The English-as-a-second-language (ESL) community college student population has increased notably in the past decade, but a decreasing number of these students are completing courses, programs, or degrees (Erisman & Looney, 2008). These students come to college with unique background experiences, and once in college, deal with challenging linguistic, academic, and social integration issues. Though they are not linguistically homogenous, and they do not have a common purpose, ESL students share the common goal of attending community college to learn to speak English (Szelényi & Chang, 2002). Course completion is a primary measure of progress toward that goal, and is therefore an issue of concern for both ESL students and community colleges, which continue to be the access point for language-minority students progressing into higher education (Laden, 2004). The purpose of this study was to investigate the factors that predict in-term persistence of community college ESL students. A mixed methods research design consisting of two phases was utilized, and participants in this study were ESL students enrolled in a large community college in south Florida. Phase 1 students completed the Community College ESL Student Questionnaire (CCSEQ), which collected demographic data and data on entry characteristics, academic integration, and social integration. Discriminant and descriptive analyses were used to report the data collected in Phase I. Phase 2 students were a matching cohort of completing and non-completing students who participated in semi-structured interviews at the end of the term. Data collected in the interviews were analyzed thematically, using a constant comparative method as described by Glaser and Strauss (1967). Students’ self reported demographic data, background characteristics, goal commitment, and integration factors on the CCSEQ showed no significance between the students who completed the term and the students who did not complete the term. However, several differentiating themes emerged from the interview data, which indicated differences in goal commitment and integration between the two groups. The focus of non-completers on getting good grades rather than completing the course, and the commitment of completers to the goal of finishing the class in order to go forward, both raise questions for future research studies.

The focus of this MA TESOL project was to develop promotional products for BYU's Community Outreach English (CORE) program. The purpose of these products is to create greater community awareness of the program and the resources it provides to learners. It is also hoped that the promotional products will aid in the process of recruiting students for the program from one year to the next. While the essential elements of the marketing mix (product, place, promotion, and price) were reviewed, an emphasis for this project was placed on promotion, which translated into developing materials for this purpose. Promotional materials that were created included a video of student testimonials, a new program name and logo, program flyers, and a Facebook page. The promotional video was viewed and evaluated by a group of past and future CORE instructors. From the teachers' feedback, the video was shortened, the text script was altered to make it more readable, and some video segments were edited and rearranged. After editing the video, a group of 36 CORE students were shown the video and data was collected with a follow- up survey. Feedback showed that 100% of the students felt the video provided an accurate description of the student experience in the CORE classes. Demographic information also obtained from the survey indicated that the CORE students generally do have access to the internet outside of class, that the majority have newly arrive in the U.S. within the past three years, and that the majority do not work. Further elaboration on the data is provided in the discussion of the findings.

Pronunciation instruction in the English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom often focuses exclusively on production and fails to address students’ perception problems. This report attempts to explain why L2 learners struggle to perceive and produce segments accurately in their L2 and what can be done to help L2 learners overcome these problems. Accordingly, the report explores how L1 experience and segmental differences between Vietnamese and English contribute to these English language learners’ perception and production problems. The report also considers instructional methods that can be used to help ESL learners overcome their perception and production challenges and recommends several approaches for addressing segments that are often difficult for Vietnamese learners. / text

Increased numbers of low educated adults lacking basic first language literacy skills are moving to the United States making literacy an important individual difference to consider in the field of second language acquisition and ESL instruction (Tarone, Bigelow, & Hansen, 2009; Young-Scholten, 2013). Many of the materials and instructional approaches typically used in ESL classes assume students are literate in their first languages which is increasingly not the case. These learners may be affected by difficult life experiences such as interrupted schooling resulting from long sojourns in refugee camps. Chapter one of this Report will give readers an introduction to some of these low-literate learners, focusing on the background of a specific group of Somali learners at Kakuma refugee camp. Chapters two and three review research on the development of literacy skills and the efficacy of various approaches to teaching basic literacy skills. Special attention is paid to how first language literacy skills might affect an individual's acquisition of L2 literacy. Chapter four examines a pilot ESL course which taught low-literate adult Somali refugees at Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya and suggests introducing basic first language literacy skills into the ESL course curriculum. / text

Faculty of Humanities School of Human and Community Development/Psychology 9503776d Kajeean@educ.wits.ac.za / This study investigated English Second Language (ESL) students’ experiences of academic writing in a tertiary institution. It focused particularly on ESL students’ interpretations of what is expected in academic writing. Consequently, ESL students’ expectations were compared and contrasted to the academic writing expectations of a group of academics in the same institution. The study aimed to explore how the concepts of Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) were manifest in the students’ expectations and writing. The main aim was to identify the BICS and CALP distinction in ESL students as explanatory of their ability to write academically. In other words, the assumption was that ESL students experience difficulty with writing because they achieve surface fluency in terms of BICS but do not seem to develop sufficient levels of CALP to cope with the demands of the curricula in academic study. The sample consisted of thirty first year ESL Psychology students and six academics who taught on the first year Psychology course. ESL student volunteers were organized into focus groups, while academics were asked to participate in semi-structured, individual interviews. The participants’ responses were recorded and subsequently analyzed using thematic content analysis. It was found that academic writing was conceptualized in terms of structure and content. Through this distinction, ESL students recognized that, although they are able to operate at surface levels of language proficiency they find it problematic to operate at deeper levels of cognitive academic language proficiency. This in turn explained why they found it difficult to perform higher order academic tasks that go beyond the rote recall of content to analysis, synthesis, evaluation and application of concepts and theory. Further findings were extrapolated that lie at the level of the ESL student and the tertiary institution. It was found that academic writing expectations needed to be communicated to students by academics in more distinct terms. The internalization of academic discourse by ESL students, and students in general, seemed to require further facilitation by academics in the tertiary community of practice. Furthermore, the study raised the issue of English Second Language as a label impacting on ESL student’s confidence, self-esteem and overall attitude towards transcending challenges associated with academic writing.

Abstract The purpose of this research was to explore, through interviews, miscue and retrospective miscue analysis, and retellings of stories, the oral reading performance of three English as a second language (ESL) students and their perceptions of the reading process, their knowledge of the English language cueing systems and their use of strategies in reading narrative and expository passages in English. The Burke Modified Reading Interview was administered to explore the students perceptions of the reading process and of themselves as readers. Additional interviews were conducted to obtain information about their schooling and literacy background. The students miscues while reading narrative and expository passage from an informal reading inventory were recorded, transcribed and coded using selected parts of Goodmans reading miscue inventory. Students listened to their miscues during retrospective miscue analysis sessions and engaged in self-reflection and exploratory talk to discuss why they made those miscues. The findings showed that the students perceptions of reading varied. The print-based readers relied heavily on graphophonic strategies and knowledge-based readers focused on semantic strategies in reading the selected passages. All of the participants read below their grade levels. The findings also revealed that these students created images and overarching schemata in their imaginations as they were reading the selected texts. The students performed better on passages about which they had strong background knowledge. Their relative performance with narrative and expository structures varied. It was concluded that ESL students need more instruction and experience in reading informational texts and need to learn new strategies for making inferences from the texts using their knowledge of the language cueing systems and their knowledge of the world. / Language and Literacy Education

This paper proposed a scalable chip multiprocessor architecture, which is called Hyper-scalar combined with the concept of superscalar and multithreaded architecture; hence, this architecture can enhance single-threaded performance by using core group and also supports multithreaded applications. System programmer can dynamically allocate the core groups to accelerate a single thread by extended system instructions. In order to solve the data dependence between all issued instructions the virtual shared register file is proposed. This mechanism allows the data in local register files to be accessed from other cores through the data switching path hardware and the instructions are executed only when the operands are available. The instructions within a single-threaded application can be dispatched to variable cores without re-compilation. This execution paradigm accelerates the single-threaded performance more flexibly. In the case of simulation and experimental framework, the ESL Model written in SystemC, a modeling language based on C++ is to provide hardware-oriented simulation platform and the MediaBench suite is selected for the experiments. On average, the Hyper-scalar architecture can accelerate single-threaded performance by 30% to 110% using 2 ~ 8 cores.

In multicultural cities such as Vancouver, high proportions of inner city residents and immigrants (including refugees, domestic care workers, and citizens for whom English is a foreign language) are, for various reasons, socially, economically, and politically excluded from the mainstream. In attempting to narrow the divide that separates those on the “outside” from those on the “inside” of society, the planning profession has become increasingly concerned with the idea of planning with, as opposed to for, marginalized individuals. This approach is most often referred to as “communitybased” or “empowerment” planning. This thesis explores the role conversational English as a Second Language (ESL) can play in the empowerment planning process by analyzing the “ESL Summer Pilot Project” as a case study. Collaboratively planned and implemented with residents of the Downtown Eastside (DTES) who patronize the UBC Learning Exchange, the story/ case study reveals how a total of DTES residents helped nearly 70 immigrants practice what they need to effectively integrate into society; that is a cultural understanding of the who, what, where, when, and most importantly, how questions relating to life in Canada, and the means to ask those questions- conversational English. The story also reveals how, by taking a leadership role, these DTES residents were able to increase their sense of self-confidence, self-esteem, and capacity to make a difference in their own lives and communities. After situating the ESL Summer Pilot Project story in the empowerment planning literature, I based my analysis on my own observations and on those of the nine “ESL facilitators” who participated in the focus groups I led after the pilot had concluded in the summer of 2004. What I found was that the empowerment planning process involves, more than anything, the development of mutually trusting, mindful, and caring “planner-participant” relationships and eventually, “participant-participant” relationships, that rely on the continued use of cross-cultural dialogue (or, in this case,conversational ESL) in order to link people’s knowledge and love to action.

In multicultural cities such as Vancouver, high proportions of inner city residents and immigrants (including refugees, domestic care workers, and citizens for whom English is a foreign language) are, for various reasons, socially, economically, and politically excluded from the mainstream. In attempting to narrow the divide that separates those on the “outside” from those on the “inside” of society, the planning profession has become increasingly concerned with the idea of planning with, as opposed to for, marginalized individuals. This approach is most often referred to as “communitybased” or “empowerment” planning. This thesis explores the role conversational English as a Second Language (ESL) can play in the empowerment planning process by analyzing the “ESL Summer Pilot Project” as a case study. Collaboratively planned and implemented with residents of the Downtown Eastside (DTES) who patronize the UBC Learning Exchange, the story/ case study reveals how a total of DTES residents helped nearly 70 immigrants practice what they need to effectively integrate into society; that is a cultural understanding of the who, what, where, when, and most importantly, how questions relating to life in Canada, and the means to ask those questions- conversational English. The story also reveals how, by taking a leadership role, these DTES residents were able to increase their sense of self-confidence, self-esteem, and capacity to make a difference in their own lives and communities. After situating the ESL Summer Pilot Project story in the empowerment planning literature, I based my analysis on my own observations and on those of the nine “ESL facilitators” who participated in the focus groups I led after the pilot had concluded in the summer of 2004. What I found was that the empowerment planning process involves, more than anything, the development of mutually trusting, mindful, and caring “planner-participant” relationships and eventually, “participant-participant” relationships, that rely on the continued use of cross-cultural dialogue (or, in this case,conversational ESL) in order to link people’s knowledge and love to action.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of writing strategies in promoting 13-15 years old Chinese ESL learners’ writing ability. Two writing strategies I selected in this study are Julia's (in James 2000) 8-step writing strategy and Englert's (1991) POWER strategy. Both writing strategies are designed based on Hayes and Flower's (1989) theory of writing process but with different steps in guiding writing. According to their different functions, these two strategies can stand for two main kinds of writing strategies at present. The study included two questionnaires and two writing tests designed for fifteen Chinese students who were chosen randomly in grade 3 of a middle school. Through the analysis of these questionnaires, the students’ attitude to writing and the functions of writing strategies were collected in order to keep the two tests reliable and authentic. And then, the pre-test was used to evaluate these students' primary level of English writing; in the post-test, these students were divided into three groups: the first two groups received two writing strategies and the last one was no strategy group. The comparison of their writing results between the two tests were analysed. Both writing strategies groups in the post-test showed the effectiveness of the given writing strategies .   Two writing strategies were chosen for this study according to the research objects' English level and cognitive capability. And the fifteen research objects chosen in Chinese middle school represent the average level of Chinese ESL learners in writing. The analysis of their results in both tests focused on the content of their writings and writing elements, such as, vocabulary, grammar, organization. In the qualitative research of the study, the 8-step writing strategy is shown to be the more effective one for 13-15 years old Chinese ESL learners.