The purpose of this Electronic Film Review (EFR) Project was to take the feature film October Sky and apply the EFR approach to an ESL setting. By the use of a special EFRaid player, high-intermediate to low-advanced ESL/EFL students access vocabulary and cultural material in short segmented clips in order to improve their listening and overall comprehension of the film. This material was developed and tested by the materials developer of this project.

In order to help ESL missionaries teach the gospel from their hearts using their own words, I have developed a 500-word list of core gospel vocabulary in English. To enhance the 500-word list, I included a lexicon with simple definitions, some grammatical information, and examples of the words in context. The resulting product complies with the standards for master's projects established by the Department of Linguistics and English Language. Published literature shows that the development of specialized corpora can be beneficial for students learning another language. Additionally, specialized corpora act as a catalyst for in-depth vocabulary analysis and the development of other materials associated with the field of language acquisition. Using the 5,013 lexical items from the Preach My Gospel manual and related materials, I developed a specialized vocabulary list of 500-words. To achieve this, I used a number of strategies to reduce the larger compilation of words into the most useful and essential core vocabulary: a pre-rating selection that resulted in 2,419 words, a non-native ESL-instructor rating that resulted in the selection of 994 words, a post-rater researcher analysis that resulted in 425 words, a range-and-frequency analysis that resulted in 634 words, and a think-out-loud analysis that resulted in 500 words. After creating the 500-word list, I implemented and tested the materials with ESL missionaries at the Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Provo, Utah. I gathered feedback from ESL teachers and missionaries through interviews and a questionnaire. Based on their responses, I determined that the 500-word list is useful in helping missionaries learn essential vocabulary and to teach gospel topics in English. Furthermore, the materials have drawn attention from administrators and developers at the MTC, creating a springboard for future projects at the MTC.

This project describes the piloting of a family literacy curriculum developed for use in a community ESL course. The purpose of this curriculum was to teach family-literacy-oriented English to students in the community ESL courses that are part of Brigham Young University's TESOL Teacher Training Course (TTTC) held at the University Parkway Center on BYU's campus. Students in BYU's TESOL Graduate Certificate program are required to complete a one-semester teaching practicum in the TTTC program. This program regularly offers English courses that enroll approximately 100 ESL students from the local community who are non-native speakers of English. These ESL students have an oral proficiency interview before classes begin and are placed in an appropriate level according to their ability to communicate in English. Graduate students (hereafter referred to as teachers) design their own course and syllabus and teach classes in pairs. Classes last for approximately ten weeks. The TTTC administration allowed the author of this study, a student in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at BYU, to design a family literacy curriculum for the teachers to implement for two weeks of their classes. This report relates the preparation of the curriculum, the needs analysis of the students, the needs analysis of the teachers implementing the curriculum, the situational analysis of the TTTC program, the design of the curriculum, and its implementation and evaluation. In addition, this report describes the instruments used to evaluate the curriculum. Finally, it draws conclusions about the worth of the curriculum, and it gives suggestions for future work in family literacy curriculum development for speakers of other languages.

One of the major questions in second language (L2) phonological learning is whether perception precedes (and therefore guides) production. This question is important for knowing what types of training most benefit L2 learners. While most theories assume that perception always precedes production (e.g., Best, 1995; Flege, 1995), several recent studies have found that production may precede perception (e.g., Baker & Trofimovich, 2006; Beach, Brunham, & Kitamura, 2001; Goto, 1971; Sheldon & Strange, 1982; Underbakke, 1993), demonstrating that this complex relationship may differ depending on how and when the L2 is learned. The current study seeks to further explore this relationship by examining how perception and production influence each other on the suprasegmental (i.e., primary word stress) level. While many studies have examined whether perceptual training can influence production accuracy of suprasegmentals, little to no research has examined whether the opposite is true. Thus the goal of this study was to examine whether ESL learners who were trained in suprasegmental pronunciation accuracy improved in listening and speaking more than similar students who were trained in perception accuracy. Comparisons of pre- and post-tests suggest that focusing on accurate production improves not only production accuracy, but also listening comprehension more than does training in listening comprehension. These results enlighten our understanding of how perception and production influence each other, and may underscore the importance of providing bottom-up pronunciation skills for improving L2 phonological learning.

Evaluation is an important process in any language program curriculum to determine whether the program is meeting the needs of students, teachers and others who are involved in the program. The English Language Center (ELC) at Brigham Young University (BYU) is a unique institution that functions as 1) a language school for students from different backgrounds and with various purposes of learning English and 2) as a lab school for undergraduate and graduate students studying TESOL at BYU to have practical teaching experiences. Because of these two purposes, there are constant changes to the curriculum at the ELC. Evaluation is done to measure the effectiveness of such changes in the curriculum. This project is the development of a systematic evaluation model, specifically applies to the ELC context, which will provide organization and direction in conducting effective evaluations. The three major purposes of this project are to 1) increase awareness in evaluations, which leads to professional development in teachers and administrators, 2)reduce the time spent on evaluations with the proposed evaluation model, and 3) unify the evaluation projects at the ELC based on the ELC curriculum philosophy and principles. The main focus of this evaluation model is on the ELC Curriculum Philosophy and the guiding principles, which define what a successful curriculum should include. In-depth study of this philosophy, definitions and principles of the ELC curriculum, combined with the study of the evaluation models previously introduced in the field of language program evaluation were done to develop this ELC curriculum evaluation model. The process included the participation and support from the Executive Council who makes the majority of the decisions at the ELC. This model was developed using Microsoft Word 2007. It is intended to function as a reference guide for those who are interested in conducting evaluations at the ELC. This reference book includes the evaluation model and other practical worksheets and documents for conducting the evaluations at the ELC.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether language aptitude and the use of language strategies predict pronunciation gains in second language (L2) acquisition. A second goal was to determine whether these factors differed depending on whether learning occurred in an English as a second language (ESL) or English as a foreign language (EFL) learning context. Eighty-six ESL students in the United States and one hundred EFL students in China were asked to take the Pimsleur language aptitude test. The top 15 or 16 and lowest 15 or 16 scorers on this test from each group were asked to complete a test of pronunciation proficiency and a pronunciation strategies inventory at the beginning and end of a 10-week speaking class in which they were enrolled. The pre and post pronunciation tests were rated and pronunciation proficiency gains in global foreign accent, fluency, comprehensibility and accuracy were compared to both Pimsleur test scores and use of pronunciation strategies before and after training. Results indicated that general language aptitude did not predict pronunciation gains regardless of type of setting (ESL or EFL), but that auditory aptitude may be linked to pronunciation proficiency. Analyses revealed that specific pronunciation strategies were strong predictors of pronunciation gain for comprehensibility and accuracy gains. The findings for this study suggest that pronunciation strategies seem to play a bigger role in pronunciation improvement than language aptitude and are effective in both ESL and EFL settings.

The focus of this project was to develop self-directed pronunciation materials for a specialized group of English as a second language (ESL) learners—missionaries at the Provo Missionary Training Center (MTC) of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A set of six Cued Pronunciation Readings (CPRs) were developed. CPRs are computer-based, self-directed pronunciation materials designed to help students perceive pausing, word stress, and sentence-final intonation in spoken English and practice these features through a sequence of oral reading tasks. The CPRs developed in this project were based on essential missionary communicative tasks and utilized high-frequency gospel vocabulary. These tasks included saying set prayers, reciting relevant scripture passages, and bearing testimonies on gospel principles. These materials, originally developed in Microsoft PowerPoint, were converted for use in an MTC application called Assessment Tools. Following development, the materials were tested with a group of ESL missionaries in the Provo MTC. Fourteen missionaries used the materials during a three-week period. They were encouraged to spend 10–15 minutes each day in the computer lab working on the tasks. At the end of three weeks, a posttest survey was administered to obtain the missionaries' feedback. The missionaries' use of the materials and their reactions are discussed. Suggestions are given for the further development of similar materials and for further implementation of these materials at the MTC.

This project resulted in the creation of a prototype for a new book series entitled Instructional Readers that will be linguistically engineered to assist English-language learners in acquiring academic and content-based vocabulary in the sciences. The development of the prototype represented a process of trial and error, with decisions firmly grounded in extensive research concerning linguistic features that assist vocabulary growth while reading. The end result, the prototype entitled Cellular Transport, reflects the author's best attempt to combine these features. The project write-up details the steps used in writing the prototype to aid in the creation of similar instructional readers in the future.

The focus of this thesis was to develop vocabulary materials to supplement those already in use for emergent literate Burundian refugees preparing for the U.S. Citizenship Test. These learners study in conjunction with the International Rescue Committee in Salt Lake City, Utah, and with volunteer tutors who help them study. The flashcards and supporting activities were designed to better enable tutors to teach learners highly-dense vocabulary items, as well as to provide vocabulary scaffolding support for both learners and tutors and to increase depth of vocabulary knowledge with the target vocabulary. The U.S. Citizenship Test Vocabulary Flashcards and Vocabulary Support booklet were the products of a frequency-based vocabulary analysis to provide content-focused vocabulary instruction. This thesis details the steps and rationale of the process used to create these materials.

This study examined the effect of two forms of feedback (qualitatitive and quantitative) on the development of the spoken fluency of English language learners. Sixty-five intermediate- high students from 22 countries and 11 native languages enrolled in an intensive English language program at the English Language Center, Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, participated.Throughout the 11-week course, the treatment group (consisting of 33 participants) received feedback on a weekly basis during speaking assessment tasks. The first form of feedback consisted of a quantitative analysis of their spoken fluency. This analysis, performed by PRAAT acoustic analysis software, measured several key features: speech rate (syllables per minute), pause frequency and duration, fillers, false starts, and connectedness of speech (mean length of run). In addition to measurements of their own performance, participants were presented with data on the average performance of their peers, as well as measurements of how closely their performance approximated the fluency measurements of a native speaker.The second form of feedback was qualitative, consisting of written descriptions of the participants` dysfluencies including fillers, high pause frequency and duration, low speech rate and false starts. Participants also received qualitative feedback in the form of self-assessment where they analyzed their own previously made recordings.Following the completion of the treatment, participants completed a survey eliciting their perceptions of the forms and effectiveness of feedback they had received over the course of the treatment. Though participants reported that the feedback (especially the qualitative variety) was useful, through statistical analysis of test and task scores it was found that other than for filler and false starts, feedback was not a significant factor in influencing the students' improvement over the course of the semester, and it is probable that other factors (task repetition) played a larger role.