Students are expected to interpret the complexities and nuances of literary texts yet might struggle with interpreting texts in ways that are academically valued in literary studies. While linguistic studies that examine students' literary interpretive writing have mainly been situated in secondary contexts, there is a noticeable absence of…

The purpose of this action research is to evaluate the impact of gamified peer feedback in a high school English Language Arts classroom at Southern Charter High School. National assessments on writing show that student proficiency is low in part because many high school students lack revision skills. Compounding the problem is that as classroom…

Research examining students' historical reasoning has heavily relied on evidence in the form of students' written work to make claims about students' ability to reason historically and have argued that the document-based history essay holds the most promise for assessing students' historical thinking (Nokes & De La Paz, 2018). However,…

This study investigates how aspects of collocational proficiency affect the ratings that expert examiners give to second language (L2) English learner essays. Lexical proficiency is a multi-faceted phenomenon and certain aspects of it are particularly impactful on human judgements, including lexical sophistication and accuracy. However, the…

Despite the established importance of writing, many students have difficulty writing proficiently (Ann Rogers & Graham, 2008; Graham & Perin, 2007). This study was designed to assess whether the provision of argumentative writing goals focusing on revision affected the quality of college students' first drafts and revised essays. In…

We examined spelling errors patterns, cohesive ties, and syntax features in English and Spanish essays written by Spanish-English emergent bilinguals in Grades 1, 2, and 3 (N = 278; 51% female) enrolled in either English immersion or English-Spanish dual immersion programs. In Study 1, we addressed whether students made consistent spelling errors…

The debate around student personal essays has dissipated in recent scholarship, though it still remains a highly contested subject. This dissertation study examines three main criticisms surrounding student personal essays from the theorists James Berlin, Lester Faigley, and David Bartholomae. These critiques are that students don't attend to…

This study is an examination of the outcomes of practicing autoethnography, specifically in the context of first-year undergraduate, writing-intensive courses. The researcher recounts his initial, inspiring encounter with autoethnography and explores the possibility of its pedagogical application in composition instruction. Autoethnography is a…

In the past three decades, the construct of second language (L2) writing complexity has been theorized and refined in both second language acquisition (SLA) (Crossley, 2020; Housen, De Clercq, Kuiken, & Vedder, 2019; Lu, 2011; Norris & Ortega, 2009) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) research (Byrnes, 2009; Ryshina-Pankova, 2015;…

The dissertation paints a cultural-historical portrait of the New Criticism, a formalist school of twentieth-century literary criticism. My case study revisits the trajectory of this vital school of thought through a fine-grained textual comparison of critical essays produced by principal affiliates. Using "genre" as a guiding concept, I…

Although most of the writing in high school English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms is about literature and although there have been incessant calls for changing the practices of teaching and learning literature, only meager amounts of research have been conducted in these interrelated domains of the field. Accordingly, this dissertation seeks to…

In 2010-2011, urban high schools across New Jersey reported suspension rates that ranged between 10 and 20%. This rate translated into increased dropout rates and low graduation rates. The purpose of this study was to examine the factors that influenced suspension rates, dropout rates and graduation rates of an urban New Jersey high school. More…

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…

This dissertation is a qualitative practitioner research study in which I explore how my students and I engage in critical literacy using sociopolitical Articles of the Week (AoWs). Critical literacy is the ability to read, write, and speak about texts in a reflective manner to better understand power, inequality, and injustice that prevails in…

Study abroad is an under-researched domain of language learning. Moreover, most investigations of this phenomenon adopt traditional structuralist approaches, wherein outcomes of study abroad are assessed solely in terms of proficiency gains as measured through conventional exams. The present study builds upon an emerging body of poststructuralist…