The research problem for this study was teachers in grades 6-12 at a particular school district on the West Coast are not provided targeted professional development needed to support lower-performing English speakers of other languages (ESOL) students in their school districts. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore these teachers'…

Teaching and learning for emergent bilinguals is often based on monolingual instructional assumptions which ignore how emergent bilinguals use their entire linguistic repertoire to communicate and make meaning. Bilingual pedagogies such as Preview-View-Review have the potential to support the development of biliteracy and meaning-making of…

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate linguistic variation within ESL/EFL reading textbooks and between EAP reading textbooks and lower-division university textbooks. Specifically, within ESL/EFL reading textbooks, lexical, lexico-grammatical, and formulaic variation was measured within series of textbooks, across textbooks at the…

Within English supplementary tutoring centers in China, the professional development teachers are afforded is limited due to time constraints and the qualifications of teacher trainers within those centers. To facilitate a novel means of engaging teachers in their professional development related to guided reading, an innovation configurations map…

As gentrifying dual language (DL) schools in the United States increasingly attract students with linguistic, racial, and socioeconomic privilege, a key consideration is whether these schools are intentionally supporting the specific needs and assets of emergent bilingual (EB) students from Latinx families. This dissertation of practice examined…

This three-part dissertation explores the complexity of collaboratively designing and implementing translanguaging reading pedagogies for students classified as English learners in a second-grade English-medium classroom. With the increasing linguistic heterogeneity in the United States, public schools have a pressing need to develop culturally…

In the southeastern United States, many local school districts have mandated an increased use of instructional technology to address low reading proficiency among English language learners (ELLs). However, local district leaders and stakeholders concurred that additional research was needed to explore how teachers were using technology in their…

This autoethnographic case study examines the localization of the literature circle (LCs) methodology within a Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) pedagogy course, focusing on the training of prospective educators. Most Chinese K-12 EFL teachers, having graduated as English majors, frequently lack exposure to innovative, student-centered…

The purpose of this mixed-methods sequential explanatory study was to investigate the effects of watching text-relevant video segments on reading comprehension of a culturally unfamiliar text when technical words are present or absent. Therefore, 44 adult English Language Learners (ELLs) with higher-intermediate to advanced English language…

The qualitative descriptive phenomenological study aims to identify, describe, and analyze educational processes and best practices from the bilingual teachers' perspectives; that help improves the teaching of reading in the elementary level of English Language Learners classrooms in Puerto Rico. This research assessed the contribution of…

The problem addressed in this study was that the English as foreign language teachers in five government elementary schools were not consistently instructing in a manner that contributed to a student-centered learning environment when teaching reading comprehension. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore the perceptions of…

As online collaboration continues to normalize in the post-pandemic digital age, how students engage online through collaborative learning has grown in importance. Web 2.0 has led to a shift in learner engagement that impacts the ways students interact with class content, and this provides opportunities for more meaningful collaboration and…

Students who have problems comprehending textual material tend to experience failing grades, peer rejection, and even social isolation. Furthermore, students with poor reading comprehension demonstrate poor academic performance in all subjects, not due to difficulty in learning specific subject content (i.e., math, history, etc.), but rather their…

The academic success of dual language learners (DLLs) has been studied extensively, but few studies have investigated the effectiveness of the Scott Foresman Reading Street (SFRS) program on DLL struggling readers. The purpose of this quantitative study, grounded in the linguistic interdependence theory, was to compare the Measure of Academic…

This study examined if a faculty-run Reading and Writing Lab at a small, private university in the Midwest helped traditionally underserved college freshmen taking developmental English classes increase their levels of self-perceived comprehension and confidence. Students who typically need to take developmental English classes include English as…