The aim of this study is to investigate the inclusion of low-proficiency students in grades 4-6 in EFL classrooms in Sweden. The low-proficiency students are identified as new arrivals who are still in the process of mastering the Swedish language and Swedish speakers who have a negative attitude and low motivation towards the learning of English language. The methods used to collect data were interviews and classroom observations of four certified English teachers in grades 4-6. The findings of this study showed that the teachers supported the inclusion of low-proficiency students through differentiated methods and scaffolding. The results revealed that a lack of common language is an obstacle in the inclusion of new arrivals in the EFL classrooms.

At the beginning of each term, a handful of students who are linguistically unable to function in an English-speaking classroom appear at the doors of intensive English language programs across the globe. The English Language Center (ELC) at Brigham Young University (BYU) is no exception. In the recent past, five to twelve students have arrived each semester inadequately prepared for the lowest level class available. When placed in that level (Level One), these so-called "Level Zero" students have had trouble progressing and have also delayed the progress of the entire class. Without intervention, these students can continue to lag behind and pull down the level of the class throughout their time at the ELC. Finding or creating a solution to this ongoing problem was the purpose of this project. The solution presented here is to develop and implement a new curriculum designed specifically for these students. This course of action presents its own challenges, such as ensuring cost-effectiveness, providing adequate staffing, and finding or creating appropriate course materials. Each of these challenges has been addressed. Cost effectiveness and adequate staffing are ensured by utilizing unpaid interns from the BYU undergraduate TESOL minor program as teachers, and paying only one experienced teacher who functions as a supervisor and a teacher as needed. Course materials, some only recently developed, were chosen for the All Skills Class, the Vocabulary Class, the Reading Class, and the Lab Class. These classes currently constitute the Foundations Prep Course. The need for this curriculum was reiterated during a needs analysis conducted Winter Semester of 2009 by the students of the BYU Linguistics 677 (Curriculum Development) class. The Foundations Prep curriculum was then developed by the author during the summer of 2009 and implemented by her the following semester at the ELC. It is again being utilized there Winter Semester 2010. Institutional and financial feasibility, progress of students, reactions of members of the Executive Council, of the Foundations Prep Teacher/Supervisor, and of the interns, have all been examined to aid in considering the efficacy of continuing this program into the future.

Listening comprehension has been the forgotten skill in second language acquisition. However, in recent years, more and more studies have focused on listening comprehension and now acknowledge its importance in language acquisition. Empirical studies have explored how listeners use the two main listening processes (top-down processing and bottom-up processing). In this study, 31 low-proficiency level Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners from Brigham Young University took the Chinese Computer Adaptive Language Test (CCALT) and listened to four listening passages, measured by idea unit analysis and local and global question types. The data from these measurements suggest that low-proficiency level CFL participants in this study used both top-down and bottom-up processing while they listened to short listening passages. The results suggest listening comprehension at various proficiency levels needs to be studied further in Chinese and with different types of listening passages.

本研究旨在探討韻尾類比訓練對國小六年級學生英文讀字能力、讀字態度之影響及其學習困難。研究分兩階段進行：第一階段為小規模之預試研究，第二階段則為正式實驗。預試研究後，研究者在教法、試題做修正改進，並經由了解學生之思考過程及學習困難後，再進一步設計更完整之訪談。 在正式實驗中，對象為桃園縣某國小二個六年級班級，並從二班各挑出25人做為實驗組及對照組。實驗組施以韻尾類比策略訓練，教材來源為學生二至五年級之教科書字彙以做為類比策略運用之基礎。對照組雖使用相同之教材，但教法則僅限於字母與音的對應關係。實驗時間為每週20分鐘(每週兩節英語之前10分鐘)，持續十週。兩組學生在教學前後各施以讀字測驗及唸讀英文字態度問卷調查，訓練後則二組各選6名做為訪談對象以進一步了解他們的學習困難。 結果發現，二組學生在讀字能力上並無顯著差別，但在讀字態度上只有實驗組有顯著正向改變。比較二組學習困難則發現對照組之困難較為複雜。此外，實驗組之低程度學生在接受類比訓練後，在讀字能力及讀字態度上相較於對照組之低程度學生有非常明顯之進步。 以上研究結果顯示，韻尾類比策略訓練可以提升國小六年級學生英文認字能力亦能正向改變學生之讀字態度，尤其對低程度學生更為有效。最後根據本研究之結果及學生之學習困難提出教學建議，供未來國小英語教師英文讀字教學時之參考。 / The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of rime analogy training on sixth graders with respect to their decoding skills, attitudinal changes towards reading English words, and perceived difficulties with word reading. The present study comprised 2 phases: the first being a small-scale pilot study, the second a formal study. The pilot functioned as a preparatory work for the formal study. In the pilot, the testing materials, instruments, and activities of the training were tested and revised to be more suitable for the formal study. From the students’ responses, the researcher obtained some insights about their thinking process and learning difficulties and this allowed for designing a more complete interview for the formal study. In the formal study, there was an experimental group and a control group, each comprised of 25 sixth graders from two classes in one elementary school in Tao Yuan county. The experimental group received rime analogy training. The teaching materials were selected from the participants’ textbooks word bank, from the second grade to the fifth grade, as a basis for making analogy. The control group was taught with the same materials but received phonics instruction that focused only on grapheme-phoneme correspondences rules. Both groups received two 10-minute training sessions a week for 10 weeks, and were administered the same pre-and post-test (generalization test) to assess decoding skills, and a pre-and post-training questionnaire on attitudes toward reading English words. After the training, six participants from each group were further interviewed to understand their thinking process and perceived difficulties. The findings are as follows. In terms of the decoding skills, the post generalization test showed that no significant statistical difference was found between the two groups. In light of the attitudinal changes, only within-group comparisons of the experimental group were significantly different. In view of perceived difficulties, the interviews revealed that the difficulties in the control group were more complicated than those in the experimental group. The most noteworthy finding is that the lowest-proficiency participants in the experimental group not only outperformed their counterparts in the control group in decoding skills, but also demonstrated far more positive attitudinal changes after the training. The findings provide supporting evidence for the value of rime analogy training in promoting students’ decoding abilities and positively changing students’ learning attitudes. The nature of students’ perceived difficulties is also discussed, in respect of which several pedagogical implications and suggestions for future studies are outlined.