This dissertation examines conversations between L1 and L2 English speakers for interactional procedures whereby speakers make an initial reference to a target and achieve recognition of it, using the methodology of conversation analysis. Data comes from a series of conversations between two Korean adolescents and one American graduate student.…

This dissertation investigates processing of English and Japanese relative clause (RC) sentences by native speakers and second/foreign language (L2) learners. Particularly, the relationship between the sentence processing and individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity was examined. The main question addressed in this study is whether…

Utilizing the methodology of Conversation Analysis (CA), this study examines teaching moments observed in free conversations by pairs of Japanese and American friends. CA's detailed turn-by-turn analysis reveals that teaching of vocabulary, idioms, and culture occurs when native speakers orient to the non-nativeness of the other speakers.…

Heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian in the United States form a very complex and diverse group of learners. Research in heritage linguistics has examined key parameters of the HSs' oral production. Important work has been done in heritage language (HL) pragmatics, morphology, and lexicon. However, very few studies have been conducted to…

Similar to its neighboring countries of China, South Korea, and Japan, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) (also known as North Korea) has made English a compulsory subject for middle school to university level students, and teacher training programs based on the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach have also been…

This paper reports the results of a descriptive study on the use of a technology-enhanced formative assessment system called Accelerated Math (AM) for ELLs and their native-English-speaking (NES) peers. It was comprised of analyses of an extant database of 18,549 students, including 2,057 ELLs, from grades 1 through 8 across 30 U.S. states. These…

This dissertation research investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying second language (L2) listening comprehension. I use three types of sentential contexts, congruent, neutral and incongruent, to look at how L2 learners construct meaning in spoken sentence comprehension. The three types of contexts differ in their context predictability.…

This study explores the effects of a Two-Way Bilingual Immersion (TWBI) program on language majority and minority students. The fundamental hypothesis was that the process of receiving instruction in two languages (English and Spanish) throughout elementary school (i.e., attendance at a TWBI school) would help the native Spanish-speaking students…

Native languages are disappearing quickly in this country, but there are many programs that are underway trying to save Native languages before they are gone. One such program is the Euchee/Yuchi Language Project which uses a modified version of the Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program (MALLP). Elder language speakers, masters, and younger…

Drawing on Lave and Wenger's (1991) and Wenger's (1998) "communities of practice" (CoP) framework, this study explores the shared repertoire of humor practices in the creation of community within the context of a culturally diverse and multilevel adult Arabic language classroom consisting of two native speakers, five heritage language learners…

This study investigated and compared how native-English and native-Korean speaking university students, who received their education respectively in the U.S. and in Korea, thought about the concepts of "infinity" and "limit". The primary motivation for this study was the discontinuity in Korean and the continuity in English…

Each day, foreign language teachers are faced with issues that render the control of the K-12 classroom challenging, at best, and virtually impossible at worst. Even preservice foreign language teachers, those going through a teacher education program towards K-12 licensure, understand that no content can be taught or learned if there is mayhem in…

This dissertation reports the results of within-English structural priming experiments in language production which investigated the syntactic representations of English syntactic structures in three different bilingual groups: Japanese-English, Korean-English, and Mandarin Chinese-English bilinguals. Specifically, my dissertation research…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to identify factors impacting second language oral proficiency of native English speaking secondary students in public schools in Texas that had chosen to complete at least two years of traditional classroom Spanish instruction. Further, the study sought to determine the effectiveness of the traditional…

Recent research in language contact has investigated bilingual deviations from monolingual norms where syntax interfaces with the lexical and discourse components of the grammar (e.g. Iverson & Rothman 2008; Lozano 2006; Montrul 2004, 2005; Sorace & Filiaci 2006; Tsimpli et al. 2004). Such studies generally show that the…