With the increasing number of young emergent multilingual language learners in transnational contexts, there is a growing need to explore and examine how emergent multilingual children develop their translingual competence and how they exercise their agency to engage in translingual practices across different settings (e.g., home and school). Yet,…

Middle Eastern students represent the fastest-growing international student population in the United States, with the majority coming from Saudi Arabia. While some studies have examined the academic challenges faced by international students, few have examined the academic writing difficulties encountered by Saudi international graduate students.…

Second language (L2) writing has been determined to be influenced by what is read, with language learners tending to borrow words and short phrases from input texts while writing (e.g., Wang & Wang, 2015). This phenomenon is referred to as lexical alignment. Only one empirical study has investigated the influence that the linguistic complexity…

This study investigates the multicomponential nature of L2 Arabic writing by adapting a number of direct measures of linguistic "complexity," "accuracy," and "fluency" (CAF) to the measurement of written Arabic texts produced by L2 Arabic learners and Arabic Native Speakers (NSs). Previous studies of L2 writing have…

This dissertation explores the identity enactments (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005) of 14 multilingual university writing center tutors and multilingual student writers who use English and Putonghua to negotiate their interactions. The study is situated within sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978) and uses ethnographic methods such as observation,…

With the rapid development of Web 2.0 in the field of education, which allows users to interact and collaborate with teachers and peers on the web, many researchers have focused on exploring the developments of using Course Manage System (CMS) in service of L2 writing (e.g., Chun, 2011; Warschauer & Grimes, 2007). Simultaneously, participation…

Constructionist research on L2 learning has focused on the degrees to which skewed frequency (Goldberg, Casenhiser & White, 2007; Casenhiser & Goldberg, 2005; Goldberg, Casenhiser, & Sethuraman 2004) in a person's linguistic environment can facilitate "entrenchment," "schematization," and "contingency…

Generation 1.5 students, foreign-born children of first-generation immigrants, complete some or most of their K-12 education in the United States. Their oral communicative competence may be advanced, but their academic language proficiency may still be underdeveloped when they enter college. In 2013, SB1720 made placement testing optional for most…

In this study, I explored the interactions among genre, task complexity, and L2 proficiency in learners' writing task performance. Specifically, after identifying the lack of valid operationalizations of genre and task dimensions in L2 writing research, I examined how genre functions as a task complexity variable, and how learners' perceptions and…

The new writing standards outlined in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are ambitious. Meeting these new demands will be challenging for all students, but even more so for English Learners (ELs) who are simultaneously developing language proficiency while learning to write in new genres. Teacher feedback is widely accepted to be a potentially…

The purpose of this study is to explore ways of incorporating web-based concordancers for the purpose of teaching English collocations. A mixed-methods design utilizing a case study strategy was employed to uncover four specific dimensions of corpus use by twenty-four students in two classroom sections of a writing course at a university in…

Learner-centered methodology like peer review is problematic in the pluralism of the ESL classroom when teaching academic English composition. A distinct complication is the form writing instruction should take given the interaction and variations between ESL students' L1 background, experiences, schema, and the meaning of academic literacy in…