<p> Collocations, two or more words that co-occur (e.g., <i>extensive research, conduct a study),</i> are linked with native-like lexical accuracy and fluency. Yet even advanced-level second language (L2) learners frequently have difficulty producing appropriate collocations. To help them achieve accurate and fluent collocation production, researchers believe that L2 writers should take advantage of learner friendly collocation tools. To explore whether L2 writers benefit from collocation tools, the current study examined the effect of three collocation tools (two online and one paper) on accurate production of collocations in L2 writing. The collocation tools included (a) the <i> Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English</i> (LDOCE) (online), (b) <i> Macmillan Collocation Dictionary</i> (MCD) (online), and (c) <i> wordandphrase.info</i> (WPI) (paper).</p><p> L2 writers of English (<i>N</i> = 45) in an intensive English program (IEP) in the southwestern part of the USA were divided into three groups. Each group was provided with collocation training for a different collocation tool. After training, each group used the collocation tool to correct 16 miscollocations (8 verb + noun; 8 adjective + noun) embedded in an essay-format collocation test. After each test, the participants completed a quality review checklist. The procedure was repeated three times so that each group used each tool but in a different order; thus, the study employed a Latin Square Design.</p><p> This study used quantitative data to examine the effect of these three collocation tools on L2 learners&rsquo; ability to self-correct collocations in their own writing. Qualitative data were used to further understand L2 writers&rsquo; use of and perception of the collocation tools.</p><p> The results indicated that online collocation tools (LDOCE and WPI) contributed more than a book collocation dictionary (MCD) to accurate collocation production in L2 writers&rsquo; essays. L2 writers favored WPI because it was easier to navigate and it helped them locate the correct collocations. Furthermore, both online tools, namely, LDOCE and WPI, helped the participants correct more collocations than MCD. Focusing on the type of collocations, the participants made more accurate collocation corrections to adjective + noun collocations than to verb + noun collocations.</p><p> The study has several implications. First, English language teachers need to introduce collocation tools to L2 writers because without such introductions, L2 writers will remain unaware of the availability of useful collocation tools. Second, L2 writers will benefit from explicit collocation introduction to and practice with strategies for using collocation tools effectively. Such training will help L2 writers improve their collocation accuracy and fluency. Third, learners should be able to differentiate verbs, adjectives, and nouns. These parts of speech are important to assist learners in producing appropriate verb + noun and adjective + noun collocations.</p>

<p> The purpose of this research is to determine whether speech shadowing influences the values of voice onset time (VOT) of word-initial consonants, /b/, /p/, /t/, /d/, and /k/ in reading and speaking conditions after a four-week training period. Twenty participants separated into two groups from a learning center in Taipei, Taiwan were recruited for this experiment. Mann-Whitney U tests were conducted to compare the values of VOT of five word-initial consonants in reading and speaking conditions, and narrative analyses were conducted to distinguish the differences among reading, speaking, and shadowing conditions. The results indicate that after the training period, the pronunciations of the consonants /b/, /p/, and /d/ had changed in reading and speaking conditions. The teaching of English pronunciation in Taiwan elementary schools was discussed and speech shadowing was recommended as one pedagogical method for improving the acquisition of English pronunciation.</p><p>

<p> This study aims to investigate programmatic and curricular support systems in place for ESL instructors to readily and appropriately address mental well-being concerns amongst their student populations. Furthermore, the study evaluated instructors&rsquo; involvement with local counseling and trauma-based training with refugee and immigrant populations in mind. As refugees, along with a percentage of the immigrant population, enter the United States with a pre-flight history of war, violence, and persecution the ESL classroom exists as a social point of entry to establish communal ties. Additionally, an ESL classroom may be the first educational context an immigrant or refugee experiences after a protracted period of time. To determine the knowledge and practices of instructors and their institutions, an online survey was sent to program directors and ESL instructors at adult ESL programs throughout Illinois. The survey questions were created to examine ESL instructors' awareness of mental well-being of their students and identify types of training and resources at ESL instructors&rsquo; disposal and whether ESL professionals were able to assist with their students&rsquo; mental well-being. Findings from this study indicated that instructors need more support from their programs to effectively respond to trauma and other mental well-being concerns manifested in both social and cognitive behaviors in the classroom. Findings showed that instructors with clear protocols and procedures for mental well-being concerns were more likely to know of and refer students to mental health providers. Additionally, instructors indicated a desire for more training on the subject of trauma and mental health and methods to incorporate this knowledge into their lesson planning and classroom instruction.</p><p>

<p> In St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands (USVI), the growing population of English language learners (ELLs) are expected to meet the standards of the Smarter Balanced assessment and take the test during their first year of school on the island. However, meeting the accountability measures while acquiring academic language proficiency is overwhelming. The lack of language proficiency in English prevents ELLs from achieving academic success in high-stakes standardized testing. For this reason, it was necessary to study this phenomenon. This study addressed the problem of educational policies concerning strategies to help ELLs to demonstrate success on standardized assessments (Modiga, 2013). Results will give leaders and teachers a voice regarding ways to improve practices to assist ELLs on standardized assessments. The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand the struggle of ESL teachers in the USVI to meet not only the language needs of ELLs but also the requirements for them to pass the Smarter Balanced assessment in the St. Croix School District. Eight themes emerged from the data analysis: lack of professional development (PD), language support, commonly used assessments, language proficiency, cultural diversity, language background experience and expectations, district and school-wide initiatives, and lack of understanding how to meet the provisions of the constructivism theory or ESSA. The first recommendation is to extend the scope of the research to involve more mainstream middle school teachers across the USVI who also serve ELLs and must prepare them for the Smarter Balanced assessment. The second recommendation is to identify instructional practices that can best meet the needs of ELLs in content-area classes in the USVI. The third recommendation is to compare the perceptions of best practices of mainstream teachers from two districts in the USVI, one not making statistically significant gains with ELLs and the other making statistically substantial gains on the Smarter Balanced assessment. The last recommendation is to conduct a study in the USVI on the alignment of the core curriculum with English language proficiency and Common Core State Standards with mainstream teachers using ESL strategies to serve ELLs&rsquo; language needs to see if there is improvement on standardized test scores.</p><p>

<p> This study investigated the effect of first language (L1) transfer on Arabic ESL learners&rsquo; acquisition of the relative clauses, the passive voice and the definite article. I used Contrastive Analysis (CA) and Error Analysis (EA) to analyze 50 papers written by Arabic ESL students at the ACTFL Advanced Mid proficiency level. The analysis was paired with interviews with five advanced students to help determine whether L1 transfer was, in fact, influencing students&rsquo; errors predicted by CA. </p><p> Students in this study made L1 errors along with other errors. Although no statistical difference was found between the frequency of transfer and other (non-transfer) errors, L1 transfer errors were still common for many learners in this data. The frequency of the relative clause L1 transfer errors was slightly higher than other errors. However, passive voice L1 errors were as frequent as other errors whereas definite article L1 errors were slightly less frequent than other errors. The analysis of the interviews suggested that L1 still played a crucial role in influencing learners errors. </p><p> The analysis also suggested that the frequency of transfer errors in the papers used in this study might have been influenced by CA-informed instruction students received and students&rsquo; language level. Specifically, learners reported that both factors helped them reduce the frequency of L1 transfer errors in their writing. </p><p> The teaching implications of this study include familiarizing language instructors with possible sources of errors for Arabic ESL learners. Language instructors should try to identify sources of errors by conducting their own analyses or consulting existing literature on CA paired with EA. Finally, I recommend adopting a CA-informed instruction to help students reduce and overcome errors that are influenced by their L1.</p><p>

abstract: The goals of science and myth go hand in hand. Both seek to see beyond the senses. Both seek to understand the environment and the human mind. Both seek patterns. Both invent, through narrative, reasons for things happening the way they do. This considered, how do writers use myths in contemporary literature? How do they use science? Myth and science are stories that belong to everyone, stories that are shared. For those who are brought up learning science in school or who are raised in a religious society, how can writers take advantage of these shared associations, these shared memories, when writing fiction? What is the power of science in fiction? This essay seeks to answer these questions. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2015

<p> With the significant increase in the number of immigrants entering the United States, schools and adult programs must prepare teachers to teach English Language Learners. The problem is that educators are unsure of what is the most effective method to teach the increasing number of ELLs who are in the silent/pre-production and production stages of learning the new language, and these learners are not engaging in appropriate cooperative learning strategies. Teachers are overwhelmed since many are not equipped to teach ELLs. This impact has left a greater need for educators to identify strategies to assist learners in acquiring the English language to gain employment and enter higher education. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to discern the effectiveness of cooperative learning strategies, a theory supported by Johnson and Johnson cognitive developmental and social interdependence perspective. Participants for this study were ELLs who were at least 18 years old and did not speak English. Participants had to be enrolled in an English as a Second Language (ESL) Adult Education program. Data were collected by observing students interacting in groups and with their peers in a classroom. ESL teachers were also part of the data collection process through interviews, using an open-ended, semi-structured process. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis in (a) Strategies, (b) Evaluating Success, and (c) Teaching. Findings suggested that cooperative-learning strategies not only increased students&rsquo; acquisition, it also improved social interactions; as such, teachers should be encouraged to use the approach. The study concluded with potential implications that ELLs were at different levels; secondly, some ELLs might become dependent on others to speak for them, and that teachers in the setting did not evaluate their own students. Future studies should observe ELLs for longer periods to identify if their goals were realized, in addition, ELL&rsquo;s pre-test scores should be compared with their post-test scores to ascertain their growth in language acquisition</p><p>

A study submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of General Linguistics at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 2011. / This study focuses on the negative impact of English on the cognitive development of second language learners of English. The study was conducted in Empangeni District (Ngwelezane Ward) in KwaZulu-Natal. The negative impact of English on the cognitive development of second language learners of English was identified as the main cause of the high failure rate, especially at matric level. Second language learners of English in rural and some township schools end up unemployed and not in tertiary institutions as most teachers are not adequately trained to detect, explain, diagnose and try to remedy the problems these learners encounter when they are taught in English. This study highlights the negative impact of learning in English on the cognitive development of second language learners of English that result on the high failure rate in rural and some township schools. Challenges facing the different stakeholders that are affected by this problem are outlined. Suggestions towards alleviating the negative impact of English on the cognitive development of second language learners of English are also provided.

No description available.

The importance of input on language learning cannot be overstated. One method of providing input to learners at a level that is appropriate for them is called extensive reading, in which learners read an abundance of texts. In practice, for learners of English as a second or foreign language, these texts are often books that have been written and classified into a particular difficulty level, called graded readers. Previous studies of the language in these texts have been limited in size and scope, often including books from a single publisher or series. However, if these books are meant to serve as the primary source of input for students in extensive reading programs, it is important to not only better understand the language in them, but to understand how the books within different series and made by different publishers compare with one another. Therefore, in this study I investigated the single- and multiword expressions present in graded readers for three purposes.First, I wished to better understand the difficulty of the texts by analyzing the vocabulary within them and learning how much vocabulary knowledge is required to reach 95% and 98% lexical coverage thresholds. Second, I wished to investigate the multi-word expressions (MWE) present in graded readers to better understand what MWEs students are exposed to when reading these books. Third, I investigated how the use of MWEs differs between graded readers at each level of text difficulty, as defined by reading levels defined by the Extensive Reading Foundation (ERF). In order to address these problems, I utilized a large corpus of 1,872 graded readers containing 16,448,662 tokens. Using this corpus, I calculated the coverage figures for all texts within each level to determine the vocabulary required to reach 95 and 98% levels of coverage. These coverage figures were calculated using two kinds of lists, frequency- and difficulty-based, each meant to represent learner word knowledge. The frequency-based lists were the New General Service List (New GSL; Brezina & Gablasova, 2015), another list by the same name, which I refer to as the NGSL (Browne, 2014), and Nation’s BNC/COCA list (2020) based on the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The difficulty-based list was the Scale of English Word Knowledge–Japanese (SEWK-J), a word list designed to estimate vocabulary difficulty for Japanese learners of English (Mizumoto et al., 2021; Pinchbeck, 2019). The results of the single-word analyses showed that graded readers start to be become available at the minimum 95% threshold of known vocabulary of around the 1,700 rank in the lemma-based New GSL, the 1,250 rank for the flemma-based NGSL, and the first 1,000-word level for the level-6 word family-based BNC/COCA lists (based on the 25th percentiles for ERF level 1 using those lists). Studying beyond those ranks and levels should give students access to a wide range of graded readers, both at the 95% and 98% coverage thresholds, unless using the New GSL, which was much more limited in its ability to provide coverage. The median rank needed for sufficient coverage rises with each ERF level, no matter what list is used. There is also considerable overlap between levels, allowing learners to move between levels easily, as far as lexical requirements are concerned. These findings indicate that ERF levels incrementally guide learners towards more and more authentic language and texts. Similarly, the SEWK-J provides coverage of the majority of books, making it suitable for comparing a wide range of books together under the same framework. Differences between ERF levels in the SEWK-J ranks required to reach 95% and 98% were more less noticeable than those for the pedagogically focused frequency-based lists. Next, I investigated the degree to which publisher-declared headword counts are representative of the number of headwords in each graded reader. Using the headword ranges provided by publishers tends to overestimate the number of word types needed for 95% coverage, except at the lowest ERF level. If 98% coverage is expected, then a general trend towards underestimation was found at the lowest ERF levels. Following up on these single-word analyses, I then investigated the MWEs within the graded reader corpus to produce a list of the most frequent MWEs, which I compared with a large comparison corpus, the COCA. These results indicated that graded readers are a good source of 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-grams, with more occurring in graded readers than the COCA. Next, I examined the degree to which the most useful MWEs were included, defined as being MWEs in the Phrasal Expressions List (PHRASE) (Martinez & Schmitt, 2012) list and Phrasal Verbs Pedagogical List (PHaVE) (Garnier & Schmitt, 2015). Graded readers tended to include the most pedagogically important MWEs and phrasal verbs at all ERF levels. Those PHRASE and PHaVE list items that were most common in the large reference corpora used in their creation were also found to be most common in the GRC, suggesting that graded readers are a good source of comprehensible input using these forms. Finally, using studies of L2 speaking and writing at different levels of proficiency as a guide (Siyanova-Chanturia & Spina, 2020; Tavakoli & Uchihara, 2020), I conducted an exploratory investigation into whether MWE usage in graded readers follows similar trajectories as graded reader difficulty levels increase. It was found that 2-grams that are infrequent and strongly associated in unsimplified text tend to become more common as ERF levels increase. / Applied Linguistics