College graduates are expected to acquire certain skill sets that are necessary and sought after by potential employers, as many industries in the United States continue to grow a global footprint. Employers also value good communication skills, and communication classes are a staple of most general education curricula, including those taught on…

What do students expect before starting a Virtual Exchange (VE) with peers? Are their initial expectations mirrored in the final outcomes they perceive after the VE experience? Or, else, do students acknowledge benefits and acquired skills which they did not expect at first? This study draws on qualitative and quantitative data collected across a…

Describes an initiative to incorporate folktales and legends from francophone West Africa into a college-level advanced French literary and cultural studies course. Students recorded their reactions to various texts taken from France and West Africa in reading journals. Analysis of the journals shows that critical competencies in Western culture…

Describes a "Culture and Foreign Language" action research project that consisted of two years teaching experience with Finnish uppersecondary school pupils. (21 references) (CK)

Discusses the preparation of students of Indonesian origin for the type of thinking and writing they will have to do in graduate programs in Canada. The article argues that foreign students bound for Western English-medium universities must learn not only to produce a new language but also to display a different form of logic in the classroom.…

An environmental education-oriented global studies program to promote attitudes of environmental stewardship can be implemented in K-12 rural school systems, as an integrated part of social studies instruction, without overburdening the curriculum, by using the Curriculum Organization and Program Evaluation (COPE) model. The model provides…

The teacher education program at New Mexico State University requires all undergraduate preservice teachers to enroll in a multicultural education course. This study was conducted to assess students' ideas, beliefs, and attitudes about multicultural issues, and to determine how the course may affect their view of the world. Two newspaper articles…

Learning to swim and learning a foreign language are analagous activities, in that both are skills learned for different reasons. Few foreign language students will attain "near-native fluency;" nor will many of them become interpreters or teachers. Foreign language teachers must therefore revise priorities, restructure courses, adjust methods,…