Explores factors affecting the successful maintenance of a college-level Portuguese language program, focusing on expansion of course offerings, cooperation with other foreign language programs, responding to student interests, and hiring and retaining instructional staff. (CB)

Middle school philosophy requires primary attention to student characteristics and needs when designing language programs. Designers must recognize a need for concrete treatment of subject matter and an integrated, egalitarian approach to instruction. Advice is provided regarding the articulation concerns, program outcome options, and format…

A survey of the Language Program Coordinator (LPC) role in higher education deals with conditions of employment, professional training, support for professional development and research, the nature of the LPC's responsibilities, his or her relationship to other members of language departments, and professional status. (17 references) (CP)

Explores the concept and goals of a "full-service" college foreign language department, which would offer a wide variety of courses and programs, reach out to a broad segment of the academic community, and attempt to develop collaborative, mutually beneficial programs with other departments. (CB)

Considers where English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) programs belong and presents responses from several ESL faculty members. Among the topics are ESL in its own department, housed in several departments, outside the departmental structure, within the English department, and within a modern language department. (GLR)

Describes the Foreign Language Center at the European University Viadrina in Germany, asserting the necessity of foreign language training for Europeanization and globalization. Also discusses several ways of structuring foreign language programs. (EV)

This volume reports on innovative, useful evaluation work conducted within U.S. college foreign language programs. An introductory chapter scopes out the territory, reporting key findings from research into the concerns, impetuses, and uses for evaluation that FL educators identify. Seven chapters then highlight examples of evaluations conducted…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe how and why Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) has developed a system aiming to effectively place students in freshman and developmental English programs. The placement system includes: triangulating data from external test scores, with scores from a panel-marked hand-written essay (HWE),…

In a paper published in "The Language Learning Journal" in 2005, Eric Hawkins describes his vision of language education as an apprenticeship comprising two stages. In stage one (ages 5-14), the purpose is "educational" and the focus is on language awareness; in stage two (14-19), the purpose is "instrumental" and…

The present study expands the design of Warschauer (1996) surveying freshman foreign language students at a Turkish university. Motivating aspects of computer assisted instruction in terms of writing and e-mailing are explored through an exploratory factor analysis conducted on the survey developed by Warschauer (1996). Findings suggest that…

Teachers play a vital role in the classroom environment. Interaction between teacher and students is an essential part of the teaching/learning process. An educator, Flanders originally developed an instrument called Flanders Interaction Analysis (FIA). The FIA system was designed to categorize the types, quantity of verbal interaction and direct…

The history of the role of assessment in policy-making for languages education in Australia over the past 20 years is characterised by a complex and shifting interface between language policy, curriculum and assessment. Three phases can be identified during which significant changes occur. These highlight an ongoing struggle for legitimacy for…

This article describes the efforts of an intensive English programme to design a class that addressed the challenges of bringing authentic English into the curriculum. This class exposed students to a variety of authentic English language input, while providing support. Through this class, students volunteered with various community organizations.…

Although the relationship between research and language teaching is often discussed among applied linguists, the views of language teachers are often reported anecdotally, if at all. Our article explores how language teaching colleagues in a Canadian university view this relationship as expressed in open-ended questionnaire responses and…

In this article, the author describes the genesis of the Australian Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations (AFMLTA) and "Babel." With regard to the origin of the title of the journal, its name refers only indirectly to the Tower of Babel in Genesis. It comes in fact from the affectionate nickname that had been given to the…