This Educational Leadership Portfolio (ELP) sought to address the challenge of optimizing handwriting instructional practices and assessment methods for teaching Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) at St. Andrew's School (SAS). SAS is an Episcopal, co-educational boarding school in Middletown, Delaware. With 18 years of experience as the primary…

This dissertation studied the effects of Teacher Directed Games (TDGs) on student vocabulary development and student engagement in a second language. Achieving automaticity with vocabulary is crucial to mastering a second language. A sample of 40 first grade students in a Jewish Day School participated in the study. Students learned their…

Children with Down syndrome are largely excluded from the foreign language classroom, and no research exists documenting their abilities to learn a foreign language. Research is needed to demonstrate the abilities of children with Down syndrome to learn a foreign language so that they might be included in the foreign language classroom along with…

The influence of tests and assessments on learning and teaching is known as the washback effect. The purpose of this study is to investigate the washback effect of self and peer assessment in Arabic writing as a second language. The study was conducted on high school advanced Arabic learners at an Islamic school in the USA. The study examines the…

This dissertation builds on existing heritage language research (e.g., Albirini 2014, 2018; Benmamoun & Albirini 2018) and examines the complex and challenging practices of an understudied, marginalized, and stigmatized group of Muslim Arabic heritage-speaking children (MAHSC) and their immigrant families in the US. It argues that the…