This article reports research into the development of vocabulary in lower-intermediate level learners of French as a foreign language in Year 12 in 20 schools in the south of England. The focus of attention is the role of less common, or non-basic, vocabulary at a stage in students' learning when they have just moved to a much more advanced…

People live in a world that is increasingly interconnected, in which distant events can affect them as never before. On both an economic and social level, they are experiencing rapid change. While in the past only a small number of people engaged with the wider world, today the picture is very different. At a social level, if children are to be…

This article investigates the vocabulary of textbooks and relates it to education policy, assessment methods and teaching methods. It considers the range of vocabulary covered by key stages 3 and 4 German foreign language textbooks for secondary schools from the beginning of the 1990s to 2006 and shows that there is an overall decrease in the…

Patterns of language are usually perceived, learned and used as meaningful chunks that are processed as a whole, resulting in a reduced learning burden and increased fluency. The ability to comprehend and produce lexical chunks or groups of words which are commonly found together is an important part of language acquisition. This paper…

This paper presents some of the preliminary findings of a study into modern languages (ML) learning in five Scottish secondary schools. Five ML teachers were observed and audio-recorded over a period of several weeks while teaching their third-year classes (pupils aged 14-15 years). All the teachers used the target language extensively in their…

This article considers the discourse of teachers when content areas are taught through a second language. Bilingual discourse is discussed in the particular scenario of content and language integrated learning, CLIL, a paradigm growing in strength and popularity in L2 teaching across Europe. An examination of instructional discourse is carried out…

Vocabulary is one of the building blocks of language and is a necessary component of learners' development. This paper aims to describe the development of the L2 lexicon from the first year of learning French as a foreign language at school to the last year of undergraduate studies at university by setting out what learners know and how this…

The editors and guest editors of Volume 35 have very kindly asked me to write an end-piece to this special issue of "The Language Learning Journal" that has focused on language learner strategies (LLS). Particularly they have asked me to evaluate the extent to which the papers presented in this volume adhere to some sort of theoretical consensus.…

The Review (Dearing & King, 2007) will doubtless be judged less on its detailed content and standpoint and more on the impact it has on politicians' and ministers' priorities for teaching languages. For the Review is concerned with language "teaching" much more than with "learning". This is evident, for example, in the discussion of the consensus…

This paper explores the impact of a specially designed programme of communicative strategies on English second language (ESL) development in a scaffolded case study that set out to promote teacher-guided, constructive learner talk in the outcomes-based education arts and culture classroom. The programme was implemented in a multilingual secondary…

The focus of this paper is on the effects of the use of the home language (i.e. isiZulu) on teachers' and learners' understanding and use of core concepts in mathematics and science at the senior phase, in contexts where the language of instruction is English. It reports on a national, collaborative, multilingual research project which attempts to…

This paper presents an empirical study investigating the relationship between vocabulary size and the skills of listening, reading and writing in English as a foreign language (EFL). The participants were 88 EFL learners from lower secondary education whose language skills were assessed as part of the national school leaving examination in…

This article reports on part of a larger study of the impact of strategy training in listening on learners of French, aged 16 to 17. One aim of the project was to investigate whether such training might have a positive effect on the self-efficacy of learners, by helping them see the relationship between the strategies they employed and what they…

Foreign language teachers have long been frustrated by learners' written errors. Traditional approaches to the problem--grammar instruction and error feedback--when used alone are not effective. Explicit instruction in proofreading provides a missing link. When instruction in proofreading is embedded in grammar instruction and when learners use…

Describes a test aimed at investigating the rule knowledge stored in foreign-language learners heads and at determining the relationship between rule knowledge and second-language performance. (CK)