abstract: Writing centers are learning settings and communities at the intersection of multiple disciplines and boundaries, which afford opportunities for rich learning experiences. However, navigating and negotiating boundaries as part of the learning is not easy or neutral work. Helping tutors shift from fixing to facilitating language and scaffolding literacy learning requires training. This is particularly true as tutors work with second or subsequent language (L2) writers, a well-documented area of tension. This mixed methods action research study, conducted at a large university in the United States (US), centered on a tutor training intervention designed to improve writing tutors’ scaffolding with L2 learners by increasing tutors’ concrete understanding of scaffolding and shifting the ways tutors view and value L2 writers and their writing. Using a sociocultural framework, including understanding writing centers as communities of practices and sites for experiential learning, the effectiveness of the intervention was examined through pre- and post-intervention surveys and interviews with tutors, post-intervention focus groups with L2 writers, and post-intervention observations of tutorials with L2 writers. Results indicated a shift in tutors’ use of scaffolding, reflecting increased understanding of scaffolding techniques and scaffolding as participatory and multidirectional. Results also showed that post-intervention, tutors increasingly saw themselves as learners and experienced a decrease in confidence scaffolding with L2 writers. Findings also demonstrated ways in which time, common ground, and participation mediate scaffolding within tutorials. These findings provide implications for tutor education, programmatic policy, and writing center administration and scholarship, including areas for further interdisciplinary action research. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2019

This study is based on data gathered from two corpora. It investigates and analyses the written English of second language users, in this case English used by Swedes, with the English used online in blogs found in the Birmingham Blog Corpus, which includes blogs written in English by authors of various nationalities. The aim is to compare Swedes’ use of English in blogs and the English used in general in blogs. The study focuses on typical features associated with either American English (AmE) or British English (BrE) and investigates which variety is the most prominent online.  The results indicate that features that are generally associated with AmE have a higher frequency in both analysed corpora in this thesis. The conclusion is therefore that AmE tends to dominate both Swedish and international authors’ use of English in blogs.

This student thesis project centers around two subjects, heteronormativity and LGBTQIA+ representation, and examines whether or not they are prominent in today’s schools in a smaller selected municipality in Sweden, if schools strive for inclusivity, and what is done to prevent any potential suffering for the LGBTQIA+ youth. Firstly, this student thesis project presents the theory, more specifically queer theory, that will be used as the basis for results analysis. Secondly, the background is presented with relevant previous research in similar areas where LGBTQIA+ themes or issues and heteronormativity are key elements. Thirdly, this student thesis project presents the questionnaire that eight upper secondary school teachers in English have responded to and what they have responded, followed by the results that consist of an analysis using the previous research. Lastly, this student thesis project concludes that many areas affect how and when LGBTQIA+ issues or questions are represented. One area is responsibility as responsibility appears to be put on teachers, Skolverket, and the students themselves for change to happen. Teachers must dare to include LGBTQIA+ issues or questions, and teachers urge Skolverket to assist in including LGBTQIA+ related topics in the steering documents. The students have a responsibility to take LGBTQIA+ issues or questions seriously as they are presented to them in class and allow themselves to ask questions to gain more knowledge in the area. There is room for improvement in terms of inclusivity as heteronormativity still influences the schools in the selected municipality, making LGBTQIA+-questions secondary and separate rather than a natural part of education.

This study investigates how different educational activities affect students’ motivation and how teachers can induce students’ motivation to learn English as a second language (ESL) in Swedish lower secondary schools. Data was gathered through a questionnaire and analyzed through a sociocultural perspective. In the questionnaire, which was handed out to students in ages 13 to 15 at three different schools, the participants had to indicate if they become motivated or unmotivated by certain activities or if the activities do not have any impact on their motivation. The results indicate that the activities which most students become motivated by are likely to also be encountered outside school. These are activities such as watching a film, playing Monopoly, listening to a song, chatting online, playing a computer game or video game, or having a conversation with a close friend. In contrast, the activities which most students become unmotivated by are task- or fact-oriented activities which are likely to be encountered inside school or in work-related situations in their future adult life, such as holding a presentation, writing news articles, doing work-sheets and reading word lists with grammar exercises and glossary, or participating in job interviews. The results also show that students in Swedish lower secondary schools have positive attitudes towards ESL learning in general and that there are many similarities between the different schools regarding what students find motivating and non-motivating. Thus, the results do not encourage eliminating certain educational activities from the learning process. However, in order to induce students’ motivation for ESL learning, teachers could increase the use of activities that many of their students find motivating and decrease the use of activities that many of their students find non-motivating.

<p>The present study investigated technical qualities of the elicited imitation (EI) items used by the Assessment of College English – International (ACE-In), a locally developed English language proficiency test used in the undergraduate English Academic Purpose Program at Purdue University. EI is a controversial language assessment tool that has been utilized and examined for decades. The simplicity of the test format and the ease of rating place EI in an advantageous position to be widely implemented in language assessment. On the other hand, EI has received a series of critiques, primarily questioning its validity. To offer insights into the quality of the EI subsection of the ACE-In and to provide guidance for continued test development and revision, the present study examined the measurement qualities of the items by analyzing the pre- and post-test performance of 100 examines on EI. The analyses consist of an item analysis that reports item difficulty, item discrimination, and total score reliability; an examination of pre-post changes in performance that reports a matched pairs t-test and item instructional sensitivity; and an analysis of the correlation patterns between EI scores and TOEFL iBT total and subsection scores.</p><p>The results of the item analysis indicated that the current EI task was slightly easy for the intended population, but test items functioned satisfactorily in terms of separating examinees of higher proficiency from those of lower proficiency. The EI task was also found to have high internal consistency across forms. As for the pre-post changes, a significant pair-wise difference was found between the pre- and post-performance after a semester of instruction. However, the results also reported that over half of the items were relatively insensitive to instruction. The last stage of the analysis indicated that while EI scores had a significant positive correlation with TOEFL iBT total scores and speaking subsection scores, EI scores were negatively correlated with TOEFL iBT reading subsection scores. </p><p>Findings of the present study provided evidence in favor of the use of EI as a measure of L2 proficiency, especially as a viable alternative to free-response items. EI is also argued to provide additional information regarding examinees’ real-time language processing ability that standardized language tests are not intended to measure. Although the EI task used by the ACE-In is generally suitable for the targeted population and testing purposes, it can be further improved if test developers increase the number of difficult items and control the contents and the structures of sentence stimuli. </p><p>Examining the technical qualities of test items is fundamental but insufficient to build a validity argument for the test. The present EI test can benefit from test validation studies that exceed item analysis. Future research that focuses on improving item instructional sensitivity is also recommended.</p>

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) has replaced No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and many changes were made to offer more flexibility for English language learners (ELLs). Historically, teachers have not been well informed of the changes made to the specific requirements of educational policy despite being at the frontline to implement these changes in their classrooms. This mixed methods study includes the development of a comprehensive online survey to investigate how aware Indiana teachers are of the ESSA specific requirements for ELLs and the results of the survey completed by 46 teachers. For the analysis of the survey data, both statistical analysis and visual analytics were employed. Findings suggest that the teachers were not highly informed of the specific requirements of ESSA for ELLs, as well as were not adequately prepared to teach and assess ELLs under ESSA. Accordingly, very few teachers reported that they have made changes to their classroom instruction and assessment practices that would be beneficial for ELLs under ESSA. This study reiterates that the effectiveness of federal educational policy should be examined at the classroom level and suggests that the first step should be to clearly inform the classroom teachers by offering district level professional development, which includes a summary of the changes resulting from NCLB to ESSA. The study further highlights that without informing Indiana teachers of the changes made in federal educational policies, the shift from NCLB to ESSA will be nothing more than a renaming of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Hence, the study underlines that only when these changes are implemented at the classroom level through teachers, all students, including ELLs, will benefit from these new policy changes under ESSA.

Text-related oral participation is ubiquitous in literacy and language instruction. As such, considering how invitations to these interactions are framed is critical, as this framing is directly implicated in the design of equitable classrooms. In this Teaching Tip, one common technique teachers have been encouraged to use—a class set of “equity sticks”—is reconsidered through the lens of asset-based instruction for all learners including emergent bilinguals (EBs). Reframing how EBs are invited to respond to texts requires that teachers get to know their students, privilege multilingualism, provide scaffolding for oral discussion, and encourage responses that transcend linguistic modalities.

No description available.

abstract: Computer assisted language learning (CALL) has become increasingly common as a means of helping learners develop essential skills in a second or foreign language. However, while many CALL programs claim to be based on principles of second language acquisition (SLA) theory and research, evaluation of design and learning outcomes at the level of individual CALL exercises is lacking in the existing literature. The following proposed study will explore the design of computer-based vocabulary matching exercises using both written text and images and the effects of various design manipulations on learning outcomes. The study will use eye-tracking to investigate what users attend to on screen as they work through a series of exercises with different configurations of written words and images. It will ask whether manipulation of text and image features and combinations can have an effect on learners’ attention to the various elements, and if so, whether differences in levels of attention results in higher or lower scores for measures of learning. Specifically, eye-tracking data will be compared to post-test scores for recall and recognition of target vocabulary items to look for a correlation between levels of attention to written forms in-task and post-test gains in scores for vocabulary learning. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2019

This applied dissertation was designed to explore the relationship between the language complexity of high school academic assessments and the language proficiency of English Language Learners (ELLs) in their academic achievement levels and to examine what accommodation strategies would be the most effective in reducing performance gaps between ELLs and non-ELLs that are due to language factors. Students designated ELL by the school where the study took place scored significantly lower than non-ELL students in teacher-created content area assessments and state-standardized tests. English for speakers of other languages accommodations, such as extended time in completing tasks and assessments and the use of dictionaries and glossaries, seemed to narrow the gap between ELLs and non-ELLs; however, the effect was not substantial. Research was conducted to determine whether providing English for speakers of other languages linguistic modification accommodations increased student scores. Two groups of students participated in this research: the control group received the standard test, and the experimental group received the modified test. An original 10th-grade reading comprehension test normed on English-speaking students was administered to the control group and the linguistically modified version of the original test was administered to the experimental group. A comparison of the outcomes was assessed to find out whether there was a significant difference in academic achievement between the two groups. This quantitative study was followed by a qualitative study through student interviews to examine whether there was a relationship between the perceptions of ELLs on the usefulness of the accommodation types and their test scores. An analysis of the data revealed that students with low English language proficiency may not understand the test questions they are expected to answer. As a result, their test scores may not be an accurate measure of the test item construct, but a measure of their limited English skills.