As the United States works to reclaim economic prosperity, the Hispanic population--with the largest growth in population over the last decade--will likely play a key role in any economic resurgence. Educational success is a crucial part of economic recovery. While statistics on the educational success of Hispanic children are hardly encouraging,…

The purpose of this research is to identify teaching strategies and practices that impact the vocabulary and language development for English Language Learners. Today, there are over 3.5 million non-English speaking students enrolled in public classrooms and the number has continued to climb over the past decade. Many ELL students live in poverty…

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…

This study attempts to identify the specific professional needs of pre-service English immersion teachers in Korea in order to establish key components of English immersion teacher preparation programs. As an alternative approach of English language education, immersion instruction has been employed by a number of private and public schools in…

Student diversity has become a typical phenomenon in American public schools. The impact of increasing diversity on literacy instruction is unchallenged. Teachers reinforce this message by often citing ESL student diversity as a barrier for literacy teaching. In order to better understand the complexity of diversity issues, I explored two ESL…

The Houston Independent School District offered five different bilingual programs for language minority students during the 2012-2013 school year. In the Pre-Exit phase of bilingual education, students transition to a predominantly English-language instruction program in core subject areas. This report summarizes the performance of students who…

The Texas Education Code requires school districts to provide every language minority student with the opportunity to participate in either a bilingual or English as a second language (ESL) program. This evaluation report summarizes the performance of students who participated in two of the bilingual programs offered by the district during the…

For English learners reclassifying to fluent English proficient signifies reaching a milestone indicating the ability to function in mainstream classes without support. Employing a longitudinal, multimethod approach, I describe patterns of reclassification using administrative data for 7 cohorts of students over 2 years in a large urban district.…

State tests, which assess reading comprehension, ask students to make inferences and connections beyond the text. The problem of practice in which this study is situated is that students are having difficulty making meaningful connections and developing inferences in relation to the material that is read aloud together in class or assigned for…

Research in the field of second language learning indicates that proper use of language learning strategies leads to the improvement of overall Second Language (L2) or Foreign Language (FL) proficiency as well as specific language skills. This essay firstly attempts to build a theoretical framework of learning strategies theories by clarifying the…

The present study investigates the locus of language selection in less and more proficient language learners, specifically testing differential predictions of La Heij's (2005) concept selection model (CSM) and Kroll and Stewart's (1994) revised hierarchical model (RHM). Less and more proficient English dominant learners of Spanish participated in…

The teaching of culture has become gradually more significant for all teachers involved in language education; it has been referred as the "hidden curriculum" of foreign language teaching. Because of limited time available in the classroom and curriculum constraints, the inclusion of cultural lessons often comes second to the teaching of…

A variety of cognitive diagnosis approaches (CDAs) have been used by researchers to extract fine-grained information about the linguistic knowledge states and skill mastery levels of test takers based on their performance on language tests. Although some of these approaches have been in use in the psychometric community for quite some time, many…

While much attention has been paid to the gap between beginning language instruction and literature courses, there is another gap which presents significant challenges to college instructors, namely the gap in proficiency levels between students in the same third-year course. This article argues that bridging this particular gap can productively…

Lardiere suggests that second language acquisition (SLA) researchers should pay more attention to the distribution of a given feature in source and target languages, using the distribution of [plural] in English, Chinese and Korean to illustrate. I argue that the distribution of [definite] in English shows a similar complexity, and that this has…