Given the multilingual population of the United States, dual-language books (DLBs), or books with the complete text written in two languages, are often recommended for teachers to use in their classrooms to validate students' language and culture, facilitate language learning, and support (bi)literacy development. These recommendations are based…

There is an ongoing debate as to whether written corrective feedback (WCF) is effective for the improvement of adult second language (L2) writers' accuracy. Ever since Truscott (1996, 1999) began arguing against grammar correction in L2 writing courses, researchers have challenged his position (i.e. below). Although most of these studies show WCF…

This dissertation explores seven second language (L2) undergraduates' learning experiences in a First-Year Writing (FYW) course at an American university. While the FYW course is designed from the perspective of first-language (L1) composition scholarship and focuses, broadly speaking, on analytical writing and the related development of critical…

The field of Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA) has expressed interest in pursuing a research agenda that expands the current heritage language (HL) strand of research to investigate how this heterogeneous population re-learns their family language, and how this experience differs from that of second language (L2) learners. This…

Reading comprehension of school-aged students is an important topic of research; however, research on the reading comprehension of adult foreign/second language learners whose first language is English is limited, especially studies investigating the reading comprehension strategies that readers of different proficiency levels use when they…

This dissertation tests a grammatical structure, differential object marking (DOM), which is particularly difficult for L2 learners to acquire. DOM is a phenomenon in which some direct objects are morphologically marked to distinguish them from subjects (Comrie, 1979). In Spanish, animate and specific direct objects are marked with the preposition…

Developing literacy and language proficiency in English is essential to thrive in school and in the workforce in American society. Research on cross-linguistic influences on text-level skills is scant, especially studies investigating reading comprehension among language-minority adults. The present study investigated the effects of…