This study compared the Mandarin performance of elementary immersion program students and high school world language program students in the same school district. A cross-sectional design was employed to gather information on Mandarin proficiency of fourth and fifth graders and Level 4 and Level 5 (AP Chinese) high school students who took the…

Videos are very versatile. They can act as a tool for listening that enhances listening experience for our students. Other than that, the actions, gestures, emotions, settings, etc, that is observed by students in a video can provide significant visual stimulus for the practice and production of the English language. The study also considers the…

There is sometimes an assumption among language educators that students find the transition from school to university language learning a challenging process (see for example Busse & Walter, 2011; Chambers, 2014; Macaro & Wingate, 2004). In this research we set out to explore this assumption through a small-scale study of first-year…

To strengthen the professional competence and basic ability is the objective requirements of the Chinese higher vocational college English teaching, while the positioning of the teaching objectives is partial to a "prisoner's dilemma" in game situations that any party will result in. To get rid of the "dilemma", we have to…

Drawing on recent work on cosmopolitanism, global citizenship, and critical applied linguistics, this article examines the concept of cosmopolitanism as a viable goal in education in Canada. Particular attention is paid to the inclusion of global citizenship objectives in K-12 language programs in general and in heritage language (HL) curricula in…

This study aimed at evaluating the textbook used for teaching Arabic for speakers of other languages at the International Institute for Teaching Arabic for Speakers of Other Languages at the University of Jordan from the perspective of instructors who taught the book and the students who studied it. The study aimed at identifying the points of…

In this article, the author considers some of the issues addressed in the 2007 MLA report. The 2007 MLA report argues that the two-tiered literature/language configuration in post-secondary foreign language departments "has outlived its usefulness and needs to evolve," and even needs to be replaced. When proclamations are made that foreign…

Foreign language teachers are nowadays required to respond to the changes provoked by the advent of web 2.0 and the developments it has introduced in the learning behaviour of users, and to adopt a new teaching approach, integrating users' online social activities in their educational practice. In this new educational approach, users must be able…

Han's (2009, 2013) selective fossilization hypothesis (SFH) claims that L1 markedness and L2 input robustness determine the fossilizability (and learnability) of an L2 feature. To test the validity of the model, a pseudo-longitudinal study was designed in which the errors in the argumentative essays of 52 Iranian EFL learners were identified and…

Japan is known to be a country that manicures its socio-cultural borders. In this article I will examine discourses regarding openness, closedness and cultural diversity in relation to policies and practices that draw heavily on mythologies of English language as an inroad to greater openness and diversity. To do this I will examine two English…

According to the big-fish-little-pond (BFLP) model, the self-concept is not only influenced in a positive way by one's own achievement, but also in a negative way by one's relative achievement in comparison with one's immediate peers. This study investigates whether the BFLP effect also holds for second language acquisition. A random sample of…

This study focuses on exploring poor and good learners' language beliefs and their language strategy use in an attempt to see whether there is any significant relationship between the poor and good learners. This paper particularly seeks to examine to what extent language beliefs as a construct are reflected in learners' language behavior, which…

This article explores levels of proficiency in Chinese with reference to the new HSK (Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi) Chinese Proficiency Test and the "Common European Framework of Reference for Languages" (CEFR). Special attention is given to learning and teaching the writing of Chinese characters and the use of Pinyin, a phonetic Romanization…

This article presents some aspects of multilingualism and multilingual education in the Nordic countries, drawing upon experiences from the project "Network for Researchers of Multilingualism and Multilingual Education, RoMME" (2011-2013), where Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden are represented. The aim is to briefly present and…

Although English as a second language (ESL) programs are common in the United States, there is surprisingly little research documenting the existing structures and mentoring strategies they use. This lack of research could be partly due to ESL programs' widely varying internal structures (Larson, 1990) and the fact that they are often marginalized…