Despite an emphasis on oral communication in most foreign language classrooms, the resource-intensive nature (i.e. time and manpower) of speaking tests hinder regular oral assessments. A possible solution is the development of a (semi-) automated scoring system. When it is used in conjunction with human raters, the consistency of computers can…

Practice is necessary for developing oral English proficiency, but many Chinese learners of English lack the self-confidence to practice oral English; furthermore, students' self-confidence deficiency is perpetuated by insufficient oral English proficiency. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to discover pedagogical practices that break…

It has long been recognized that collocations, or chunks of formulaic language, are essential and frequent in language (Henriksen, 2012; Sinclair, 2004). Therefore they are a crucial part of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Linguistic scholars Pawley y Syder (1983: 192) remark that "in order to know a language, the [second language] (L2)…

In 2015, then-Higher Education Minister Rodolfo Alarcon said in response to many Cubans' inability to communicate in the international language, English fluency would be required by students as a university exit requirement ("Mastering English," 2015).The purpose of this interpretive qualitative study was to understand the experiences of…

According to Boo et al. (2015), between 2005 and 2014, the majority of L2 motivation studies focused on general learner motivation, neglecting research on motivating learners in classroom contexts. Similarly, Sudina (2021) stated that most research on motivation focused on students' individual motivation, even though what teachers do to motivate…

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…

As a country founded by immigrants, the United States (U.S.) has a long history of multilingualism. Multilingualism is associated with better linguistic awareness (Aronin & Singleton 2012; Bialystok, 2002), cognitive advantages (Aronin & Singleton 2012), and social benefits (Baker, 2001). The need for and value of multilingualism in an…

The nature of this research study examines the relationship between text-talking and writing skills used by American Sign Language (ASL) and English speakers. When given ample opportunity to text-talk in academic settings, it is likely that students will improve their expressive communication and writing skills. The main research question asks:…

Despite the benefits of performance-based oral communication tests, a plethora of variables, as illustrated in Ockey and Li's (2015) model of oral communication assessment, can create construct-irrelevant variance in test scores. In relation to human participants in the oral communication tests, previous studies mostly focused on the direct effect…

This dissertation examines individual, constricted agency in a multilingual environment within the context of a language discussion group and the form of social capital possessed by their Mexican Indigenous diasporic community living on the California Central Coast. The research is based on participant-observation ethnographic work with a language…

While recent research has shown that multimodal feedback and use of formulaic sequences (FS) are effective in improving student performance on writing tasks, there is a dearth of studies on the impact of these aspects on computer-based academic speaking assessments. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap by examining the impact of both…

Through this descriptive qualitative case study of three native speaking Arabic teachers in an L2 Arabic classroom in a private school setting in the U.S., this study presented a four-stage multi-layered analytical approach demonstrating functional, interactional and pedagogical analyses of the uses of Arabic Arabic pragmatic markers (PMs) in…

Learning to speak a foreign language (L2) can be a challenging feat, made all the more challenging when done in only 50 minute, daily increments in class. Oral asynchronous computer-mediated communication (ACMC) provides learners with opportunities to practice spoken communication and evaluate their practice outside the classroom. In this…

As our society has become increasingly data dependent, statistics education has emerged as a field of study. Research has focused on statistics course content outcomes, showing most students struggle with statistical concepts, including variation and the standard deviation. Variation is a foundational concept in statistics. Without a firm grasp of…

Studies in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) indicate that the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the academic writing of second language learners improves the overall quality of these texts by contributing to their cohesion and comprehensibility (Saif Modhish 2012; Jalilifar 2008; Intaraprawat & Steffensen 1995). However, despite the…