Describes one New Zealand university language teacher's reflection on her own grammar explanations to university-level students of Bahasa Indonesian. Examines form-focused instruction through the teacher's spontaneous answers to students' questions about the form of the language they are studying. The teacher's experiences show that it takes time…

The locus of control, whether internal or external, is an influential concept in second-language learning. One observes it, for example, in Puerto Rican students returning to Puerto Rico to take university-level courses. Explanations address a teaching method relying on use of problems with examples in such a way as to empower students. This also…

Known primarily for its tutoring and testing of grade-school and high-school students, for-profit Sylvan Learning Systems has developed interests in distance education, teacher education, English-language training, and college-level study outside the United States. The company is consciously stepping up its presence in areas associated with higher…

Describes the Voice Interactive Training System (VILTS), a language-training prototype developed to help improve comprehension and speaking skills. The system incorporates two related technologies: speech recognition and pronunciation scoring. Discusses the motivation for the program, the interdisciplinary efforts involved, and the resulting…

Describes four computer-assisted Japanese language and culture projects using word processing and the World Wide Web conducted in a college-level third-year Japanese class, and reports on the impact of the projects as assessed by student pre- and postquestionnaires, reflective comments from students, and instructors' reflective observation notes.…

Discusses the rationale, procedures and techniques, and findings of an exploratory study carried out at Bilkent University School of English Language (BUSEL), and proposes an exploratory framework through which learner observations of teaching and learning can be effectively used to achieve collaborative exploration of teaching and learning.…

Discusses pedagogical principles for performance-based instruction and demonstrates how these principles can be applied to foreign-language classroom instruction, curriculum design, materials development, and proficiency testing. (Author/VWL)

Describes differences between the level of English taught in Japanese high school English textbooks and that of English examinations for entrance into Japanese universities from the viewpoints of the size of the vocabulary and readability scores. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the first-year English program at Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela. The program is composed of three courses designed by language department professors to meet the needs of students who will major in different areas of science and technology.(Author/VWL)

Focuses on determining which semantic classes were being easily learned and which were causing difficulty for pupils in Brunei Darussalam's bilingual-education system. Also sought to determine, through analysis of pupil translation errors, which factors made a particular word or class of words difficult to learn. (Author/VWL)

Describes a study of English writing by Norwegian English-as-a-foreign-language learners. Language problems on different linguistic levels are analyzed and the theory of compensatory strategies is used to explain the process behind the production. Results show that less proficient learners have a higher number of grammatical, orthographic, and…

Reports on an investigation of learning-strategy applications in elementary French, Japanese, and Spanish immersion classrooms. Focus is on identifying strategies that more and less effective learners use for classroom reading and writing tasks in the target language. Think-aloud data from 3rd-grade and 4th-grade students were quantified and…

Explains the use of a computer-assisted language-learning tool that utilizes acoustic data in real time to help Japanese second-language learners improve their perception and production of English consonants. The basic features of the speech-learning software that runs on a networked workstation and is used for pronunciation training are…

Analyzes how differences in the beliefs or metacognitive knowledge held about writing relates to differences in English as a foreign language (EFL) writing skills. Data were collected from undergraduate students enrolled in EFL classes in Barcelona, Spain. (Author/VWL)

Presents a study of the literacy practices and attitudes of Bangladeshi families in Birmingham, England. Particular focus is on the extent to which the mothers of 18 6-year-old Bangladeshi children were able to support their children's school-related literacy learning. (Author/VWL)