An increasing number of students complete an internship during their higher education studies in a country different from that of their home institution. A main advantage of this type of mobility is that it responds to employers' need for graduates with both hands-on experience and global skills. In this paper, we attempt to review existing…

By maximizing class time with more peer-to-peer interaction, students can develop interpersonal skills essential for communicating in a global society. While technology empowers the world language student with a global classroom, this short-form article discusses the value of "unplugged" activities based on ACTFL's Proficiency and World…

From the perspective of newcomers to Canada, using English as an additional language (EAL), this study explores how newcomers' interlocutors might impede workplace communication. Six participants speaking EAL and with a variety of language backgrounds shared their workplace experiences. Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured…

In this paper, we propose a pedagogical approach for teaching and learning multimodal literacy, specifically, the application of multimodal discourse analysis for genre awareness. The mastery of specific oral genres is seen as desirable to help students become competent professionals. This is the case of Product Pitches (PPs) in the business field…

Analysis of progression in spoken English by newcomer migrant-background learners has traditionally oscillated between formal assessment of oral proficiency and ethnographic description of naturally occurring peer discourse. This paper reports on data gathered from a longitudinal study of newly arrived students with English as an additional…

The present contribution focuses on Benigni's auteur film "La vita è bella" (Italy, 1997) as a tool for the development of language competence in L2 English, Spanish and German, as well as of translation skills from Italian into these languages. The project, developed at the CLASS Language Centre at the University for Foreigners of…

The necessity of forming foreign communicative competence of adult immigrants has been substantiated. The topicality of this issue for Ukraine has been defined. The experience of Global Talent Bridge, an initiative of World Education Services that is dedicated to helping skilled immigrants fully utilize their talents and education in the United…

The purpose of this classroom-based study was to discover the kinds of skill integration tasks that were employed by English teachers in Kuwait and to measure their attitudes toward implementing the skill integration technique in their classrooms. Data collection involved recording 25 hours of classroom-based observations, conducting interviews…

A method for the assessment of competence in language is suggested that allows a new approach to the study of the sources and conditions of competence development. The method builds on the functional analysis of text building behavior, making use of the discontinuities in produced text as the only reliable observations from a scientific point of…

In describing reading proficiency--the relative difficulty or ease that an individual reader experiences reading a particular text--researchers have recognized the importance of both text- and reader-based factors. This digest focuses on the factor of purpose, as determined by the reader or the instructional context. Having a purpose means having…

An experimental course in English for non-English speaking post graduate research students is described here. The course was intended to enable the students to use English efficiently in exchanges related to their profession. The selection process, teaching methods, and the "exit test" are described and a discussion of the adequate and inadequate…

In language instruction, students do not learn to elicit needed information in the classroom or in real, everyday communicative situations because (1) the material they ask questions about in class is basically uninteresting to them, and (2) many student responses that would be incomprehensible to a non-English-speaking person are left uncorrected…

Makes a case for the continued emphasis on the incorporation of reading and listening skills in the second language proficiency movement and considers ways in which this movement has advanced such skill development. (CB)

A rationale is presented for describing the communicative competence of language students in terms of proficiency guidelines. Techniques are discussed for helping students develop communicative proficiency in the four skill areas (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) and for evaluating students' proficiency levels in relation to…

Account of an experiment reported in "Bulletin de Psychologie." The results indicate a correlation between practice using a wide variety of semantic elements and better retention and use of correct syntax. This experiment indicates the importance of insuring growth in inductive capacity of learners. (Text is in French.) (AMH)