The international trend towards a practice-based approach in teacher education has permeated foreign language teacher education and English language teaching. A practice-based approach is based on the understanding that teachers learn to teach a language by engaging in "actual" teaching rather than "talking" about teaching. We…

Measuring the quality of information and communication technology (ICT) tools and their impact on learning outcomes is not an easy task. Carol Chapelle, the leading authority on the evaluation of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) tools, wrote in 2008: 'Evaluation of innovation is perhaps the most significant challenge teachers and…

Theory of Mind (ToM), as a relevant aspect in children's socio-cognitive development, has been widely studied. Some results have suggested that bilingual children have an advantage over their monolingual peers in development of ToM. However, there is less research regarding the predictive role of ToM in performance of oral and reading…

The acquisition of verbal morphology presents challenges for many second language (L2) learners, in part because they do not readily process those forms during sentence comprehension. Instead, L2 learners rely on lexical-semantic cues (e.g., temporal adverbs and explicit subjects). This study investigated the role of task-essential training in…

In this study, 21 university students, who represented thirteen nationalities, participated in an online cross-cultural learning activity. The participants were engaged in interactions and exchanges carried out on Facebook® and Skype® platforms, and their multilingual communications were supported by speech-to-text recognition (STR) and…

Software can facilitate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students' self-correction of their free-form writing by detecting errors; this article examines the proportion of errors which software can detect. A corpus of 13,644 words of written English was created, comprising 90 compositions written by Spanish-speaking students at levels A2-B2…

The purpose of this single-case study was to understand the perceptions of Latino Spanish-speaking English learners on the efficacy of developmental education services at a Western U.S. community college. The primary data collection method was in-depth individual interviews of a purposeful sample of nine successful students. Findings indicated…

The purpose of this paper is to present an experimental study on summative assessment in translation teaching. The paper emphasises the need to use, as an alternative to traditional assessment (i.e. the translation of a text under exam conditions), multidimensional assessment based on a range of criterion-referenced and competence-based assessment…

This comparative case study explores the use of Spanish, Arabic, and English in two elementary classrooms where instruction is delivered primarily in English and teachers and students do not share proficiencies in students' home languages. Using methods derived from ethnography of communication, the study examines how languages other than English…

This article addresses an innovative approach to connecting an urban university with the surrounding neighborhoods comprised of Latino immigrants, who represent potential new students or current students' family members. The National Latino Research Center (NLRC) uses popular education, culturally informed, and linguistically relevant strategies…

This project aimed to describe oral narrative retells of Spanish-English speaking dual language learners (DLLs) and examine relationships with standardized vocabulary assessments. Investigators described oral narrative retells of 145 DLLs in kindergarten and first grade by number of different words (NDW), words per minute (WPM), and…

Whereas myriad studies have been published in the field of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) in the past thirty years, research on the use and implementation of technology in the teaching and learning of Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) is very scarce. This study is aimed for those SHL instructors and researchers who are interested in…

A growing body of research has shown a positive role of task-supported instruction in second language (L2) learning (Ellis, 2003a; Loewen, 2015; Van Den Branden, 2006). From a pedagogical perspective, recycling or repeating parts of teaching materials is common practice and theoretical support for such practice is emerging (Bygate and Samuda,…

The growing diversity in schools in the United States resulting from the rising number of English learners (ELs) has put more pressure on both children and teachers. Teachers are faced with the challenge of meeting the educational needs of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) learners, including the unique needs of CLD children with…

The main objective of this study is to explore how students who participate in virtual intercultural exchanges use evaluative language to build rapport and encourage collaboration. Data were gathered from 211 email messages sent by 40 Spanish and American university students and were tagged following Martin and White's Appraisal model.…