Japanese who travel outside Japan in their childhood or adolescence, and then return to the Japanese educational system, are referred to in Japan as kikokushijo [帰国子女] or returnee students. In this year-long narrative analysis study I focus on three such students in their first year at a gaikokugo daigaku [(外国語大学) foreign language university] in Japan. My purpose is to explore their life stories, including their experiences abroad as children, their returns, and their choices and experiences in their university education. Data gathering includes multiple, in-depth, semi-structured interviews, field notes based on my own post-interview reflections, classroom experiences and interviews, and written texts in the form of participants’ emails and online social networking posts. Using sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s (1992) primary thinking tools (p. 160) of field, capital, and habitus, I examine to what degree the participants’ perceptions of their lives and life trajectories fit into what they see as possible or appropriate. I consider participants’ views on the promise of realizing themselves as “global citizens” at the foreign language university, their attitudes toward Japan and Japaneseness, and the prospect of going abroad again. I attempt to help fill the gaps of the lack of studies of returnees at foreign language universities, the lack of studies focusing on emergent international studies programs in Japanese universities, as well as a lack of studies examining the perspectives of individual returnees. Employing narrative re-storying, I present the participants’ stories chronologically in consecutive chapters, covering their early youth through their first times abroad, then into their first year in university, following this with a thematic analysis of the stories using Bourdieu’s sociological lens. I found that the participants possessed different social, cultural, and economic capital at each stage, including in their host situations when abroad, and this affected both how they experienced their sojourns, and their re-acclimation after they returned. On enrollment to the foreign language university, they felt the institution served as a sanctuary of sorts from the wider social field of Japan, and a staging ground for a longed-for return to living overseas. The desire to exit the social and wider fields of Japan was common among the three participants. / Teaching & Learning

Willingness to communicate (WTC) in a second language (L2) is crucial to the development of communicative speaking skills. This study is a cross-sectional investigation of the role in models of second language (L2) willingness to communicate of three personality variables hitherto underresearched in the L2 field: extroversion, ego permeability (one's capacity to tolerate ambiguity), and perceived distance from one's core persona. A sample of 252 Japanese university students responded to a set of instruments used to measure individual difference variables and personality variables; the instruments were drawn from the fields of L2 acquisition and psychology as well as a 5-item instrument designed to measure perceived distance in a series of participatory L2 speaking activities. Confirmatory factor analysis, Rasch analysis, and structural equation modeling were utilized to validate the respective instruments. The International Posture instrument was best represented by a two-factor configuration consisting of Intergroup Approach-Avoidance Tendency and Intercultural Friendship Orientation, while the L2 Communicative Confidence was altered to consist of three factors (L2 Anxiety, Perceived L2 Communicative Competence, and Extroversion). The hypothesized additions of Ego Permeability and Perceived Distance failed to improve the measurement models, and the original Ego Permeability variable functioned poorly in this context. The MacIntyre and Charos (1996) model had marginal fit to the data even after undergoing considerable respecification. The models of Yashima (2002) and Yashima, Zenuk-Nishide, and Shimizu (2004) were found to have good fit as originally conceptualized, but the addition of Extroversion and paths from International Posture and L2 Communicative Anxiety improved the fit of both models. Collectively, the results indicate that extroversion plays an important role in models of L2 WTC and that the basic models of Yashima and colleagues are robust. These findings provide crucial insights into the process of L2 WTC, an important factor in the students' acquisition of communicative competence. / CITE/Language Arts

This qualitative study investigated the reasons why educators initiate referrals of ELLs for special education services in a sample of three educational organizations near a major city in a mid-Atlantic state. This study addressed how and why educator perception influenced the referral process and identification of English language learners into special education programs. The intent of the study examined how perceptions of regular education teachers, special education teachers, teachers of English as a second language, speech and language therapists, school psychologists, and principals influence the referral of ELLs for special education programs based on the commonly shared knowledge. Students receiving special education services have gone through a referral, assessment, and placement process. The special education process is initiated once a student is experiencing considerable difficulties in the general education programs despite a variety of implemented interventions. For English language learners (ELLs), low English proficiency, gaps in educational experience and cultural differences influence the referral process. The reality is teachers have a tremendous impact on who is referred for special education services and who is not referred. I employed a systematic, sequential approach while collecting data for this case study. A combination of interviews and observations provided a foundation for the collection of data. Interview participants from each district included regular education teachers, special education teachers, teachers of English as a second language, speech and language therapists, school psychologists, and principals. Board meeting observations, as well as artifact reviews, including Board policy and Administrative Regulations, were completed. The constant comparative method served as the primary mode of analysis for this case study. Brisk (1998) states that good teachers of ELLs embrace their roles as language teachers and cultural facilitators. In a 2002 National Center for Education Statistics report, it was stated 42% of teachers indicated they had ELLs in their classrooms, but only 12.5 % of the teachers received more than eight hours of professional development specifically related to ELLs. Schools have often provided support for ELLs through special education or speech and language services, relying on the common sense premise that special education support is better than no support at all (Walker, Shafter, & Iiams, 2004). The potential impact of this study may be considerable. Accountability derived from a district’s Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) is significant. The increased presence of ELLs in our schools has the potential to create a subgroup impacting AYP. Often times, the creation of an ELL subgroup for AYP leads to the creation of a low socioeconomic subgroup for AYP. The inappropriate special education referral and resulting placement yields an increase in the special education AYP subgroup. Schools must be held accountable to educate all students, including ELLs. This study provides relevant recommendations for districts to utilize in order to equip all educators with a skill set to appropriately serve ELL learners. / Educational Leadership

In recent years, university-based Intensive English Programs (IEPs) have expanded to serve the growing population of international students who wish to earn their degrees at U.S. universities. Many of these IEPs have shifted their focus to assist these academically bound international students by functioning as a bridge to enrollment in American undergraduate or graduate degree programs. Accordingly, it has become increasingly important to investigate and better understand how such programs are serving this student population. This dissertation explores how one university-based IEP is preparing its academically bound international students for their subsequent academic studies. In order to gain greater insight into students’ experiences throughout the college-going process, current and former students were interviewed about the ways in which this IEP facilitated their admittance to, enrollment in, and academic readiness for success in university degree programs. Additionally, interviews with instructors and administrators, observations of IEP courses and advising sessions, and student test score and academic record data were all analyzed to gain a more holistic understanding of the processes these students undergo in the pursuit of their academic goals. This study draws upon Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory of situated learning as a theoretical framework to examine the academic socialization that international students studying at a university-based IEP experience throughout the college-going process. The findings from this study revealed that in addition to English language instruction, university-based IEPs with academically bound student populations must also provide their students with the college choice support and academic readiness skills necessary to achieve their goals. By conducting an in-depth analysis of one university-based IEP, this dissertation offers concrete implications that IEP administrators and instructors can enact in order to better support their students throughout the university applications and admissions processes, while providing these students with the linguistic and academic skills necessary for ultimate success in their undergraduate or graduate degree program. / CITE/Language Arts

The primary purpose of this study is to investigate external and internal factors that act as learning demotivators that can discourage students from learning in Japanese high school English classrooms. More than 1,200 students responded to two questionnaires designed to measure five external demotivators, Teachers, Characteristics of Classes, Experiences of Failure, Class Environment, Class Materials, and one internal demotivator, Learners‘ Lack of Interest. Using the Rasch rating scale model and confirmatory factor analysis, the questionnaire results were analyzed to test the inter-relationships among the six hypothesized demotivators. Qualitative data were also obtained from an open-ended questionnaire asking the participants what demotivated them from learning. Two models, a six-factor and a four-factor demotivation model, were tested. As the four-factor model displayed slightly better fit than the six-factor model, it was selected as the final model. In this model, the first-order latent variable that best explained Demotivation was Experiences of Difficulty (b = .74), which was followed by Class Environment (b = .72), and Loss of Interest (b = .71). In contrast to the findings of previous studies, teachers‘ direct behaviors (b = .51) were the least influential of all the demotivators studied. In a follow up study, relationships between the teacher ratings of students‘ motivation, the students‘ perception of their current motivational level and their motivation in high school were investigated. Although it was anticipated that students‘ self-reported motivational states and teacher ratings of students‘ motivation would have a reasonably strong relationship, a series of regression analyses indicated that the teacher rating of students‘ motivation was not significantly related to either motivational level. While students might appear to be motivated in the classroom from the teachers‘ point of view, the students might feel otherwise. The first important finding concerned the two hypothesized demotivation models that were tested using confirmatory factor analysis. In the final four-factor model, the first-order latent variable that best explained Demotivation was Experiences of Difficulty followed by Loss of Interest, and Class Environment. In contrast to the findings of previous studies, teachers‘ direct behaviors were the least influential of all the demotivators studied. The results revealed that Japanese high school English learners can become demotivated due to difficult experiences they encounter or loss of interest in studying in the classroom. While influences from teacher behaviors can also cause demotivation, it appears that the approach or materials that focus on difficult reading passages and/or vocabulary cause the strongest sense of demotivation. The second important findings concerned group differences. The high and low motivation groups and the male and female groups differed in their perceptions of Class Environment. However, no statistically significant differences were found among the first- and second-year groups, and the students attending academic and non-academic schools. The third finding was from the follow-up study. It was found that the teacher rating of students‘ motivation is not related to the students‘ perception of their current motivational level and their motivation in high school time. While students might appear to be motivated in the classroom from the teachers‘ point of view, the students‘ perception of their current motivational level and their motivation in high school can differ greatly. Overall, the results revealed that Japanese high school English learners can become demotivated due to the difficulties they experience in the English language classroom, or a loss of interest in classroom study. While influences from teacher behaviors can also cause demotivation, this study shows that an approach or materials that focus on difficult reading passages and/or vocabulary cause the strongest sense of demotivation. / CITE/Language Arts

This study was an investigation of student beliefs about their EFL education, and it was based upon the subjective task value component of the expectancy-value theory, a prominent theory of achievement motivation. The participants were three cohorts of Japanese public elementary school students (Cohort 1 from 2008; Cohort 2 from 2009; and Cohort 3 from 2010); each cohort consisted of third through sixth graders (N = 1,478; N = 3,693; and N = 1,336, respectively). Three research questions with associated hypotheses were posited in order to determine: (a) if students of all age groups could differentiate the three value components of Enjoyment, Importance, and Use; (b) the degree to which grade levels and genders were different with regard to each value; and (c) if grade level and gender differences were consistent between cohorts. The Young Learners Value Scale (YLVS) was an 11-item, 4-point Likert self report scale created in order to investigate elementary school students' values concerning their EFL education. Prior to conducting inferential analyses on the collected data, the dimensionality, validity, and reliability of the YLVS were established through the use of the Rasch rating-scale model. In addition, the raw scores were converted into interval Rasch measures. Results of the principal components analyses showed that each grade level was able to differentiate the three values of Enjoyment, Importance, and Use. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that the instrument measures as well as the factorial structure of the theoretical model were both invariant across grade level. Results of the two-way ANOVAs indicated that the third grade students valued the Enjoyment, Importance, and Use of English to a statistically significant higher degree than the higher grade levels. Descriptive statistics showed that all grade levels valued the Enjoyment and Importance of English, yet all grade levels responded neutrally to the Use of English. With regard to gender, female students held statistically significant greater values of Enjoyment, Importance, and Use of English and their EFL class than boys, yet these differences were found for only Cohorts 2 and 3. This study was the first, to the best of my knowledge, to use the expectancy-value theory of achievement motivation as a basis for an investigation of public school EFL students. The results indicated that the elementary school students valued the Enjoyment and Importance of English, but were neutral to the Use of English. The integration of more skill-based activities that focus on listening to English and speaking in English to communicate to others and a reduction in fun-focused activities such as songs and games might provide a greater opportunity to enhance the students' value of Use. / CITE/Language Arts

Although studies of lexical inferencing indicate that second language learners frequently encounter difficulties inferring lexical meaning from context, lexical inferencing, or deriving lexical meaning from contextual analysis, constitutes an essential part of reading comprehension. Two main purposes motivated the current study. The first purpose was to investigate how 139 Japanese EFL learners performed in lexical inferencing tasks and the second purpose concerned to what degree their linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge sources were related to lexical inferencing and which knowledge sources contributed to successful lexical inferencing. Linguistic knowledge sources were categorized into lexical knowledge (recognition vocabulary and collocation), syntactic knowledge (syntactic property of words and sentence-level grammar), and discourse knowledge of cohesion and coherence (conjunction, pronoun reference, and discourse prediction). Extralinguistic knowledge sources concern background knowledge related to the topic of texts. The participants were relatively successful at the lexical inferencing tasks for two reasons. First, the lexical density of the texts was controlled so that almost all of the non-target words were at the 2,000 word frequency level, a comprehensible level for the participants in this study. Second, the data were analyzed in a way that gave the participants credit for acquiring partial knowledge of the semantic features of the target words. All the knowledge sources were significantly correlated with lexical inferencing, and a hierarchical multiple regression identified the three best predictors of lexical inferencing. Discourse prediction was the best predictor of lexical inferencing due to the similarities of the cognitive processes of bridging information gaps through scrutinizing textbase input. The second best predictor was written receptive vocabulary size, the most fundamental component of deriving meaning in a text. It was followed by text-related background knowledge. Other significant, but minor predictors were knowledge of the part-of-speech of words and syntax, both of which are constituents of sentence-level processing. Collocational knowledge and knowledge associated with discourse-processing constituents were not significant predictors of lexical inferencing. To summarize, three semantically oriented knowledge sources, i.e., discourse prediction, recognition vocabulary, background knowledge, were more important predictors of lexical inferencing than structurally oriented knowledge sources such as part-of-speech and syntax. / CITE/Language Arts

Academic writing in U.S. higher education often involves textual borrowing, referred to as the integration and documentation of reading sources and carried out with summaries, quotes and paraphrases. Second language (L2) English students are likely to use sources inappropriately and consequentially are accused of plagiarism based on a moral judgment. A body of research on textual borrowing including this study has provided strong evidence that these students' inappropriate source use does not result from their intention to steal other's intellectual property and language, but from their cultural backgrounds or situated factors in their U.S. academic contexts. Few research studies, however, offer a thorough view of how both cultural backgrounds and situated factors are associated with L2 students' textual borrowing practices; much empirical attention has focused on a more limited examination of Chinese student populations. In this respect, this study explores the complex and dynamic nature of Korean graduate students' source use by investigating faculty expectations both in Korea and in their L2 academic setting and these students' perceptions and practices of textual borrowing. For these investigations, a qualitative research study was conducted, and multiple sources of data were analyzed: (a) interviews with two faculty informant groups and the student participants, (b) observations of the Master's meeting and group study meetings, (c) tutoring sessions at the Writing Center, and (d) written texts, including institutional and instructional documents, email messages, and multiple handouts, outlines, and essays. These sets of data were analyzed using two different methods: content analysis and text analysis. The findings of this qualitative research revealed that both cultural and situated factors were associated with the Korean students' understandings of and changes in textual borrowing practices. With regard to their initial understandings, the results showed that although the participants understood textual borrowing in terms of citation methods and writing skills, their practices were not aligned with their perceptions nor with faculty expectations. However, I noted that in the process of the research period, most of them were able to achieve the textual purposes by utilizing reading sources strategically and appropriately and thus fulfill the academic goals required in the situated context. Based on these findings, pedagogical implications are discussed. / CITE/Language Arts

This study investigates orthographic skills in students with learning disabilities (LD), English Language Learning (ELL) students and their typical-achieving, native-English speaking (TYP) peers to help in the differentiation of these groups, and ultimately improve LD assessment for linguistically diverse students. A repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted to compare the effect of Group Type (LD, TYP, ELL) on the orthographic skills of 108 children as measured by the Words Their Way Primary Spelling Inventory on three administrations over the course of a school year. There were statistically significant differences between groups with medium and large effect sizes in all spelling inventory measures: Feature Points, Words Spelled Correct and Spelling Inventory Stage scores. In each grade and administration, the students in the LD group consistently had the lowest means and students in the TYP group had the highest means. On the Words Spelled Correct measure, there was a triple interaction with a medium to large effect size between the three groups by grade and over time. This interaction showed that in Kindergarten, both ELL students and students with LD score significantly lower than the TYP group. ELL students made substantial progress and by spring of first grade, they had similar scores to those of the TYP group. The LD group continued to have significantly lower scores than both other groups in first and second grades. A comparison of spring stage scores indicated significant differences between the ELL group and the TYP group in the number of students that were on or above grade level. There was also a significant difference between the number of students with spring spelling stages on or above grade level in the LD and the TYP group. However, there was not an equivalent difference between the LD and ELL groups. An analysis of student progress over the course of the school year found the rates of improvement in all three groups to be comparable, though the group means are consistently ranked with the LD group underperforming the ELL group and TYP group (LD <ELL <TYP). These important variations in how diverse students perform by grade and over time can inform both the instruction and assessment of students. In doing so, more well-designed pre-referral interventions can begin to correct problems of disproportionality of linguistically diverse students in special education. / Special Education

This research explores issues involving gender, education, and learning/using English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) by investigating three Japanese women's experiences of fashioning their lives in ways that made them feel satisfied and happy. In order to develop an emic point of view--one derived from grounding myself as strongly as possible in the three women's worlds and views, I adopted a situated qualitative research approach, and collected the data mostly through multiple interviews with the women and participant observation of their work life situations. I then interpreted the data focusing on the women's identity constructions, their gendered struggles, and the roles of education and English in their lives and gender transformations. The findings common across the three women are as follows. First, the women developed a high degree of self-worth and an ethos of studying hard for self-cultivation in the family discourses that they grew up within. Second, the women's professional interests (i.e., in English education, physical fitness education, and dance, respectively), and the lives they aspired to craft for themselves were produced at the intersection of local and global discourses. Third, at some points in their married lives, they faced severe difficulties in seeking professional satisfaction and at the same time conforming to gender norms. However, their struggles to play multiple gender roles as "Japanese women" produced their agency to take up educational opportunities and re-craft themselves. The three women therefore chose to attend professional educational programs offered at Western institutions for self-crafting in the midst of their respective gender struggles. Fourth, the women used English to participate in Western educational and globalized professional discourses. Fifth, the women's prolonged and intensive participation in these discourses contributed to their acquisition of new knowledge to alternatively perform as "Japanese women" and transform their gendered lives. This study reveals that the three women used educational opportunities and English for their identity work--that is, to become who they desired to be, and to expand the boundaries of their freedom as "women" as well as to act socially as members of globalized cultural worlds. / CITE/Language Arts