In early childhood contexts, reading literature to engage children in critical discussions about ability and race--and how it impacts their daily lives--is a promising practice. Indeed, critical literacy scholars see the use of language, text, and discourse structures as powerful ways to address inequity in educational settings (Gainer, 2013;…

This dissertation explores language as a resource for the formation and expression of ethnic identity among the members of an Asian American college sorority. As a community of practice organized around ethnicity, the sorority provides an excellent site to examine the mutually constitutive relationship of language and ethnic identity. Two features…

A great deal of research has been done to understand leadership styles in different organizational settings. In this study, the researcher focused on the leadership practices of university presidents of land-grant universities (LGUs) in the United States. The study examined the leadership practices of presidents of land-grant universities as…

This collaborative inquiry case study investigated a pre-existing peer learning group composed of five Korean college voice students and a non-musician facilitator. The group was chosen for this research to understand the implications of a diversified learning context in addition to the typical master-apprenticeship context of higher music…

An increasing number of students are selecting for-profit universities to pursue their education (Snyder, Tan & Hoffman, 2006). Despite this trend, little empirical research attention has focused on these institutions, and the literature that exists has been classified as rudimentary in nature (Tierney & Hentschke, 2007). The purpose of this…

Recasts are one type of corrective feedback that reformulates all or part of a learner's erroneous utterance during communicative interaction without changing the meaning. Categorized as implicit and input-providing corrective feedback, recasts have become the focus of debate in the area of interaction research in recent years. The debate…

This descriptive qualitative case study explored the changing role of the reading specialist through various perceptions of professionals in the Neon Shadow School District. The purpose of the study was to explore what, how, and why the duties and responsibilities of the reading specialist have changed since first employed as an…

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…

Students with mathematical learning disabilities (MLDs) experience persistent challenges learning even the most elementary mathematics. While prior research on MLDs has classified students on the basis of test scores and documented performance differences between groups, this dissertation focuses on the qualitative differences in individual…

Using a theoretical framework of critical pedagogy and the lens of social justice to focus on engagement and student voice, this research includes both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, in respect to the perceptions of continuation high school students regarding factors affecting their engagement in high school. The purpose of this study…

Bilingualism (Sanz, 2000), motivation (Pintrich, 1989), and language aptitude (Grigorenko, Sternberg, and Ehrman, 2000) are crucial individual differences that contribute to successful adult language learning. Since Gardner's (1985) seminal work on motivation, many studies have shown that motivation is dynamic and that it affects language…