The present study attempts to identify difficulties that Japanese students encounter with metadiscursive nouns in writing second language (L2) argumentation essays. Metadiscursive nouns are abstract and unspecific nouns which can serve as cohesive markers by retrieving their meanings in the text where they occur. Using a selected number of nouns…

Reviews of literature made manifest that native English speakers who were research participants in many studies on disagreements were Americans (e.g., Beebe & Takahashi, 1989; Takahashi & Beebe, 1993; Dogacay-Aktuna & Kamisli 1996; Rees-Miller, 2000; Guodong & Jing, 2005; Chen, 2006). The excessive use of Americans as research…

One Mandarin immersion programming model involves a pair of partner teachers switching cohorts of students. Many programs meet their staffing needs with international teachers that remain with the school district for 1-3 years. Due to transient staffing, many partner teachers find themselves as mentors to their immersion teachers and maintain the…

Background/Context: Current estimates show 2,500 Islamic State (IS) jihadists are from the United States, Australia, and Western Europe. How and in what ways formal schooling influences the radicalization process and the development of extremist worldviews is yet to be fully understood. There is little research that explores how religious…

Amid growing controversy about the oft-cited "30-million-word gap," this investigation uses language data from five American communities across the socioeconomic spectrum to test, for the first time, Hart and Risley's (1995) claim that poor children hear 30 million fewer words than their middle-class counterparts during the early years…

Many college students set out on Study Abroad Programs to other countries in which the variant of the foreign language spoken in the region differs from the variant to which learners have been exposed. This study explores the perception of L2 Western Andalusian Spanish aspiration of word-final /s/ by L1 American English listeners, in relation to…

Beginning in the nineteenth century, a plethora of western Christian and secular philanthropies introduced "top-down" philanthropic initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa to promote education and "development". There seems to be a complex link between the agendas of international philanthropies and their home governments' broader…

Approaching Christian education in light of Charles Sanders Peirce's Classical Pragmatism can help catechists make Christian tradition more intelligible to present-day North Americans; it can provide them with a rich framework for pedagogical practices; and it can help them offer a compelling vision of deeper participation in the Trinitarian life…

Study Abroad (SA) has often been referred as the ideal means to learn a second language due to the unique opportunities it brings to the learners. SA provides learners access to both formal and communicative learning contexts where they can interact with the members of the target language community. Existing studies identified various contextual…

Despite the decline of rituals in North America, contemporary grief literature emphasises the healing potential of these practices. After my father's death, and due to my cultural hybridity as an Indo-Canadian, once the short-term western ways of mourning concluded, long-term Indian rituals offered meaningful and sustaining ways to honour my…

This book clarifies the fundamental difference between North America-based instrumental motivation and Korea (and East Asia)-specific competitive motivation by which the EFL learners' excessive competition to be admitted to famous universities and to be hired at a large-scale conglomerate is the main source of L2 motivation. It enables readers to…

This dissertation is a case study of the experiences and perspectives of nine US teachers who participated in a short-term international study tour to Turkey, from the theoretical perspectives of global education and experiential learning. It examines how that experience shaped the teachers' understandings of global dynamics, cultural differences…

The involvement of a native English speaker teacher (NEST, henceforth) in teaching English is a new phenomenon in Sumbawa Besar. SMAN 2 Sumbawa Besar involved a NEST sent by the American Indonesian Exchange Foundation (AMINEF) through the Fulbright English Teaching Assistants (ETA) program. This study aims at describing the roles of a NEST on the…

The general question this research investigates concerns the difference between the use of lexical bundles in a corpus of abstracts for theses in the liberal arts written by Chinese undergraduate students and a corpus of abstracts written by American master's degree students. The undergraduate abstracts were first written in Chinese and then…

This paper traces 120 student teachers' professional identity transformation during practicums in China and US. By eliciting the participants' 240 written metaphors at the start and the end of the teaching practicums respectively, this study reveals the change of the embodied metaphors revolving around four arenas: (1) from idealistic expectations…