Recommendations about syllabi design have emerged over the last two decades. From a Promising Syllabus, to a Graphic Syllabus, to a Student-Centered Syllabus, faculty are encouraged to purposefully set the tone with this document. Few studies examine students' impressions of these documents. In order to do this, we created four types of syllabi…

Awareness of transcultural pragmatics serves as the foundation for intercultural communicative competence. Explicit teaching of pragmatics in conjunction with intercultural communication training can contribute to the professional development of non-native English-speaking teachers. This article reports on an interdisciplinary attempt to develop a…

Objective: To examine whether the completion of a course of study relating to preventive health and lifestyle risk factors was associated with alterations in health behaviours. Design: Within-group intervention, repeated-measures design. Setting: Health behaviours of university students studying a course focused on health and well-being. Method:…

This ethnographic case study explores intercultural and ethnographic engagement by undergraduate Hong Kong students enrolled in an Intercultural Communication course at a public research university. Ethnographic projects originated from virtual exchanges with undergraduates in a professional writing course at a private research institution on the…

The current study explores utilizing the ACTFL cultural framework to structure synchronous video-based speaking activities and subsequent class discussions. The study includes 39 students in two sections of an intermediate-level college Spanish course who engaged in five 30-minute conversations with native speakers of Spanish via Talk Abroad…

Authentic materials, if appropriate to the learning situation, might turn the classroom environment into a more engaging place, where motivation might be generated through the performance of meaningful tasks. This article describes how a Text-Based Instruction approach can provide the basis for the design of an ESP syllabus based on relevant,…

This study examines the intellectual consequences of writing about data in relation to disciplinary concepts. We collected and studied written assignments from sixteen students in which they had to analyze data provided by the instructor in a general education linguistics course. We also surveyed them at the beginning, middle, and end of the…

Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of increasing the intellectual viability of lower-level foreign language (FL) study while facilitating connections between academic practice, learners' lives, and global communities. This article reports on a content-based role-immersion simulation (RIS) designed to incite a critical orientation…

Rapid demographic shifts are occurring around the country. United States' public schools are more diverse than any time in history. To help prepare pre-service teachers for these shifts, this small-scale qualitative case study explored the impact of a required social justice course for pre-service educators at a large private Christian university…

This paper describes an alternative and unique format to the customary culture and civilization course taught at the upper levels in a university foreign language curriculum. The semester-long course employed a content-based design that combined language instruction and learning with authentic music generated during distinct historical eras in…

A significant shift in the dominant paradigm governing the relationship of humans with nature and society is crucial in order to change the current unsustainable practices. This article describes a pilot-study based on a Masters level sustainability course, which explored what specific content, activities and resources may contribute to promoting…

There is a growing interest in the application of digital games to enhance learning across many educational levels. This paper investigates pre-service teachers' ability to operationalize the learning principles that are considered part of a good digital game (Gee, 2007) by designing digital games in Scratch. Forty pre-service teachers, enrolled…

The growing demand for Spanish for Specific Purposes (SSP) courses at universities in the United States in the last two decades (Klee, 2015) has brought to light the need for more theoretically driven research in this field, which can inform pedagogical decisions and materials design. The present study conceptually replicates Serafini and Torres…

Edutainment, while seemingly a new and trending idea, is quite simply the combination of education and entertainment, or improving learning by making it more engaging. What began as a way to teach children concepts in a fun way (e.g., School House Rock) has evolved into an integration of technology, design, and academics (e.g., TED talks).…

One of the most significant hurdles to overcome in teaching law to business students is getting them to recognize and appreciate the real-world applicability of the law, a seemingly esoteric and irrelevant discipline. This hurdle is especially challenging when teaching Legal and Ethical Environment of Business (LEEB), a course that most business…