The field of biology is becoming increasingly fragmented, and this fragmentation spills over into the ways our students think and learn about biology. Biology education policy documents stress the importance of teaching biology in an integrated manner and call for the biology education research community to establish a unifying paradigm for the…

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to understand how context may shape multiple goal negotiation. Prior research has focused on identifying variables that influence goal pursuit in general, but little attention has been given to how these principles operate in different circumstances. This study adopted the Dynamic Systems Model of…

In this dissertation I present research on the creative aspect of language use. I focus on Blind Variation and Selective Retention, a process whereby a creative system produces an outcome by first generating with no imposed constraints all variant outcomes and then retains from these variegated candidates the optimal outcome by gradually…

Previous literature has shown that voicing contrast is a difficult feature for Chinese-English emergent bilingual learners of L3 Spanish (Bravo Diaz, 2020; Chen, 2007; Zhang, 2022). The production of voicing contrast in stops has been broadly investigated in second and third language studies (e.g., Zampini, 1998; Llama, 2010; Wrembel, 2014), but…

Drawing on theories from Applied Linguistics research, this doctoral dissertation brings together European perspectives on "language," "identity," and "voice" in an examination of English as the international language of science (EILS). Using the theoretical frame of Dynamic Systems Theory (DST), each of the chapters…

Child language data are notoriously noisy. Children may produce several phonetic variants for a given word or use the same forms for several different words. As such, child data are characterized by little apparent systematicity. Competing theories have arisen to account for a range of problematic phenomena, but each has struggled to relate child…

This dissertation sheds light on how learners of German, NSs of German, and Americans unfamiliar with German reach decisions about the nature of speech acts that they witness NSs of German perform in three authentic video clips. It also aims to gain a better understanding of what sources members of the three groups bring to bear when they attempt…