The purpose of this research was to investigate the representation of black students in contemporary American English. Two questions were addressed, what is the semantic prosody of Black students, and what are the semantic roles for Black students. All the concordance lines containing the phrase Black students were downloaded from the Corpus of…

Many studies have shown that morphological knowledge has effects on reading comprehension separate from other aspects of language knowledge. This has implications for reading instruction and assessment: it suggests that children could have reading comprehension difficulties that are due to a lack of morphological knowledge, and thus, that explicit…

This research investigated three synonymous adjectives "perfect," "flawless," and "impeccable" in terms of meaning, degree of formality, collocations, and grammatical patterns. The three synonymous adjectives were scrutinized through the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings suggested that these…

Speech is highly variable and systematic, governed by the internal linguistic system and socio-indexical factors. The systematic relationship of socio-indexical factors and variable phonetic forms, referred to here as "socio-indexical structure," has been the cornerstone of sociophonetic research over the last several decades. Research…

This study examined 283 online learner dictionary definitions in terms of scores based on word frequency level and readability. Results revealed three findings. First, in terms of word frequency levels, definitions from the Cambridge learner dictionary incorporated fewer non-high frequency words (mid and low frequency words) compared to Oxford,…

This research examined how linguistic differences between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE) impact how children process sentences and learn new information. The central hypothesis of this dissertation is that these linguistic differences adversely impact how AAE-speaking children use contrastive inflectional verb…

With the rise of different English varieties, scholars argued for reconceptualizing teaching pedagogies to acknowledge and incorporate diverse Global English (GE) varieties into the classroom (Rose & Galloway, 2019). However, very few studies explored the effectiveness of such innovative pedagogy on language skills. This study investigated the…

Speakers vary in their pronunciations of the sounds in their native language. Listeners use lexical knowledge to adjust their phonetic categories to speakers' idiosyncratic pronunciations. Lexical information can, however, be inconclusive or become available too late to guide this phonetic retuning. Sentence context is known to affect lexical…

Purpose: Previous studies have demonstrated that speakers can learn novel speech sequences, although the content and specificity of the learned speech motor representations remain incompletely understood. We investigated these representations by examining transfer of learning in the context of nonnative consonant clusters. Specifically, we…

Purpose: A common way of eliciting speech from individuals is by using passages of written language that are intended to be read aloud. Read passages afford the opportunity for increased control over the phonetic properties of elicited speech, of which phonetic balance is an often-noted example. No comprehensive analysis of the phonetic balance of…

Foundational skills are often viewed as necessary components for automaticity in reading and writing. In this study, we draw on teacher interviews to explore what secondary English/language arts teachers identify as necessary language for successful school writing. Findings suggest that teachers believe White mainstream English is a necessary…

This contrastive corpus-based study aims to analyze the similarities and differences of two synonyms "important" and "significant" concerning on the degree of formality in their distribution across genres as well as their collocations and semantic preference. The corpus data derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American…

Despite the fact that pronunciation is a vital aspect of language learning, previous research has shown that its instruction is limited in the classroom in terms of time and attention, due in part to the time constraints inherent in any curriculum. It then becomes essential for instructors to be strategic about the pronunciation features they…

Using critical discourse analysis, I critically examined the National Communication Association's (NCA) standards for public speaking competency to determine what type of ideal speaker the standards would produce. Highlighting NCA's emphasis on "suitable" and "appropriate" forms of communication and the use of Standard American…

In this paper, we explore the complicity of writing centers in the Global North in global neocolonialism despite its resounding rejection within Western writing center scholarship, in which Romeo García contends that writing tutors can be "decolonial agents." We show that higher education is used by governments in the Global North as a…