicit first language (L1) acquisition was only possible during a critical period (CP) spanning from infancy to puberty. The critical period hypothesis (CPH) has since been a topic of controversy among L1 and second language (L2) scholars, whose studies have produced varying results that argue for and against a CP. It is suggested in this paper, however, that these often-varying results offer important insight that can serve to inform current and future L2 educational policy and instruction within K-12 education in the U.S. Thus, it is imperative …

Investigando Los Éxitos Y Las Dificultades De Implementar Un Programa De Inmersión Dual A Través De Las Perspectivas De Tres Administradores, Victoria E. Slaybaugh

World Languages and Cultures

This Modern Languages and Literatures senior project investigates and analyses the successes and struggles of implementing a dual immersion program through interviews with three dual immersion principles. In interviewing three highly experienced administrators, ample information was collected on why some programs are prosperous while others see little success. Each individual principal had unique and valuable input, especially with regard to why their respective schools changed programs from 50/50 to 90/10, why they implemented K-12, and even why they chose to eliminate the program entirely. Using supplemental studies to more thoroughly examine the historical and social context of dual immersion, this …

Implementing The Siop Model To Support English Language Learners, Pamela T. Chandler

All Theses And Dissertations

Children who are English as a Foreign Language Learners (EFL) and/or English language learners (ELLs) are missing critical content-specific learning. These students are transitioning into mainstream classrooms, lacking basic literacy foundation skills, including vocabulary, grammar, comprehension, phonology, and meaning, which is preventing them from accessing grade-level content. Teachers who are charged with educating English language learners are not always provided with sufficient professional development that will allow them to meet the students’ needs. ELL students need specific instructional strategies that will address their learning needs as well as language development. The purpose of this study was to examine the implementation …

Creando Un Sitio Web Para Concientizar Cómo Implementar Un Programa Bilingüe, Kylie S. Potter

World Languages and Cultures

This website serves the purpose of educating the community of the process of the implementation of bilingual education programs, specifically dual immersion programs. Because the demand for bilingual education is evidently high in the San Luis Obispo County, it is important for local families and community members to have access to information regarding the implementation process. The website provides detailed information from the book Designing and Implementing Two-Way Bilingual Programs by Calderón and Minaya-Rowe. As bilingual education rises in popularity, it is essential that all members of the community are aware of not only the benefits of bilingual education programs, …

Participatory Action Research In A Time Of Digital Literacies, Joanna Maravilla

Education Department Faculty Articles

Katie is a high school science teacher who participated in an ongoing participatory action research project. She is part of a larger professional development program (PROJECT) that aims to incorporate students’ funds of knowledge to assist in the development of curriculum that promotes greater equitable outcomes for English learners (ELs). Katie’s reflection of the way in which language plays a significant role in students’ content development aims for a better understanding of why an integrative approach to curriculum development is critical. Katie’s yearlong participatory action research project included the use of digital literacies to support her students’ science and language …

Phil The Phytoplankton, Kylie Kihm, Lexi Frankiewich

World Languages and Cultures

This project, a bilingual children's book, “Phil the Phytoplankton” and “Felipe el fitoplancton” educates young readers on the importance of phytoplankton in our world. The book emphasizes the fact that such small organisms, invisible to the naked eye unless gathered in immense quantities, are responsible for providing the earth with approximately 50% of the oxygen essential for human life. As defined by Cal Poly, sustainability is “the ability of the natural and social systems to survive and thrive together to meet current and future needs.” This book encourages a symbiotic relationship as a young girl, initially afraid of the unknown, …

Intergenerational Family Learning Programs: Stories Of Latinx, Immigrant Families And Their Journeys To And Through Higher Education, Monica Ramos

Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This research presents the stories of three Latinx families who participated in an intergenerational family program. I endeavored to understand their experiences navigating the American system of education and their immigrant stories. Their narratives revealed significant details that can serve as integral elements in the development of an intergenerational learning curriculum based on culture, language, and traditions, and that steps away from the assumptions that perpetrate the deficit-based narratives about Latino families and higher education. Their hopes provide points for further research and advocacy. In this qualitative study, I collected data using semi-structured interviews, including documents and artifacts. The …

Representing Percents And Personas: Designing Syncretic Curricula For Modeling And Statistical Reasoning, Sarah Radke, Sara Vogel, Christopher Hoadley, Jasmine Ma

Publications and Research

Syncretic literacy can link everyday and scientific concepts in student learning. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a curricular unit in a bilingual middle school science class developed to help students link everyday conceptions, conceptions from math, science, and computer science, and their own broad linguistic repertoires to support syncretic literacy in modeling and statistics in a unit on post-Hurricane Maria outmigration from Puerto Rico. The unit invited students to use printed maps, physical objects, computer code, and simulations to explore concepts such as percentages and scientific models, framed by an approach from translanguaging pedagogy. Qualitative …

Afro-Americano: The Transracialization Of The African-American Spanish Speaker, John M. Flanagan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Transracialization is not a biological term connoting the change of one’s skin tone to become a member of a different race. Its definition has its roots in racialization—the ideological process that describes how one assembles ideas about groups based on their race and decides, for example, what a ‘Black’ person is and how ‘Black’ people speak. Thus, transracialization is a linguistic term that describes the political and sociocultural act of recontextualizing one’s phenotype with the use of language, and in so doing, upending the observers’ stereotypical expectations of who one is (Alim 2016). This dissertation deals with how Spanish influences …

Advocating For Culturally Responsive Practices In The Ib Diploma Programme: Tapping In The Potential Of Acid Tests To Foster Coherence Between The Ib Principles And Teaching Practices, Timizay Ruiz Pineda

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

International education programs, like the one proposed by the IB Organization, offer students across the world education for global, internationally-minded citizens. Nonetheless, the definition and often, the use of these terms are vague and, for the most part, refers to education and practices of Western countries that are Eurocentric in nature. It is necessary to develop coherence between the principles expressed in many international education frameworks and the reality of their practices. For this, it is fundamental that explicit guidance on culturally responsive teaching practices is acknowledged and provided by organizations like the IB. This paper provides theoretical support explaining …

Languages, Literacies, And Literate Programming: Can We Use The Latest Theories On How Bilingual People Learn To Help Us Teach Computational Literacies?, Sara Vogel, Christopher Hoadley, Ana Rebeca Castillo, Laura Ascenzi-Moreno

Publications and Research

Background and Context: In this theory paper, we explore the concept of translanguaging from bilingual education, and its implications for teaching and learning programming and computing in especially computer science (CS) for all initiatives.

Objective: We use translanguaging to examine how programming is and isn’t like using human languages. We frame CS as computational literacies. We describe a pedagogical approach for teaching computational literacies.

Method: We review theory from applied linguistics, literacy, and computational literacy. We provide a design narrative of our pedagogical approach by describing activities from bilingual middle school classrooms integrating Scratch into academic subjects.

Findings: Translanguaging pedagogy …

Enseignement Engagé: Engaging And Motivating French Language Learners, James T. Workman

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This portfolio is a compilation of work that the author completed during the Master of Second Language Teaching (MSLT) program at Utah State University. It represents the culmination of the author’s personal learning and teaching experiences from his coursework and teaching experience both as a graduate instructor of French at USU and as a seventh-grade French Dual Language Immersion (DLI) instructor.

The portfolio consists of three main sections. The teaching perspectives section provides insight into the author’s beliefs about the ideal roles of teachers and students in an L2 classroom, both in a foreign language setting and an immersion setting, …

Press Release - Utrgv Linguists Awarded Federal Grant To Document The Language Of The Rgv, The University Of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Corpus Bilingüe Del Valle

Corpus Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa) - News Releases

No abstract provided.

Southeast Asian Refugee-Learners: Identities Informing Esl Education And Support, Andrew J. Perlman

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

Serving as a synthesis of previously published studies and digests, this paper focuses on Southeast Asian refugees in America to address the complex interaction between refugee-learners’ ongoing construction of identity and the ESL environment. Drawing on a wealth of historical and contemporary research on one of America’s most prominent refugee populations, this exploration highlights the traits that constitute Southeast Asians as a unique group of learners due to their shared histories of trauma; social, cultural and religious influences; and ongoing sociocultural and linguistic negotiations of identity during resettlement. As a result, ESL programs and practitioners become critical to both language …

The Struggle For Strong Democracy: We Need To Go Deeper. A Response To "Democratic Spaces: How Teachers Establish And Sustain Democracy And Education In Their Classrooms", Rick Ayers

Democracy & Education

The article by Collins, Hess, and Lowery (2019) explores struggles teachers faced in order to pursue Deweyan educational practices. This response proposes that even more is needed for a critical educational practice, called “strong democracy.” Such an approach requires addressing and countering the White supremacist legacy of U.S. capitalism and U.S. education. The article advances examples and various projects in strong democratic education.

Using Extensive Reading And Digital Flashcards For Vocabulary Acquisition, Zijin Feng

Master's Projects and Capstones

Non-native English learners often find it difficult to acquire adequate vocabulary knowledge. This can prevent them from making progress in other aspects of English learning, because learners have to understand most of the words that they hear or read to obtain comprehensible input. Fortunately, second language acquisition literature has long identified pleasure reading and spaced retrieval practice as effective in learning vocabulary. This field project examines the effectiveness of these two methods on vocabulary acquisition in adult English learners, and presents a handbook on how teachers can implement pleasure reading and spaced retrieval practice in the classroom. The handbook lays …

Using Bloom's Taxonomy To Teach College English In China: A Handbook For Educators, Yue Cai

Master's Projects and Capstones

With the modernization and globalization of China, the Chinese need to study and utilize English to be a part of the world. College students are essential to learning English. However, the purpose of college English in China still focuses on the national College English Tests. College students are not able to meet their original goal of learning English.

The purpose of this project is to create some teaching materials that improve students’ motivation and ability to learn English instead of raising exam grades. The project is a handbook which composes two model units based on Bloom’s taxonomy. Each unit contains …

Integrating Chinese Culture Into English Textbooks For Efl Teachers In Lesson Plans, Kexin Lu

Master's Projects and Capstones

In recent years, second language teaching in China, especially English teaching, has developed rapidly, making significant progress, and training a large number of outstanding non- native English speakers. However, Chinese cultural knowledge and its English expressions are neglected, resulting in learners' weak ability to express Chinese culture by using their second language. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to the integration of Chinese culture in English teaching materials and improve China ’s second language education.

This project first analyzes the current situation of weak cross-cultural communication competence of English learners in China, then explains the reasons cause for this …

Retaining The Power To Teach And Advocate In The Era Of "Reform", David Aram Wilson, David Aram Wilson

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

This qualitative, multi-case study investigates veteran, dual-language teachers in urban elementary schools in the Southwest United States and how these teachers manage to continue teaching despite education “reforms” that have contributed to increased attrition among their peers. Each participant contributed qualitative data through a narrative questionnaire, two interviews, two focus groups., and physical artifacts. Coding and analysis of each case was inductive and involved the identification of patterns and themes that emerged from the data. A cross-case analysis was conducted. Modern Critical Theory served as the theoretical lens.

Teachers as advocates for their students’ cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic well-being emerged …

An Effective Method Of Teaching English: A Handbook For English Teachers In China, Zichen Cai

Master's Projects and Capstones

Along with the significance of learning English has been emphasized by Chinese government for more than thirty years, more and more Westerns who mostly came from the U.S and England were welcomed to teach English in China. However, most of them are not qualified to teach, and they are not well-prepared before teaching according to author’s observation, which make students lose their interest in learning English eventually. Moreover, these foreign ESL teachers follow the activities and exercises in the textbook step by step while teaching, which is very dull and monotonous. In the literature review, the factors that might influence …

Beyond Working Relationship-Chinese International Students' Acculturation Stress, Wenjing Zhao

Education | Master's Theses

Chinese students form the largest group of international students in the U.S. today, yet research demonstrates that they experience significantly more acculturation stress than their European peers (Qi, Wang, Pincus & Wu, 2018). The purpose of this study is to analyze acculturation stress Chinese international students (CIS) face that stem from interactions with their American peers. This study takes a qualitative approach consisting of both group and individual interviews involving one focus group of seven American students and another focus group of six CIS. The researcher also interviewed two teachers and observed their classes. The research findings indicate that both …

Self-Directed Learning Practices In Esl: How Beginning Adult Latinx English Language Learners Can Increase Learning Outcomes, Jessica Parisi

Master's Projects and Capstones

This field project investigates the self-directed learning (SDL) practices that could increase learner outcomes in English language acquisition for beginning adult English language learners (ELLs), and presents on a website designed for the learner, the practices and local resources to engage them. Non-credit English as a second language (ESL) courses in community colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area have high enrollment and low levels of advancement, especially beginning levels. Latinx adult ELLs face unique challenges that contribute to their low rates of advancement, including linguistic isolation, and work and home duties that often prevent learners from attending classes the …

Black Unrealia: Handbook For Teaching The Structure Of Past Counterfactual Statements, A. Carter

Master's Projects and Capstones

For various reasons, students are attending California community colleges to learn English. Classes taught are usually influenced by models that integrate aspects of reading, writing, speaking, and listening, and courses that center on grammar are rarely if ever taught. There has been a resurgence in interest in Form Focused Instruction and strong evidence that grammar instruction combined with Corrective Feedback can produce marked gains in a student’s implicit and explicit knowledge of grammatical forms. This Field Project proposes that by combining Form Focused Instruction with aspects of Communicative Language Teaching such as authentic materials, or realia, instructors can assist learners …