Dissertations are a challenging requirement for completion of a doctoral program, especially for multilingual students pursuing a degree in a second language medium of instruction, as is the case for many international students pursuing degrees in the United States. Although institutions provide various means of support for graduate students,…

A growing body of academic writing literature has been devoted to studying the rhetorical patterns and language use in diverse academic texts. One of the central goals of these studies is to demystify these texts to acquaint writers, particularly less experienced ones, with the genre conventions. However, Teaching Philosophy Statements (TPS) as a…

This study examines the impact of High-Immersion Virtual Reality (HiVR) as a tool for teaching English L2 pragmatics to international students enrolled in an Intensive English Program at a US university. This research focuses on integrating HiVR into explicit L2 pragmatics instructional treatments. A quasi-experimental design was employed to…

A strong perception of classroom community has been linked to student satisfaction, perceived learning, and persistence. However, there is limited research on classroom community and the use of online tools with English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students, a population that typically has low completion rates. This study builds on the literature…

This qualitative case study responds to a significant gap in the literature in the area of gamification for vocabulary study among international students in higher education. It aims to respond to a call for a more in-depth qualitative analysis of gamification techniques on student learning experiences in comparison to the more commonplace…

This dissertation examines (1) the nature of the transfer climate in an English for academic purposes (EAP) education setting specifically from the perspectives of EAP instructors. It also examines (2) what EAP instructors perceive can be done to prepare students for such a transfer climate. The transfer climate refers to the nature of the target…

Learning transfer is a common assumption of education and a primary goal of curriculum design because most educators want learning activities to have positive effects extending beyond the exact conditions of initial learning (Bradford & Schwartz, 1999). A great many studies have been conducted on learning transfer with regard to academic…

This dissertation is composed of three interlinked studies that pilot new methods for combining corpus linguistics and semantic network analysis (SNA) to understand and teach academic language. Findings indicate that this approach leads to a deeper understanding of technical writing and offers an exciting new avenue for writing curriculum. The…

The purpose of my dissertation study was to explore the experiences and perceptions of English language instructors about the use of multimodal digital technologies in the teaching of academic writing. Writing academically in English as a second language (L2) is complex and multilayered for international students, and multimodal digital literacy…

Although community colleges strongly espouse student-centered approaches, the actual experience of student populations remains a source of information and insight that needs to be tapped. English Language Learners (ELLs) in particular, with diverse backgrounds, needs, and experiences, need to have those experiences heard and accounted for. Much…

This dissertation considers how English for Academic Purposes (EAP) instructors can reimagine notions of academic writing by exploiting multimodal texts in ways that invite students' fuller language repertoires into the classroom. Using ethnographic data collected during the Spring 2022 semester of a college EAP class, this study argues that a…

This dissertation examines how the transmission of language ideologies on a US campus shapes Chinese international students' experiences regarding English academic writing. The study is motivated by past research that demonstrates the challenges of mastering English academic writing, particularly for people who did not speak English early in life.…

This study was focused on adult English language learners (ELLs) that described their experiences with language acquisition in an elementary, middle, or high school in the United States. The problem addressed in this qualitative descriptive study was that public schools were unable to handle the academic inadequacies of ELLs as well as the…

This experimental study, and partial replication of Sun and Hu (2020), examined how and to what extent direct (i.e., hands-on corpus use) or indirect (i.e., hands-off corpus use) online data-driven learning (DDL) modules were able to assist Chinese writers from an English as a foreign language (EFL) context in using more appropriate hedging (i.e.,…

Internationalization at institutions of higher education in the United States results in greater linguistic diversity of the student body. Admission policies for international students include English proficiency standards which are meant to ensure that multilingual students for whom English is an additional language can function linguistically in…