A validity study can be used to investigate the effectiveness of an exam and reveal both its strengths and weaknesses. This study concerns an investigation of the writing portfolio Level Achievement Test (LAT) at the English Language Center (ELC) of Brigham Young University (BYU). The writing portfolios of 251 students at five proficiency levels were rated by 11 raters. Writing portfolios consisted of two coursework essays, a self-reflection assignment, and a 30-minute timed essay. Quantitative methods included an analysis with Many-Facet Rasch Model (MFRM) software, called FACETS, which looked for anomalies in levels, classes, examinees, raters, writing criteria, and the rating scale categories. Qualitative methods involved a rater survey, rater Think Aloud Protocols (TAPs), and rater interviews. Results indicated that the exam has a high degree of validity based on the MFRM analysis. The survey and TAPs revealed that although raters follow a similar pattern for rating portfolios, they differed both in the time they took to rate portfolios and in the degree to which they favored the rating criteria. This may explain some of the discrepancies in the MFRM rater analysis. Conclusions from the MFRM analysis, surveys, TAPs, and interviews were all used to make recommendations to improve the rating process of the LAT, as well as to strengthen the relationship between LAT rating and classroom teaching and grading.

After careful review of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Medical Purposes (EMP) literature, I assisted in the development of a curriculum for an ESP Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) Preparation course. The course participants were non-native English speaking employees of Utah Valley Regional Medical Center (UVRMC), currently working in the department of housekeeping, wanting to further their employment opportunities. The ESP CNA Preparation course was 12 weeks duration, three days per week, 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm. My contribution to the curriculum was the development of teaching materials and methods and I used two guiding questions to assist in the development of the materials: • What form should effective materials take for an ESP CNA preparation course? • How effective were these materials? From all the ESP / EMP related literature that I reviewed, I found three studies (Orr, 2002; Bosher & Smallkowski, 2002; Dias, 1999) that had a strong emphasis, closely related to our curriculum, on different aspects of materials development. The literature provided a basis for the outline of materials to be developed for the ESP CNA Preparation course. An in-depth needs and situational analysis, close observation of the CNA course and ongoing Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) coursework, added to the basis established from the review of literature. The CNA course gave the project team opportunities to observe what English skills a non-native English speaker (NNES) would need to participate appropriately, and with different people observing we gathered different perspectives. The materials development process reviews the types (e.g., lesson plans, activities, worksheets, audio etc) and purpose of materials developed. After two week increments of the ESP CNA Preparation course, I critically reviewed the things that I learned from the use of my materials (e.g., lesson plan format, time allocations, teaching methodology, materials that did not enhance language skills etc). My materials went through a refining process. Three things I learned from this project are: • To teach an effective ESP curriculum, an ESL and a content expert are required. • Materials developed for an ESP course come from a variety of sources. • The development of materials is a progressional process.

The grammar course objectives at Brigham Young University's English Language Center (ELC) are a list of grammar structures for each level that students are expected to be able to master. These objectives currently are only measured by pencil-paper grammar tests, providing information regarding receptive grammar ability only. Therefore, there is a need for an oral grammar assessment to measure productive grammar ability, providing diagnostic and achievement information about the specific grammar objectives. This project is a web-based oral grammar assessment tool that enables teachers to assess students' mastery of the structures covered in the ELC grammar classes. The core of the project is an online database of speaking tasks designed to target specific grammar structures. Teachers can access the database through a website and create assessments using groups of selected speaking tasks. Then, students access the speaking tasks through a separate recording application that has been developed to display the prompts and record students' responses. Teachers can access the recorded responses on the website and rate the responses, using a rubric to measure students' mastery of each grammar structure. An evaluation of the project reveals that students and teachers feel that it is beneficial in providing practice and self-assessment opportunities. Most students like using the program and consider it helpful. However, a major challenge is the time required of teachers to listen to students' responses in order to use the program for actual assessment and give effective feedback. As the program is used more widely, future research needs to investigate the reliability and validity of the tasks and using the rubric for assessment.

Treating Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker as Erziehungsroman—that is, stories whose coming-of-age process depends on the characters' education—reveals the similar process that both Esperanza Cordero and Henry Park experience as they navigate the 1960s and 1970s American school system. The most important obstacle in Esperanza's and Henry's ability to achieve academically is the contract of vagueness, the tacit agreement between federal education policy and English language learning (ELL) students to misunderstand one another. Differing cultural conceptions of education perpetuate this mutually detrimental relationship between education policy and ELL students, forcing Henry and Esperanza to choose between satisfying the cultural expectations of their ethnic communities and fulfilling the cultural expectations of their schools, a decision which initially appears mutually exclusive. Exacerbated by their school experiences, both Henry and Esperanza go through a process of rejecting and reclaiming their ethnicity as they come to terms with their ethnic identity. That both characters eventually turn to social advocacy as a solution not only to their own educational struggles but also to the ghettoization of their ethnic communities suggests cosmopolitanism as a solution to the constraints of the contract of vagueness, both for Henry and Esperanza and for their ethnic communities.

The purpose of this study was to test the effect of one approach to writing pedagogy on second-language (L2) writing accuracy. This study used two groups of L2 writers who were learning English as a second language: a control group (n = 19) who were taught with traditional process writing methods and a treatment group (n = 28) who were taught with an innovative approach to L2 writing pedagogy. The methodology for the treatment group was designed to improve L2 writing accuracy by raising the linguistic awareness of the learners through error correction. Central to the instructional methodology were four essential characteristics of error correction including feedback that was manageable, meaningful, timely, and constant. Core components of the treatment included having students write a 10-minute composition each day, and having teachers provide students with coded feedback on their daily writing, help students to use a variety of resources to track their progress, and encourage students to apply what they learned in subsequent writing. Fourteen repeated measures tests using a mixed model ANOVA suggest that the treatment improved mechanical accuracy, lexical accuracy, and certain categories of grammatical accuracy. Though the treatment had a negligible effect on rhetorical competence and writing fluency, findings suggest a small to moderate effect favoring the control group in the development of writing complexity. These findings seem to contradict claims from researchers such as Truscott (2007) who have maintained that error correction is not helpful for improving the grammatical accuracy of L2 writing. The positive results of this study are largely attributed to the innovative methodology for teaching and learning L2 writing that emphasizes linguistic accuracy rather than restricting instruction and learning to other dimensions of writing such as rhetorical competence. The limitations and pedagogical implications of this study are also examined.

With the new curriculum at the English Language Center (ELC) at Brigham Young University (BYU) including a program focused specifically on preparing students to succeed in academic institutions wherein the language of instruction is English, a need for a systematic approach to vocabulary instruction was identified. Specifically, the Academic Program focuses on the Academic Word List (AWL) in order to provide a broad base of words that can best prepare students for the academic world. This project followed the ADDIE model (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate) to craft a systematic approach to developing vocabulary learning activities. An analysis of existing gaps in the Academic Program's vocabulary learning objectives, along with an examination of teachers' attitudes and understanding, was conducted. A similar need was also proposed as existing in many Intensive English Programs (IEPs) around the world. This was followed by research into effective principles of L2 vocabulary learning, through which four principles were distilled. These principles are: the use of a variety of strategies, multiple exposures to target words, practice that includes production, and the need for flexibility and practicality in the vocabulary activities. These four principles became the guiding principles in the development of a system for creating effective vocabulary learning activities. This system and many suggested activities comprise a guide, or set of specifications, that can be used by teachers at IEPs, with a specific eye to the ELC to effectively, and with little extra effort, create and utilize their own effective vocabulary learning activities.

This dissertation investigates the challenges faced by learners of English for academic purposes (EAP) when required to complete writing assignments that use source texts. In order to address this problem, I explore the issue from the perspectives of applied linguistic researchers, writing program administrators, and classroom composition instructors. These three perspectives are highlighted in distinct articles that build on one another to create a more complete understanding of the challenges that EAP students face when writing from sources. The first article contains a literature review of relevant studies that explore the reading-to-write construct. Experts suggest that unintentional plagiarism, or patchwriting, can be attributed to a lack of cultural and linguistic competence. In order to address these limitations, researchers identify several reading and writing subskills that are integral to success in academic source writing. The literature review concludes with recommendations for teaching and testing contexts. The second article details a rater training evaluation study that resulted in unexpected, but welcomed, recommendations. Teacher-raters provided feedback that influenced how the institution made use of benchmark portfolios to train teacher-raters as well as inform students about writing achievement standards. The increased use of benchmark portfolios also helped to clarify classroom and program standards regarding citation, attribution, and anti-plagiarism policies. The final article is a practical guide for classroom composition instructors. I outline a recommended curriculum for teaching source writing to EAP students. The guide incorporates the findings of the literature review and the evaluation study into a collaborative and iterative pedagogical model. This recursive approach to EAP writing instruction helps students to diagnose and develop the advanced literacy subskills required for successful source integration into their writing. As a set, the three articles demonstrate that effective solutions to instructional issues can be developed when a problem is approached from multiple perspectives. Indeed, linguistics-based research, program administration, and teacher experience can be combined to produce a model for writing instruction that acknowledges principles of second-language advanced literacy and accounts for learner struggles as students develop source writing skills.

This thesis documents the process of developing and evaluating a curriculum written for adult literacy students transitioning from their current literacy goals to academic and occupational pursuits. The curriculum, titled the Basic College Skills Transition Curriculum (BCS Transition Curriculum), was written for students at Project Read, a non-profit adult literacy program located at the Provo Library in Provo, Utah. The model used to design this curriculum is a variation on the ADDIE model (analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation), including the reiterative steps of research and evaluation. The lesson plans and materials in the BCS Transition Curriculum include the topics of U.S. History Vocabulary, Textbook Reading Skills, Lecture Note-Taking Skills, Study Organization Skills, Test-Taking Skills, Computer Skills, and Time-Management Skills. The curriculum is content-based, with each skill being taught through the content subject of U.S. History. This allows vocabulary to be recycled through each lesson plan and creates more opportunities for vocabulary acquisition. This also ties the curriculum together in an integrated experience that simulates an academic course in U.S. History. After the lesson plans were developed, tutors and students used the lesson plans and participated in an evaluation of the curriculum. Their feedback gave direction for revisions and provided ideas for the future development of this curriculum. Some lessons learned during this project about curriculum design include the importance of 1) including the curriculum designer's needs in the needs assessment; 2) clearly communicating needs and constraints to collaborators and stakeholders; 3) planning for problems and accepting limitations in the product; and 4) collaborating with others.

The present study replicated the research framework of a previous study (Biber, Gray, & Poonpon, 2011) that identifies the grammatical complexity of L1 professional academic prose as strongly favoring a dense use of phrasal nominal modifiers such as prepositional phrases as postmodifiers, attributive adjectives, and nouns as premodifiers which characterize its unique structurally compressed discourse style. The main purpose of the present study was to explore syntactic similarities and differences between L1 professional and L2 student academic writing in terms of their reliance on phrasal/nominal compression features to determine characteristics of the grammatical complexity of advanced ESL academic writing. To this end, the distributional patterns of use for 25 specific grammatical complexity features of structural elaboration and compression were investigated in a corpus of 128 short academic essays collected from 16 advanced ESL learners and 16 L1 university students (as comparison data).The results showed a heavier reliance of both the advanced ESL and L1 student academic writing on phrasal nominal modifiers (attributive adjectives and prepositional phrases as postmodifiers) of structural compression than on clausal elaboration features, which lent empirical support to Biber, Gray, and Poonpon’s (2011) findings. In addition to the phrasal compression features, both the advanced ESL and L1 student academic writing were also characterized by a prominent use of specific colloquial grammatical devices such as adverbs as adverbials. Compared to the advanced ESL writing, the L1 student academic writing showed a significantly more preference for one particular colloquial feature: ZERO relative clauses where relative pronouns replacing relativized objects are omitted. This combined reliance on both phrasal compression devices and colloquial features in both the advanced ESL and L1 student academic writing distinguished their grammatical complexities from that of L1 professional academic prose and signaled a possibility for recognizing them as a transitional developmental stage from more casual to more academic writing.

In the curriculum for the compulsory school it is stated that teachers should provide gender equal environments free from gender bias. Furthermore, some researchers suggests that the EFL (English as a foreign language) classroom in particular is an important place for the regulation and production of gender. As a result, I decided to explore some EFL teacher’s attitudes towards gender bias and how they work with gender equality in their classrooms. To do this, I conducted semi-structured interviews with two 4-6 EFL teachers. Prior research on the subject suggests that EFL teaching materials often contain gender biased depictions. Despite this, some researchers do not consider this a problem since teachers should be able to work around these types of issues. Instead, looking at research on how much attention boys and girls receive in the classroom, boys often come out on top. However, this is likely due to the teacher more frequently telling the boys to not disturb their classmates. When it comes to students own attitudes, some research claims that boys undermine girls in the classroom and consider femininity as something negative. Shifting focus to the consequences of gender bias, research proposes that it may result in passivity and lack of self-esteem for the victim. Lastly, according to research, some strategies for counteracting gender bias includes teachers having students reflect on the problems with gender bias, changing the gender of characters in texts and alternating between boys and girls when asking questions to ensure a gender equal distribution of talking time. Through the two interviews I conducted, I learned that both teachers have seen consequences of gender bias similar to those described in the research. They also agree that there are norms affecting student’s behaviors that may restrict their participation and learning. The male norm is brought up as something particularly bad. To discourage these norms, and gender bias in general, the two teachers suggests several strategies. This includes complementing traditional teaching materials with more nuanced sources, encouraging a critical stance in terms of discourse, making sure that every students is active and placing their desks strategically.