This thesis presents a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the 2006 Arabic study abroad in Amman, Jordan. This analysis aims to help organizers and participants of similar future programs to maximize language gain. The students' pre- and post-program language competencies in reading, speaking, listening, and writing are measured and compared. The students' daily journals during the period of the program are also analyzed. The quantitative analysis shows that statistically significant improvement has occurred in all four language skills. The qualitative analysis suggests that keeping a steady journal, setting daily or weekly language goals, doing volunteer work, having clear and reasonable language learning expectations, understanding the need to get out of one's comfort zone, and being aware of the resources available are the best factors that positively affected the students' language gain. Frustration in terms of not having enough opportunities to practice the language negatively affected the students' language gain.

This study examines the effects of experience in German on the categorical perception of German rounded vowels, namely /uː/, /ʊ/, /oː/, /ɔ/, /yː/, /ʏ/, /øː/, and /œ/, by native speakers of American English (AE). Of special interest is whether more experience in German leads to more accurate perception of German front rounded vowels, namely /yː/, /ʏ/, /øː/, and /œ/, which do not have correlates in American English and are well known to cause perceptual problems for native AE speakers (Strange, Bohn, Trent, & Nishi, 2004). Subjects in this study were students at Brigham Young University that were divided into 4 experimental groups: students at the end of first-semester German with no residency in a German-speaking country (101 group); students at the end of third-semester German with no residency (201 group); students in third-year or higher German courses with less than 4 months of residency (300+ group); students in third-year or higher courses with 16 or more months of residency (300+Resi group). A control group of native German speakers also participated. Subjects completed a forced-choice identification task in which they selected the German word they thought they heard. The results of the task indicate that experience in German did affect native AE-speaking subjects' overall identification accuracy of German rounded vowels. In particular, a statistically significant difference was found between the 101 and 300+Resi groups for all German rounded vowels except /uː/ and /ʊ//, suggesting that experience significantly affected AE subjects' perception of all of these vowels except /uː/ and /ʊ/.

This study focuses on the effect of teacher-fronted and group work instruction on beginning Chinese as a Foreign Language learners' understanding and ability to use grammar principles correctly in a Performed Culture class setting. Three sections of beginning Chinese classes at Brigham Young University were selected to participate in the study. Each section instructor was assigned one of the following teaching techniques: teacher-fronted, group work, or a combination of both teacher-fronted and group work. Quizzes focusing on grammar were given before and after instruction to all students as pre-tests and post-tests. The results showed that students being taught with the teacher-fronted classroom instruction style outperformed the group work section on quizzes, while there was no significant statistical difference between sections on oral performances. Surveys given to students showed that students' attitudes towards teaching styles did not correlate with their quiz scores.

This study was an exploration of how an instructional technique that uses language, image, and sound—that of a meaningful presentation of language with image by gradual, step-by-step sequencing—affects vocabulary acquisition. Research was carried out with volunteers from the BYU language community, who were randomly assigned to one of two testing groups. The two groups viewed Arabic language presentations wherein the presentation for the experimental group received line drawings to indicate vocabulary meanings, and the other group received English translations. Following the treatment, learners completed an online vocabulary test, and one week later, the same online vocabulary test. Statistical analyses indicated that one method of presentation was not better than the other method of presentation. ACT English scores and testing times, however, were significant for their affect on learning outcomes.

In recent years, advances in computer technology have allowed increasingly rich multimedia content to be incorporated into educational materials in many fields, including the field of language teaching. Yet as visually appealing as such products may be, we must ask whether multimedia-enriched materials actually improve learning in a measurable way. If so, individual curriculum makers can then decide whether the benefits of the multimedia materials justify the cost of purchasing and implementing them. This study attempted to examine the effects of multimedia glossary aids on incidental vocabulary acquisition rates of L2 learners of Japanese. Subjects included 35 third- and fourth-year students of Japanese at a large private university in the United States, who read a Japanese short story using an online web application that included a multimedia-enriched glossary. A total of 27 keywords were selected from the text for inclusion in the glossary. A third were annotated with English text definitions only; another third had an English text definition plus a picture illustration; the final third had an English text definition plus a video illustration. An unannounced post-test measured vocabulary gains. A logistic mixed models regression was performed to test for differences in acquisition rate across the annotation types. Also, due to the unique dual nature of Japanese orthography, which includes both the phonemic kana and so-called ideographic kanji characters, the regression also examined interaction between orthographic representation of the keyword and annotation type on acquisition rate. A significant result (p<0.0001) was found for annotation type as a main effect, with video-annotated words showing the highest acquisition rates. Additionally, a significant interaction (p=0.0139) was observed between orthography and annotation type, indicating that multimedia glossary annotations may have affected the acquisition of phonemic kana representations of keywords differently than they affected ideographic kanji representations.

This study investigates the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension of authentic Arabic texts; in particular, it attempts to investigate the percentage of vocabulary coverage (known words) readers need to ensure reading comprehension of two reading passages from online Arabic news source. Data was collected from twenty-three Arabic as-foreign language (AFL) learners at Brigham Young University, who ranged from Intermediate Low to Intermediate Mid in both productive and receptive skills. Two reading comprehension tests, circling the unknown words in texts and a lexical coverage test for each passage texts were given to the subjects. A linear regression analysis of the data shows that there is a correlation coefficient of 0.7 and 0.6 between the percentage of known words and students'comprehension of the two reading texts. The results indicate that the subjects needed to know approximately 90% of running words to adequately comprehend the first passage and around 86% to comprehend the second passage. Based on the findings, this study suggests that there is a lexical threshold for AFL learners,below which adequate comprehension of authentic texts might not be possible.

Previous second language (L2) acquisition research has assumed that L2 learners from a common first language (L1) have the same problems in an L2, ignoring the potential impact of a speaker's L1 dialect on L2 acquisition. This study examines the effects of L1 dialect on the acquisition of L2 German vowels. In particular, this thesis investigates two questions: 1) Do speakers from L1 dialects with vowel mergers perceive or produce vowel contrasts in the L1 and/or L2 differently than speakers from dialect areas without the same mergers? and 2) Are subjects' patterns of L1 perception or production paralleled in the L2? This thesis focuses on the vowel contrasts "pin"-"pen," "fail"-"fell," and "pool"-"pull"-"pole," which are merged (i.e., neutralized) in some environments in the Mississippi dialect, such that words like "him" and "hem" are heard or produced as the same word. Two groups of subjects participated: students from The University of Mississippi (the merging group) and students from Brigham Young University (BYU) (the non-merging group). Subjects completed a perceptual task and a production task. The perception task was a forced-choice identification task in which subjects heard English and German words and indicated which word they heard. In the production task, subjects read aloud German and English sentences. Results indicate that BYU subjects were significantly better than UMiss subjects at perceiving many vowel contrasts in English and German. Additionally, some perceptual patterns seemed to transfer to the L2, e.g., /ɪn/ and /ɛn/, were identified with similar accuracy in English and in German. In production, the groups differed significantly from each other in their production of many vowel contrasts, while acoustic analysis found no production mergers for either group in English or German. In two case studies, perception results and production results (as found by native speaker judgments), showed that vowel contrasts merged in English were also problematic in L2 German, though the problematic vowel was not necessarily the same. In sum, the UMiss speakers with mergers in their L1 dialect appeared to face different challenges than the BYU speakers when perceiving and producing German vowel contrasts. Results have implications for the L2 classroom and L2 research, suggesting that instructors may need different teaching strategies for speakers from merging dialects.

This study was designed to evaluate the correlation between participants' acquisition of feminine Chinese speech patterns and time lived in Chinese speaking areas. These patterns include final particles, key words, request words, sentence patterns, and intonation. Data collection was administered through an on-line survey. Participants in this study included twenty female native Mandarin Chinese speakers and 39 female CFL learners. The data collected revealed the correlation between the participants' acquisition of feminine Chinese speech patterns and time spent abroad in a Chinese language environment. Part one of the survey targeted the demographics of the participants. The second part of the survey contained five scenarios that allowed the participants to reveal their reactions to different situations. These groups were separated by the amount of time spent abroad and then analyzed according to these parameters.

This thesis examines motivation in English L1 learners of Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) by analyzing the students' responses to a questionnaire modeled after Dörnyei's research and an observational instrument called the Motivation Behaviors of Language Learning (MBLL) modeled after Guilloteaux and Dörnyei's (2008) research on motivational teaching strategies on behaviors. The data from the questionnaires were subjected to a discriminative analysis of students answers in relation to a high grade (receiving a B- or higher) or lower (C+ or lower) in their Japanese classes. A Factor Analysis of the data was also carried out. The discriminative results could predict students' receiving higher or lower grades with 13-16% error. In addition, behaviors examined in the 200-level Japanese classes seemed to match students' responses to a questionnaire, suggesting they are not highly motivated. However, students who passed this class reported similar study habits outside of class in preparation as students from a 400-level class. The Factor Analysis also found that students with higher self-perception of their motivation and language aptitude tended to receive higher grades in the class. The results suggest that motivation can be further understood by understanding behaviors in addition to traditional questionnaires, and students' self perceptions of their language abilities may affect their grades in the language classroom. In the future, motivation research should include triangulating questionnaire data with other data, such as observational instruments. This thesis is a step in that direction.

This study explored the relationships between roughly 330 participants' tolerance of ambiguity and their preference for either an inductive or deductive presentation of grammar by means of an online survey. Most participants were college students. Other variables examined included years of study, in-country experience, proficiency, age, year in school, and language of choice. A new instrument for measuring inductive vs. deductive preference was also created based on Cohen, Oxford, and Chi's (2001) Learning Style Survey (LSS). Results showed weak correlations between: tolerance of ambiguity and inductive preference (.25), tolerance of ambiguity and proficiency (.25), and inductive preference and proficiency (.20). Additional findings include: a correlation (.62) between proficiency and years of instruction received, a slight correlation (.22) between age and tolerance of ambiguity, no correlation between years of language instruction and tolerance of ambiguity, no correlation between studying abroad and ambiguity tolerance or inductive/deductive preference, and no correlation between age and inductive vs. deductive preference. Lastly, data was analyzed to determine whether language was a contributing factor or not, and only the participants learning Japanese were significantly different (p = .004), with a higher preference for inductive learning.