The purpose of this master's project was to investigate the types of personal characteristics, knowledge, and skills TESOL employers are seeking in foreign job candidates in today's biggest EFL job markets, specifically in China and South Korea. First, the literature review introduces the enormous development of the EFL job market in these two countries and some challenges these two countries faced in their attempt to hire foreign EFL teachers. A total of 303 job advertisements were gathered from two Internet sources (Dave's ESL Café and TESOL.org) that met all the established criteria for choosing a reliable data source during a 12-month period and analyzed in order to determine the personal characteristics, knowledge, and skills listed by TESOL employers in these two Asian countries. The results indicate that 92% of the ads required international applicants to be native speakers of English. Key skills needed in both countries included communication skills, computer skills, a high level of English language proficiency, and writing skills. The majority of the full-time positions sought instructors with experience in materials development, curriculum development, or assessment. In terms of personal characteristics, employers want applicants to be enthusiastic, energetic, dedicated, and interested in young learners ranging in age from kindergarten to high school level. These findings have important implications for those TESOL graduates preparing themselves to obtain full-time jobs in China and South Korea.

As English continues to become the universal language in commercial, educational and social settings worldwide, there is an increasing demand for English language teachers (ELT). While many teachers are native English speakers, many of them lack formal training in pedagogy and content knowledge. One challenge of novice teachers is how to create a learning experience that is both engaging and enjoyable for English language learners. Basic Training and Resources for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (BTRTESOL) created by Dr. Lynn Henrichsen, is a basic but comprehensive program to provide skills and resources to teachers with limited formal training, time and financial resources. Two of the units of the BTRTESOL program focus on creating positive learning environments through the use of songs and games, thus improving motivation, participation and learning among English language learners. This project details the development of two BTRTESOL units titled "Using Songs to Increase Participation, Recall and Enjoyment" and "Using Games and Other Fun Yet Effective Activities for English Language Teaching." It also explains the rationale for using songs and games to enhance the curricula and provides practical examples for producing enjoyable and effective activities.

Under the direction of Dr. Lynn Henrichsen, a group of students has developed numerous units for the Basic Training and Resources for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (BTRTESOL) program. This program is currently located on a website and will someday be published in book and DVD format. These units provide general training for novice teachers who teach domestically or abroad. With little or no training, volunteer English language teachers are often left with questions that BTRTESOL strives to answer in its 52 units. As this audience may or may not have university education or heavy commitment, these units are kept short and to the point with easy to read and understand language. The program uses a minimalist approach so each unit includes only "The least you should know" while connecting users to additional resources in a "where to go to learn more" section. This master's project describes the creation, evaluation and revision of two units for the BTRTESOL program, "Content-Based Language Classes" and "Multiple Skills in One Class." The first unit introduces the idea of integrating content teaching and language teaching into one course. In addition, it explains different types of scaffolding and teaching techniques that will aid novice teachers in creating successful content-based instruction courses. The second unit will help teachers to integrate different linguistic modalities into one course. Suggestions on how to pick themes, manage class time, and plan lessons are addressed

Pausing is a natural part of human speech. Pausing is used to segment speech, negotiate meaning, and allow for breathing. In oral speech, pausing, along with other suprasegmental features, plays a critical role in creating meaning as comprehensible speech is seen as a goal for language learners around the world. In order to be comprehensible, language learners need to learn to pause correctly in their speaking. Though this notion is widely accepted by applied linguists and many language teachers, the effect of pausing on intelligibility of spontaneous oral discourse has not been established by empirical data. This study isolates pause duration in spontaneous oral discourse in order to establish its connection to the intelligibility of non-native speech. In this study, North American undergraduate students' reactions to non-native pause duration in spontaneous oral discourse were examined. The task involved measuring the NESs' processing, comprehension, and evaluation of three different versions of an international teaching assistant's presentation: One with unmodified pause duration, one with pause duration shortened by 50%, and a third passage with pause duration lengthened by 50%. Results showed a positive correlation between pause duration and number of listeners able to identify main ideas. Finally, listener reaction was measurably more positive to the unmodified passage than to the passages with lengthened or shortened pauses.

The number of English as a second language (ESL) students attending universities in the United States has increased during the 2011-2012 school year (Hagedorn & Lee, 2005), with, for the first time since 2001, more undergraduate international students than graduate students in institutions across the country (Davis, 2012). Given the wide range of backgrounds and English proficiencies represented by this group, their varying needs are frequently not being fully met, particularly in reading and writing, two areas that are often weak in ESL students but linked to academic success (Matsuda, 2004). Regarding writing, much research has shown that ESL students need feedback on various aspects of writing to improve (Ferris, 2009), ranging from content, to organization, to linguistic features. However, giving feedback on each of these components may not be possible for writing teachers, due to time demands. Alternatively, peer tutors may effectively work with ESL students to help them understand academic writing expectations in the U.S. and meet said expectations. This investigative study looked at a newly-developed ESL Writing Fellows (WF) program at Brigham Young University, focusing on the perceptions of the various stake holders (students, writing teachers, and Fellows themselves) regarding the success of the ESL WF program. Via pre- and post-program surveys, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups, the perceptions of the students were obtained. Via non-structured interviews, the perceptions of the teachers and Fellows themselves were obtained. From these data, themes that looked at the aspects of the program that were successful and that need to be improved were developed and analyzed, primarily from an administrative perspective. Overall, this study found that ESL students greatly appreciated having the individualized tutoring provided by the ESL WF program. Students valued the feedback given by the tutor on content, organization, and grammatical issues, and found the follow-up conferences with the tutor to be a great asset as the tutors could explain intended meaning. Additionally, tutors felt more comfortable negotiating intended meaning with the Fellow, which may be more effective at helping students develop the needed schema to apply Fellow suggestions to future writing assignments. However, much of the success of the program relies on the individual Fellow, with Fellows who neglect duties or provide feedback that conflicts with that of the teacher creating problems for students. Administrators should hire and train tutors accordingly. Teachers agreed that the Fellows generally were an asset to their classes, and the Fellows themselves appreciated the opportunity to work one-on-one with ESL students, feeling that this program afforded them experience that would make them more employable in the future.

The current study is a collection of three publishable articles addressing a similar theme. Each article is an examination into the role textbooks play in Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms and, specifically, a look at textbooks as an element in the classroom environment, their relationship to pressures from high-stakes exams, and an exploration into any paradigms about the nature of EFL learning they may be explicitly or implicitly promoting through their content and methodologies. The first article, a grounded theory look at underlying methodologies and ideologies in common Chinese textbooks, reveals that there may be competing paradigms promoted by different texts that could be sending conflicting messages about the nature of EFL study. The second article, a critical discourse analysis of textbooks as items of cultural discourse, finds that subtle wording and structure in common textbooks could be reinforcing ideologies of the dominant paradigm about English study. The third and final article again uses grounded theory to compare the content of a common textbook series to passages from the national college entrance exam and to goals of the national syllabus to suggest that while in several aspects, the textbook series is in harmony with stated educational standards, there are certain ways in which the textbook and the exam seem to be misaligned in their goals and structure.

This thesis seeks to develop a pedagogy for teaching academic writing to nonnative graduate students of technical disciplines in order to give them the skills they need to write papers that they can submit to academic journals and conferences, thereby advancing their careers and gaining recognition for their academic institutions. The work draws on research from the fields of technical communication and second-language acquisition in order to develop pedagogical principles for a class in which nonnative technical graduate students write an academic paper that they can submit for publication. The thesis proposes an approach that incorporates content-based instruction, certain plain language principles, and guided drafting, and then discusses some specifics of a potential class based on those conclusions.

The present study, a quantitative lexical analysis, examines the extent to which vocabulary size and lexical diversity contribute to writing scores on advanced non-native speakers’ and native speakers’ academic compositions. The data consists of essays composed by 104 adult non-native English learners enrolled in advanced second language writing courses and 68 native speaking university students in a first-year composition course. The lexical diversity of the sample essays is quantified by both the Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity (MTLD) and the voc-D while vocabulary size is measured by CELEX word frequency means, three instruments that are available in the computational linguistics program Coh-Metrix 3.0. Writing scores are provided by three independent raters’ evaluations according to the TOEFL iBT Independent Writing Rubric. Results from a binary logistic regression reveal that lexical diversity has a significantly greater impact on writing score than vocabulary size (p < .01). Nevertheless, a series of MANOVAs indicate that vocabulary size initially facilitates writing scores at the lower proficiency levels, but it is an essay’s lexical diversity that promotes it to the higher score levels. Additional findings from the MANOVAs demonstrate that native speakers’ profiles of lexical diversity and size are significantly different from their non-native peers (p < .001). The lexical profiles also differed significantly among the individual score levels of the TOEFL iBT rubric (p < .05). A final outcome from a Pearson’s product moment correlation analysis shows that iii vocabulary size has only a moderate relationship to lexical diversity, suggesting that variation of mid-range vocabulary may be more important to writing proficiency than the use of more sophisticated terms that occur less frequently in natural language. Implications for practice suggest that it is not enough to simply teach vocabulary words in the L2 composition classroom, but also to guide learners in how to employ these words in a varied manner within their writing. Furthermore, the results of this study indicate that teachers should spend more time on helping students use medium frequency words along with synonyms of a similar frequency rather than teaching students infrequent vocabulary, which may appear to sound more advanced.

The writing of this thesis was guided·by the question "how does one teach English as a second language through theater?" This thesis.contains the pedagogical research basis for teaching English as second language, a script with supporting materials for teaching English as a second language, and a playwright's.journal detailing the writing process for the dramatic work. Within the pedagogical research, there is a comparison between the different founding fathers of modem TESL methodologies, a comparison between the different methodologies, and a practical exploration of teaching English as a second language through Task Based Instruction. The script itself is the lyrical book for a ten day, episodic musical for Spanish speaking 3rd and 4th graders. The dramatic work was written to be performed in a voluntary extracurricular context, such as an ESL summer camp.

Some psychologists (e.g., Bergin, 1997) have contended that if individuals neglect the world of the spirit, they ignore a foundational aspect of themselves. This must especially be true for language educators, who come from all corners of the globe and thus bring into their classrooms many spiritual views. I define spirituality, following Palmer (2003) as “the eternal human yearning to be connected with something larger than our own egos” (p. 377). Spirituality need not, then, entail belief in a supernatural being or force. The main thrust of Palmer’s definition was that educators should seek to forge meaningful and lasting connections with their learners. Although such thinking is common in general education, it has been little addressed in Second Language Education (SLE). Hence, I felt that this inquiry was timely. I undertook this qualitative case study by analyzing narratives about the turning points in the spiritual journeys of nine language teachers of varying creeds (or who professed no overt spirituality), as well as their stories of how they felt that they applied their spiritual beliefs to classroom teaching. To this end, I interviewed each participant at least twice. After analyzing their interview transcript data, I triangulated the common themes emerging from these data with, where appropriate, the informants’ classroom syllabuses, lesson plans, and academic publications. I also attempted to validate the results of this study through member checking. Three participants felt that their journeys into religious pluralism had strongly influenced their efforts to teach social responsibility and challenging moral dilemmas in their classrooms. Another three held that their tribulations, as well as the resulting comfort they found in spiritual practices, helped them to be nurturing teachers who could understand clearly the pain faced by some of their young charges. Still another three, despite their divergent spiritual paths, all insisted that they sought to teach in an ethical, caring manner. Finally, most of the informants, regardless of their spiritual backgrounds or views, spoke of the importance of transformation, ethics, and connection (nurturing) to their pedagogy. I conclude the study by positing implications of the aforementioned findings for research and practice. / CITE/Language Arts