Csikszentmihaly's (1997) concept of flow describes a mental state resulting from peak experiences in which the level of challenge is high, but manageable given a person's skills. Because flow occurs at peak moments, these moments can motivate teachers, possibly shaping their classroom practices and giving them insight into their teaching beliefs.…

A great deal of research has been carried out over the past two decades related to the effectiveness of computer-assisted teaching and learning. This large body of work, however, has not produced unequivocal findings, especially in the area of CALL. Our study takes a systematic look at what dedicated meta-research since 1991 might have contributed…

This paper presents and discusses some longitudinal observations of a case study of multilingual language acquisition from birth to the age of five. The analyses are based on data provided from written observations and audio recordings made on a regular basis. The child in this study is acquiring two minority languages at home and the two official…

Luxembourg is a trilingual country where residents communicate in Luxembourgish, French and German concurrently. Children therefore study these languages at primary school. In this paper I explore how six eight-year-old Luxembourgish children use and learn German, French and English in formal and informal settings over a period of one year. Their…

In this study we surveyed teachers and program coordinators of Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) from Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta to determine to what degree they believe they are incorporating citizenship concepts into the ESL classroom. Respondents provided us with information on the nature of their programs, the…

In the past few decades, new governmental efforts to internationalize Japanese higher education have been in progress. One move has been to provide assistance to study abroad programs using English as the language of instruction. Though seen as an effective internationalization strategy, the consequences are by no means culturally neutral. This…

Transcripts were made of teacher-student conversations in four Hawaiian classrooms in which Korean is taught as a heritage language. The study examines the use of the sentence-ending particle "yo," the meaning of the particle, the way it is used in interaction, and its sociopragmatic implication. The following research questions are…

Interaction has been argued to promote noticing of L2 form in a context crucial to learning--when there is a mismatch between the input and the learner's interlanguage (IL) grammar (Gass & Varonis, 1994; Long, 1996; Pica, 1994). This paper investigates the extent to which learners may notice native speakers' reformulations of their IL grammar in…

This article discusses how research on language transfer in the field of SLA can help to explain the origins of substrate influence in creoles and provide answers to more difficult questions concerning the distribution and verification of substrate features. First, it argues against the view that both SLA and transfer are not involved in the…

This study investigates the effect of the context of learning--"at home" (AH) classroom versus study abroad (SA)--on the number and types of communication strategies (CSs) used by learners of Spanish as a second language. Oral data from 46 learners--20 AH and 26 SA--were analyzed before and after the treatment period, to discern the effect of…

Four teachers and their eight classes of 179 fifth-grade (10-11-year-old) students participated in this quasi-experimental classroom study, which investigated the effects of form-focused instruction (FFI) and corrective feedback on immersion students' ability to accurately assign grammatical gender in French. The FFI treatment, designed to draw…

The present study addresses the reactivity of two types of verbal protocols in SLA research. It expands on the work of Leow and Morgan-Short (2004), who found nonmetalinguistic verbalization during a second-language reading task to be nonreactive for beginning learners' text comprehension, intake, and production of the targeted morphological form.…

This study examined Australian English (AE) and Thai-English bilingual (TE) speakers' ability to perceive word-final stops in their native and non-native languages. In the perception experiment, the TE listeners were able to discriminate stop contrasts differing only in place of articulation (/p/-/t/, /p/-/k/, /t/-/k/) in both English and Thai…

Although it is recognized that ESL students often need assistance to become more comprehensible speakers, their teachers usually have limited time to devote to pronunciation instruction. Research should help teachers set priorities for pronunciation teaching to address these students' needs as efficiently as possible. Here we test the usefulness…

Action Research has been used in many fields of endeavour as a useful means of improving practice. This article describes how this methodology was used to develop a programme of language learning at the University of the Free State. The researcher was tasked with the development and implementation of an English language access programme for…