English Literacy Curricula In A Sino-Canadian Transnational Education Program: Teachers’ Implemented Curriculum, Rong Hai

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This case study explored the English literacy curricula in a Sino-Canadian Transnational Education Program that is accredited by British Columbia (BC). Underpinned by nested pedagogical orientations and critical multimodal literacies, this study focuses on how the BC English literacy curricula were implemented in three English literacy teachers’ classes. Data show that two pedagogical orientations (i.e., transmission and social constructivist) were used by English literacy teachers in the transnational education program. This study also found little evidence of transformative pedagogy in all three teachers’ English literacy teaching. The implications include missed opportunities to engage students to critically analyze and evaluate the …

The Effects Of Song Use On Vocabulary Learning: Studies Of Distribution Of Practice, Modes Of Input, Retrieval, And The Input-Output-Input Sequence Of Exposure, Niousha Pavia

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates the effects of the distribution of practice, modes of input, retrieval, and the input-output-input sequence of exposure on incidental vocabulary learning from songs. This thesis takes an integrated article format, organized into five chapters, including an introduction, articles one, two, and three, and a conclusion. The participants (N=225) across all three studies involved Thai students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) in Thailand. All three studies measured vocabulary learning gains by comparing participants' scores on the vocabulary knowledge tests used for pretests, immediate posttests, and two weeks delayed posttests. Study one partially replicated and …

Learning Verb-Noun Collocations Through Multiple-Choice Exercises: Do Distractors Benefit Or Hinder Later Recall?, Mengxue (Alyssa) Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study aimed to investigate under what conditions multiple-choice exercises benefit second language learners’ acquisition of lexical phrases. Of particular interest was the question whether the distractors in the multiple-choice items create interference when learners’ later try to recall the lexical phrases. Twenty advanced ESL (English as a Second Language) learners were given 20 multiple-choice items on verb-noun collocations (e.g., run a business, take a toll, speak volumes) followed by feedback. They were then tested on the same collocations two weeks later by means of gap-fill items. The participants were invited to verbalize their thoughts during the exercise and …

Exploring Translanguaging And Identity Among Jordanian Graduate Students In Ontario, Mohamad Almashour

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study investigated the use of translanguaging strategies by Jordanian graduate students in Ontario, Canada, as a means of adjusting to the local language and culture. It further scrutinizes the influence of these practices on their identities. The study also probes into the potential opportunities and impediments that these students may encounter in higher educational establishments in Ontario.

Data collection was accomplished through semi-structured online interviews, which were subject to qualitative analysis to respond to the research queries. The analytical process was grounded in a theoretical framework combining sociocultural theory, critical literacy, and language ecology, thereby offering a profound understanding …

Systematic Literature Review: Literacy Practices In Chinese Immigrant Families, Qingning Chen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Family literacy is important for Chinese immigrant families who are concerned for their children's English and Chinese biliteracy development. This systematic literature review uses multiliteracies as the theoretical lens to analyze 17 studies from the ERIC database. The review aims to synthesize reported family literacy practices (including both English- and Chinese-related literacy practices) in English-dominated countries and analyze how literacy is perceived in the literature. Findings suggest that Chinese immigrant families use various materials, blended situated practices, and overt instruction as the main pedagogical approaches to support children's biliteracy development in family contexts. Most researchers and parents conceptualize literacy as …

Second/Foreign Language Learners And Narrative Film Comprehension: An Intercultural Reception Study, Natalie Killick

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Sociocultural concepts (Krashen, 1981; Vygotsky, 1978; Wood et al., 1976) and a constructivist narrative film theory (Bordwell, 1985) offer interdisciplinary insights for a study exploring second/foreign language (L2/FL) interpretations of two intercultural films (films made in linguistically and socioculturally diverse contexts) with English audio/dubbing (Chafe, 1980; Desilla, 2014; Erbaugh, 2010). A qualitative reception study examined the potential of intertextual (i.e., knowledge of other texts) and cultural information as learning scaffolds as well as style and narrative cues as forms of comprehensible input used by post-secondary international Chinese and domestic Canadian students as they watched sequences from Shaolin Soccer (Chow, 2001) …

An Integrative Study Of The Effect Of Early Learning With Touchscreen Technologies Using Samr Framework: A Meta-Analysis And Systematic Review, Atefeh Taherian Kalati

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Digital technologies have brought about a remarkable shift in early childhood learning. Among different technological devices, touchscreens have attracted special interest among young children given their intuitiveness and interactive features. However, the existing empirical findings regarding the effect of this technology on young children’s learning are not consistent. Touchscreen technologies have been also postulated to have the potential for transforming learning experiences. However, there is a dearth of research explicating if the transformative potentials of touchscreens are benefited in early learning and examining the factors/conditions contributing to the improvement of young children's learning with touchscreens. To address these gaps in …

A Study On How Different Glosses Affect L2 Idiom Acquisition, Liting Luo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Adding glosses to a reading text is expected to be helpful for second (L2) language learners, especially when inferring the meaning of words or expressions is challenging. This project examines the use of glosses to foster comprehension and retention of L2 idioms (e.g., go against the grain and stick to your guns). More specifically, it compares the benefits of different types of information in glosses: simply clarifying the idiomatic meaning, clarifying the literal meaning from which the idiomatic meaning is derived, or clarifying both. The participants were 37 Chinese ESL learners who read texts with one of the three …

Exploring Factors That Affect English Language Teachers’ Self-Efficacy Beliefs In The English As A Second Language Context, Alexandra Charnina

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study explored factors that affect English language teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs in the English as a second language (ESL) context. Data were collected via two interviews with five English language teachers, one stimulated recall interview, and a full day observation of their classrooms. Based on the context and program requirements, the results showed that English language teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs are impacted by language proficiency, the curriculum and materials, the administration and collective teacher efficacy, and teaching online. Teachers view language proficiency as a principal quality of successful and effective English language teachers and this without doubt impacts their sense of …

Spaced Practice And Second Language Vocabulary Learning, Sukyung Kim

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis aims to investigate whether learners can increase second or foreign language (L2) vocabulary learning through spaced practice, in which repeated practice is spaced out in time or through other intervening events. It is well acknowledged that spaced practice promotes learning and enhances retention. Despite robust positive effects of spaced practice in learning and memory, the degree to which spaced practice effects are meaningful for L2 learning is still not clear. For example, the majority of spaced practice studies on L2 vocabulary learning has focused on paired-associate learning (e.g., flashcard learning). There are many different learning activities for vocabulary …

Reading Strategy Intervention And Reading Comprehension Success In Bilingual Readers, Bailey Frid

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Previous research has found that specific reading strategies predict reading comprehension success in bilingual readers (Frid & Friesen, 2020; Friesen & Frid, 2021). Yet, the pattern in which readers recruit these strategies has not been investigated. In the first study, the patterns of strategy recruitment used by skilled vs. poor bilingual readers was analyzed with previously collected think-aloud data. Results showed that skilled bilingual readers recruit a variety of strategies, they pair necessary inferences with other strategies and utilize comprehension monitoring strategies. In contrast, poor readers perseverate on specific strategies, recruit fewer strategies in total and make more incorrect statements. …

The Effects Of Multilingualism And Music Experience On Tone And Vowel Discrimination Ability, Niloufar Ansari Dezfuly

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study investigates the effects of language background (monolingual/bilingual and early/late bilingual exposure), knowledge of a tonal language and music experience on auditory discrimination by employing tone and vowel discrimination tasks. A total number of 8,769 observations were analyzed using logistic regression to answer the following questions: (1) Do vowel and tone discrimination abilities correlate with language background in diverse groups of speakers such as monolinguals and bilinguals of different types (early/late bilinguals)? (2) Does musical training affect tone and vowel discrimination? (3) Does knowledge of tonal language affect tone discrimination? The findings suggest that with regard to vowel discrimination, …

A Systematic Literature Review: The Modalities, Pedagogies, Benefits, And Implications Of Storytelling Approaches In Early Childhood Education Classroom, Xinyu Du

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Abstract

The purpose of this systematic literature review was to investigate and synthesize several aspects of storytelling in the reviewed scholarly research, providing a holistic summary and potential insights for early childhood educators. The study asked: (1) What are the various forms, modes and media, and involved pedagogies that storytelling in early childhood education can take? (2) What are the reported benefits of storytelling in early childhood education? (3) Based on the literature, what understandings and pedagogical implications are enriched for early childhood educators to utilize storytelling in their pedagogies? Using a theoretical framework based in multimodal literacy and sociocultural …

Better Together: Fostering Student-Level Intercultural Competence Through Collaborative Online International Learning (Coil) And A Collaboratively Created Assessment Tool, Wes Armstrong

The Dissertation in Practice at Western University

Many Japanese universities have been undergoing processes of internationalization to mitigate demographic realities that conspire against robust student enrolments. These internationalization initiatives often attract students from other Confucian-based contexts who are expected to move away from their homeland and fully integrate into an unfamiliar, Japanese environment. Resultantly, international student needs are often camouflaged by cultural similarities that favour group harmony and collectivism over more equitable approaches to learning. Therefore, this Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) aims to serve student needs by fostering the development of intercultural competencies through a pilot collaborative online international learning (COIL) project open to all students, and …

Ontario High School Science Word List (Ohswl), Mohamed Mahfouz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This research aims to explain the development of an Ontario High School Science Corpus and subsequently an Ontario High School Science Word List (OHSWL). The OHSWL is a list of the most frequent technical words in the Ontario high school science curriculum. The science corpus was compiled from Ontario science textbooks and public written lecture material. A total of 803 lemmas were identified as part of the OHSWL. The coverage of the OHSWL in the science corpus vs non-science corpus is 7.79% and 1.52% respectively. The high frequency vocabulary (top 3,000 words) of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) …

A Systematic Literature Review Of Intergenerational Literacy Studies, Ling Niu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study is a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed intergenerational literacy studies published in the past 20 years. A key goal of the study is to address the concern of what knowledge has been reported about intergenerational literacy learning between young children and older people who are in their grandparents’ generation. The research questions are: 1) What are the trends of academic research on intergenerational literacy in terms of publication date, country of the research, research site, participants’ demographics, and literacy phenomenon? 2) What is the existing knowledge of intergenerational literacy? and 3) Based on the extant literature what are …

Incidental Acquisition Of Multiword Expressions Through Audiovisual Input: The Role Of Repetition And Typographic Enhancement, Elvenna Majuddin, Anna Siyanova-Chanturia, Frank Boers

Education Publications

There has been limited research on the efficacy of captioned second language (L2) television in facilitating the incidental acquisition of multiword expressions (MWEs). The present study aims to fill this gap. Additionally, this study examined the role of typographic enhancement and repetition. One-hundred and twenty-two L2 learners were assigned to one of six conditions which differed in terms of caption condition (no captions, normal captions, enhanced captions) and the number of times they watched the same video (once, twice). The participants took a cued MWE form recall test before watching the video, and immediately and two weeks after watching it. …

A Case Study Of Efl Learners’ Identity And Investment In A Private Educational Company In China, Jing Yan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In response to the scant literature on Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ identity and investment in language learning within private settings, this study employed exploratory case study to report findings regarding Chinese EFL learners’ identity and investment at a private educational company in mainland China. This study used the model of investment as the theoretical underpinning. Data presented in this paper were collected through three adult students’ learning materials in three different English learning programs and interviews with both students and three teachers who taught the students respectively. Findings reveal how students constructed identities as related to …

Beyond Books: Closing My Chapter At The Timmins Public Library, Britney Forget

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

For my SASAH experiential-learning project, I worked at the Timmins Public Library over the summer of 2020. While it was my third year working as a summer student at the library, this one offered new challenges and unique learning opportunities as I was working in the midst of a pandemic. My main responsibilities were working on the newly implemented curbside pick-up program and assisting patrons over the phone. But working at the library is so much more than just checking out books. Throughout the summer, I created social-media content, organized a StoryWalk event, and provided vital resources to the community. …

Learning From Experience: My Time With Swim And Read, Aleksandra Tosic

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

My experiences at SWIM and READ have led me through many challenges and earned me many successes and have helped me to gain a variety of hard skills and soft skills while letting me improve upon some that I already had. Here, I got the opportunities to work on a book project called “20 Stories of Hope” and to spend a year teaching a young child literacy skills, both of which have given me valuable chances to both find and pursue new passions and to develop my career pathway towards teaching.

The Flipped Spanish Classroom: Student Engagement, Satisfaction And Autonomy, Ana Garcia-Allen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates how the implementation of a pedagogical innovation in the foreign language (FL) classroom enabled me to explore student engagement, autonomy and course satisfaction and understand preferred practices for FL development. The ‘flipped classroom,’ formally known as the ‘inverted classroom,’ has become ‘the’ new phenomenon in pedagogical innovations in the last few years (Jensen, et al., 2015). In a Flipped Classroom, direct instruction is moved out of the classroom and takes place at home, by means of reading text or viewing a video or a digital presentation. This appears, at least superficially, positive in that it maximizes class-time …

A Call For Cautious Interpretation Of Meta-Analytic Reviews, Frank Boers, Lara Bryfonski, Farahnaz Faez, Todd Mckay

Education Publications

Meta-analytic reviews collect available empirical studies on a specified domain and calculate the average effect of a factor. Educators as well as researchers exploring a new domain of inquiry may rely on the conclusions from meta-analytic reviews rather than reading multiple primary studies. This article calls for caution in this regard, because the outcome of a meta-analysis is determined by how effect sizes are calculated, how factors are defined, and how studies are selected for inclusion. Three recently published meta-analyses are re-examined to illustrate these issues. One illustrates the risk of conflating effect sizes from studies with different design features, …

University Partnership Of The Confucius Institute: A Case Study In Canada, Yinan Wang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study aims to explore the university partnership of the Confucius Institute between its partner from Canada and China. Drawing on organizational theory through the lens of higher education partnerships, the study uses a qualitative research method with a case study approach. Taking the Confucius Institute in a Canadian university as a case, the study probes into research questions regarding the nature and characteristics of the partnership built via the Confucius Institute as the platform, the key stakeholders involved in the partnership of the Confucius Institute, and in what ways have the key stakeholders shaped the partnership. Data were collected …

The Impact Of Multiliteracies And Multimodality On Esl Learners: Using Neuroimaging Technologies, Wenyu Huang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Educational neuroscience has become an important role in understanding education and the association with brain development. However, few previous studies have applied neuroimaging techniques to multiliteracies research, which is an important literacy pedagogy addressing multimodal learning and cultural and linguistic diversity. This study used functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate the association of multiliteracies learning on adult English Second Language (ESL) students’ performance through multimodal tasks.

Students’ multimodality background was collected through a technology questionnaire. Behavioural and fNIRS data were collected before and after multiliteracies learning. Results showed that there was no significance change in behavioural responses while the …

Formative Space: Literacy Practices In 21st Century Curriculum Making, Mary C. Ott

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Partnerships for 21st Century learning support curricular reforms for global, cross-disciplinary competencies that will leverage and benefit education technologies. However, this research partnership with a literacy program developer occasioned an opportunity to study curriculum making in the 21st century that did not make assumptions about technologies and competencies. The integrated thesis based on this project pushes boundaries on how assessment and curriculum making are conceptualized by exploring broader questions of inquiry and participation through literacy and assessment practices in six junior elementary classrooms in Ontario, Canada, over a two-year period. Chapter 1 provides the background and purpose of the study …

What Do Students Say About Writing? How Student Experiences Can Inform Canadian Writing Studies Pedagogy, Christopher Eaton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation focuses on Canadian Writing Studies by working with students as co-constructors of knowledge. It stems from my pedagogical and personal desire to understand how students built their knowledge of writing in my first-year writing classroom. By working closely with ten former students, the study explored how their experiences in my writing course at Conestoga College (otherwise known as COMM1085) could inform writing pedagogy. To accomplish this, the study combined Academic Literacies theory with Rhetorical Genre Theory as part of a larger Critical Narrative Inquiry into the students’ narratives of experience. Simply put, these theoretical and methodological frameworks enabled …

The Use Of Reading Strategies In Second Language Adult Learners, Taninder Atwal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The current study examined the use of reading strategies in connection to reading comprehension success. 38 graduate students, who did not consider English their first language participated in this study. The participants’ vocabulary knowledge, word reading fluency, decoding, and working memory were measured. Think-alouds captured strategy use and reading comprehension was assessed through questions about the text. Results indicate that vocabulary knowledge was correlated to reading comprehension success but word fluency, decoding and working memory were not. A factor analysis on strategy use revealed that three factors emerged to account for unique variance in reading comprehension performance. These factors were …

Using Literal Underpinnings To Help Learners Remember Figurative Idioms: Does The Connection Need To Be Crystal-Clear?, Xinqing Wang, Frank Boers, Paul Warren

Education Publications

No abstract provided.

Teacher Professional Learning In Multiliteracies Pedagogy: Exploring The Lived Curriculum Of Preservice And In-Service Educators, Joelle Nagle

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The purpose of this exploratory case study is to examine the lived curriculum (Aoki, 1993) of preservice teachers enrolled in a Bachelor of Education language arts course and in-service teachers enrolled in an online graduate program, both with a focus on multiliteracies pedagogy. Through this study, the rationale is to understand how these formal professional learning experiences shape teachers’ perceptions of their literacy pedagogy. Specifically, the aim is to gain insight into how to promote multiliteracies pedagogy in preservice and in-service professional learning. This dissertation research builds upon two qualitative exploratory case studies (Stake, 2010; Yin, 2012) rooted in a …

Increasing Collective Teacher Efficacy Through Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit And Coaching: A Community-Based Approach, Brenda Mercer

The Dissertation in Practice at Western University

Abstract

Instructional coaching in one remote northern community focuses on teacher mentorship and professional learning and prioritizes the implementation of prepackaged literacy resources. This focus on the implementation of prepackaged programs and data collection, promotes neo-liberal priorities and the privatization of education, over the methods that support the inclusion of Inuit cultural knowledge. Kostogriz (2011) states that we should be cautious about accepting the neo-liberal discourse of the literacy crisis and standardized reforms, the author suggests that low levels of literacy are not a large-scale problem so much as a result of under-provision of a socially just education.

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