Attaining Advanced proficiency and beyond has been a principal goal for second language learners, practitioners, and researchers. Achieving this level in writing requires producing connected discourse of paragraph-level length and nurturing the ability to arrange various linguistic units to form a unified and cohesive whole. This ability, known as…

This dissertation study investigated how L2 doctoral students regulate their emotions upon receiving written feedback from their mentors. The study took a multiple-case-study approach that entailed stimulated recall of the feedback-reading and revision process. Three international doctoral students who were engaged in high-stakes writing in the…

Text messaging is the most popular form of communication (Lionbridge, 2019; Ceci, 2022), and mobile phone ownership is high, especially among university students (Chen & Denoyelles, 2013). Research on mobile language learning is increasingly found on the forefront of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) (Loewen et al., 2019; Stockwell,…

This dissertation provides an in-depth linguistic description and analysis of the discourse in a target domain of digital games, a domain referred to as "single player offline role-playing games." Gaming discourse from this domain is represented by a 4.8-million-word corpus of spoken and written language extracted from the digital files…

"How can teachers help students improve their second language (L2) speaking accuracy?" This is a question that most L2 educators ask themselves every day. Although L2 writing is a popular topic among Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers, the consideration that L2 writing has the potential to act as a scaffold for L2 speaking…

People have many reasons to want to learn a foreign language: some want to enjoy foreign media in its original form, some need it for business or travel, personal enrichment, and so on. Roughly 1/6 of Earth's population's learn languages with logographic writing systems (LWS) such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean as their native tongues. These…

Orthography-phonology mapping in world languages exhibits variations. Extensive research has investigated whether orthographic-phonological consistency impacts the cognitive processing of written words. A major body of work has focused on the recognition of phonographic first language (L1) written words. Results show that the more transparent the…

This study investigated factors that are related to student success in using and learning from written corrective feedback (WCF). Focusing on learner affective variables and a student writing corpus collected over the span of a semester, different types of feedback and errors were investigated. Previous studies have focused on one or, at the most,…

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (WCF) in a Korean as a foreign language (KFL) context. The assumption that indirect feedback (IF) is more effective for L2 learners with higher-proficiency levels has yet to be fully corroborated, which necessitates substantial research-based…

Prior research has extensively explored audiovisual speech perception and literacy skills in various linguistic contexts. Studies have shown that children's ability to integrate auditory and visual speech cues plays a crucial role in language acquisition and development (Erdener & Burnham, 2013; Lalonde & Werner, 2021). Furthermore,…

Within the field of linguistics, whether considering language contact situations (Weinreich, 1979) or foreign language education (Lado, 1957), the topic of language transfer, especially as it relates to pronunciation, has always been an item of particular interest. While research on such transfer has mostly focused on various phenomena of the L1…

Purpose: The purpose of this quantitative, causal-comparative study was to determine whether English learners who participated in transitional kindergarten perform equally or better than English learners who did not participate in transitional kindergarten in the areas of oral language, written language, and overall language as measured by the…

This dissertation investigates a typologically rare linguistic phenomenon found in Irish from three different perspectives: how it challenges phonological theory, how it is used by contemporary speakers, and how its written representation affects its acquisition. Initial consonant mutation (ICM), as it appears in the Celtic languages, is known to…

This qualitative case study examines learners' experiences in the development of written complexities during Discussion Board (DB) assignments in an Advanced university level Chinese class. Discussion Board was chosen as the avenue for written complexity development because it provides learners a supplementary space with additional time and…

Analysis of second language (L2) learners' language development can allow valid and reliable assessment of the learners' L2 linguistic knowledge, which can enable the teachers and researchers to choose appropriate teaching or experimental materials (Bardovi-Harlig & Bofman, 1989; Wolfe-Quintero et al., 1997). However, most language development…