The purpose of this study was to unveil how school leaders, particularly school principals, navigate Eurocentric curricular structures in the implementation of bilingual programming. This is a relevant study given the widespread issues and concerns circulating around the achievement of English Learners, recent immigrants, and the politicized arena…

This practitioner inquiry dissertation is situated within the context of U.S. education policy that persists in defining literacy as print-based and privileges standardized literacy assessments as the singular measure of what students "know". Decades of literacy research have shown that such orientations to education policy and resulting…

In 2001, the Korean government launched a new English language education policy called "the 7th national curriculum," in an attempt to meet the growing public demand for improved communication skills in English. With this policy in mind, the aim of this dissertation is to examine the ways in which the mandatory English language…

This one-year long ethnographic case study seeks to add to the body of literature on EFL teachers' identities in Colombia by drawing on ethnographic methods and sociocultural theories to examine the identity construction of four EFL teachers at the university level. Specifically, this study explores how EFL teachers' identities shaped and were…

School organizations are in a constant state of change. One of the major changes that all schools encounter is adopting new curriculum. It is important to look at the role of the principal during the implementation of a new curriculum so that we can identify specific strategies that might be useful in other areas of school change. This study…

This study examined elementary student literacy performance in Lancaster School District in kindergarten through 5th grades for 6 elementary schools implementing the Reading First program and 6 elementary schools not implementing Reading First. Subgroup data for English Language Learners, Hispanic, and African American students was closely…

For the past several decades, Asian teachers of English have been traveling to English L1 countries to do graduate work and return home ready to try new teaching approaches (Golombek & Jordan, 2005; Liu, 1999; Major & Yamashiro, 2004). Among these approaches, Communicative language Teaching (CLT) of English is a teaching innovation that…

The significant increase of English Language Learners (ELLs) in the United States raises complex questions about how to provide these students with access to high quality education that can improve both their content knowledge of school subjects and their English proficiency, particularly their academic English proficiency. The development of…