Title of Document: CONTRIBUTIONS OF PRIOR KNOWLEDGE, MOTIVATION, AND STRATEGIES TO KOREAN COLLEGE STUDENTS’ L2 WRITING DEVELOPMENT Soo Eun Chae Doctor of Philosophy, 2011 Directed By: Professor Patricia A. Alexander, Department of Human Development The current study examined Korean college students’ L2 writing development and performance, motivation, and strategies while taking ESL writing clas...

The molecular pathways that drive the differentiation of somatic cell populations in the testis and ovary have been the subjects of intensive research over the past decade. It is now clear that ovarian differentiation is a coordinate event driven by secreted factors including R-spondin1, WNT4, and follistatin and transcriptional regulators such as β-catenin and FOXL2. These factors direct bipot...

L2 research has shown that instruction in L2 pragmatics is necessary. The current study evaluated the impact of explicit instruction on EFL learner's awareness and production of three speech acts of request, apology, and complaint. It also probed whether learners’ language proficiency plays any role in incorporating pragmatic instruction into the L2 classroom. Iranian undergraduate students maj...

In L2 development, the cognitive complexity of tasks plays a crucial role in task performance and language features produced. However, there have only been few studies addressing the impact of task complexity on EFL learners' attention to L2 system and form-focused self-repairs (FFS).This study explores the role of increasing cognitive task complexity in EFL learners' form-focused attention (FF...

The main purpose of the study reported in this paper was to examine the interrelationships between L2 risk-taking, English learning motivation, L2 speaking anxiety, linguistic confidence, and low-proficiency English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ speaking complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). A secondary purpose was to test whether task repetition can influence the level of the mentio...

The present study investigated second language (L2) learners’ acquisition of automatic word recognition and the development of L2 orthographic representation in the mental lexicon. Participants in the study were Japanese university students enrolled in a compulsory course involving a weekly 30-minute sustained silent reading (SSR) activity with graded readers for 12 weeks. They completed the ma...

Across amniotes, sex-determining mechanisms exhibit great variation, yet the genes that govern sexual differentiation are largely conserved. Studies of evolution of sex-determining and sex-differentiating genes require an exhaustive characterization of functions of those genes such as FOXL2 and FGF9. FOXL2 is associated with ovarian development, and FGF9 is known to play a role in testicular or...

This paper discusses some of the general issues that involve the relationship between memory and L2 comprehension by focusing on the roles of auditory short-term memory (STM) in L2 listening processes. Specific research questions to be addressed here are: 1) What processes are involved in L2 listening comprehension?, 2) What roles does memory play in L1 and L2 listening comprehension processes?...