Date of Graduation

Spring 5-1-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

College/School

School of Education

Department

Learning and Instruction

Program

Learning & Instruction EdD

First Advisor

Sedique M. Popal

Second Advisor

Kevin Oh

Third Advisor

Sisi Dong

Abstract

This qualitative study, rooted in phenomenological inquiry, explored the extent to which an understanding of language transfer informs the pedagogical decisions of foreign language teachers, most notably in how they approach the teaching of sentence construction, apply the Grammar Translation Method (GTM), and understand the errors of their foreign language students produce. The research was implemented at an Undergraduate Foreign Language School of a government-operated language institute, and drew on two complementary data sources: in-depth interviews with four experienced foreign language instructors, each of whom responded to twelve open-ended questions, and a written survey was administered to twenty-three additional foreign language teachers addressed nine open-ended narrative prompts. All participants had at least two years of classroom experience in the study and shared a common professional context: teaching adult learners whose linguistic backgrounds ranged from monolingual to bilingual to multilingual.

Across all three research questions, the results converged on a consistent pattern that teachers who consciously recognize how their students' mother tongue tends to interfere with or influencing foreign language acquisition is far better positioned to design instruction that is anticipatory, precise, and impactful. Among the strategies that surfaced most frequently was contrastive analysis, a deliberate, structured comparison of word-order patterns across languages, used not merely to diagnose errors after the fact, but to assume them and develop in students a reflective awareness of how language itself works. Translation, meanwhile, occupied a nuanced and context-dependent role; rather than being embraced or abandoned totally, it was treated as a tool whose value shifted with learner proficiency. At the beginner level, it proved indispensable, opening pathways to meaning and enabling students to examine grammatical structures through a familiar perspective, yet teachers consciously drew back from it as students grew more capable of thinking and processing directly in the foreign language.

On the question of learner variation, all four interviewed teachers agreed that students with bilingual or multilingual backgrounds held a distinct cognitive edge over their monolingual English-speaking counterparts. This advantage manifested in several ways: a greater willingness to engage with unfamiliar syntactic patterns, a faster capacity to adjust to new phonological systems, and a tendency to absorb grammatical structures as whole units rather than laboriously mapping them word-for-word onto their mother tongue. Yet the study also identified a meaningful complication that tempers this advantage. At higher levels of proficiency, multilingual learners with limited ability in English as one of their mother tongues may find themselves caught under what the study terms a "triple-language burden", the simultaneous cognitive demand of processing foreign language subject matter, navigating grammatical structures, and decoding the complex English metalanguage through which instruction is delivered. Beyond multilingual status itself, the findings further emphasized that the individual variables, among them memory capacity, motivational drive, and innate linguistic aptitude, carry their own independent method in shaping how students ultimately perform.

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