The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to explore how different modes of learning may impact student achievement. Little research has been conducted regarding how the pandemic may have affected students' reading skills. The problem addressed in this study was that the effects of varying and inconsistent learning environments for Title I K-2…

Public school teachers must meet the unique needs of English language learners (ELLs) in the general education classroom. There is a need to understand teacher attitudes toward ELLs because attitudes can explain and influence teacher behavior and professional practice. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the relationships between…

This collected papers dissertation explores students' academic interactions in an active learning, introductory physics settings as they relate to the development of physics self-efficacy and interest. The motivation for this work extends from the national call to increase participation of students in the pursuit of science, technology,…

The present cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary study was aimed at exploring the similarities and differences between English and Indonesian research articles from the disciplines of applied linguistics and chemistry in terms of frequency of usage of hedges (e.g. "perhaps," "may") and boosters (e.g. "clearly,"…

The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of interactive whiteboard technology on ninth grade English End of Course scores in two high schools in the Upstate of South Carolina in the school year 2011-2012. This study also sought to determine what impact interactive whiteboard technology had on the factors of gender, socio-economic…

The purpose of this mixed method descriptive study was to investigate the relationship between deaf educators' perceived efficacy of a specifically-designed curriculum and DHH learners' use and comprehension of function words in written text, and explore unknown perceptions related to the research topic. The study was conducted to…

Despite the growing interest in examining the link between peer-peer collaborative dialogue and second language (L2) development in recent years (Swain, Brooks, & Tocalli-Beller, 2002), much of the empirical work in this regard focused on face-to-face communication, leaving the operationalization of collaborative dialogue in text-based…

In recent years, L2 researchers from the sociocultural and cognitive linguistic perspectives have emphasized the importance of properly organized explicit and in-depth grammar instruction for second or foreign language learning. Such instruction is believed to lead learners to systematic understanding of the target features faster and more…

This quantitative study investigated whether and to what extent the motivational and sociocultural factors affect female Asian American high school physics students' achievement, their intended major in college, and their planned career goals at work fields. A survey of 62 questions, extracted from subscales of AAMAS,STPQ and PSE, were…

The present study explores the use of discourse markers (DMs) in talk-in-interaction of Korean-English bilingual children and their monolingual peers in two languages. The corpus-driven analysis proposes a core meaning of the two DMs as signaling contextual divergence in two monolingual groups. Both similarities and differences coexist in the…

The number of English language learners (ELLs) in the United States school system is growing rapidly. Much of the responsibility for teaching ELLs lies with regular classroom teachers. However, little training is being provided to help them. From a sociocultural perspective and drawing on constructive-developmental theories of adult learning and…

The dissertation investigates the effect of a concept-based approach to teaching the Chinese temporal system to English-speaking university learners at the elementary level. The pedagogical framework, Systematic-Theoretical Instruction (STI), adopted in this study was proposed by Piotr Gal'perin and originated from Vygotsky's…

The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of social media language learning activities with traditional language learning activities on the development of L2 grammatical competence in two English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes at a Taiwanese university. The study was grounded in four bodies of knowledge: (a) the…

This dissertation study employed quantitative methods to investigate the impact of adult questioning styles on children's novel vocabulary acquisition during shared storybook reading. In an effort to examine adult qualitative variations in shared storybook readings, two experiments were conducted to assess the effect of noneliciting questions…

The focus of this study was the problem of the high dropout rate among African American and Hispanic students enrolled in Westchester, New York, high schools during the 2003-2004 school year. A mixed method was used to collect data in this study. The 90 participants consisted of minority and non minority high school students who had dropped out of…