We explore the integration of Media Literacy in the 2-year Russian language STARTALK program, "How Words Shape People: Understanding Business Russian Through Proverbs." Given the current geopolitical climate, particularly the ongoing war in Ukraine, fostering critical engagement with media has become more essential than ever. By…

Study abroad is laden with socially constructed expectations informed by discourses of place, people, and culture presented through social media, pop culture, word-of-mouth, and marketing. These discourses can shape how students approach and interpret their host countries and study abroad experiences. To better inform language and culture…

Language teachers' Classroom Interactional Competence (CIC) has been a popular research area in that language teachers use interaction as a tool to mediate teaching and learning at the same time. Among many moves that language teachers make during the interaction, this study focuses on teacher echoing, which briefly refers to a language teacher's…

The study investigates whether and how mock interviews, an instructional component of business Chinese courses, prepare students for real interviews. The study included 11 American undergraduate students who participated in a 10-week summer study abroad program in China. Participants underwent two rounds of mock interviews with their instructors…

This article analyzes the perceptions of two undergraduate learners' regarding the educational impact of a collaborative map making project in the context of a summer study abroad program in France, focused on language learning. Over the eight-week long program, students created a digital map with textual and visual annotations that helped them to…

In spite of the superior effects of semester- or year-long educational experiences abroad, the majority of students prefers short-term study abroad for which participation numbers are steadily rising. Due to the increased student interest in short-term study abroad options, investigations into how a short stay abroad can be designed to maximize…

The Atlas of Kanyen'kehá:ka Space project (Kanyen'kehá:ka Nation, 2020; see www.mohawkatlas.org) launched in 2019 for the purposes of preserving Kanyen'kéha (Mohawk language) place names and related landscape terminology. Built using Nunaliit, a community mapping framework developed by Carleton University's Geomatics and Cartographic Research…

To address a student-teacher educator perspective in the engagement of critical pedagogy (CP), I employed a critical and analytical autoethnography to self-investigate my lived experiences during coursework in a doctoral program in the United States. Framed in postcolonial CP in border-crossing notion, I engaged in critical and analytical…

This exploratory study evaluated the impact of a Spanish second language (L2) domestic immersion (DI) program that was developed expediently at a large university in the United States in response to widespread study abroad (SA) program closures due to COVID-19. Spanish language learners (n = 14) participated in an intensive, six-week summer…

This mixed methods study explored the development of technological, pedagogical, content knowledge (TPACK) of Chinese teachers who attended the STARTALK Chinese Teacher Institute, a 10-day residential summer professional development program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A sequential explanatory design was adopted in which quantitative and…

The research aimed to examine whether co-teaching in EFL classrooms could have positive impacts on students' learning outcomes and their overall academic performance, including the improvement of the four language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing). The experiment of the study was conducted throughout the summer course of 2018 for…

This chapter offers a chronological narrative of the steps taken by the Centre for Foreign Language Study (CFLS) at Durham University to move language teaching, learning, and assessment online following the announcement of the global COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. This includes immediate steps to suspend classroom teaching, a move to online…

Learning and Reading Assistant (LARA) is an open source platform that enables conversion of plain texts into an interactive multimedia form designed to support second- and foreign-language (L2) learners. In this workshop, we illustrate the open source aspects using collaborative work carried out during a six-week summer project at the Árni…

Washback, that is, the effect of tests on teaching and learning, has captured the interest of scholars in applied linguistics for almost 30 years. However, most research has been conducted on large-scale tests, rather than classroom-based language assessments like ACTFL's Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA). The present study explored washback…

The current study attempts to investigate the potential benefit of using a custom-designed virtual reality experience to reduce the social distance between the students and the speakers of the target language. This virtual reality experience provides opportunities for students to acclimate to the Spanish culture and at the same time practice and…