Researches conducted on narrative as it relates to learning overwhelmingly agree on its benefit for learners. Benefits include better comprehension, retention, persuasion, meaning-making, and wisdom for navigating the world. Themes in the literature relating to narrative and epistemology include narrative theory, narrative identity, narrative…

Teacher noticing requires listening to student sense-making, interpreting the mathematical understandings teachers hear, and deciding how to respond based on what they notice in a specific interaction. Teachers manage what they notice about students in instructional interactions to both make key teaching decisions and adjust their interactions…

From an early age, we engage in building our narrative language through social interactions. These narrative language skills influence academic success. Many educational establishments focus solely on academic achievement. A focus on supporting emotional intelligence that can support narrative language development is imperative. In this…

The redundancy principle of multimedia learning indicates that people learn better from graphics and narration simultaneously than from graphics, narration, and printed text simultaneously. The current study investigated whether the redundancy principle may apply to multimedia instruction of correspondences between a second language (L2) and a…

Extensive bodies of literature examining child language acquisition and early literacy development indicate that the language and literacy opportunities young children have at home and in school settings, including the nature of their language interactions with adults and their exposure to books and stories, are consequential for mastery of…

In this study, I explored the interactions among genre, task complexity, and L2 proficiency in learners' writing task performance. Specifically, after identifying the lack of valid operationalizations of genre and task dimensions in L2 writing research, I examined how genre functions as a task complexity variable, and how learners' perceptions and…

This research study documents and analyzes the experience of teachers who participated in a professional development program to integrate process drama into the teaching of English language arts, social studies, and world languages and cultures. The study addresses and builds upon extant literature in process drama, arts integration, drama…

Learning Chinese characters is a difficult task for adult English native speakers due to the significant differences between the Chinese and English writing system. The visuospatial properties of Chinese characters have inspired the development of instructional methods using both verbal and visual information based on the Dual Coding Theory. This…

The purpose of the present study is to investigate similarities and differences in the listening behaviors of native speakers and learners of Japanese, focusing on the production of "aizuchi" and head nods. The term "aizuchi" is often interchangeably used with the word backchannel, and these are characterized as the…

Four interrelated and prominent scholarly books on community college teaching were analyzed for the purpose of understanding their constructions of teaching. Thematic, narrative, and discourse analysis were used to identify each book's pedagogy and explain how that pedagogy was developed in context. Composite sequence analysis was also used to…

This dissertation study examined a broad question of whether computer-based grammar tutorials are effective and welcome tools to review grammar for language learners by investigating effects of three different modes of such tutorials on learners' knowledge and satisfaction. For this study, I developed experimental tutorials in three different…

The case-based instructional method uses fictionalized or actual narratives as instructional tools to support learning, decision-making, and improved transfer to practical settings. Educational theorists and researchers specializing in case-based instruction have suggested that cases can be made more realistic, engaging, and challenging, thus…