Background Context: In most immigrant-receiving societies, an important question, both for researchers and policy makers, has been the weighing of the relative efficiency of different formulas in the learning of the host language by immigrant students, especially the potential impact of specific services on social integration and the role of…

Provides revisions of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) writing guidelines. The proficiency guidelines are presented in a top-down fashion, rather than in a bottom-up order, thereby allowing for more positive descriptive statements for each level and sublevel, stressing what language users can do with the language…

The simultaneous presence in a learner's grammar of two features that should be mutually exclusive (optionality) typifies second language acquisition. But generative approaches have no good means of accommodating the phenomenon. The paper proposes one approach, based on Truscott and Sharwood Smith's (2004) MOGUL framework. In this framework,…

This research project addresses the validity of assessments used to measure the performance of English language learners (ELLs), such as those mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB, 2002). The goals of the research are to help educators understand and improve ELL performance by investigating the validity of their current…

Attacks the "tendency toward a technocratic pragmatization of scientific work" which is seen in the catalog "Guidelines for the FL teacher" by Bludau et. al. in this journal, 1973 No. 4. Takes a position in the controversy between these authors and K. Otten, English philologist. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Two golden rules for teachers of young children are (1) work, speak, and act with complete naturalness, and (2) never try to teach language per se; rather, teach life (joy, sorrow, work, play, differentiation, self-awareness, etc.) by involving the children in situations and activities that are highly significant to them. (NQ)

Discusses the work of Seiichi Makino, a scholar of Japanese, noting that his work in establishing the Japanese proficiency guidelines helped make it appear that Japanese language teaching was part of mainstream American language teaching. (Author/VWL)

The article proposes Stern's (1983) framework for classifying issues related to instruction in order to ascertain the relevance of Universal Grammar (UG) in the ESL/EFL classroom. Discussed in this article, particularly as UG pertains to them, are issues related to: (a) L1 transfer; (b) teaching rules and giving error correction versus presenting…

Students of foreign language are being encouraged to learn and use a broad range of language learning strategies that can be tapped throughout the learning process. This approach is based on the belief that learning will be facilitated by making students aware of the range of strategies from which they can choose during language learning and use.…

Examines research on learning related vocabulary, such as lexical sets, a unit of vocabulary or specific items sharing certain formal or semantic features. This research shows that learning related words at the same time makes learning them more difficult and suggests that this difficulty can be avoided if related words are learned separately.…

The Conference on College Composition and Communication's statement on second language writing and writers is reprinted in this article. It contains a general statement, guidelines for writing programs, and a bibliography. (Author/VWL)

Three recent books take up different positions in the on-going debate about how, and out of what, to construct a theory of second language (L2) acquisition. Johnson (2004) advocates a "dialogically based approach", inspired by Vygotsky's sociocultural theory and Bakhtin's "dialogized heteroglossia", with which she would replace what she views as a…

This article describes the reasons for project-based learning and how it better motivates students in an EFL classroom. It illustrates this topic by presenting a documentary film project that was carried out in a high-intermediate EFL class in Saudi Arabia. The article summarizes the theoretical support for communicative language learning and…

The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) describes language proficiency in reading, writing, speaking, and listening on a 6-level scale. In this study, English-language experts from across Europe linked CEFR levels to scores on three tests: the TOEFL® iBT test, the TOEIC® assessment, and the TOEIC "Bridge"™ test.…

This column from the English Learners department outlines a framework for robust literacy instruction for English learners--instruction that addresses the cognitive challenges of acquiring literacy, accounts for English learners' special language needs and abilities, and includes their unique cultural experiences. The framework consists of four…