Employing Daisaku Ikeda’s iteration of soka, or value-creative education, I detail a small qualitative study with adolescents involving commonplace, a traditional literacy practice of collecting excerpts from a variety of texts, as well as an accompanying inquiry activity of writing memory vignettes that includes a procedure that I call mirroring text. With an interest in self-reflexive responses to reading, my study explores what happens when five adolescent multiliteracies practitioners select, compile, and respond to excerpted multimodal texts, primarily from social media sites. Conducted in a virtual tenth grade advisory class during the 2020-2021 school closures due to the global pandemic, I discuss the peculiarities and challenges of the virtual learning space and the study activities that occurred therein, as well as the pedagogical implications of commonplace and mirroring for secondary Language Arts.

This is a case study that focuses on the oral proficiency in English manifested by the 4-year-old sonof the author. He speaks Swedish as his L1 like his both parents but has been exposed to Englishsince he was one year old from using a tablet. The child’s spoken production was recorded andtranscribed with a focus on the plural-forms and the genitive. An important field that this case studyis motivated by is how child language development may be connected to the concept of innatism,that language is based on innate principles (Lightbown & Spada, 2013:20) as it has been found that anumber of languages are acquired according to predictable patterns and processes (Moskowitz,1994:621-627) such as a the u-shaped learning process and over-generalization which has beenfound when investigating both L1 and L2 acquisition (Abrahamsson, 2013:663). The aim of thisstudy is to find possible similarities within the learning process: whether L2 acquisition follows thesame developmental patterns as in L1 acquisition by analyzing the recordings mainly targeting theplural and the genitive morphemes produced by a 4-year-old L2 speaker of English. Findings in thisresearch revealed that the child demonstrated a similar developmental pattern in the form of theu-shaped learning process (Abrahamsson, 2013:663).

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / El estudio propuesto aquí evalúa las actitudes de estudiantes en el colegio hacia la diversidad en Estados Unidos, el aprendizaje de español, la educación bilingüe y la motivación de aprender una lengua extranjera. Tambien, compara las actitudes de estudiantes tradicionales y de estudiantes en un programa de inmersión. los programas de inmersión y clases tradicionales no resultan en actitudes completamente diferentes hacia aspectos importantes de lenguas extranjeras. Tienen perspectivas similares hacia la integración de personas de culturas diferentes en sus escuelas y clases. Además, están de acuerdo sobre la importancia de español y los programas que promueven el bilingüismo en los Estados Unidos. Los estudiantes en el programa bilingüe tienen actitudes más positivas hacia la educación bilingüe, pero los resultados no muestran que tienen actitudes más positivas hacia el aprendizaje de español ni una motivación más alta que los estudiantes tradicionales.

After Norton Peirce's (1995, Norton, 2000) groundbreaking work in conceptualizing identity as "multiple, changing, and contradictory," many researchers have explored language learners' identities. However, few studies of identity have been conducted within the "overlooked and understudied" (Mathews-Aydinli, 2008) context of adult community ESL (English as a Second Language), and even fewer studies have focused on LESLLA (low-educated second language and literacy acquisition) learners in mainstream community ESL programs. This thesis, based on a case study of an adult LESLLA learner in a community ESL class, analyzes how this student's identity, the social context of her life, and the classroom space shaped her investment in participating in the ESL class. Ethnographic interviews revealed that the participant's investment in language learning was linked to her identity in multiple and contradictory ways: while the participant eventually left the ESL program, her self-identification as 'no preparada' (uneducated) and therefore 'burra' (stupid) seemed to be a motivating challenge, not an insurmountable obstacle, and her sense of investment in language learning remained strong even though her in-class participation was limited. The results have pedagogical as well as theoretical implications: there is clearly value in engaging learners' lives in the classroom as well as including learners' voices in research to have a clearer recognition of how learners see themselves and their "possible selves" (Dornyei, 2009) to be able to understand the complex factors that underlie their investments in language learning.

Strategic competence, or the cognitive resources necessary for utilizing language knowledge, is widely recognized as an essential component of second language (L2) ability. However, research on strategic competence in the context of L2 speaking assessment has been limited, and findings have been inconsistent, making it challenging to discern the nature of strategic competence and its relationship with L2 speaking performance. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to examine the cognitive dimension of L2 academic speaking ability and its role in L2 speaking performance. In an effort to capture a broadened construct of L2 academic speaking ability through the assessment of a real-world academic speaking competency that calls for the L2 learner’s use of language, topical, and cognitive resources, the current study utilized a scenario-based academic speaking test (i.e., SBEST) to assess the test-takers’ ability to orally present their ideas on a disciplinary topic. The SBEST was administered to 155 adult English language learners. The test scenario simulated an online journalism class, and the culminating task of the scenario required the test-takers’ participation in an online discussion forum. The test-takers were asked to listen to audio-visual materials on a specific topic related to journalism and perform a series of coherently sequenced strategy tasks leading up to the scenario goal. The strategy tasks were designed to elicit and assess the test-takers’ use of eight different cognitive and metacognitive strategies. The performances on the strategy tasks were scored and quantitatively analyzed using a variety of data analysis procedures (e.g., mean comparison, multiple regression, confirmatory factor analysis, and structural equation modeling) to investigate the functionality of the test instrument and its underlying constructs, explore the nature of test-taker performance, and examine the effects of strategic competence on L2 speaking performance. The findings indicated that the SBEST is a reliable and valid instrument for assessing academic speaking ability where L2, topical, and cognitive resources are required to effectively demonstrate the target academic speaking competency. The test-takers also exhibited improvement in their speaking performance, especially with regard to their disciplinary topical knowledge, suggesting that the SBEST facilitated learning. Additionally, the results provided supporting evidence that strategic competence is an integral component of L2 academic speaking ability and a significant contributor to L2 speaking performance. Finally, the study demonstrated that strategic competence can be appropriately addressed, operationalized, and possibly even scored in L2 assessments.

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This thesis is a study of the learning of English grammatical morphemes (copula, possessive, ING, plural, progressive auxiliary, irregular-past, regular-past, definite article, indefinite article, and the third-person-singular-present) by 31 Japanese high school students. The data were based on the results of the subjects' spoken language, which were tape-recorded and carefully investigated. The results indicated some similarities and differences between the present study and the previous L1 and L2 studies. The present study showed more similarities to the studies which dealt with Japanese subjects by both the Spearman rank order correlation coefficients and the Implicational Scaling Analysis based on Group Range. This indicates strong transfer from the Japanese language. But language transfer is not such a simple phenomena as the researchers in the Behaviorism era thought. Some methodological problems concerning the grammatical morpheme studies and possible determinants of the accuracy order of the morphemes were also discussed.

This dissertation is comprised of three teacher-researcher studies carried out with the intention of showing teachers how to move beyond the monolingual paradigm to build upon linguistic and cultural diversity in their everyday practice. The monolingual paradigm is linked to ideologies regarding proficiency in English as the principle means of academic success and citizenship. These studies challenge this traditional way of viewing education by treating learning "as an emerging property of whole persons' legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice" (Lave, 1991, p. 63), whether these are interest-based communities of practice beyond the classroom or bilingual communities of practice within the classroom. In order to recognize and explain this learning and inform teaching practices, I adopt a social semiotic approach in order to explore how meaning is constructed through language, and also through social interactions with all modern aspects of society, including gesture, image, performance, and music (Kress, 2012; van Leeuwen, 2005). I explore how these interactions allow youth to create diverse identities, beyond immigrant, refugee, limited English proficient, learner, and "other", in three educational arenas: 1) Outside of the classroom in interest-based communities of practice at school, 2) in a secondary dual-language content classroom, and 3) online in an educational transnational telecollaboration project. In all three studies I triangulate quantitative data of student participation and academic achievement with qualitative participant narratives and teacher-researcher observations. What results is insight into the impact of creating multimodal trajectories for youth to perform identities and knowledge as language users in schools, where historically messages of youth's social identities are ascribed in much more constricting ways (Harklau, 2003). Viewing these youth as language users, rather than learners, sends a message to both educators and youth that in education, identity formation trumps skills development, and this can lead to higher expectations, more engaging learning, and opportunities for youth to question race-language educational legacies (Malsbary, 2014; Wenger, 1998).

The Huang and Van Naerssen (1987) survey in Southern China proved conclusively that the more fluent Chinese L2 learners ofEnglish used more communicative strategies than their not :fluent counterparts. This study was an attempt to repeat the Huang and Van Naerssen study in a different setting with L2 learners of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. L2 learners of English at secondary level were chosen from four countries in which I had recently lived and worked. In addition an attempt was made to empirically test the validity of Schumann•s (1978) acculturation hypothesis on models for which it was not originally intended. A correlation was being sought between the level of acculturation ofL2 learners and their fluency in English. A cloze test was given to the one hundred and twenty-five L2 learners in the study in order to gauge their level of proficiency in English. A survey was then presented to L2 learners in all four countries, Chile, Paraguay, South Africa and Botswana. Part One of the survey asked questions related to acculturation. Part Two asked the same communicative questions used in the South China study. The results from the survey were inconclusive though the raw data for the communicative strategies and acculturation helped to show that the more proficient the student in English, the more likely he or she was to use communicative strategies or show a higher level of acculturation. The results were not statistically significant. / English Studies / M.A. (English)