Since its inception, America's system of public education has faced many challenges. One of its more important challenges has been how to teach children from diverse backgrounds and cultures. As a society that prides itself on a democratic ideology, cultural diversity and schooling are not trivial issues. One of the more significant diversity…

Despite the need to use and develop their English-language proficiency, English-language learners (ELLs) are often quiet during classroom discussions. The Response Protocol was developed to help teachers elicit and support the oral interactions of ELL students. The Response Protocol is a framework consisting of six types of responses that students…

This is an investigation into the accelerated acquisition of English among young ESL learners in an International School. It employed an ethnographic case study approach where data were gathered through non-participant observations, unstructured interviews, relevant documents, students' portfolios, field notes and biographical details. The sample…

This study explores factors influencing the degree to which language minority (LM) children from Spanish-dominant homes understand how connectives, such as "in contrast" and "because", signal relationships between text propositions. Standardized tasks of vocabulary, listening comprehension, word reading, and a researcher-designed text cohesion…

The study investigates the effect of explicit contrastive analysis and translation activities on the incidental acquisition of single words and collocations. We compared three high school groups of learners of the same L1 and comparable L2 (English) proficiency. Each group represented one instructional condition: meaning focused instruction (MFI),…

Students enter higher education with multiple identities that reflect their social, ethnic and cultural origins. Students from minority ethnic groups (as opposed to "new immigrant" or international students) straddle more than one cultural and language setting. This paper reports a Scottish study which suggests that, as university…

The Certificates of Foreign Language Proficiency are general purpose tests of language use designed for the adult learner in Finland. This paper deals with the techniques of validation used when designing the test specifications and implementing these into the first versions of the tests. The data comes from the development of tests in one…

Most research on language transfer has been conducted on the first and second language. This paper describes a case of transfer from the second language to the third language, specifically the influence of French (L2) on the learning of English (L3). The study focuses on French-English lexical cognates and suggests that although the learners…

This paper discusses findings from an ongoing 3-year study of the impact of strategy training on Russian listening comprehension. In particular, the study focused on the techniques that encourage increased student control of their application of learner strategies. The research presented adds to prior research on listening training in second…

This digest focuses on the American Council on the Speaking of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Speaking Proficiency Guidelines. The history and development of the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines (originally, the ACTFL Provisional Proficiency Guidelines) are reviewed, the generic characteristics of each level of the speaking guidelines are presented in…

This report suggests that language study combined with the broad-based study of the history, politics, and culture of other countries, as well as existing international business courses, are essential for first-class preparation of a business person who will operate internationally. The report discusses how to sharpen the focus of internalization…

The oral interaction hypothesis, proposed by Long and investigated by Pica, in second language (L2) acquisition is critiqued. The interaction hypothesis advances two major claims about the role of interaction in L2 acquisition: (1) comprehensible input is necessary for L2 acquisition; and (2) modifications to the interactional structure of…

Persian language instructors at U.S. universities were surveyed regarding (1) their methods for measuring Persian language proficiency among American undergraduate students, (2) research verifying the validity and reliability of these methods, and (3) their definitions of Persian language proficiency. A 12-item questionnaire was completed by 17…

This column examines the Cambridge English Examinations and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). The changes made to these tests are discussed. (SW)

The TOEFL was taken by 159 non-native speakers of English in Tehran, Iran, who also took a cloze test and two dictations. Results revealed that Listening Comprehension, cloze and dictation were more highly correlated with each other, and with the remaining parts of the TOEFL, than the latter were with each other. (Author/KM)