A validity study can be used to investigate the effectiveness of an exam and reveal both its strengths and weaknesses. This study concerns an investigation of the writing portfolio Level Achievement Test (LAT) at the English Language Center (ELC) of Brigham Young University (BYU). The writing portfolios of 251 students at five proficiency levels were rated by 11 raters. Writing portfolios consisted of two coursework essays, a self-reflection assignment, and a 30-minute timed essay. Quantitative methods included an analysis with Many-Facet Rasch Model (MFRM) software, called FACETS, which looked for anomalies in levels, classes, examinees, raters, writing criteria, and the rating scale categories. Qualitative methods involved a rater survey, rater Think Aloud Protocols (TAPs), and rater interviews. Results indicated that the exam has a high degree of validity based on the MFRM analysis. The survey and TAPs revealed that although raters follow a similar pattern for rating portfolios, they differed both in the time they took to rate portfolios and in the degree to which they favored the rating criteria. This may explain some of the discrepancies in the MFRM rater analysis. Conclusions from the MFRM analysis, surveys, TAPs, and interviews were all used to make recommendations to improve the rating process of the LAT, as well as to strengthen the relationship between LAT rating and classroom teaching and grading.

After careful review of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Medical Purposes (EMP) literature, I assisted in the development of a curriculum for an ESP Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) Preparation course. The course participants were non-native English speaking employees of Utah Valley Regional Medical Center (UVRMC), currently working in the department of housekeeping, wanting to further their employment opportunities. The ESP CNA Preparation course was 12 weeks duration, three days per week, 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm. My contribution to the curriculum was the development of teaching materials and methods and I used two guiding questions to assist in the development of the materials: • What form should effective materials take for an ESP CNA preparation course? • How effective were these materials? From all the ESP / EMP related literature that I reviewed, I found three studies (Orr, 2002; Bosher & Smallkowski, 2002; Dias, 1999) that had a strong emphasis, closely related to our curriculum, on different aspects of materials development. The literature provided a basis for the outline of materials to be developed for the ESP CNA Preparation course. An in-depth needs and situational analysis, close observation of the CNA course and ongoing Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) coursework, added to the basis established from the review of literature. The CNA course gave the project team opportunities to observe what English skills a non-native English speaker (NNES) would need to participate appropriately, and with different people observing we gathered different perspectives. The materials development process reviews the types (e.g., lesson plans, activities, worksheets, audio etc) and purpose of materials developed. After two week increments of the ESP CNA Preparation course, I critically reviewed the things that I learned from the use of my materials (e.g., lesson plan format, time allocations, teaching methodology, materials that did not enhance language skills etc). My materials went through a refining process. Three things I learned from this project are: • To teach an effective ESP curriculum, an ESL and a content expert are required. • Materials developed for an ESP course come from a variety of sources. • The development of materials is a progressional process.

A formal evaluation of BYU's Basic Training in TESOL course shows the strengths and weaknesses of the curriculum of this course. Interns take this course in preparation for international internships where they may be asked to teach English. However, the interns are generally not seeking majors or even minors in TESOL. Furthermore, most interns are not seeking any teaching major. Internship locations vary throughout the world and include, but are not limited to the following regions: Central and South America, Africa, Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. This MA curriculum evaluation project reports findings of a formal evaluation of BYU's Linguistics 377, Basic Training in TESOL, a course designed to provide interns with minimal teacher training in preparation for international internships. It specifically looks at how effectively the basic training course prepares the interns and to what extent it helps increase the confidence of the interns. This report presents quantitative and qualitative data collected from the interns enrolled during the Winter 2008 semester course, via interviews and questionnaires. The evaluation also offers recommendations for the course and other volunteer programs, as well as future research recommendations.

Far from being simply will, a survey of English grammar textbooks revealed that a multitude of expressions exists in the English language to express the future time. These expressions include, but are not limited to, will, be going to, the simple present tense, modals, the future perfect tense, and the present progressive tense. With so many choices and with a lack of direct relationship between tense and time, a language learner may certainly have difficulties in choosing which expression to use when attempting to produce a future utterance. A corpus-based approach to analyzing real language has been demonstrated to be quite useful for the field of TESOL (Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 1996; Biber & Conrad, 2001; Biber & Reppen, 2002) and numerous studies on the frequency of lexical and grammatical items of language have revealed salient features that otherwise would have remained unknown. Adding to this body of knowledge, the current study was an analysis of future expressions in spoken conversational English using the television sitcom Friends as a corpus. A careful analysis of 349,106 words from transcripts of 117 randomly selected episodes revealed that the most common expression of the future in the English language is the contracted form of be going to – gonna. The results of the study also revealed that only six future expressions emerged in this spoken conversational English from this corpus: will, be going to, the simple present tense, the present progressive tense, modals, and be about to.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the phonetic production of fricatives across differing word positions and task types. Further knowledge about the fricative production of second language learners of English would potentially improve the ability to teach correct pronunciation and improve the productivity of second language programs. All participants in this study were native speakers of Mandarin Chinese with English as their second language. A total of 12 subjects participated, all of whom had English proficiency ratings ranging from novice to advanced. The speakers were between 21-51 years of age, with each speaker having between 2 to 6 years of experience learning English in their country of origin. Using acoustic and spectral moment analyses, the acoustic nature of four types of fricative productions (/f/, /θ/, /s/, and /ʃ/) were analyzed as a function of linguistic task type and word position. Although a number of measures were found to differ significantly as a function of word position and task type, the majority of statistical analyses were not found to be significant. This lack of significance may be due to the specific methodology used, the speakers atypical voicing patterns, and/or decreased length of sound productions. Findings of this study may indicate that second language learners production of fricatives vary minimally across differing word positions and task types.

No description available.

This study uses a self-presentational framework to investigate second language listening anxiety (L2 listening anxiety) among university students learning English in Japan and demonstrate that L2 listening involves social concerns that are specific to L2 settings. Successful performance in aural interaction presupposes mutual understanding, and L2 listeners have good reason to become anxious when it is doubtful whether they properly comprehend what others say. The Shortened Scale of Foreign Language Listening Anxiety, the Revised Interaction Anxiousness Scale, the Penn State Worry Questionnaire as well as a dictation test were administered to 1,177 students in 15 universities for the quantitative part of this study. Introspection verbal report data were collected from 17 students in two universities to investigate the thought processes of L2 listeners for the qualitative part. The profile analysis indicated the following: L2 listening anxiety was (a) specific to L2 situations and (b) linked to L2 proficiency because high and low L2 listening proficiency groups were different in the overall levels of L2 listening anxiety, but not different in general anxiety measures. The exploratory factor analysis and Rasch principle component analyses demonstrated that L2 listening anxiety was a broad construct composed of two related but distinct dimensions, Self-Focused Apprehension and Task-Focused Apprehension. The former is a concern over social evaluative threat, and the latter is worry over effective processing of aural input. The univariate analyses of variance confirmed that L2 listening anxiety was partly socially constructed because social anxiety was linked to both dimensions of L2 listening anxiety. The verbal data suggested that L2 listening anxiety was receiver-specific in that it involved concerns over comprehending and responding appropriately to aural messages. They also indicated that the levels of L2 listening anxiety were (a) susceptible to individual differences, and (b) influenced by different social situations. This study contributes to conceptual developments in the area of L2 learner psychology because understanding others is of profound importance in successful communication, and anxiety over non-understanding or misunderstanding can have significant personal and interpersonal consequences. / CITE/Language Arts

In this interview study involving the analysis of narratives collected from Japanese American professionals teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) who have lived more than ten years in Japan, I focus on how the participants negotiated their often contested identities in the TESOL context in Japan. I use the notion of identity negotiation narrowly defined as "struggles which occur when certain identity options are imposed or devalued, and others are unavailable or misunderstood" (Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004, p. 20). Most Japanese Americans share similar phenotypes with the majority of Japanese nationals, creating many misconceptions about our linguistic competence in Japanese and English and ability to act appropriately within Japanese cultural norms. Educational settings are also an arena contributing to a simplistic Japanese/non-Japanese, native speaker/non-native speaker (NS/NNS) framework within which such encounters are defined. I intend to illuminate the underlying assumptions responsible for the misconceptions that continue to challenge their authenticity. This is in line with inquiry into the role of race in TESOL (Curtis & Romney, 2006; Kubota & Lin, 2006). The six participants were two men and four women, including myself. I conducted multiple interviews individually and in groups over a period of four years. I transcribed the narrative data into numbered lines and reworked selected parts into stanza form (Gee, 2005) or used block quotes to analyze the identity negotiation processes. For the autoethnography, I used intensive reflective writings done throughout the course of this project in addition to interview data in which I am the interviewer who also shares stories. Through multi-layered analyses (Sorsoli, 2007), I hope to illuminate what the individuals' narratives reflect about the contested nature of values held about language, ethnicity, race, and identity in the context of English teaching, learning, and use in Japan today. I suggest that the findings and conclusions from this study can be applied to other contexts in the world as well. It is therefore important for the TESOL professional to become an actively critical observer of how her work is affecting all the stakeholders, including her own self. / Applied Linguistics

Positive psychology is rapidly developing as a field in psychology. Many constructs associated with positive psychology have been developed but relationships have not been demonstrated to second language (L2) learning or L2 learning motivation. The main purpose of this study was to explore empirically some core constructs of positive psychology and L2 learning motivation by testing a structural model of the causal relationships among levels of self-concept, and L2 proficiency. In order to do that, it was first necessary to validate measurable components of each of the levels. The self-concept constructs were: a global positive self-concept, a domain-specific positive L2 self, and L2 skill specific self-efficacy. The various self-constructs were organized into finer levels of specificity, from the global to L2 domain to L2 domain skills. A structural model was created from three latent variables that were in turn created from measured variables at each level of specificity. For the latent positive self-concept the measured variables consisted of flourishing, hope, and curiosity. For the latent variable of positive L2 self the measured variables consisted of an interested-in-L2 self, passion-for-L2-learning self, and L2 mastery goal orientation. For the latent motivational variable of L2 self-efficacy the measured variables were L2 speaking self-efficacy, L2 listening self-efficacy, and L2 reading self-efficacy. The measured variables were based on adapted or newly created self-reports. To demonstrate that the model holds beyond self-reports, objective L2 proficiency measures were also modeled with the latent variables of positive self-concept and positive L2 self. To demonstrate the generalizability of the self-model with L2 proficiency, a cross-validation study was done with two different objective measures of L2 proficiency, TOEIC and TOEIC Bridge. The results for the study were all positive for the creation of composite variables and fit to causal models. Latent variables were created for a composite positive self-concept, a composite positive L2 self, and a composite L2 motivation variable. The positive self-concept and positive L2 self also fit a model that included an objective measure of L2 proficiency. Finally, structural equation modeling confirmed causal relationships among positive self-concept, positive L2 self with both L2 motivation and with L2 proficiency. This study showed how constructs from the rapidly expanding field of positive psychology can be integrated with second language motivation. This study showed one way positive psychology can be applied to second language learning and suggests that positive psychology might invigorate future L2 motivation studies. / Teaching & Learning

<p dir="ltr"><a href="" target="_blank">ABSTRACT</a></p><p dir="ltr">This dissertation delves into postmodern wordless picture books, employing a multimodal content analysis across twenty-eight titles. It stands on a theoretical framework amalgamating concepts from multimodality grounded in social semiotics, critical literacy, and postmodernism. Among the corpus, three titles— <i>Alien Nation</i> (Bassi, 2021), and <i>The Rabbits</i> (Tan, 1998) and <i>The Other Side</i><i> </i>(Bányai, 2005)— emerge as principal subjects of analysis, with the remaining twenty-five titles providing contextual support. Guiding this journey is Barthes' (1977) tripartite model of visual textual meaning at the literal, symbolic, and personal levels, illuminating the intricate layers of the analyzed picture books.</p><p dir="ltr">The analysis unveils distinguishing features of these books: 1) Disruption of boundaries of story worlds and reality; 2) Disruption of space and/or time; 3) Multiple levels of intertextuality; 4) Visual incongruity, visual metaphor and 5) Personal Narratives. Such characteristics are found to challenge narrative conventions, blur reality-fiction distinctions, and implore readers to cultivate personal narratives and critical interpretations.</p><p dir="ltr">However, the research's significance extends beyond feature identification. It births a postmodern literacy pedagogy that encompasses visual, critical, and postmodern dimensions. This pedagogy advocates for embedding postmodern wordless picture books in pre-service teacher curricula. The aim surpasses genre acquaintance, aspiring for a profound grasp of the books' visual nuances and ideological layers. As these visual dynamics play a pivotal role in shaping a reader's experience, they bolster critical reading and foster personal and emotive connections to narratives. By engaging with such books, pre-service teachers gain multifaceted insights into intricate social and historical issues. They're empowered to question prevailing narratives, embrace diverse perspectives, and champion social justice and educational equity. Viewed through this prism, postmodern wordless picture books serve as powerful tools, guiding future educators to see the world from diverse perspectives, navigate uncertainties, foster empathy, and empower varied voices, ultimately becoming advocates for change and inclusion.</p>