<p> Research affirmed that instructional strategies that promote English Language Learners&rsquo; (ELLs) Academic Language Proficiency (ALP) are essential in the primary grades for ELLs to succeed in school. This quantitative causal-comparative study relied on the premise of Vygotsky&rsquo;s sociocultural theory and addressed to what extent Balanced Math instruction affected ELLs&rsquo; math performance in Grade 1 and Grade 2, as measured by STAR Math. This study examined the extent differences existed on STAR Math Scores and Student Growth Percentiles of ELLs in Grade 1 and Grade 2 based on exposure to Balanced Math instruction in a rural school district located in the Pacific Northwest. The Mann-Whitney <i> U</i> test examined the extent there were significant differences, <i> p</i> &lt; .05 of the dependent variable, Student Growth Percentile, based on exposure to Balanced Math instruction. The results of the Mann-Whitney <i> U</i> were not statistically significant, <i>U</i> = 1034.50, <i> p</i> = .062, and the null hypothesis could not be rejected. ANOVA assessed if there were significant differences based on the alpha level <i>p</i> &lt; .05 of the dependent variable, STAR Math Scaled Scores, based on exposure to Balanced Math instruction. The results of the ANOVA were not statistically significant, <i>F</i> (1,114) = 0.12, <i>p</i> = .729, &eegr;²_p = 0.00, and the null hypothesis could not be rejected. This study concluded there were no significant differences between ELLs who received Balanced Math instruction and ELLs who did not receive Balanced Math instruction.</p><p>

<p> This study investigated whether use of the Achieve 3000 differentiated reading internet program correlated with increased incidence of ELL students achieving proficiency and/or with improvement in reading and literacy scores. It also examined attitudes among district ELL teachers. Results supported DI and CALL methods as instructional approaches. Achieve 3000 was most strongly related to improved literacy among students who completed 80 activities or more. Number of activities scoring at least 75% was the strongest predictor of improvement. Lexile score was related, but Lexile growth was not. When not used according to company recommendations, correlations were much weaker. Only 4.2% of district ELL students followed those recommendations. Relationships did not hold true for the lowest, beginning English proficiency students. </p><p>

<p> This study emphasized the instructional input and student uptake of high school students&rsquo; EFL writing process in Taiwan. A multiple-draft writing approach was utilized to meet students&rsquo; need for writing preparation for college admission tests, the General Scholastic Ability Test (GSAT) and the Department Required Test (DRT). Thirty-six 10^th grade students, whose English proficiency ranged from low to intermediate, participated in this study along with their EFL teacher. Students&rsquo; essays were assessed by two high school teachers using five criteria: <i>content, organization, grammar/syntax, vocabulary/spelling, and format awareness,</i> as released by the College Entrance Exam Center in Taiwan. Students wrote two themed essays during the implementation of the multiple-draft approach and two timed essays; one before the implementation of the writing approach (pre-test), and the other after completion of the thirteen writing sessions (posttest). Paired-sample t-tests measured the difference between the pre- and post-test. Results indicated a significant difference in one category, <i>format awareness.</i> A grounded theory approach was used to analyze interview transcript data, the field notes and peer review responses. The results indicate that students felt that the time factor had little to do with their timed writing performance; instead, confusion regarding basic English grammar, insufficient experience with English essay writing, the uncertainty of how to apply vocabulary and doubts regarding meaning of vocabulary were obstacles preventing uptake in their writing process. Students highly valued the input via personalized feedback from the teacher participant and the researcher. Though teacher-student meetings served the purpose of content development and grammar correction, students preferred one-on-one meetings with the teacher. Students benefitted from peer-to-peer discussions and heightened awareness during process writing but doubted the validity of peer review feedback they had received. The teacher participant reported struggling to step out of his teacher-centered approach while attempting to utilize the suggested student-centered instructional approach. Pressured to keep up with the school&rsquo;s strict curriculum and with limited instructional time, he resisted offering basic grammar review based on students&rsquo; observed needs for English basics. These factors mitigated greatly the promised potential of input and uptake in utilizing a process writing approach with EFL high school students.</p><p>

<p> This qualitative single-case study examined the experiences of a post-secondary first-year English composition instructor teaching long-term English learners at an urban, public university in the northeast United States by exploring the instructor&rsquo;s literacy ideologies and the effects of those ideologies on the instructional practices of the instructor within the English learners&rsquo; classroom. The study used in-depth phenomenological interviews, classroom observations, a student diversity survey, and artifacts to achieve its purpose. The results of this study support three thematic findings: (a) Although the instructor was unsure as to what qualifies students to be classified as English learners, she teaches them in the same way she does native English-speaking students; (b) The instructor felt that her job was to help students learn &ldquo;the game&rdquo; of how to write academic text; and (c) The instructor used a variety of instructional practices but lacked professional training and resources.</p><p>

Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.

In this study, I establish that language textbooks are sites of discursive struggle through which nationalist imagined communities are reproduced. I use critical discourse analysis to analyze how these textbooks construct Canadian identities that position students in relation to an imagined community of Canada. I analyze twenty-four textbooks and three Citizenship and Immigration Canada publications used in government-funded language instruction in Ontario. Representations of Canada and Canadianness in the texts examined include and exclude student readers, participate in banal nationalism, and legitimate particular understandings of Canada. The identified textbooks mark nationality through flags, maps, references to nation, and the use of nation as a frame of reference. The textbooks also make claims about how 'Canadians' think and behave. This banal nationalism naturalizes and essentializes imaginings of 'Canada' and 'Canadianness' supporting particular and interested constructions and positive evaluations of 'Canadian' identity. Both government produced publications and identified textbooks legitimate constructions of Canadian identity through repeated positive representations of Canadianness; the marginalising inclusions of 'others'; the subordination of gendered, racialised, and classed social positions to nation; and by maintaining a low level of dialogicality overall.

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of the semantics of telicity by Japanese learners of English with emphasis on a particular grammatical phenomenon, the neutral perfective reading of simple past predicates (Singh, 1991), which is available in Japanese but not in English. Three main points are of interest in this dissertation: First, we examine whether or not Japanese learners of English learn to derive the telicity of a simple past predicate despite lack of explicit classroom instruction. Second, we investigate potential factors that may assist L2 learners in discovering a target-like representation of the predicate telicity in English. Finally, we aim at revealing the L2 learners' developmental profile for the acquisition of the semantics of telicity. Two experimental tasks, a morphological task and a truth-value judgment task, were conducted which included three proficiency levels of L2 learners (beginner, intermediate and advanced), as well as native speakers of English and Japanese. Empirical data from the experimental tasks indicated that Japanese learners of English succeeded in progressing towards target-like representation of telicity. While the beginners directly transferred the L1 Japanese representation of the semantics of predicate telicity onto their target language, the intermediate and advanced levels dissociated the telicity of the English simple past predicates from that of the Japanese past predicates. That is, they learned to invalidate the neutral perfective reading of English predicates. We postulate that L2 learners' progress in the acquisition of the semantics of English predicate telicity can be accounted for by the acquisition of Det/Num morphology and by a Bayesian learning model: This learning model helps learners use L2 input to make form-meaning inferences on the predicate telicity and aids them to gradually acquire the most appropriate representation of English predicate telicity.

This dissertation examines the development of long-distance wh- movement questions in the L2 English of (Canadian) French and Bulgarian speakers. The main phenomenon under investigation is medial wh- constructions (wh- scope marking and wh- copying). Such constructions are of particular interest because they are unattested in both the L1 and the L2 of the two learner populations; at the same time, they are licensed options in a number of other typologically distinct languages, of which the participants report no knowledge. As such, medial wh- constructions pose a learnability problem in L2 acquisition: how can a learner "know" something that is not supported by either the native language or the target input, but is attested in other languages? Two experiments, a written grammaticality judgment multiple-choice task and an oral elicited production task, were carried out with the two different learner populations and with English native speaker controls. The written experiments showed that medial wh- constructions co-exist and compete with the target English long-distance structure at the early and intermediate stages of acquisition of both the French and the Bulgarian speaking participants; at the advanced stages of acquisition, both populations showed evidence that medial wh- representations had been successfully eliminated from the interlanguage grammar, and the L2 data converged with that of the native speakers. In the oral elicitation experiments both the French and the Bulgarian speaking participants resorted to medial wh- and a number of other strategies aimed at avoiding long-distance wh- movement; I argue that such strategies are due to both the derivational complexity and the high processing load associated with long-distance wh- movement. The account developed to address the findings of the dissertation incorporates insights from both nativist and domain-general views on acquisition. The proposal is that L2 grammars have to be UG-constrained in order for the learnability problem to be resolved. In addition, the acquisition process has to be strongly driven by the input, allowing learners to make extensive use of a general probabilistic learning mechanism; this mechanism helps them to gradually eliminate the competing representations unsupported by the L2 input and to converge with the grammatical target. This approach is in principle applicable to both L1 and L2 acquisition and accounts for some relevant similarities between the two.

Using new longitudinal data, this thesis investigates the acquisition of clause structure from the earliest stages of language production of a child native speaker of Arabic learner of English. Specific attention is paid to the acquisition of the TP and CP systems and their related syntactic features. The first major objective of this work is to investigate the initial and subsequent emerging grammars of this child. Another objective is to investigate the status of child L2 acquisition with regard to child L1 and adult L2 acquisition. The idea is to test whether child L2 resembles child L1/adult L2 in the domain of syntax and/or morphology. A third objective is to determine the extent to which L1 intervenes with the L2 acquisition, and to ascertain the nature of the intervention. In this work I mainly study the TP and CP systems with their related features. This involves a variety of morphosyntactic constructions related to those features. I assume, following Hawkins (2005) and Lardiere (2008), among others, that language acquisition involves feature activation/assembly. A feature-based account of functional categories assumes that the language faculty provides a set of features and a computational tool that assembles these features into lexical items and expressions (Hawkins, 2005). In this system, formal features play a more important role as they determine agreement, case relations, and movement processes. Therefore, recent developments in minimalist syntax have shifted the acquisitionist's focus from the acquisition of functional categories to the availability and organization of formai features. The data of this study suggest that the functional projections TP and CP are activated early on. Formai features associated with the TP and CP systems are present from the earliest data available from this child. Moreover, this thesis confirms previous tradings (e.g., Haznedar 2001) that even very young L2 children are subject to the influence of the native language. Finally, this study shows that although child L2 resembles child L1 and adult L2 in certain morphosyntactic aspects, the differences among these three groups are much more salient than the similarities.