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In compliance with NCLB, states receiving Title I funding were to ensure that all teachers of core subject areas, including foreign languages, were highly qualified by the end of the 2005-2006 academic year. Given that 44 states assess teacher quality through The Praxis Series tests, and 32 of these rely on one of the Praxis II subject-matter tests to gauge foreign language competency (ETS, 2010a), research examining the perspectives of teacher candidates and faculty members regarding these licensure tests is needed. The purposes of this study were to (a) examine the perspectives of teacher candidates and faculty members regarding the Praxis II, (b) determine how their unique perspectives were influenced by their own classroom experiences as language learners, and (c) consider how the Praxis II experience might contribute to curricular reform including suggestions for altering pedagogical strategies, coursework, and the requirement of additional exposure to the target language independent of the four-walled classroom. Lortie’s (1975) framework of “apprenticeship of observation” (p. 61) provides a context to understand the perspectives of the Praxis II tests for licensure in foreign languages. The data revealed that three categories of Spanish teacher candidates emerged: (a) Confident Completer, (b) Surprised Prevailers, and (c) Frustrated Disregarders and each group prepared differently for the Praxis II as a result of their experiences in the language classroom as apprentice observers. Faculty members offered both similar and different perspectives of the Praxis II than did teacher candidates. Data suggested that the Praxis II can also serve to alter the behavior of teacher candidates and faculty members which may improve foreign language teacher preparation. Suggestions including course development and instructional strategies are included to assist teacher candidates in meeting the expectations of the Praxis II.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / The purpose of the present study was to investigate the influence of rhetorical specification in writing assignments on the writing performance of EFL students from above average universities in Taiwan. Rhetorical specification refers to the amount of information provided in the writing assignment with regard to the purpose of a composition, its topic, audience, and ways of presenting ideas. The research questions were (1) How do writing assignments with varying degrees of rhetorical specification affect the overall writing quality, the content, and the rhetorical structure? (2) How do writing assignments with varying degrees of rhetorical specification affect EFL writers with varying amounts of writing instruction? (3) How do writing assignments with varying amounts of rhetorical specification affect the use of Chinese writing features in EFL students' English texts? (4) How do students assess the usefulness of rhetorical specification? Participants were assumed to be at three levels of proficiency, ranging from basic to advanced: 60 Non-English major freshmen, 50 English major freshmen, and 57 English major juniors. Each participant composed two essays in response to two writing tasks: a writing assignment that contained specific information about topic, purpose, and audience, and a task that contained little rhetorical information. Repeated measures ANOVA, paired-samples T-tests, and Chi-square statistic were undertaken to examine the effects of prompt types on several writing features. Also, the researcher interviewed 12 participants to explore their evaluations of the rhetorical information. The findings of the study are: (1) EFL students across groups benefited from rhetorical specification with regard to content richness and effective rhetorical structure. (2) English junior students were the most successful in utilizing the rhetorical information to represent a developed rhetorical problem and to compose better texts. (3) Rhetorical specification enabled Chinese-speaking EFL students to conform to English writing norms with less transference of Chinese writing features. (4) Most students indicated that among the rhetorical elements, purpose specification was considered most valuable in composing more effective essays, although they also reported that addressing the purpose demands was a challenging task. / 2999-01-01

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / The purpose of the dissertation was to investigate English as a foreign language (EFL) students' use of their first language (L1) in composing English texts. The first study focused on factors associated with students' spontaneous use of L1 in EFL writing. The research questions of this study concerned how spontaneous L1 use in EFL writing may interact with cognitive demands of writing tasks, learners' English proficiency, and writing quality. Thirty Taiwanese college students from different disciplines participated. Writing tasks included the issue analysis and argument analysis tasks, both derived from GRE and GMAT writing. Students' percentage of L1 use in think-aloud protocols was calculated within each phase of the composing process and compared to the cognitive demands of writing tasks, students' English proficiency, and writing scores. EFL students' percentage of L1 use was found to vary not only by cognitive demands of writing tasks but also by types of writing tasks. Total quantity of L1 use of EFL students was not related to their English proficiency. Further, EFL students' spontaneous use of L1 was found to be associated with better writing quality when used in activities such as making logical transitions, posing questions about logic and content development, or summarizing long chunks of reasoning. The second study, concerning the advantage of L1 used as the only composing language in EFL writing, looked in detail at four cases to examine factors such as the cognitive demands of writing tasks, students' English proficiency, and students' ability to use L1 strategically. The choice of composing language was found to be associated with English writing quality only in cognitively demanding writing tasks, such as argumentation. In argumentation, the advantages of composing in L1 depended on the interaction of students' English proficiency and students' ability to use L 1 strategically. Compared to English, L1 Chinese as a composing language was advantageous to writing quality when students had either the ability to use L1 strategically or high English proficiency. On the other hand, L1 as a composing language was disadvantageous to English writing scores when the student had neither the ability to use L1 strategically nor high English proficiency. Pedagogical implications are discussed. / 2999-01-01

The current study was conducted with foreign language students enrolled in the summer course at Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS), an intense foreign language program. The study measured and analyzed students' preferences toward mobile applications for learning a foreign language. Survey questionnaires were used to collect data on students' preferences of mobile delivery modes for learning a foreign language. The research design deployed was single-case design at two points-in-time, called repeated measures design in the t-test statistics, where effects-over-time of treatment (i.e., using a technological device) were tracked. The effects-over-time of using a mobile device for learning foreign language skills were significant and the magnitude of differences in students' attitudes between Weeks 2 and 8 was also significant. Students must have felt that their performance had changed at Week 8 and that using a smartphone could have been the difference. The structure and the research methodology of having null hypotheses that are tested statistically are both clear enough to provide a template for a replication of the study with a different sample. The statistical tests used by this study can be replicated with different research problems or a different audience.

This thesis is focused on dynamic assessment (DA), an instructional approach based on Vygotskian sociocultural theory, applied to French pronunciation instruction, which can be neglected or inconsistent in the foreign language curriculum. DA aims to combine instruction and assessment into a cooperative, mediated approach in which the mediator works with the learner to identify and develop emergent abilities. These emergent abilities can appear in what is often referred to as the zone of proximal development (ZPD), or the difference between what a learner can do independently and what he/she can do with mediation, which in the present study was the difference between what the participant could pronounce correctly with or without mediation. In carrying out an individual DA session with a learner, the author aimed to find suggestions of potential benefits by applying DA to French pronunciation instruction and gain a more detailed understanding of the learner's performance than is generally possible from a traditional assessment, which is totally devoid of mediation for the sake of validity and reliability. The study includes a discussion of some potential benefits and limitations related to the use of DA for teaching French pronunciation to intermediate L2 learners based on what was observed in the DA session, for example suggestions of increased awareness of pronunciation, suggestions of increased independent performance, and suggestions of decreased errors in specific problem areas.

The aim of this study is to: (1) examine whether non-native EFL teachers experience feelings of foreign language teaching anxiety; (2) investigate whether non-native EFL student teachers experience feelings of foreign language teaching anxiety; (3) examine how the participants’ feelings of foreign language teaching anxiety compared with other cultural groups in previous studies; and (4) examine how foreign language teaching anxiety affects foreign language classroom instruction. In total, 79 non-native EFL teachers and 131 non-native EFL student teachers participated in this study by completing a battery of questionnaires. The results indicated that both non-native EFL teachers and student teachers experience varying levels of foreign language teaching anxiety. However, foreign language teaching anxiety does not appear to have any effect on the foreign language teaching/learning activities the teachers or student teachers use in their classrooms. / text

The present study is based on the theoretical assumptions that frequency of characters and their structural components, as well as the frequency types of structural components, are important to enable learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) to discover the underlying structure of Chinese characters. In the CFL context, since reliable target language input is limited largely to textbook materials and teacher instruction, it is important to more rigorously examine the inventory of Chinese characters that is typically presented in CFL textbooks. The purpose of this study was to systematically describe and classify Chinese characters from ten CFL textbooks designed for college and adult beginning learners. The main focus was to compare the textbooks in the following areas: explicit orthographic decomposition instruction, character frequency selection, radical combination frequency, radical semantic transparency, radical positional regularity among different character graphic structures, phonetic element reliability, and phonetic component combination frequency. To accomplish the analysis required for this study, a special character database was created. Dictionaries were used to classify character characteristics, and documented frequency lists were used to classify the character usage frequency. The findings revealed that most textbooks rarely include explicit orthographic decomposition instruction in the vocabulary lists or lessons, while over 40% of the characters in most of the textbooks did not combine with other characters to form words. In addition, analysis of frequency lists created over time revealed that the ten textbooks generally contain many high frequency characters. Furthermore, the results indicated that 60% of the characters in the database were classified by relatively few radicals (17%), with most radicals appearing on the left side of the characters. Relatively reliable phonetic analogy groups appeared frequently. About half of the characters are semantic-phonetic compound characters. Less than 10% of the characters in the textbooks are semantic-phonetic compound characters that contain semantically transparent radicals and reliable phonetic elements. The results of the study suggest that textbook writers should consider integrating orthographic decomposition and component frequency materials into their textbooks, as systematic instruction in textbooks is generally lacking. Teachers should also be mindful of emphasizing the high frequency characters that are consistently featured in all textbooks, as well as the frequently appearing radicals and left-right internal structure of many of the characters. In this way, students will early on develop a firm foundation of the principles governing Chinese orthography.

Amid a recent wave of revived interest in citizenship and citizenship education, foreign language education is emerging as an important but under-researched site for the education of citizens under conditions of globalization and massive social, economic, and political changes. This qualitative study deconstructed the concept of good citizenship embedded in China's and America's foreign language curricula during the past decade. The study presented a comparative critical discourse analysis of four interwoven data sets: (a) foreign language policies and/or curriculum standards bounded by the two contexts of this study: Shanghai in China and Utah in the U.S.; (b) EFL (English as a foreign language) and CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) instructional materials developed for the 1st through 3rd and 10th through 12th graders in Shanghai and Utah, respectively; (c) media accounts relating foreign language education with citizenship education in the two countries; and (d) relevant academic publications. Together with a body of critical literature on ideology in curriculum, a two-dimensional citizenship matrix consisting of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, neoliberalism, and Confucianism assisted in the identification and comparison of the country-specific sociopolitical and sociocultural meanings associated with being a good citizen in China and the U.S. Three sets of findings were reported in response to the three research questions. First, among a jumble of meanings and expectations, the most widely shared imaginary embedded in China's EFL curriculum is an individual whose allegiance is to the nation and the market, whereas the second popular perception is someone who observes Confucian moral principles and adopts a global perspective. Second, the dominant good citizenship notion embedded in America's CFL curriculum is characterized by a marked neoliberal orientation. Third, the two cases demonstrated two chief differences and two major similarities. Due to the unique social contexts, cultural institutions, and global power differentials of China and the U.S., the good citizenship discursive fields of two cases were qualitatively different both in terms of intent and belonging. The discursive fields were similar in that the neoliberal-nationalism discourse was prevalent and the officially preferred good citizenship notion was oppressive in nature in both cases.

The major concern of the Field Study is the teaching of composition, with particular reference to Chinese foreign language institutes. Robert B. Kaplan (1966), having analyzed the rhetorical behaviours of several linguistic groups, claims that different cultures develop different rhetorical conventions, which influence the non-English native speaker's way of writing in English. Recent years have witnessed many developments in language teaching as a result of research done in sociolinguistics, yet the implication of Kaplan's finding for EFL teaching is still unexplored. This paper thus intends to examine this issue of "cultural differences in the nature of rhetoric" by comparing the Chinese linguistic system with the English linguistic system in terms of rhetorical organization in exposition. The following aspects are to be discussed. In the first place, an introduction delineates the need for this Study, its aims, scope and sources of data. After the Introduction, there is a brief review of the EFL composition teaching in China and the influence of overseas composition teaching in foreign language institutes in China today. An attempt is then made to study Kaplan's theory by exploring both Chinese and English rhetorical patterns; and devices. The emphasis of this chapter is on a comparison and contrast of expository modes and strategies in the two rhetorics. Having studied rhetorical principles in a broad sense, the report narrows its focus to the differences in their use of English rhetorical devices between Australian English native speakers and foreign language learners from China; the material studied is a selection of compositions produced by Chinese students and rewritten by Australian students. The final section contributes practical suggestions for EFL composition teaching in foreign language institutes in China.