How are nonnatives evaluated when committing cultural faux pas, and how does their fluency in the language of the foreign culture affect the evaluation of their culturally inappropriate behavior? I address these questions in the context of Russian professionals learning to interview for jobs in the United States, an arena of strong cultural…

This study, based on ethnographic methods, explores how the professional identities of a group of bilingual (Spanish/English) Latino/a teachers-in-the-making in an urban public school district in the USA are formed and enacted. It illustrates the national and local discourses that influence novice bilingual teachers in their professional…

Language questions are increasingly on the agenda in Europe. This paper addresses some problematic aspects of language teaching and learning that have come to the fore in the Baltic states after the European Union enlargement of 2004. First, the paper aims at providing relevant information about language policies in the former USSR and the…

This article gives an overview of a piece of qualitative research conducted at a women's university in the United Arab Emirates. The aim of the study was to evaluate the English language peer tutoring programme in order to highlight benefits and challenges, and to make informed improvements. The study drew particularly on participant perceptions…

The written English vocabulary of 72 deaf elementary school students of various proficiency levels in American Sign Language (ASL) was compared with the performance of 60 hearing English-as-a-second-language (ESL) speakers and 61 hearing monolingual speakers of English, all of similar age. Students were asked to retell "The Tortoise and the Hare"…

This investigation of English immersion learners explored processes of learning English, patterns of language use, and levels of comprehensibility among 34 predominantly Spanish-speaking 12th graders at the American School of Asuncion in Asuncion, Paraguay. The analysis of data from language learning histories, group interviews, perceived…

East Texas, home to a large English language learner (ELL) population, is the setting for a successful program that offers students support for both language development and subject-matter learning. In this article, the authors examine why East Texas is so successful in closing the achievement gap of its minority students. The authors also…

In this article, I examine the assimilationist assumptions embedded in the development and implementation of the Texas Reading Proficiency Test in English (RPTE). The RPTE was designed as a developmental bridge for English language learner (ELL) students to perform on the English Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS). These assumptions…

Socio-cultural models offer great scope for scope for theorising the complex processes involved in teaching and learning, and of capturing the nature of the co-constructions, which are important factors in success for both teachers and learners. But the implications of this theoretical stance are perhaps, not fully recognised in the attendant…

This paper reports on the grammatical and programmatical production aspects of the "Hebrewer," a cross-platform web-based reference work in the form of a Hebrew inflection generator. The Hebrewer, a Java applet/servlet combination, is currently capable of generating 2,500 nouns in full declension and 500 verbs in full conjugation,…

Truly current, up-to-the-minute video by native speakers using the language for real communication can make the language and culture come alive for students. With the explosion of broadband Internet access through cable and DSL, better connections in schools, faster low cost computers, and better graphics adapters, access to authentic video on the…

This study focuses on the various playful uses of language that occurred during a semester-long study of two German language courses using one type of synchronous network-based medium, the MOO. Research and use of synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) have flourished in the study of second-language acquisition (SLA) since the late…

The inspiration for our project arose from a perceived gap between research in foreign/second language learning and classroom practice. In order to address this issue, we created a web site containing summaries of seminal articles in the area of CALL--computer assisted language learning. The summaries are useful for many teachers who do not have…

Active communication with others is key to human learning. This straightforward premise currently undergirds much theory and research in student learning in general, and in second language and literacy learning in particular. Both of these academic areas have long acknowledged communication's central role in successful learning with the exact…

This study investigated the effect of English-language acquisition on the learning experiences of a four-year-old Taiwanese immigrant child in a state kindergarten in New Zealand. Data was collected through child observations and parents' and teachers' interviews. The child's learning experience was analysed based on five behaviours--"taking…