Mothers' spontaneous teaching of their 4-year-olds was observed during block play in 230 dyads from low-income African American, Mexican, Dominican, and Chinese backgrounds. Blocks contained graphics that could be used to teach concepts in literacy, math, construction, or body/color. Coders noted how often mothers taught each of the concepts,…

The current government in Korea, in order to encourage more fluent use of English, has shifted the focus of the English curriculum from language accuracy to language fluency by encouraging English teachers to use English as a classroom language. However, many English teachers in Korea feel burdened by this policy, mainly because they themselves…

Multilingualism is an international fact of life and increasing in the United States. Multilingual families are exceedingly diverse, and policies relevant to them should take this into account. The quantity and quality of a child's exposure to responsive conversation spoken by fluent adults predicts both monolingual and multilingual language and…

This study examines a lesser-known population of students, called "long-term English language learners" (LTELLs) in the USA, who now comprise one-third of all English language learners in New York City secondary schools. A major finding from our research, which explores the characteristics and educational needs of this student…

In this chapter, the authors present a synthesis of the small, but growing, body of literature examining what some teacher educators are already doing and what all teacher educators need to do to prepare mainstream classroom teachers to teach English language learners (ELLs). While the discussion applies to teachers of immigrant and refugee…

This paper adopts an automated frequency-driven approach to identify frequently-used word combinations (i.e., "lexical bundles") in academic writing. Lexical bundles retrieved from one corpus of published academic texts and two corpora of student academic writing (one L1, the other L2), were investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively.…

In this article, I analyze how a group of multilingual students at a university in British Columbia, Canada, go through the process of "re-becoming ESL" during their first year of university. I highlight a central contradiction. Despite bringing a diverse and rich range of languages and cultures to the university, multilingual students…

By means of a phraseological identification method, this study provides a general description of the use of conventional sequences (CSs) in interviews at four different levels of spoken L2 French as well as in interviews with native speakers. Use of conventional sequences is studied with regard to overall quantity, category distribution and type…

This paper investigates spoken directive language use in office hour consultation contexts by international teaching assistants (ITAs) in training, individually and in comparison with practicing academic professionals. The purpose is to inform instruction in advanced spoken English for academic purposes, to contribute to intercultural pragmatics…

Acculturation and language proficiency have been found to be inter-related both from the perspective of second language acquisition (Schumann, 1978, 1986) and socio-psychological adaptation in cross-cultural contacts (Ward, Bochner, & Furnham, 2001). However, the predictions as to the effect of a particular strategy on success differ, with…

In this article, factors inhibiting the use of mother tongue as the language of learning and teaching (LoLT) in rural foundation phase classes is investigated. I analysed qualitative data from focus group interviews with 20 foundation phase teachers that were selected through purposive sampling. Findings show that factors such as prior learner…

The Southern Conference on Language Teaching (SCOLT) held its annual conference March 10-12, 2011, at the Crowne Plaza in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in collaboration with the Louisiana Foreign Language Teachers Association (LFLTA) and the Southeastern Association of Language Learning Technology (SEALLT). Those individuals whose proposals were…

The main goal of this study was to investigate whether computer-mediated communication (CMC) intercultural exchange offers the conditions necessary for the development of the sociolinguistic competence of second language learners. Non-native speakers (NNS) of French in British Columbia interacted through CMC with native speakers (NS) of French in…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the L2 use rate in EFL classrooms through introducing three task conditions in learning lexical items. Data were collected from a group of freshman university students (male and female) studying in Islamic Azad university of Sabzevar, Iran (N = 73). Based on their performance on a Michigan TOEFL…

This article explores the compensatory strategies used by two Indonesian children who experienced first language attrition when acquiring English in the English-speaking environment. They use compensatory strategies to compensate for their lack of competence in first language. They employ both interlingual strategies and discourse strategies when…