As more higher education institutions in the United States look not only to be designated as Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) but to serve their student population in languages other than English, learning designers who are native speakers or have fluency in languages other than English are utilizing their language and cultural competencies to…

Most research focusing on the challenges that international teaching assistants (ITAs) encounter in U.S. classrooms employs a linguistic perspective. The present study furthers that research by examining other challenges unique to ITAs, through the lens of an intercultural competence framework. Through individual interviews with 15 ITAs, the study…

Globalization and the digitalization of our lives have made it impossible to avoid (inter)cultural encounters. In the traditional classroom environment, students are expected to juggle a myriad of choices almost simultaneously. Factors like grammar, pronunciation, word choice, etc. are all important assessment factors to consider when looking at…

The author and her family spent a few weeks traveling through Central America last summer. A few years back, they had been to Guatemala, Belize and Costa Rica yet that was it, not much more exploration of their neighbors to the south. They decided on a short tour of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama and realized this would be a great opportunity…

Being a study abroad student is not all sweetness and light. By definition, study abroad students are faced with acculturative stress (Berry, 2005) by virtue of encountering differences in assumptions, values, and expectations of daily living in their host culture. Add to that the usual challenge of hearing and speaking a different language, and…

This article examines youth assessment of the quality and success of languages provision. The discussion draws on data collected from students and graduates of Victoria's 16 secondary Turkish programs in large-scale surveys (n=858) and follow-up interviews (n=177). Surveys revealed that upper secondary Turkish classrooms serve predominantly…

The goal of integrating coping skills into the English as a second language (ESL) curriculum is to enable adults to use language in the real world. To accomplish this goal, two kinds of input are needed: (1) comprehensive knowledge about the workings of American English, and (2) accurate information about the language contexts in which adults need…

A university professor and director of a writing program found many examples of what he terms "colonialism" during his thirty years of teaching experiences in countries around the world. One such example was a former pupil in Hong Kong struggling to make her students memorize a poem called "London Snow" ("snow" is an…