In order to give language learners a fighting chance outside the classroom, teachers must provide them with consciousness-raising opportunities for developing pragmatic awareness. By attending to pragmatic factors in second-language (L2) situations, student will be better able to make informed choices in negotiating effective communication. This…

This study aimed to investigate native English-speaking teachers' beliefs about Korean EFL learners, following a qualitative case study approach. Participants consisted of 3 Americans and 15 Canadians, aged 29-41, who were a part of a university teaching staff in Korea. The data collection employed questionnaires and interviews. The results…

The English article system presents many problems for non-native speakers of English, particularly when they do not have an equivalent structure in their first language. Different approaches to the teaching of articles have attempted to overcome this problem. By encouraging students to address the notion of countability and to identify specific…

The National Research Council (NRC) report on the disproportionate representation of minority students in special and gifted education represents an opportunity to draw national attention to the challenges faced by educators as they attempt to provide high-quality educational opportunities for students from culturally and linguistically diverse…

When Botswana gained independence from the British in 1966, a political decision was taken to designate English as an official language and Setswana, one of the indigenous languages, as a national language. This move disregarded the multilingual nature of Botswana society. Furthermore, although not explicitly stated, the use of other languages…

An analysis of 100 Flemish high-school students' attitudes towards French and English (both "foreign" languages) revealed complex links between personality factors, gender, politicocultural identity, communicative behaviour and foreign language attitudes. Attitudes towards English were found to be much more positive than those towards French,…

This article discusses some of the challenges that researchers working in the fields of bilingualism and second-language acquisition (SLA) and in the field of language testing face in developing comparable and culturally and cognitively appropriate data collection and language assessment tools for bilingual children from rural minority-language…

The notion of language dominance is often defined in terms of proficiency. We distinguish dominance, as a property of the bilingual mind and a concept of language knowledge, from proficiency, as a concept of language use. We discuss ways in which language dominance may be assessed, with a focus on measures of mean length of utterance (MLU).…

A successful collaboration resulted in a researcher and a teacher linking professional development with change in small-group reading instruction and student achievement. The context was a two-way Spanish-English bilingual immersion first-grade classroom with many English language learners (ELLs), located in a low-performing, high-poverty school.…

This article reviews experimental studies comparing bilingual and English-only reading programs for English language learners. The review method is best-evidence synthesis, which uses a systematic literature search, quantification of outcomes as effect sizes, and extensive discussion of individual studies that meet inclusion standards. A total of…

This article presents a framework that identifies areas of expertise necessary for mainstream teachers to be prepared to teach in classrooms with native and non-native English speakers. Currently, explicit attention to the linguistic and cultural needs of English Language Learners (ELLs) is lacking in most teacher preparation programs. A recent…

A bibliometric approach is used not only to sketch out the development of CALL during the last 25 years, but also to assess the contribution of educational technology to 21st century foreign-language teaching and learning. This study is based on the six instalments of the author's International (and multilingual) Bibliography of Computer Assisted…

Recently a number of quasi-experimental studies have investigated the potential of a cross-modality transfer of second language competency between real-time, conversational exchange via text and speech (Abrams, 2003; Beauvious, 1998; Kost, 2004; Payne & Whitney, 2002). Payne and Whitney employed Levelt's (1989) model of language production and…

An analysis was conducted of relevant documents published by federal and provincial governments and other French as a Second Language (FSL) stakeholders to examine whether governmental and school board policies are contributing to the general decline in status of FSL instruction in Canada. Federal documents published by the Office of the…

The present study discusses and describes codeswitches produced by two trilingual children acquiring English, Spanish and Hebrew simultaneously from birth. Data were collected regularly over a period of 20 months (from age 2;6 to 4;2 for M and from age 5;5 to 7;1 for E), in naturalistic tape-recorded sessions. Codeswitches drawn from…