<p> Students' and teachers' attitudes towards an English language teaching approach play an important role for its implementation success or failure. This study measured Pakistani government school students' and teachers' attitudes towards Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and Grammar Translation (GT). Two separate survey instruments were used to assess students' and teachers' attitudes. Data were collected from students and teachers at two government secondary schools located in Quetta, Balochistan, Pakistan. A total of 204 students (102 females and 102 males) and 13 teachers (five females and eight males) participated in this present study. Overall, both students and teachers showed favorable attitudes towards CLT. In contrast, both the teachers and students showed either less favorable attitudes or a neutral stance towards GT. Finally, this study suggests that policy makers consider adopting or adapting CLT to teach English in the aforementioned schools. Recommendations for future research are also suggested.</p>

<p> Languages can be categorized in terms of topic prominence or subject prominence. English is characterized as subject prominent while languages such as Chinese are considered topic prominent in structure. In subject prominence, the subject must always have a direct relationship, in terms of meaning with the verb, and the subject performs the action or exists in the state named by the verb. This is not the case in a topic prominent system, where the subject may be missing altogether (Li and Thompson 1981). Crucial to this study will be a comparison of word order and pragmatics between English and Chinese with their respective systems. Chinese learners of English have been observed to unknowingly "map" their Chinese discourse structure onto English sentences to fit this pattern (L1 function to L2 form) resulting in what has been called a "pseudo passive" construction (Han 2000). An example of a pseudo-passive would be: <i>New cars must keep inside.</i> This study will attempt to demonstrate that these pseudo passives are indeed an indication of transfer of L1 function to L2 form and that they persist in interlanguage even at advanced stages of proficiency. Appropriate pedagogical considerations will then be discussed.</p>

Abstract not available.

<p> The purpose of this study was to determine the validity of state standardized testing English Language Learners are required to participate in as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Although policymakers continue to debate the minutia of the academic accountability for English Language Learners, the over-arching question of test validity has continued to be ignored. Current federal requirements identify participation in state standardized testing of all English Language Learners who have been in country more than one academic year. Data collected for analysis included English Language Learners&rsquo; level of English proficiency, and state standardized testing scores in reading, English language arts, and mathematics. The goal was to determine, using quantitative data, correlations between these variables. The study concludes by highlighting factors to be considered that influence accountability policy at the state and federal level and by making suggestions for future research in the area of assessing English Language Learners for the purpose of increased accuracy for accountability in academic growth and performance.</p><p> Through the use of ex-post-facto data, the results of the study identified three findings. The first finding identified that there is a correlation between ELL students&rsquo; English language proficiency level and performance on state standardized testing in the areas of reading, English language arts, and mathematics. The second finding in the study, using the Washington English Language Proficiency Assessment (WELPA) to identify student English proficiency levels, recognized that there is a threshold between WELPA levels and the ELL students who are passing state standardized tests. The third finding recognized that there was no significant distinction in state standardized testing between the number of reading/English language arts tests and mathematics tests.</p>

<p> This dissertation seeks to understand college writing-center work between peer tutors and college students&mdash;called <i>peer tutoring</i>. Specifically, this study explores peer tutoring between deaf peer tutors and deaf tutees as they discuss academic writing. Further, this study investigates how deaf peer tutors and deaf tutees who are bilingual users of American Sign Language (ASL) and English use strategies to support the learning of academic writing during a tutorial session in a writing center. My review of the writing-center literature shows that research on the topic of a deaf peer tutor (DPT) and a deaf tutee (DT) as a pair is limited. While the literature on deaf tutees is expanding, the research studies on deaf peer tutors remain little understood. In fact, the literature on the retention rate of deaf college students remains low and persistent (Marschark &amp; Hauser, 2008). I conducted a qualitative case study to explore the DPT-DT interaction in a writing-center setting with a theoretical framework of (1) sociocultural, (2) ASL/English bilingual, and (3) Deaf Critical (DeafCrit) theories. The analytical framework contains an early form of grounded theory analysis and a four-layer discourse analysis, which highlights the micro and macro views of the DPT-DT interaction. One of the three main findings shows that the study participants relied on visual discourse markers, consisting of signed modality and peripheral communication, which clearly supports deaf-student learning of academic writing in English. Another finding reveals that tutors offered many `explaining incidents' compared to the other five means of assistance: giving feedback, questioning, giving hints, modeling, and instructing. Finally, the third finding relates to the participants' lived experiences of audism during their school years where they experienced limited access to learning English incidentally&mdash;a form of oppression. This research effort has the potential to promote writing support for deaf students and writing-center practices for hearing and deaf tutors who are interested in working with deaf students. Further, this research effort has the potential to improve the retention rate for deaf college students and to increase career opportunities for deaf peer tutors in the writing-center field.</p><p> Keywords: Academic writing, writing center, peer tutoring, deaf college students, discourse markers, sociocultural theories, ASL/English bilingual theory, DeafCrit</p><p>

<p> Abstract not available.</p>

<p> This study investigated whether learners with a phonemic vowel quantity distinction (VQD) in their L1 have an advantage when acquiring allophonic vowel length in L2. Many languages contain a phonological rule to devoice final consonants. While English maintains a phonemic contrast between voiced and voiceless syllable codas ("bat" vs. "bad," e.g.), it accompanies an allophonic contrast in the duration of the preceding vowel, resulting in longer vowels before voiced codas than before voiceless ones. German-L1 English learners (group 1), whose L1 has devoiced codas and VQD, and Russian-L1 English learners (group 2), whose L1 also devoices codas but has no VQD, performed a vowel production and XAB vowel perception task, designed to determine whether group 1 perceived and produced longer vowels before English voiced stop codas, compared to group 2. Both perceived but did not produce vowel lengthening before English voiced codas, which was significantly different from native English speakers. </p>

<p> The increased number of English language learners (ELLs) presents a difficult task for middle school building principals. The challenge of ensuring the success of ELLs in future years will force schools to rethink educational practices. This study focused on how middle school building principals strategically planned, organized, and managed their schools to meet the needs of ELLs. The phenomenological study was based on the growing student population of English as a second language (ESL) in school districts in Eastern New York. Ten principals were interviewed and a triangulation of data was achieved through observation and collection of documents. The researcher found through bridging that middle school principals engaged in relationship building with parents, students, teachers, and community to create a sense of belonging in the school. As a result, principals are encouraged to provide professional opportunities for the faculty to become certified ESL teachers, accessible to community members, bilingual, and engaged in community building.</p>

<p>This study investigates features of high-level academic writing in English with the aim of understanding the development of L2 English learners&rsquo; academic writing skills as they follow a course of study in an English-speaking country. The study focuses on L2 writers&rsquo; text quality and use of clause subordinators as a measure of writing complexity. The typology of the writers&rsquo; L1s provides the organizational framework for the study, with three language typology groupings determined by a writer&rsquo;s L1 word order tendency: (1) configurational languages, (2) nonconfigurational languages, and (3) Asian languages. </p><p> The corpus analyzed included written work collected at the beginning, the middle, and the end of a semester from 19 international graduate-level students enrolled in a semester-long academic writing course specifically for international students. The principal features examined in the corpus of texts collected were writers&rsquo; use and frequency of subordinators, and text comprehensibility. To provide a comparative reference for the academic writing course findings, a separate dataset composed of 240 TOEFL^&reg;iBT independent essays was also examined for evidence of similar features. </p><p> The results revealed that (1) writers from configurationally different L1s write texts in English that are significantly different in quality and complexity, and; (2) the analysis of the significant differences between groups&mdash;sentence length, sentence complexity, comprehensibility, total subordinator frequency, and specific subordinator usage&mdash;shows the groups are distinct in their text construction and use of subordination, and that the configurational group&rsquo;s texts are most different from other groups. Writers&rsquo; self-reflections on the progression of their writing skills during the study abroad context add insights to the quantitative findings. The study&rsquo;s findings suggest directions for future research in L2 writing development, inform EFL pedagogy and L2 English learners&rsquo; preparation for study abroad, and underscore the importance of colleges and universities providing comprehensive writing support to incoming international students. </p>

<p> Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty producing and perceiving non-native phonological contrasts. Even highly proficient bilinguals, who have been exposed to an L2 for long periods of time, struggle with difficult contrasts, such as /r/-/l/ for Japanese learners of English. To account for the relative ease or difficulty with which L2 learners perceive and acquire non-native contrasts, theories of (L2) speech perception often appeal to notions of similarity. But how is similarity best determined?</p><p> In this dissertation I explored the predictions of two theoretical approaches to similarity comparison in the second language, and asked: [1] How should L2 sound similarity be measured? [2] What is the nature of the representations that guide sound similarity? [3] To what extent can the influence of the native language be overcome?</p><p> In Chapter 2, I tested a `legos' (featural) approach to sound similarity. Given a distinctive feature analysis of Spanish and English vowels, I investigated the hypothesis that feature availability in the L1 grammar constrains which target language segments will be accurately perceived and acquired by L2 learners (Brown [1998], Brown [2000]). Our results suggest that second language acquisition of phonology is not limited by the phonological features used by the native language grammar, nor is the presence/use of a particular phonological feature in the native language grammar sufficient to trigger redeployment. I take these findings to imply that feature availability is neither a necessary, nor a sufficient condition to predict learning outcomes.</p><p> In Chapter 3, I extended a computational model proposed by Feldman et al. [2009] to nonnative speech perception, in order to investigate whether a sophisticated `rulers' (spatial) approach to sound similarity can better explain existing interlingual identification and discrimination data from Spanish monolinguals and advanced L1 Spanish late-learners of English, respectively. The model assumes that acoustic distributions of sounds control listeners' ability to discriminate a given contrast. I found that, while the model succeeded in emulating certain aspects of human behavior, the model at present is incomplete and would have to be extended in various ways to capture several aspects of nonnative and L2 speech perception.</p><p> In Chapter 4 I explored whether the phonological relatedness among sounds in the listeners native language impacts the perceived similarity of those sounds in the target language. Listeners were expected to be more sensitive to the contrast between sound pairs which are allophones of different phonemes than to sound pairs which are allophones of the same phoneme in their native language. Moreover, I hypothesized that L2 learners would experience difficulty perceiving and acquiring target language contrasts between sound pairs which are allophones of the same phoneme in their native language. Our results suggest that phonological relatedness may influence perceived similarity on some tasks, but does not seem to cause long-lasting perceptual difficulty in advanced L2 learners.</p><p> On the basis of those findings, I argue that existing models have not been adequately explicit about the nature of the representations and processes involved in similarity-based comparisons of L1 and L2 sounds. More generally, I describe what I see as a desirable target for an explanatorily adequate theory of cross-language influence in L2 phonology.</p>