Across international boundaries, linguistic and cultural diversity among pupils present teachers with pedagogic challenges. Research on teachers’ perceptions (e.g. Pajares, 1992; Woods, 1996; Farrell, 2005) suggests that the beliefs that teachers hold impact significantly on their classroom practices. This study adds to the existing body of international literature on teacher beliefs and literacy practices by exploring teachers’ perceptions about the reading literacy needs of EAL pupils and how these were met in Scottish secondary mainstream classroom contexts. In Scotland, policy specifies a Framework for Inclusion where pupils learning English as an additional language (hereafter EAL) are placed in mainstream classrooms. Schools are encouraged to play a key role in making sure that the needs of such pupils are addressed in an effort to raise achievement. A sociocultural theoretical lens was used to examine the shared and divergent beliefs and reading literacy practices of sixteen mainstream English teachers; five EAL teachers; and five head/depute head teachers across three local authorities. Participants’ responses communicated an undifferentiated understanding of the distinctive reading literacy needs of EAL pupils. The majority of teachers foregrounded reading as a set of universal skills that emphasised a knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Ill-fitting policies and teachers’ experiences within the varying school contexts appeared to mediate how EAL pupils’ needs were constructed. Findings concerning the beliefs and practices of these teachers revealed that there was a lack of available ways of thinking about how to meet the reading literacy needs of EAL pupils effectively; such a lack impacted on the quality and number of learning opportunities EAL pupils had as they faced the reading literacy demands of mainstream classrooms. Teachers also highlighted their uncertainty about how to meet the reading literacy needs of such pupils effectively and this seemed to impact on how they constructed their identities as teachers within linguistically and culturally diverse classroom settings. In contrast, an overview of classroom literacy practices revealed that teachers enacted confident identities as they operated out of a secure knowledge base for developing reading literacy in monolingual English speaking classrooms. The study concludes with a discussion of the limitations related to the research design, and outlines the implications of the findings for policy, classroom literacy practices, and teachers’ professional development opportunities. It is argued that Scottish schools are no longer monolingual, monocultural environments, but rather cross-cultural sites. It is recommended that policy needs to reconceptualise and broaden how second language development is framed within its documents. It is also suggested that secondary classroom contexts address the importance of multidimensional critical literacy practices as a way to challenge the dominant undifferentiated constructions that permeate teachers’ beliefs about the development of reading literacy for pupils learning EAL. Such changes would position EAL pupils as legitimate participants in classroom literacy practices. The thesis concludes with a consideration of teacher identity and emphasises the need of ITE providers to provide a continuum of provision for pre-service and in-service teachers to enable them to develop the necessary knowledge and practices that would support the growing numbers of pupils learning EAL.

Previous job interview studies have found that evaluations of English-as-an-additional language (L+) candidates related less to demonstrated qualifications and more to matches or mismatches in communicative expectations. Candidates’ pragmatic skillfulness can affect interviewers’ perceptions of their competence, and by extension, their hireability. Despite the importance of pragmatics to interview success, few studies have looked at the efficacy of pragmatics training. To address this gap, a mixed-methods study was ncarried out with L+ English university students and professional interviewers. Two training types – pragmatics-focused feedback (n = 9) and feedback plus a pragmatics lesson (n = 9) – were compared to a control (n = 9). A second focus was to understand the factors that influenced the nine interviewers’ evaluations. To this end, the interviewers engaged in a video-stimulated recall session. The resulting data were coded thematically. Finally, the interviewers’ communication was analyzed using an Interviewer Actions instrument and qualitative analysis. Results showed that both experimental groups significantly outperformed the control group, which provides an endorsement of pragmatics training for L+ candidates. A second finding was that language ability themes were most prevalent in interviewer comments. This reveals a self-referential emphasis on the candidates’ talk as the primary source of competency judgments, which disadvantages L+ speakers. The Interviewer Action scores, supported by candidate evaluations and comments, indicated that engaged and supportive interviewer communication was most favourably received by the candidates. However, the qualitative analysis highlighted the challenge for interviewers in engaging with candidates while maintaining neutrality vis-à-vis responses. With increasingly diverse candidate pools, interviewers must upgrade their communication skills to make confident judgments about all interviewees. / Graduate

This is a qualitative study focusing on support of English as an Additional Language provided to students in an international school in Bangkok. The study aims to answer the following questions through literature and responses from interviewees: To what extent does EAL benefit second language learners’ development of language acquisition? and How is the EAL learners’ language proficiency monitored? The study was conducted at the international school The Early Learning Centre in Bangkok, including interviews with five EAL students with Swedish as their L1, and one EAL teacher, and questionnaires sent to three parents. The theoretical starting point describes the aspects that are of concern in this study: language acquisition, second language acquisition, English as an additional language in general and at The Early Learning Centre, and English as an additional language continuum. The data indicates that EAL programs that deliver both mainstream and withdrawal support is the accurate way to connect it to the curriculum. The results showed that EAL support provides students with sufficient help in acquiring academic and social language skills. ELC uses withdrawal support to improve language skills in smaller groups where the focus lies in learning language and transfer knowledge between L1 and L2. The study also indicates that to monitor language proficiency, assessments are important to monitor skills and development.

Vocabulary is well acknowledged as playing a critical role in language and reading development for young children, particularly for children learning English as an Additional Language (EAL) in school (Scarborough, 2001; Stahl & Nagy, 2005). However, most previous research on vocabulary has focused on measuring individual words and failed to examine knowledge of multi-word phrases, despite corpus evidence that these items are common in the English lexicon (Erman & Warren, 2000). The nature of multi-word vocabulary knowledge and its possible contribution to literacy skills among children remains underexplored, possibly due to a lack of available suitable measures. The current thesis details the development and administration of an original multi-word phrase task containing transparent, semi-transparent and non-transparent verb + object phrases to 108 British monolingual English speakers and learners with EAL in school years 3, 4 and 5. Results showed a strong effect of item transparency, even greater than frequency. Year 4 monolingual English speakers had significantly higher scores than year 3 monolingual learners on non-transparent items, while among learners with EAL year 3 and 4 performances were similar and year 5 learners’ scores were significantly higher. The second phase of the study explored the contribution of multi-word phrase knowledge to reading among 40 year 4 monolingual English speaking children and Bengali speakers with EAL. Multiple regression analysis showed that multi-word task performance accounted for a significant amount of variance in reading scores, when controlling for non-verbal intelligence, receptive and expressive single word vocabulary and language background. These findings are of import for increasing our understanding of vocabulary development among young learners and provide insight into the particular needs of learners with EAL.

The purpose of this study was twofold: to find out how teachers of English as an Additional Language (EAL) conceived curriculum, teaching and learning and to examine how professional learning and development (PLD) might impact on changes in the teachers’ thinking and approaches. The research was spurred by my own involvement in the revision of the national New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) and interest in the contested nature of curriculum related to English language learning. EAL teachers face challenges addressing the cross-Learning Area positioning of EAL and, at the same time, are afforded significant autonomy. PLD is needed to support teachers to make curriculum decisions that support English language learners’ (ELLs) to develop competency in English language with urgency. This is because ELLs need to manage the English language demands as they engage in the complex learning that is articulated in the NZC, along with their peers. I adopted an action research methodology to explore both how EAL teachers conceived curriculum and how PLD about EAL teaching and learning might impact on shifts in teachers’ understanding. I was a practitioner-researcher as I carried out PLD for two teachers over a period of six months. Those teacher-participants were teachers of EAL from different secondary schools with different professional contexts. Teaching-as-inquiry was the predominant approach of the PLD. This approach was consistent with my action research. The PLD comprised of a range of interruptions to teachers’ everyday work that assisted them to explore their own practice. The research drew on records of these interruptions to provide evidence of changes in teacher-participants’ thinking. The recorded conversations were captured through semi-structured interviews, video-stimulated recall and ‘learning conversations’. This qualitative data was analysed in one cycle which explored teachers’ thinking and actions about EAL curriculum. A second cycle focused my recorded reflections about my practice and on the impact of particular forms of PLD facilitation on shifts in the teachers’ thinking and actions. I created a review of literature for each cycle. This recursive process allowed me to reflect on my role as a PLD facilitator in action. Several themes emerged as the cycles were drawn together to examine how PLD impacted on shifts in teachers’ understanding of curriculum for EAL. One theme that emerged was the value of a culture of inquiry, where my action research was linked with the participants’ teaching-as-inquiry cycles. Another theme related to how PLD could influence teachers’ reconceptualising of curriculum for teaching multilingual English language learners. A third theme was how my PLD facilitation could impact on effective teaching and learning for Pasifika learners. Findings can be drawn from my study for both teacher practice and for PLD facilitation. This research adds to New Zealand research about teaching ELLs, and Pasifika students in particular. It shows how giving attention to both students’ home language strengths and academic English language learning needs can change the way teachers see pathways and work towards improved outcomes for students. The value of inquiry for teachers was confirmed in this action research, as a useful approach for bring about change in teachers’ thinking and approaches to teaching. The PLD interruption process, which included analysis of rich information about students, challenging conversations and the maintenance of respectful relationships was confirmed as an effective combination for engaging teachers in shifting their foci. Self-reflections on my PLD facilitation role, using an inquiry approach, assessed through adult learning principles, provided a useful stocktake which I would recommend for other PLD facilitators.

Personal Statements (PSs) are self-narrative essays written for Western graduate school applications, which serve an important role in Western graduate schools’ admission processes. However, genre features of PSs have not been sufficiently addressed by previous genre studies. Such neglect indicates a promising area for investigation as the increasing number of non-native English speakers in Western higher education systems creates an urgent pedagogical need for PS-related English-as-an-Additional-Language (EAL) instruction. The present thesis reports a corpus-driven genre analysis of PSs written by Chinese EAL students (CEAL-PSs). Based on a corpus of 120 CEAL-PS samples, genre features of CEAL-PSs were investigated from three perspectives: (1) linguistic complexity (i.e. lexical diversity and grammatical intricacy), (2) content foci (i.e. at the lexical, phrasal, discoursal levels), and (3) functional move structure. In addition, comparative analyses were made between unedited and edited CEAL-PSs for investigating whether the editing process significantly changed the unedited CEAL-PSs in the above three perspectives. There were three major findings of the current study. First, the majority of lexicons used by the collected CEAL-PSs were frequent academic lexicons and the average grammatical intricacy of these samples was at senior high school or junior college levels. Second, expressions of self-promotion and discussions of academic/professional achievements were explicitly emphasized in the collected CEAL-PSs at the lexical, phrasal, and discoursal levels. Third, an IERC model (“Introduction,” “Establishing Credentials,” “Reasons for Application,” and “Conclusion”), was found to be followed by the majority of the collected CEAL-PSs. Based on the above findings, the thesis further discusses the current study’s theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical implications for EAL writing instruction in China. / Graduate / 0290 / 0681 / chensibo@uvic.ca

Sweden is seen as a successful adopter of English as an additional language (EAL) and the country is a frontrunner in the globalization of the English language. Much of the success could be attributed to the large presence of English in Swedish society. Additionally, EAL learners are acquiring the English language out-of-school to a larger extent, often referred to as Extramural English (EE). Therefore, it is important to investigate how EE affects learners, teachers and discuss how it can change education. This has been done by evaluating the current state of research through a systematic literature review. It was found that learners engage in a variety of EE activities, with playing online games and watching movies being the activities with the most English exposure. Learners engage in these activities mostly out of their own interests or because of other socially driven motives. EE affects their opinion of English and could have negative effects on their attitude towards school English. Teachers are aware of the gap between EE and school English and try to integrate activities similar to EE activities in class. However, it is a challenge to find authentic material that fits a large number of learners’ interests. In conclusion, there is a need for more research that could point to a clear cause-and-effect relationship between EE and high proficiency in English. This thesis also calls on teachers, principals, and school leaders to prepare to change education if EE becomes a more widespread phenomenon.

The increasing numbers of refugee students in our schools present under-prepared and under-resourced schools with particular challenges because of the students diverse cultural and educational backgrounds, language acquisition processes, and ways of knowing and learning. Refugee students stories are unique in their texture and context compared to other stories, with their themes of oppressive governments, war trauma, loss of home and family, loss of cultural identity, and diaspora. These narratives shape the stories they live by (Clandinin & Connelly, 1999, p. 4). According to Clandinin & Connellys (2000) notion of four directions (p. 50) when researching experiences, this narrative inquiry involved looking inward and outward, and backward and forward into students lived experiences. Listening to the refugee students narratives of their past lives, their present experiences in high school and in the community, as well as their hopes for the future provides educators, administrators and policy makers with a clearer picture of their complex lives. The students narratives in this research give educators an opportunity to reflect on the ways we inspire and give hope to refugee students in our classrooms.<p> As the researcher, I have interwoven my personal experiences with war as a daughter and a mother along with my personal practical knowledge (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 3) as the students EAL (English as Additional Language) teacher together with the students narratives. The goal of this study is to provide participants with an opportunity to have their voices heard and attended to, especially in light of current teaching practices and proposed school transformation in their high school. This narrative inquiry identifies ways in which refugee students exist on the borderlands in high school and areas in schools that require attention. At the same time, it contributes an understanding of what needs to change to provide responsive educational practices in high school.

The increasing numbers of refugee students in our schools present under-prepared and under-resourced schools with particular challenges because of the students diverse cultural and educational backgrounds, language acquisition processes, and ways of knowing and learning. Refugee students stories are unique in their texture and context compared to other stories, with their themes of oppressive governments, war trauma, loss of home and family, loss of cultural identity, and diaspora. These narratives shape the stories they live by (Clandinin & Connelly, 1999, p. 4). According to Clandinin & Connellys (2000) notion of four directions (p. 50) when researching experiences, this narrative inquiry involved looking inward and outward, and backward and forward into students lived experiences. Listening to the refugee students narratives of their past lives, their present experiences in high school and in the community, as well as their hopes for the future provides educators, administrators and policy makers with a clearer picture of their complex lives. The students narratives in this research give educators an opportunity to reflect on the ways we inspire and give hope to refugee students in our classrooms.<p> As the researcher, I have interwoven my personal experiences with war as a daughter and a mother along with my personal practical knowledge (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 3) as the students EAL (English as Additional Language) teacher together with the students narratives. The goal of this study is to provide participants with an opportunity to have their voices heard and attended to, especially in light of current teaching practices and proposed school transformation in their high school. This narrative inquiry identifies ways in which refugee students exist on the borderlands in high school and areas in schools that require attention. At the same time, it contributes an understanding of what needs to change to provide responsive educational practices in high school.

The increasing multicultural and multilingual population of the UK has set new challenges for the education system. This study focuses on a particular aspect of this, namely pupils in schools in the city of Leicester who use English as an additional language (EAL). It compares their lexical understanding with that of their monolingual English-speaking peers, when both sets of pupils appeared to have attained the same surface proficiency in reading. This work also investigates teachers' awareness of any lexical comprehension gap that might exist for their EAL pupils. These key issues could not be studied in isolation, so this research was set in a sociocultural framework. This drew together social and cultural strands to give a situational understanding of the target pupils in city schools. It encompassed their teachers' observations and perceptions through a series of thirty interviews undertaken with these practitioners. This was complemented by interviews with ten key management personnel from the Language Support Service undertaken to investigate the objectives of the Service, and how successfully these were implemented in schools. The empirical research of this study was a Vocabulary Test undertaken with one hundred primary school pupils to test the key hypothesis that EAL pupils' lexical understanding was not as comprehensive as that of their L1 peers. Fifty of the pupils used English as an additional language, forming the EAL group of this study, and these were matched with fifty monolingual English-speaking pupils, the L1 group. The results of the Vocabulary Test substantiated this hypothesis for the target lexemes included in the test, and they also substantiated the additional hypothesis that mainstream teachers did not always fully recognise lexical misunderstandings that their EAL pupils might have. The research was classroom-based, and incorporated some principles of action research. A key factor in the action research paradigm has been disseminating the finding to schools and to teachers to effect changes in classroom practice by increasing awareness of lexical difficulties that EAL pupils might have. For this study, the dissemination has taken the form of Vocabulary Workshops for school staff, and these are ongoing at the present time. The workshops are designed to help teachers enhance EAL pupils' understanding of lexis in English and their learning through English.