Computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been shown to facilitate positive outcomes in language learning environments, including greater motivation, positive attitudes, and increased interactive quantity and quality of language use. This study posits that CMC can serve as an affordance that allows for increased opportunities for deaf students to engage in direct, collaborative learning and meaningful interaction in English that then allows for increased motivation, improved visualizations of the self, attitudes, and self-efficacy in English language learning. Changes in these outcomes due to the intervention of CMC in college English classes designed for the deaf student will be assessed with pre- and post-tests, using hierarchical linear modeling as a statistical methodology to capture class effects. Qualitative analyses will also capture greater levels of complexity in instructor and student experiences with CMC through interviews, observations, and transcript analysis. This report also includes an evaluation plan with an outline of the essential program components, a logic model, and analysis plan based on stakeholder questions. / text

The concept of motivation and its contributing factors have been a vital interest in language studies since the works of Gardner and Lambert (1972) on attitudes and motivation in language learning. Initial studies emphasized the individual contributors to learner motivation whereas the second wave of studies underscored the contextual contributors. Within the social contexts in which individuals live in, the issue of identity has gained a significant importance in recent years. Therefore, the purpose of this report is to identify sociocultural factors in relation to motivation in language learning and to examine what implications can be drawn to be able to ensure a cross-culturally motivating environment for learners. This report provides a comprehensive examination of second language acquisition theories and points to new trends in the field, reviews important perspectives on emotion and explains the difference between emotion and motivation, reconciling different perspectives on emotion. It also reviews important theories of motivation in language learning as well as the conceptual and operational similarities and differences between intrinsic motivation, interest, and flow. It examines the socio-cultural bases of learning languages by focusing on models of acculturation and social identity, and reiterates the new turn that has taken place in language learning models with the sociocultural perspective, and proposes a synthesis of the role of culture in language learning. It provides a vital discussion on the sociocultural factors that have crucial effects on motivation for language learning, focusing on the importance of cultural identities of individuals. And finally, it provides conclusions and implications from both theoretical and pedagogical standpoints. / text

Deaf individuals’ relationship with English has historically been problematic, in large part because of the lack of full accessibility to the language. However, language takes up not only communicative space, but also psychological space in our lives. The psychological dimensions involved with English language learning for deaf individuals are largely unknown. This study addressed this gap by exploring psychological dimensions involved with language learning for deaf individuals while concurrently exploring the role of computer-mediated communication in enhancing direct and interactive accessibility of English. The psychological dimensions of interest in this study originate from self-efficacy theory (Bandura, 1977), possible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986), and the L2 Motivational Self System (Dörnyei, 2005, 2009a). This study had three main goals: 1) to examine the motivational characteristics of deaf language learners, 2) to assess whether those characteristics would change over time, and 3) to assess the role of CMC in language learning experiences. This study took place over the course of a semester in college classes designed for deaf students studying English. Selected classes were asked to use online chat as an instructional tool. Measures were administered at the beginning and the end of the semester, and students were asked to participate in focus groups to discuss their experiences. A mixed methods approach that made use of quantitative and qualitative methods was used to capture the complexity involved in second language learning for the deaf student, including contextual influences. Overall findings indicate that deaf students’ self-images, self-efficacy beliefs, attitudes, and motivated behaviors about English were positive, but significantly influenced by the context in which language use occurs. When the environment was seen as accessible, beneficial, and enjoyable, deaf students were able to utilize greater levels of individual agency towards the aim of learning English. Computer-mediated communication emerged as an affordance that enabled “seeing English,” indicating dynamic, interactive engagement with English when ideal conditions were met. Thus, CMC appears to allow for a language learning experience that is available and accessible for deaf learners, and can provide opportunities to prime possible selves as English language users. / text

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

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Many students in an allied health program at a Middle Eastern Arab university were experiencing difficulties with courses taught in English, resulting in poor academic achievement, low grade point averages, a high failure rate amongst its first year students, and an adverse impact upon a future skilled and educated work force for the region. Tinto's theory of institutional action for students' success served as the conceptual framework for the inquiry that used a qualitative explanatory case study method to examine the experiences of those students who were facing difficulties with their studies. To address questions about why students were failing and leaving the school and how the institution might remedy this educational problem, the study employed initial and follow-up interviews and reviews of academic records and portfolios of 6 currently enrolled or recently graduated students over age 21, who volunteered to participate. Content and thematic analysis of the collected qualitative data produced findings indicative of lack of college readiness among students and gaps in institutional practices such as remedial methods for the unprepared students. Based on the study findings, a policy recommendation for improving the educational practices was introduced to support building a better educational environment at the school. The positive social change implications of this study are not only limited to establishing programs to support the students' success and improve retention rates at the institution but also may include the establishment of more effective approaches to the reform measures of the educational system in the country.

English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers’ beliefs about motivation are important but underexplored. Because research on human beliefs indicates that existing beliefs are the filters for new information, a better understanding of teacher beliefs about motivation is necessary in order to provide training on effective motivation strategies for ESL teachers. In order to investigate the beliefs and perspectives of ESL teachers on motivation, 11 teachers at a university intensive English program, from a pool of 32, volunteered to participate in a self-reporting, open-ended interview to share their thoughts and beliefs about motivation. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, divided into comments, and grouped into categories. The transcripts and their coding were checked and approved by each of the participating teachers in the study. The teacher comments were organized around 9 categories of beliefs about motivation. Results of the data analysis indicated that ESL teachers have both specific and varied beliefs about the nature of motivation, and those beliefs correlate consistently with their classroom strategies for motivating students. As a result, teacher training that focuses on motivation strategies without understanding teachers underlying beliefs about the nature of motivation may not be successful. The findings also indicated that the 9 common strategies for motivation (shared by 6 or more teachers) were generally represented in practical guides for motivation which were based on both language learning and general constructs. In addition, as a group, these teachers demonstrated a breadth and depth of beliefs about motivation that could be used as a resource for filling any gaps in individual teacher’s knowledge or beliefs about motivation. Furthermore, these teachers identified group dynamics, student-teacher and student-student interactions, as the most important single factor effecting student motivation. Therefore, any theory of language learning motivation must be able to account for or explain classroom social variables and their effects on motivation. Finally, the ESL teachers’ recollections of the origins of their beliefs focused on early life, language student, and language teaching experiences, which hints that any effective teacher training on motivation should be experiential in nature, whether through language learning, classroom observation, or practice teaching. / text

This study explored the contexts that immigrant Taiwanese mothers provided for their American born children concerning heritage language learning. Five immigrant Taiwanese mothers in central Texas participated in this study. To collect data, a qualitative approach was used including in-depth interviews, follow up interviews, supplemental interviews with other family members, and observations of the mothers and their children in different environments. The data was analyzed to answer two research questions: (1) What meanings do immigrant Taiwanese mothers attribute to their American-born children's heritage language? (2) What are the strategies that immigrant Taiwanese mothers describe themselves as using in relation to their American-born children's heritage language learning? This study demonstrated that because of the relative lack of heritage language teaching resources independent of the family, the mothers played an important role in teaching their children a wide variety of languages including Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, Spanish, Japanese, and Cantonese. Furthermore, the meanings that the mothers placed on heritage language could be categorized into cultural relationships, family bonds, social status within the immigrant community, relationship with American and global societies, and academic achievement and social success. The strategies the Taiwanese immigrant mothers used to teach heritage and home languages were diverse but could be analyzed by the concept of social capital and the theories of Lev Vygotsky. The mothers with more economic capital were able to use their social capital to allow one parent to stay at home teaching their children heritage language full-time. They were also able to purchase other people's time in the form of services and effectively use resources such as the Chinese school or travel to promote heritage language learning. Thus, they could actively pursue and establish goals for their children's heritage language learning. Mothers with less social capital were less able to provide an environment promoting early language learning and instead hoped for other resources in the future. The result was that mothers with more social capital were able to have their children excel in many languages including English, while mothers with less social capital not only had difficulty creating proficiency in heritage language but also in English. / text

Previous studies have shown that multiple talkers help learners make more robust word representations when the learner is not very experienced with the language (Richtsmeier et al., 2009; Rost & McMurray, 2009, 2010). This is likely because exposure to variation allows the learner to observe which acoustic dimensions vary unpredictably across talkers, and which acoustic dimensions vary predictably. However, this predicts that only learners who are less experienced with a language will benefit from multiple talkers, as more experienced learners should be able to use their previous knowledge about the language's speech sounds. Three word-learning experiments, with participants who were expected to have different levels of experience in the language, were performed to test this prediction. In the first experiment, English-acquiring children did benefit from multiple talker in the production but not perception of newly learned words. In the second experiment, native English-speaking adults did not benefit from learning from multiple talkers in either the perception or production of new words. Finally, second language-learning adults benefited from multiple talkers if they were less proficient speakers, but not if they were more proficient. Collectively, these results suggest that learning from multiple talkers is only beneficial for less experienced language learners.

It is argued that infants build a foundation for learning about the world through their incidental acquisition of the spatial and temporal regularities surrounding them. A challenge is that learning occurs across multiple contexts whose statistics can greatly differ. Two artificial language studies with 12-month-olds demonstrate that infants come prepared to parse statistics across contexts using the temporal and perceptual features that distinguish one context from another. These results suggest that infants can organize their statistical input with a wider range of features that typically considered. Possible attention, decision making, and memory mechanisms are discussed.