This study investigates Mandarin Chinese learners' motivation in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) program in a British secondary school from the perspective of learning environment, learner engagement, and learner identities. Fifteen pupils who are learning Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) have been interviewed individually or…

This study explores the effect of collaborative writing (CW) and peer feedback (PF) practices on subsequent individual writing assignments. Two groups of university students in a Spanish as a foreign language course experienced both CW and PF (Group 1 CW then PF; Group 2 PF then CW), and pre and posttests were analyzed for syntactic complexity,…

Foreign language classroom anxiety is a construct that has been investigated since the 1980s, yet few studies have examined language anxiety in the context of the online learning environment. In this literature review, the following guiding questions were examined: (a) What is foreign language classroom anxiety? (b) What are the research findings…

Duolingo is a commercial language-teaching platform that offers free courses on the web and on mobile apps. This study reports the ACTFL listening and reading proficiency levels of adult Duolingo learners who had completed beginning-level courses in Spanish or French. The participants (n = 225) were learners residing in the United States, had…

Learning a foreign language promotes new ways of seeing the world and the self in relation to it (Gee, 1996), making practices and perspectives underlined through the acquisition of vocabulary and grammatical structures available for appropriation (Bakhtin, 1981; Kramsch, 1993, 2009). Using a combination of interviews and self-reported…

The effect of studying abroad on students' language production has been extensively researched. However, a question that has not been addressed is whether study abroad programs lasting six weeks or less offer sufficient time and contact for students to demonstrate measurable development in their command of the language. The current investigation…

This study investigated how to present grammatical structures to intermediate-level French college students. It compared the effects of a guided inductive and a deductive approach on short- and long-term learning of 10 structures. A mixed-methods design was adopted to assess learning of the structures and to investigate preference of approach.…

With the increasing popularity of Web 2.0 tools, it only follows that these technologies are adapted to our foreign language classroom practices. Research shows their numerous advantages as participatory tools that foster communication and collaboration. This study focuses on one such tool, the wiki, and describes the implementation of three…

How well are our schools preparing students to become global citizens who can communicate in languages other than English? To answer this question, we surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 5,000 U.S. public and private elementary and secondary schools. Results identify current patterns and shifts over time in five key areas of…

Arabic and Chinese are 2 of 13 languages designated as "critical" by the U.S. Department of State. There is an urgent need to expand the teaching force in these languages. Understanding how best to prepare critical language teachers from abroad is imperative. This study examined the perceptions of 16 pre- and in-service teachers (6 Arabic and 10…

Within second language education, concern over teachers' content knowledge has typically manifested itself as concern over the teacher's target language proficiency. In increasing numbers, teacher preparation programs are turning to ACTFL's Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) for measurement of this proficiency and using OPI ratings as high-stakes…

This study investigates the relationship between acculturation and language learning during a year-long study abroad program at the pre-collegiate level. The researcher presents the experiences of four U.S. American sojourners to Sweden as case studies. This mixed-methods study looks specifically at students with no prior knowledge of the target…

This study investigated how English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' types of language for thinking and types of oral elicitation tasks influence their lexical collocational errors in speech. Data were collected from 42 English majors in Taiwan using two instruments: (1) 3 oral elicitation tasks and (2) an inner speech questionnaire. The…

According to national standards for foreign language (L2) teacher education programs established by the ACTFL and the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), L2 student teachers must be supervised by university faculty who are qualified L2 educators. An exploratory study was conducted to better understand the impact of…

This study investigates the effectiveness of deductive and guided inductive approaches for teaching grammar in college French classrooms. Forty-seven second-semester French students were taught eight grammatical structures: four with a deductive instructional approach and four with a guided inductive instructional approach. A quasi-experimental…