Reports on a study exploring patterns of discourse organization in seminar-type discussions. Analysis was made of patterns of sequential organization in discussions between English for academic purposes students in university seminars in the United Kingdom. Analysis revealed two patterns of organization: simple exchanges of pre-formed ideas and…

Investigated the effects on vocabulary acquisition of student participation in authoring a multimedia institutional module. Sixty-two subjects were randomly assigned to two groups, and each group was randomly assigned to one of two treatments. Showed evidence that students learn vocabulary significantly better when they participate in the creation…

Reports that in international schools, a second language is usually taught only if the second language is English. Argues that the students missing out in this approach are monolingual native speakers of English. Concludes that British and American students are most in need of bilingual education. (NB)

Two programs that have been successful at integrating a number of suitable conditions for learning a foreign language in the online environment are Spanish at Rio Salado Community College in Tempe, Arizona, and French at Coastline Community College in Fountain Valley, California. Discussion includes instructional delivery; course lab experience;…

An English-as-second-language (ESL) teacher could not interest her students in their work until she changed her perception of education by reading books on unschooling and meaningful learning by Holt, Dewey, and Freire. By combining solid language acquisition research with holistic learning theory, she was able to transform the experience of…

Explores the process of implementing the Nebraska Foreign Language Frameworks in an urban, Midwestern school district. Participants were two elementary, two middle school, and two high school teachers; the languages taught were French and Spanish. Findings show that the six teachers implemented the frameworks differently, depending mainly on…

One of the skills that can be taught in an English proficiency class that adopts literary texts for teaching the language is critical thinking. The background, characters and their motives are among those that invite critical inquiry and interpretation. Although it has been claimed that discussing literary texts in the traditional way can help…

With the publication of the ACTFL/NCATE Program Standards for the Preparation of Foreign Language Teachers in the fall of 2002, teacher preparation programs need to rethink the process of gathering materials that best represent the abilities of the teacher candidates they are training. This article discusses how one foreign language program has…

Outcomes assessment is a process by which an academic unit defines and articulates its program goals and assesses its attainment of those goals. This article chronicles one language division's efforts at outcomes assessment for beginning and intermediate Spanish. The evidence used for program assessment consisted of WebCAPE placement scores,…

Learner-centred approaches to language teaching, especially those that seek to develop learner autonomy, require the learner to take decisions concerning the goals, content and methods of learning; they also assign a central role to self-assessment. Although the logic of learner-centredness demands that learner self-assessment should somehow be…

Drawing on the unique opportunities that physical education settings provide, physical education specialists can assist English language learners (ELLs) in developing language by implementing language objectives in their lessons. Language objectives encourage teachers to provide explicit language instruction and language support for students who…

In the following article the author presents a methodological framework for the teaching of intercomprehension. Competence in intercomprehension is seen as a realisation of the general human faculty for using and understanding language, which includes the ability to comprehend texts and utterances in "unfamiliar" languages. This competence can be…

While research in international technical communication has flourished during the last 10 years, there has been little published on technical communication programs outside the United States. This article addresses this need by describing 12 representative academic technical communication programs in Germany, including Germany's first master's…

In its position statement, the International Reading Association states that technology needs to be an integral part of literacy instruction. This article describes two ways of integrating technology into an EAP curriculum that focuses on building students' reading and writing skills. In essence, the goal of the article is to demonstrate that…

This study uses the foreign language classroom to examine students' beliefs about learning, perceptions of goal attainment, and motivation to continue language study. Survey and interview results indicated students' attributions for success and failure and their expectations for certain subjects' learnability played a role in the relationship…