While language teaching and learning offers students essential skills and understanding in the realm of intercultural competence, both students and teachers operate within the context of the wider curriculum. Primary language specialists, for instance, often work within a collaborative environment with their generalist classroom colleagues. In…

In this paper, the author looks back over some 43 years of involvement in language teaching and examines the progress educators have made as a profession. He also considers their present situation, given a Federal Government, which, at least until this year, has seemed antipathetic to languages education, and State and Territory Governments which,…

Finding ways to reduce students' anxiety and maximize the value of learning Greek and Hebrew is a continual challenge for biblical language teachers. Some language teachers use technology tools such as web sites or CDs with audio lessons to improve the experience. Though these tools are helpful, this paper explores the value gained from…

One of the difficulties secondary non-Chinese-speaking background (NCSB) learners are facing is to remember the characters learned in order to recall them when necessary. The traditional way of teaching secondary NCSB learners to remember Chinese characters is through mere repetition, e.g. writing out each single character by following its stroke…

A teacher of modern foreign languages (MFL) and a teacher of the visually impaired working in a university college explore and examine the needs of a student with a severe visual impairment embarking upon a course in German. This article sets out to illustrate the needs of both the student and the teachers. It also reflects upon some of the…

This paper examines the use of questioning as an index of intercultural competence (IC) in an Internet-mediated, German-American language learning partnership. Such telecollaborative, intercultural exchanges are becoming increasingly more common as a means of providing students at one location with cost-effective access to distally located…

Both the objectives of the global approach and the fact that Turkey is facing European integration call for the implementation of concepts like "intercultural learning" and "intercultural understanding" in English language teaching. Although the cultural dimension of language is as important as its linguistic dimension,…

This article presents an interview with Alison Phipps, Director of the "Graduate School for Arts and Humanities" at the University of Glasgow, and Mike Gonzales, Professor of Latin American Studies and head of Hispanic Studies at Glasgow University. In the interview, Phipps and Gonzales discuss their book "Modern Languages: Learning…

Fourth semester students of Spanish as a foreign language at the university level in the US participated in two kinds of comprehensible-input based instruction, an extensive reading class that combined assigned and self-selected reading, and a "Reading-Discussion" class that consisted of assigned reading, debates and discussions. Students in both…

Recent research on second language acquisition (SLA) has strengthened foreign (FL) and second language (L2) teaching methodologies supporting the development of communicative tasks, interactive activities in the classroom, and learner-centred instruction. However, these and any other trends in FL and L2 teaching and learning could be more…

Many elementary EFL teachers in Taiwan have concerns in integrating target culture teaching into their language classrooms for reasons such as teachers' limited knowledge of the target culture, lack of time, lack of methods and materials. In order to persuade more language teachers to teach target language culture, guidelines about designing an…

Paired listening was originally developed as a research tool with the aim to understand the strategies used by L2 learners when listening to recorded speech in the target language. It offers researchers a useful combination of direct observation and verbal data, whilst avoiding the common drawbacks of subjective introspection. This paper examines…

The article presents a format for intermediate, university-level German instruction called "global simulation" (GS) as the curricular manifestation of several recent trends in the literature on instructed second-language acquisition, in particular interactionist and task-based approaches, sociocultural theory, and the acquisition of intercultural…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of using Spanish captions, English captions, or no captions with a Spanish language soundtrack on intermediate university-level Spanish as a Foreign Language students' listening/reading comprehension. A total of 213 intermediate (fourth semester) students participated as intact groups in the…

This article describes the way in which the curriculum for intensive French was developed. Reference is made to its similarities to and differences from both the multidimensional curriculum proposed by the National Core French Study and the communicative approach. The importance of learning outcomes stated in terms of communicative outcomes…