First and Second Language Acquisition Commons^™

The Lived Experiences Of Latinx Parents And Their Perception Of Bilingual Programs: A Phenomenological Reflection, Manuel O. Adrianzen

Dissertations

The aim of this study is two-fold. First, to better understand and capture the lived experiences of Latinx parents as they navigate the registration/enrollment process at the school and select a language program for their Pre-kindergarten child. Second, to understand what lived experiences influence their perception about bilingual education programs. Using Van Manen’s (2016) concept of human sciences and phenomenology, data was collected through the use of conversational interviews. The responses provided by the parents and school clerk revealed five themes, fear & anxiousness, hope for things to come & for a brighter future, use of social networks to understand …

The Effects Of Watching Text-Relevant Video Segments On Reading Comprehension Of Culturally Unfamiliar Texts With Adult English Language Learners Supported By The Schematic Information-Processing (Sip) Model Of Reading Comprehension, Amirreza Karami

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this mixed-methods sequential explanatory study was to investigate the effects of watching text-relevant video segments on reading comprehension of a culturally unfamiliar text when technical words are present or absent. Therefore, 44 adult English Language Learners (ELLs) with higher-intermediate to advanced English language proficiency levels from the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD) School of Languages located in the Dominican Republic were chosen and randomly assigned to two different groups: control vs. experimental.

First, the researcher compared two different types of reading instruction—traditional text-based vs. video-based reading instruction supported by the Schematic Information-Processing (SIP) model of reading …

Book Review: Intercultural Perspectives On Research Writing, Edited By Pilar Mur-Dueñas And Jolanta Šinkūnienė (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2018), David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Everybody Does It: The Pragmatics And Perceptions Of International Chinese Graduate Students And Their American Peers Regarding Gossip, Miriam Eisenstein Ebsworth, Timothy John Ebsworth, Chencen Cai

Journal of Multilingual Education Research

Integrating natural observation, interviews, and quantitative analysis, we used a mixed design to compare the socio-linguistic judgments of international Chinese students at a private University on the East Coast of the United States (US) with those of their native English-speaking peers regarding a critical incident involving gossip. Ninety-two participants evaluated alternative sociolinguistic strategies offered in addressing the incident on semantic differential scales. Judgments by each group regarding four alternative responses were surveyed and compared. Twenty participants, ten from each group, participated in semi-structured interviews. Themes were developed through a recursive process: interpretations were validated by a bilingual bicultural expert. Several …

Psychological Status Of High School Students 1 Year After The Covid-19 Emergency, Cong Zhou, Rongqin Li, Mingchuan Yang, Shanshan Duan, Chuanming Yang

Faculty and Student Publications

Background: With the control of the epidemic, adolescents' mental outlook might have improved. However, little evidence existed with regard to the psychological status of adolescents in post-COVID-19 era. This present study aimed to explore the psychological status of high school students after the epidemic getting eased. Methods: A web-based cross-sectional survey was used to obtain data from three high schools, including the demographic information, the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), the Self-Rating Scale of Sleep (SRSS), and self-designed general recent-status questionnaire. Correlation analysis was performed to explore potential associations between the depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and …

Integrating Dance And Language Education: A Pedagogical Epiphany, Nan Zhang, Jane Southcott, Maria Gindidis

The Qualitative Report

Dance fulfils several educational purposes, particularly in the context of second language teaching and learning. Nevertheless, challenges to implementing dance as an approach to teach and learn a second language do exist. For teachers, it is essential to develop varied pedagogical approaches to suit different student cohorts. But it is not reasonable to expect that every language teacher is a born expert and connoisseur of dance or every dance teacher a born expert and connoisseur of the target language. Moreover, we have not seen studies focus on the development of the pedagogy of using dance as an approach for teaching …

Black Lives Matter In Teaching English As A Second Language!, Kristin Lems

Faculty Publications

The Winter 2020 issue of theIllinois Reading Council Journal published a special issue focusing on “action for equity,” with thoughtful articles and abundant family and classroom resources. This issue of the “wELLcome”column, which is dedicated to topics regarding English language learners (ELLs), continues in that same vein. In this issue, we place the spotlight on ELLs of African descent, their teachers, and their schools.

Predictors Of Refugees’ Ability To Pass The United States Citizenship Exam, Molly Grover, Fern Hauck, Sarah Blackstone, Emily Cloyd

Virginia Journal of Public Health

Background: Passing the United States citizenship exam can be challenging for refugee populations for several reasons, including affordability of English classes, time restraints, medical stressors, and limited formal education. The purpose of this study was to examine factors that may influence a refugees’ ability to pass the citizenship exam, including English proficiency, education, employment, and completion of English as a Second Language (ESL) classes.

Methods: Refugee patients at the International Family Medicine Clinic (IFMC) in Central Virginia participated in a survey that assessed their levels of English proficiency and whether or not they had passed the citizenship exam. The survey …

University Students' Perceptions Of Writing Assessment, Hanan Alaa Hegazi

Theses and Dissertations

Instructors and students are the pillars of higher education. There is substantial interest in teachers’ beliefs, preferences, and perceptions in language assessment research, with an emphasis on writing assessment. Additionally, there is a growing body of research investigating students’ perceptions of assessment. However, research that examines how students perceive writing assessment is limited. Therefore, this study investigates two aspects: (a) students’ perceptions of their writing ability and (b) their perceptions of writing assessment in an English-medium private university in Cairo. This study adopts a mixed-methods approach for data collection, which involved distributing student questionnaires, conducting semi-structured interviews, and collecting writing …

Cross-Linguistic Morphosyntactic Influence In Bilingual Speakers Of Jamaican Creole And Jamaican English, Taryn R. Malcolm

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilingualism in Jamaica is of considerable consequence, as most individuals are early bilinguals, speaking both a variety of Jamaican Creole (JC) from birth and having standardized English (sE) as the language of instruction in education. Immigrants from Jamaica to the United States are an ideal population to examine how cross-linguistic influence (CLI) impacts morphosyntax as JC and sE differ in morphosyntactic constructions, including verb tense- marking, subject-verb agreement, and copula use. While much of the work in the field of CLI has examined spoken language pairs with varying degrees of similarity (or difference) between the languages, examining CLI in a …

Lexical Stress Realization In Mandarin Second Language Learners Of English: An Acoustic And Articulatory Study, Boram Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigated the acoustic and articulatory correlates of lexical stress in Mandarin second language (L2) learners of English, as well as in first language (L1) speakers. The present study used a minimal pair respective to stress location (e.g., OBject versus obJECT) obtained from a publicly available Mandarin Accented English Electromagnetic articulography corpus dataset. In the acoustic domain, the use of acoustic parameters (duration, intensity, F0, and vowel quality) was measured in stressed and unstressed vowels. In the articulatory domain, the positional information from tongue tip (TT), tongue dorsum (TD), upper lip (UL), lower lip (LL), and jaw (JAW) were …

Foundations Of Linguistics And Identity In L2 Teaching And Learning: Agency Through Linguistic Enrichment, Differentiated Instruction And Teacher Identity, Marnie Jo Petray, Rebecca Shapiro, Gladys M. Vega

Publications and Research

Language, procedure, and identity are L2 teaching/learning essentials that may promote agency and stimulate synergies among knowledge, practice, and reflection (Diaz Maggioli, 2014; Duff, 2012). This meta-report presents three studies that collectively advance agency and endorse linguistic foundations as enrichment, differentiated instruction as engagement, and teacher identity as empowerment. All of these theoretical constructs are key to successful L2 teaching and acquisition. Study 1 quantitatively reports on introductory linguistics’ presence or absence in 114 master’s programs at 54 US institutions. Findings suggest that linguistics’ curricular presence is inconsistent and training for optimal impact in the L2 classroom is lacking. Given …

Exploring The Personality Of Virtual Tutors In Conversational Foreign Language Practice, Johanna Dobbriner, Cathy Ennis, Robert J. Ross

Conference papers

Fluid interaction between virtual agents and humans requires the understanding of many issues of conversational pragmatics. One such issue is the interaction between communication strategy and personality. As a step towards developing models of personality driven pragmatics policies, in this paper, we present our initial experiment to explore differences in user interaction with two contrasting avatar personalities. Each user saw a single personality in a video-call setting and gave feedback on the interaction. Our expectations, that a more extroverted outgoing positive personality would be a more successful tutor, were only partially confirmed. While this personality did induce longer conversations in …

Basic Tools For College Composition Success For Beginner Esl Learners, Gina M. Vellani

English OER Repository

Basic Tools for College Composition Success is a practical classroom resource for instructors of beginner level ESL students. This resource teaches paragraph writing skills and syntax. Paragraph genres included in this resource are descriptive and narrative. Most paragraph examples are authentic writings from beginner ESL college students.

Tools For College Composition Success Ii For Low Intermediate Students, Gina M. Vellani

English OER Repository

Tools for College Composition Success II is a practical resource for use in the college ESL classroom. This book teaches 5 paragraph essay writing and covers the following genres: Illustration/example, narrative, informational process and classification/division. This resource also contains chapters that focus on improving introduction, body and concluding paragraphs. There are also 3 chapters dedicated to syntax: Simple sentences, compound sentences and complex sentences. All essays in this resource are authentic essays written by students at this level of ESL composition instruction.

Tools For College Composition Success I For High Beginning Esl Learners, Gina M. Vellani

English OER Repository

Tools for College Composition Success I is a practical classroom resource for high beginning ESL learners. This book covers composition skills and syntax using the descriptive, narrative and process writing genres. In addition, this resource helps students at this level of language acquisition transition from writing paragraphs to writing short essays.

Acquiring English Then Reacquiring Indonesian: A Study Of Family Language Policy, Aris Bahari Rizki, Muchamad Sholakhuddin Al Fajri

The Qualitative Report

This study investigates how family language policies are shaped and developed in five Indonesian scholars’ families who live in England. More specifically, it analyses parents’ attitudes towards children’s bilingualism and second language development focusing on the investigation of factors that can influence parental language ideologies and the patterns of language practices within the families. Data were obtained from participant observations, fieldnotes, and semi-structured interviews. All the data were then analysed using inductive analysis approaches proposed by Cohen et al. (2011) and Thomas (2006) which include reading the transcripts several times, identifying the texts related to the purpose of the study, …

Distribución De Las Funciones Retóricas De Las Citas En Los Apartados Del Trabajo Fin De Máster Escrito En Español Y En Inglés, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

This study correlates with a research study published in the journal Pragmalingüística, in which the contrastive use of the rhetorical functions of citations in master’s theses in Spanish and English was studied. The main objective pursued by this new research is to determine which rhetorical functions are used most frequently in the different parts of a master’s thesis and what these can accomplish in each part of the text. Following Petrić (2007), a computerized textual analysis of the rhetorical function of citation was used to study this phenomenon in a corpus of sixteen (16) theses of which eight (8) were …

Professional Development Of Efl Teachers In Tanzania: Ubinafsi Or Ujamaa?, Ann E. Roemer

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

This small descriptive study examined the professional development activities of English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers at a university in Tanzania, in particular their awareness of professional organizations such as the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language and TESOL International Association. Basing her inquiry on English language teaching as a community of practice, the researcher used a questionnaire, interviews, and personal observations. University lecturers were asked about their personal professional development practices, which represented the value of individualism (ubinafsi in Swahili), as well as their interest in becoming involved in professional organizations for EFL teachers, …

Using Film As A Multimodal Text In The Language Classroom, Kate Marie Steckmest

MA TESOL Collection

Film is a powerful medium for language acquisition; Not only does viewing films allow learners to experience language used in various real-life contexts, but the medium of film itself is a form of communication. Through the active viewing of films, students can explore how people with diverse backgrounds, accents, and cultures communicate using multiple modes such as gestures, images, and sounds. When learners are familiar with the techniques used by filmmakers to convey meaning, they can use the medium of film themselves to tell their stories and share their perspectives through filmmaking projects. Such projects can be collaborative and engaging …

Monolingual And Bilingual Language Networks In Healthy Subjects Using Functional Mri And Graph Theory, Qiongge Li, Luca Pasquini, Gino Del Ferraro, Madeleine Gene, Kyung K. Peck, Hernán A. Makse, Andrei I. Holodny

Publications and Research

Bilingualism requires control of multiple language systems, and may lead to architectural differences in language networks obtained from clinical fMRI tasks. Emerging connectivity metrics such as k-core may capture these differences, highlighting crucial network components based on resiliency. We investigated the influence of bilingualism on clinical fMRI language tasks and characterized bilingual networks using connectivity metrics to provide a patient care benchmark. Sixteen right-handed subjects (mean age 42-years; nine males) without neurological history were included: eight native English-speaking monolinguals and eight native Spanish-speaking (L1) bilinguals with acquired English (L2). All subjects underwent fMRI with gold-standard clinical language tasks. Starting from …

Strategies Utilized By Speech-Language Pathologists When Treating Speech-Language Disorders In Children Who Are Bilingual, Julianne L. Monceaux-Visser

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

In the state of Minnesota, more children who use a language other than English were reported to speak English less than “very well” (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020). There was neither a “gold standard” (Verdon, McLeod, & Wong, 2013), nor Preferred Practices (ASHA, 2020) for the treatment of speech-language disorders for children who were bilingual. The current study investigated the practices for treating speech-language disorders in this population by SLPs employed in schools in a region of west-central MN and eastern ND. Using an interpreter, and explicit instruction on targeted language skills were the most common clinical approaches utilized. The child’s …

Bilingual Language Stimulation Strategies: Recasting And Expansion: A Creative Research Based Product, Merri Lindsey

Undergraduate University Honors Capstones

The purpose of this research-based creative product was to provide a workshop to parents of toddlers providing information on preventative language stimulation strategies, specifically recasting and expansion. The original proposed study intended to analyze outcomes based on a pretest/posttest design, but due to recruitment challenges, it changed. Four remote synchronous workshops were planned: one for hearing parents of children acquiring ASL, one for hearing parents of children acquiring spoken English, one for deaf parents of children acquiring spoken English and ASL, and one for deaf parents of children acquiring ASL. Due to struggles with participant recruitment, I instead developed a …

Approaches To Narrative Instruction For Second Language Learners, Mathew Peters

MA TESOL Collection

Narratives have reemerged as a dominant form of rhetoric over the last fifty years. This dominant use of narrative discourse has only increased with the rise of social media. Walther Fisher (1987) proposed the narrative paradigm as a unifying theory of human communication. His major claim is that people are inherently storytellers and that people use a narrative rationality and a logic of good reasons to inform their beliefs, values, and actions. This paper utilizes his theories, along with recent findings in neuroscience, to establish an argument for greater inclusion of narratives into second language teaching. Narratives can have a …

Malaysian Esl Teachers’ Beliefs And Practices Regarding The Use Of Music And Songs In Second Language Teaching, Daler Bokiev, Lilliati Ismail

The Qualitative Report

Regardless of numerous studies supporting the effectiveness of utilizing music and songs in second language teaching, there is a remarkably limited amount of research investigating how music and songs are actually used by language teachers and the beliefs underpinning their practices, particularly in the Malaysian educational context. This qualitative study explored Malaysian ESL teachers’ beliefs and practices with regard to the use of music and songs in language instruction at different levels of education as well as factors influencing their instructional practices. The research participants consisted of five primary-level, five secondary-level and five tertiary-level ESL teachers working at public and …

Methods And Effects Of Shadowing Using Online Authentic Videos On L2 Acquisition Of Mandarin Chinese Tones, Ai-Ling Lu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mandarin Chinese tones are notoriously difficult for second language (L2) learners. Previous research focuses on tone training methods that can help learners produce monosyllabic lexical tones, and studies about the production of multisyllabic lexical tones at the sentence level in spontaneous speech are limited. This study applies shadowing—a method where the learners repeat what they heard with as little delay as possible—to tone training and compares the effects of using authentic videos and textbook audios as shadowing materials for beginner L2 Mandarin learners’ tone improvement at the sentence level. Fourteen students in elementary Chinese classes at an American university participated …

Singing And Pronunciation: A Review Of The Literature, Kassidy Joyner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Observed differences exist in the pronunciation abilities of individual language learners, especially adult learners. Musical ability and experience are possible factors that have been attributed to language pronunciation abilities. Although there has been a large amount of research concerning the effects of general musical ability and training on language abilities, very few studies have investigated the musical sub-category of singing. Research on the use of songs in the language classroom has largely tested the effects of song on vocabulary acquisition, while very few studies have explored the effects of song on pronunciation. Given that singing and pronunciation both use similar …

Aviation English In A Bilingual Context: Bilingual Spanish-English Pilots, Seneca Doty

Honors Projects

The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of English and Spanish in the applied context of aviation by researching pilot experiences in the cockpit within the register of aviation English. This study investigates pilot’s in-flight experiences in relation to language proficiency in the hopes of improving future standards of communication. Expounding on previous research with a focus on native Spanish speaking pilots, this research utilizes a Likert scale survey and demographic assessment to evaluate proficiencies inside the cockpit of bilingual Spanish-English participants. By determining each pilot´s use of English outside of the workplace as well as how …

“Life Is Splendid Here In The U.S.”: Intercultural Learning In Contemporary Chinese Students’ Academic Adjustment, Karolina Achirri

The Qualitative Report

The increasing numbers of Chinese learners studying at American universities and the high mobility across borders have recently challenged prevailing stereotypes of Asians in education. While studies of Chinese students are abundant, there has been scant research on how intercultural learning unfolds in these students’ adjustment to both academic and social settings. To address this research gap, I center my case study around six of my former students from China and examine their progress at different U.S. institutions. Data from their journals were coded and analyzed qualitatively. In tracing my participants’ first semester trajectory and their strategies to adapt to …

Brown's Stages Of Morphosyntactic Development Applied To The Typical Development Of Italian, Marie Laiche

LSU Master's Theses

Background: In A First Language (1973), Roger Brown called for an increase in crosslinguistic data and analysis of morphosyntax across languages as more research in this field is crucial for working out the overarching determinants of language acquisition order and for the ability to accurately compare child language acquisition across different languages. An increase in this research would benefit linguistic researchers and speech-language-pathologists offering services to or evaluating children speaking a different language or more than one language. The current study seeks to add to the field of crosslinguistic research by adapting Brown’s guidelines of English language acquisition to the …