The purpose of this mixed-methods explanatory sequential design study is to better understand university-level foreign students' motivations for attending tutoring sessions. Forty-eight university students were selected based on their enrollment in a university's intensive English language learning program. This study involved two phases of data…

This study examines the impact of High-Immersion Virtual Reality (HiVR) as a tool for teaching English L2 pragmatics to international students enrolled in an Intensive English Program at a US university. This research focuses on integrating HiVR into explicit L2 pragmatics instructional treatments. A quasi-experimental design was employed to…

In many U. S. universities, international students whose second language is English follow one of two admission paths: 1) the traditional admission path, where students apply directly to the university for full admission; or 2) the conditional admission path, where they can apply to the university's intensive English program (IEP) and be granted…

Despite some rises and falls in the numbers due to various reasons, including the political climate in the Trump era and the COVID-19 pandemic (Laws & Ammigan, 2020), each year universities in the United States host a large number of multilingual international students from different parts of the world. Based on their TOEFL scores, many are…

The U.S. economy receives consistent and increasing benefits from international students in higher education, an estimated $41 billion during the 2018-2019 academic year. However, the existing research literature has failed to determine whether Intensive English Language Programs (IELP) adequately prepare these students for college-level…

International student enrollments in U.S. colleges and universities continue to increase. Entry into an undergraduate or graduate program requires that applicants demonstrate suitable English language proficiency by means of a standardized test score such as the Test of English (TOEFL) or the International English Language Tests (IELTS).…

This dissertation had a three-pronged approach by examining (1) the role and sustainability of university-based intensive English programs (IEPs), (2) the value of a master's in Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), and (3) relevance of attending an IEP for international/English as a second language (ESL) students. IEPs face…

In recent years, university-based Intensive English Programs (IEPs) have expanded to serve the growing population of international students who wish to earn their degrees at U.S. universities. Many of these IEPs have shifted their focus to assist these academically bound international students by functioning as a bridge to enrollment in American…

Computer-mediated collaborative writing has drawn attention from second language researchers and instructors for a few decades, and due to recent developments in Web 2.0 technologies, the possibilities of wikis for collaborative writing have increased enormously. However, few studies have explored the nature of wiki collaboration and interaction,…

This dissertation study focused on a feature of emergent interactions in the L2 classroom called unanticipated student utterances (USUs), which is defined as utterances spoken by the student that the teacher has not anticipated as part of the discussion at hand. The purpose of the study was to demonstrate why USUs are significant in the L2…

The study proposes an alternative approach to studying interpersonal trust. The researcher uses the Rasch analysis to design a quantitative instrument that can be used to measure trust when exploring the effects that various aspects of educational environment have on students' experiences. Prior empirical studies examined trust from a…