Gamification of language learning is a clear trend of recent years. Widespread use of smartphones and the rise of mobile gaming as a popular leisure activity contribute to the popularity of gamification, as application developers can rely on an unprecedented reach of their products and expect acceptance of game-like elements by the users. In terms…

This article attempts to expand, and to add to, one important aspect of the rationale for including the study of languages as part of a liberal education. Following criticism of the profile of the vocational rationale for language learning in Irish curriculum policy, the article develops recent research on the work of L. V. Shcherba to defend the…

The Irish language is a minority language undergoing the attenuation and accelerated change commonly seen as threatened languages come under increasing pressure from the dominant language. The decline of the numbers of traditional speakers and growing numbers of L2 speakers of Irish has given rise to some contested spaces regarding authenticity,…

Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL) use is increasing and it is good to be able to provide language learners with new resources to enhance their language learning experience. One such resource is WordBricks, a non-commercial, educational app that facilitates the learning and reinforcement of grammar rules. It uses bricks and connectors of…

This paper considers the attitudes and behaviours of university language lecturers and their students regarding the use of the L1 in the higher education L2 classroom. A case study of one Irish higher education institution was carried out and qualitative interviews conducted with six lecturers in Japanese and six in German. The results indicated…

This article focuses on qualitative self-report data from a mixed-methods study which investigated Grade 5 and 6 (n = 274), 11-12-year-old, Irish-medium (IM) immersion students' improvement in linguistic accuracy in response to an explicit-inductive approach to form-focused instruction (FFI). A series of typographically enhanced PowerPoint slides…

An in-depth examination of the acquisition of grammatical gender has not previously been conducted for Irish, an endangered indigenous language now typically acquired simultaneously with English, or as L2. Children acquiring Irish must contend with the opacity of the Irish gender system and the plurifunctionality of the inflections used to mark…

The student body is becoming increasingly diverse in terms of language, nationality and cultural background. This study explores ways in which such linguistic diversity can be harnessed in the language classroom to enhance the language learning process. This paper describes a series of activities which were designed and implemented in four higher…

A classifier which is capable of distinguishing a syntactically well formed sentence from a syntactically ill formed one has the potential to be useful in an L2 language-learning context. In this article, we describe a classifier which classifies English sentences as either well formed or ill formed using information gleaned from three different…

The 23rd EUROCALL conference was held in Cyprus from the 24th to the 27th of August 2016. The theme of the conference this year was "CALL Communities and Culture." It offered a unique opportunity to hear from real-world CALL practitioners on how they practice CALL in their communities, and how the CALL culture has developed in local and…

This article first presents an overview of some trends behind the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in a second language. A study is then presented that aims to test the validity of these trends in a quantitative study of a range of socio- and morpho-phonetic variables in French, including liaison, /l/ deletion, and subject-verb agreement…

Describes a French course offered at the Irish branch of the Alliance Francaise designed to establish a common fund of knowledge for students with different language backgrounds. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Outlines a method for teaching French conversation by means of audiovisual aids. The article is part of a series reporting on French language instruction in the Irish branch of the Alliance Francaise. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Discusses the experiences of a Malaysian student studying Spanish as a Second Language in an all-female Irish secondary school, focusing on common difficulties encountered by Asian students of Romance languages. It is argued that the teaching of Romance languages often unfairly presupposes a knowledge of Latin or French on the part of learners.…

A study undertaken in Ireland investigated the effectiveness of a second language teaching strategy that focused on grammatical problem-solving. In this approach, the problems are located within the target language system, and the problem-solving involves induction of grammatical rules and use of those rules. Learners are confronted with instances…