The current study investigated the effectiveness of a Literacy Based Intervention (LBI) on English Language Learners (ELLs) with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Specifically this report focuses on the effects of LBI on vocabulary skills (e.g. naming and defining). Nineteen ELLs (ages 74 to 104 months) participated in the intervention study, which lasted eight weeks and consisted of 50-minute sessions, three times a week. The LBI focused on rich vocabulary instruction of words that were from storybook readings. Vocabulary naming and definition probes were used to assess vocabulary progress. Results revealed that vocabulary increases did not occur until the second half of the intervention (e.g. week six or seven). LBI shows promise to be successful for increasing vocabulary skills in ELLs with SLI. / text

This study examined the characteristics of 14 English Language Learners classified as having learning disabilities (LD) who were also identified as having speech and language impairments (SI) prior to, at, or after initial identification as LD. Data were collected under the auspices of a longitudinal study, Bilingual Exceptional Students: Effective Practices for Oral Language and Reading Instruction, conducted by multicultural special education faculty at the University of Texas at Austin between 1999 and 2002. Participants were served in bilingual education and bilingual special education programs in a large, central Texas school District. Archival data from students’ cumulative, bilingual and special education records were analyzed to profile student characteristics at the point of their initial LD and SI eligibility determinations. A clinical judgment panel comprised of bilingual special education experts analyzed student data and made independent eligibility recommendations for each participant. These recommendations were compared to the multidisciplinary teams (MDTs’) eligibility decisions. Findings revealed that MDTs based eligibility primary on the presence of an IQ-achievement discrepancy and did not adequately consider factors, other than the presence of LD that could explain student difficulties. When data other than the IQ-achievement discrepancy were considered, the clinical judgment panel classified 4 participants as LD and 9 as having disabilities other than LD; the panel felt that data for one student were insufficient to make an eligibility recommendation. Findings related to identification of SI for this population were limited because students were assessed using a Spanish translation of an English speech and language assessment developed by the district. Test results corroborated parents’ and teachers’ concerns that these students had significant communication problems. Implications for improving practices related to early intervention, referral, assessment, and eligibility determinations for ELLs are presented and suggestions for future research are delineated. / text

This dissertation is a case study that explores how 8th grade former English language learners, or RFEP students, interacted with texts in their social studies class across a unit of study on World War II. This study is based on three assertions: we have a limited understanding of language and literacy among newly reclassified adolescent English language learners due to a shift in state language policy, examining students' interactions with texts in a secondary content classroom is a valuable perspective, and the decisions teachers make to meet the perceived needs of their students warrants examination. The primary source of data in this study was the text annotations students completed when reading the teacher adapted texts. Annotations included any underlining, circling, questioning or commenting on the texts. Annotations were analyzed for patterns across students and across texts. Analysis of texts for linguistic features and structures was completed using the Coh-Metrix (Graesser, McNamara & Kulikowich, 2011) text analysis tool. Analysis of teacher talk during whole class text annotations as well as interviews with teachers and students showed additional patterns. Three key findings emerged: the teacher is a designer or relevant, meaningful and comprehensible instruction, teacher modeling matters to RFEP students, the adapted texts were used as instructional tools to promote content learning. These findings suggest directions for future research and have implications for practice. A critical area for research is the selection and adaptation of content area texts. With the advent of the Common Core State Standards and their emphasis on primary source documents and complex texts, it is essential to explore which texts are used and how they are adapted to facilitate access to those texts. This study also indicates the possibility for the further use of text annotations as a primary source of data for research and to facilitate instructional decisions by the teacher.

This project involved exploring the mathematics stories of three, first-generation adolescent fluent English proficient (FEP) seventh grade Latina students who attended an urban middle school in Arizona. In this study, I also explored the mathematics stories of one primary caregiver for each student as and that of their mathematics teacher. My goal for this project was to understand the factors that attributed to the formation of the young girls' mathematics identities and how these identities informed their decisions to engage with mathematical activity. Through relationships and experiences with their peers, teachers, family, and community, students come to know who they are relative to mathematics. My study addressed the construct of identity, drawn from Sfard and Prusak's (2005) framework of narrative identity, as a way to view students as they developed as mathematics learners. The findings illuminated important classroom experiences, how they made sense of these experiences, and how they took up and rejected opportunities to engage with mathematics because of those experiences. They also illuminated how their relationships with their primary caregivers and mathematics teachers influenced their level of classroom mathematics engagement and the development of their actual and designated mathematics identities. The findings further revealed a relationship between students' immediate future identities and actual identities. Examining middle school students' immediate future mathematics identities provides a more complex and nuanced understanding of how young adolescents make sense of their classroom mathematics experiences. My study showed that the mathematics identities students created were highly influenced by the messages they perceived were narrated by their primary caregivers and their mathematics teachers. Students used their relationships with these individuals as a way to read their mathematics classrooms and make decisions regarding their level of engagement with mathematical activity. They were constantly translating caregiver and teacher messages about mathematics, teacher moves, instructional environments, and social norms for participation and learning through the lenses of their mathematics identities. This study supports understanding of why students with similar social backgrounds, equal instructional mathematics environments and the same mathematics teacher developed different mathematics identities and affiliations with mathematics.

"Literacies in Motion: Transnational Lives and Lifelong Learning in the US and Nepal," is a multi-sited, ethnographic case study of adult Bhutanese refugees' English language and literacy learning in the transnational contexts of the Bhutanese Diaspora and subsequent refugee resettlement. Specifically, I look at two refugee education programs that provide intensive English language training, the Pima Community College Adult Education Refugee Education Project (REP) in Tucson, Arizona and Caritas-Nepal's Spoken English Center at the site of the Bhutanese refugee camps in Jhapa, Nepal. As a teacher engaged in classroom inquiry in the REP program in Tucson, I was interested in how multilingual adults who strategically and complexly identified as refugees also understood themselves as English language learners and what effect these orientations might have on learning processes and classroom dynamics, especially related to literacy instruction. This initial classroom research gradually expanded to include research in the homes and community spaces of the Nepali-speaking Bhutanese students who invited me to participate as a teacher-researcher in their cultural events and neighborhood meetings and, eventually, to global sites of inquiry in the Bhutanese refugee camps in Nepal. Altogether, I conducted ethnographic research over a period of 5 years, including classroom observations, teacher and learner interviews, and literacy artifact collection in homes, schools, and community spaces. My findings show that while linguistic inequalities within the communicative contexts of refugee resettlement worked to constrain adult language learners' second language literacies in the classroom, refugees' own mobile knowledge networks and global language investments allowed for more flexible multilingual and multimodal literacy resources and practices. Furthermore, while there is a profound, collective investment in English language learning in refugee camps in Nepal prior to resettlement, this investment is complex and learners often demonstrate deeply ambivalent attitudes toward the benefit of learning English especially later in life. While much local effort is invested in "empowering" teachers and adult learners through English education, true fluency among older adults in the refugee camp remains extremely limited to a truncated classroom repertoire (i.e. copying from the board, repetition, and simple greetings). Instead, adult learners, especially women, flourished in other ways through language center leadership, recruitment, and coordination involving translingual, transcultural, and multimodal skills. By considering the ways in which women refugees' expanding communicative repertoires outside of class operate in the refugee camp, and then travel through the migratory space of refugee resettlement, this study supports the work of emerging voices in the field of rhetoric and composition (i.e. Rebecca Lorimer Leonard's "traveling literacies") as well as those more established in literacy studies and applied linguistics (i.e. Jan Blommaert's "grassroots literacies" and "mobilization of language resources") to forward a mobile literacies construct that helps to explain the affordances and constraints of traveling language resources in a globalized world. Discrepancies found in both US and Bhutanese refugee camp contexts between the truncated English language repertoires of adult learners in class and their expanding translingual and multimodal repertoires outside of class, suggest important implications for translocal language policy and planning for multilingual learners.

Community colleges play a particularly valuable role in providing both immigrant students and international visa students the opportunity to participate in higher education at affordable rates and thereby, the means by which to achieve academic success in the university system and economic success in the market. Thus, community colleges bear the profound task of developing language skills and creating positive academic experiences for all students who are learning English.This phenomenological inquiry examines how English language learners constitute meaning from their experience of learning at a large community college in the southwest United States. The researcher conducted group and individual interviews with English language learners from 13 different countries of origin and 10 different first languages. Participants included international visa students and immigrant students.Cultural capital theory, including linguistic competence, was used to explain how the perceptions of linguistic competence affect the academic experience of different English language learners. The findings suggest that although some students may possess cultural capital that advantaged them in their home countries, without commensurate linguistic competence, academic literacy, and a new cognitive model for learning that cultural capital may not be rewarded with academic success in the United States. Additionally, the findings suggest that cultural capital theory may need to be adapted to explain how it manifests itself in this student population. A second theory, conceptual theory of metaphor, specifically Lakoff & Johnson's (1999) Event Structure Metaphor, provided a cognitive linguistic framework to the analysis of the language used by participants as they described their academic experience. Using the event structure metaphor, this analysis provides some support for the universal nature of metaphorical thought.

This mixed-method study investigated how and to what extent direct instruction in Spanish-English translation and interpretation affects the acquisition of academic language proficiency in both English and Spanish by Heritage Language Learners of Spanish (HLLS). The subjects of the quantitative part of the study were 24 participants who were from six high schools with a large number of minority students. These high schools were located in Tucson and Nogales, Arizona. The participants in the qualitative part of the study were six case study students, chosen from the whole group. The participants were enrolled in the 2006 annual 3-week Professional Language Development Program (PLDP), held in July at the University of Arizona. The PLDP's additive teaching translation and interpretation model engaged the participants in learning by not only the novelty of practicing real-life, challenging exercises in class, using their unique cultural and linguistic skills, but also by the dynamic collaborative learning environment. The improvement in the participants' academic language proficiency was assessed through individual interviews of six case study participants, their high school teachers, and the two PLDP instructors.The use of translation and interpretation to improve the HLLS's academic English (and Spanish) stands in stark contrast to the subtractive teaching English-as-a-Second-Language model that promotes English fluency at the expense of the heritage language. The study, therefore, expands research on minority HLL's cultural capital that is not utilized in American education, where limiting the use of bilingual education for English language learners is the norm. The success of the program was demonstrated by the students' newfound appreciation for their heritage language and culture, academic learning, motivation for higher education, and statistically significant gains in Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP; Cummins, 2000).

English is an international and global language that students, regardless of mother tongue, encounter in their everyday lives. In Sweden, students are introduced to English teaching in year 1, 2 or 3, and in some cases, year 4. English teaching can sometimes be problematic when the language of instruction often consists of Swedish, which for second language students becomes a challenge to acquire new skills in a week language. The study aims to examine, with a qualitative study, how pedagogues plan and implements English teaching in first grade with students whose mother tongue are other than Swedish. Further, the aim was to examine how pedagogues say they relate to the fact that second language pupils participating in English lessons and if they think it affects their English teaching. The conclusions is that the pedagogues has probably not been problematized the phenomenon examined and say they do not adapt their teaching. In the interviews reveals information about the teaching method which, in my opinion, indicates that, unconsciously, adapting their teaching when they have second language students. Furthermore, the study points out the importance of English as language of instruction when there is a more equal situation for all students regardless of language. Second langue students do not need to go through the Swedish language to be taught in English.

This qualitative case study examines the way in which six adult learners and their teacher in a university language classroom narrativise their identities while reflecting on experiences in and outside of the classroom. This study determined that the identity positions of the student participants were strongly influenced by notions of normative cultural, national and religious identity categories, as well as the students’ experiences in environments that were characterized by high-stakes grading, and “native speaker” norms. Drawing on poststructural identity theories (Norton, 1995, 1997; Gee, 2001) and anti-colonial and anti-racist scholarship (Kubota and Lin, 2009), this research contributes to the growing body of knowledge that addresses the effects of subjective notions of identity and structural power relations on the experiences of adult learners. Additionally, it outlines some possible actions for teachers and policy-makers to counter some of the structural inequalities that negatively impact the identity negotiation of students.

This qualitative case study examines the way in which six adult learners and their teacher in a university language classroom narrativise their identities while reflecting on experiences in and outside of the classroom. This study determined that the identity positions of the student participants were strongly influenced by notions of normative cultural, national and religious identity categories, as well as the students’ experiences in environments that were characterized by high-stakes grading, and “native speaker” norms. Drawing on poststructural identity theories (Norton, 1995, 1997; Gee, 2001) and anti-colonial and anti-racist scholarship (Kubota and Lin, 2009), this research contributes to the growing body of knowledge that addresses the effects of subjective notions of identity and structural power relations on the experiences of adult learners. Additionally, it outlines some possible actions for teachers and policy-makers to counter some of the structural inequalities that negatively impact the identity negotiation of students.