The aggregation of various Asian American ethnic groups into one homogenous block and the comparatively sparse amount of research on Asian Americans creates of one the most misunderstood groups in American society and scholarship. The aim of this dissertation is to study one Asian American ethnic group, Korean Americans, and to find the…

Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) students are often characterized as model minorities. However, AAPI students represent many diverse communities and a wide spectrum of achievement. Each AAPI culture may experience varying levels of biculturalism and acculturation that can influence students' academic success. This quantitative study…

"Standard" varieties are often perceived as morally superior compared with "nonstandard" varieties (Hill 2008). Consequently, these differences lead to ideologies that racialize "nonstandard" varieties (Rosa 2016), and increase the negative stereotypes towards "nonstandard" varieties (Giles and Watson 2013).…

Three polytomous DIF detection techniques--the Mantel test, logistic regression, and polySTAND--were used to identify GRE® Analytical Writing prompts ("Issue" and "Argument") that are differentially difficult for (a) female test takers; (b) African American, Asian, and Hispanic test takers; and (c) test takers whose strongest…

A study investigated the effect of adding a writing measure to the Graduate Management Admission Test on the gender/ethnic composition of an admissions pool. Standardized differences from the white male reference group were computed for men and women in four ethnic/minority groups: Whites, Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and…

A review of research on the cognitive, linguistic, and scholastic development of mainland Hispanic-American children paints a dismal overall picture. Hispanics are the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, 11% of the population in 1986; about 75% have Mexican ancestry. Less than half of Latin adults speak English well enough for the…

A main goal of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is to close gaps in test scores between different groups of students while raising achievement for all groups. Of particular concern are the persistent achievement gaps between African American, Latino, and Native American students and their white and Asian counterparts, and between students from…

A Los Angeles bilingual elementary school was evaluated for the effectiveness of its dual reading program for bilingual first graders, the effectiveness of the native language literacy approach for Spanish dominants, and evidence of bias in the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills (CTBS). One hundred thirty-one Spanish and English dominant children…

Studies show math achievement to be the best predictor of entering post-secondary education. However, less is known about the predictors of math achievement, particularly among immigrant youth. This study examined English proficiency and peer interethnic relations as predictors of mathematics achievement among Latino and Asian high school…

This study investigated the similarities and differences in the use of discourse connectors (DCs) in argumentative essays of American undergraduate students (AMs), Thai with high-English exposure (THHs) and Thai with low-English exposure (THLs). The data of these three groups were collected from 60 essays; 20 essays were from the corpus of…

The current study examined the extent to which native speakers of North American and Singapore English differentially perceive the comprehensibility (ease of understanding) of second language (L2) speech. Spontaneous speech samples elicited from 50 Japanese learners of English with various proficiency levels were first rated by 10 Canadian and 10…

In this study we investigated the potential for a shared-first-language (shared-L1) effect on second language (L2) listening test scores using differential item functioning (DIF) analyses. We did this in order to understand how accented speech may influence performance at the item level, while controlling for key variables including listening…

The current study examined how two groups of native speakers--monolingual Canadians and multilingual Singaporeans--differentially perceive foreign accentedness in spontaneous second language (L2) speech. The Singaporean raters, who had exposure to various models of English and also spoke multiple L2s on a daily basis, demonstrated more lenient…

Many students graduate from high school unprepared for the rigorous reading required in entry-level college and career work. This brief builds on a recent report (Wilkins et al. 2010) that used the Lexile measure (a method for measuring the reading difficulty of prose text and the reading capability of individuals) to estimate the proportion of…

The precursors of early English reading success have been widely studied for native English-speaking students, and those findings have been generalized to the English language learner (ELL) student population. However, the development of English language acquisition may be different for ELL students. The purpose of this study was to investigate…