While written exercises may serve students adequately on tests, the structures they emphasize can remain elusive or difficult for students to master in conversation. Students tend to interpret their difficulty in applying what they have learned as a lack of language ability, and they can quickly lose confidence when speaking. Producing a target…

Curriculum design and implementation can be a daunting process. Questions quickly arise, such as who is qualified to design the curriculum and how do these people begin the design process. According to Graves (2008), in many contexts the design of the curriculum and the implementation of the curricular product are considered to be two mutually…

The conversation class occupies a unique place in the process of learning English as a second or foreign language. From the author's own experience in conducting special conversation classes with Persian-speaking adults, he has drawn up a number of simple but important guidelines, some of which he hopes may provide helpful suggestions for the…

This paper discusses recent trends in language pedagogy that emphasize movement from a psycholinguistic to a more sociocultural view of language teaching and learning. Nourished primarily by sociocultural theory and Hinton's (2002, 2003) efforts to promote the stabilization of indigenous languages, the author presents Narrative Language…

In this article we present an integrated curricular model for addressing the transition from the intermediate to the advanced language level through peer-assisted learning activities in the post-secondary German classroom. In a series of group projects between students in second- and third-year conversation courses, we employed a learner-centered…

This article describes the creation of an intercultural welcoming panel that the authors developed with English as a second language (ESL) students and communication studies (CS) students at a community college. The creation of the welcoming panel is based on their collaborative work with both sets of students over several academic quarters. The…

This is an English communication instruction system designed to teach children basic, easy to remember conversation strategies without the use of a textbook or to serve as a supplement learning system to a textbook. This English communication training method provides learners with concrete language patterns, a broad spectrum of vocabulary and…

This article builds on Norton and Toohey's (2001) critique of good language learner (GLL) research to illustrate how college students in an advanced Spanish conversation course drew on particular ideologies of language and foreign language learning to construct and negotiate their classroom identities. I argue that these ideologies were implicated…

An approach to perfecting French language skills, "Mon francaise, je m'n occupe," is described. (LB)

Describes a 1978 experiment in which French conversations (among advanced students of French) were transmitted by satellite from Hawaii to other locations in the Pacific. (AM)

Conversation Rebuilding (CR) help students formulate acceptable utterances in a foreign language by starting with rough approximations, using words students know, and zeroing in on utterances a native speaker might produce. This article examines how this technique can be implemented in intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) and describes a prototype…

Describes conversation activities that can help students experiencing difficulty in French oral language increase confidence and speaking skills. Small groups of students form conversations around key words, and then expand the conversation for larger groups, incorporating more words and structures. (CB)

"Xiangsheng," a Chinese oral art form, are written and performed using idiomatic, colloquial Beijing speech and thus provide excellent material for studying spoken Chinese. Suggestions for preparing xiangsheng as teaching materials and teaching xiangsheng in the classroom are offered. Chinese character transcription, pinyin transcription,…

More foreign-language professors are stressing speaking rather than grammar in their courses. They are encouraging their students to talk as much as 90 percent of the time. At the heart of the new approach is the concept of "proficiency"--what the student can do with the language. (MLW)

Describes an activity for use in the conversational English-as-a-foreign-language classroom. The activity involves having each student say one or two sentences that continues a story being made up as the activity goes along. Students were positive about the activity, because saying only one or two sentences helped them not to feel pressured or…