When the University of Southern California announced that it would shutter its tiny German department, the outcry was out of proportion to the handful of faculty members and students directly affected by the move. In addition to students who advertised their dismay on Facebook and faculty members who complained that their efforts to bolster the…

Any curriculum consists of several components: goals, disposition, duration, needs analysis, learners and teachers, exercises and activities, resources, ways of learning, skills to be acquired, lexis, language structure, and ability assessment. Before setting up a program or course of study, these components should be determined and described in…

Experiments in Content Language Integrated Learning have been carried out most of the time at primary and secondary education. However, not much is known about what higher education institutions are doing in this respect. This article aims to present an experience that occurred in the Languages Department at Universidad Central (Bogotá, Colombia)…

In this paper, the author reviews the history of English language teaching English as a second or foreign language in schools and colleges in Nepal. Teaching English language and literature in Nepal is of about a half a decade, starting from the mid of twentieth century. English learners in Nepal do not have enough exposure to various techniques…

The study reported here investigates the predictive validity of language assessments by "Direct Entry" programs at an Australian University--programs developed on site for Non English Speaking Background international students, principally to provide (i) pre-entry academic and language preparation and (ii) language assessment for…

The aim of this paper is to illustrate the applications of service-learning pedagogy for an advanced Spanish language course through a case study conducted at Rollins College, a comprehensive liberal arts institution in Winter Park, Florida. The paper discusses diverse theories on service-learning pedagogy, explaining how and why this teaching…

The problem in the present quasi-experimental research design was the poor English communication skills of college students enrolled in first-year English as a second language (ESL) courses in Puerto Rico. The purpose of this quantitative study was to compare learning outcomes between a first-year English as a second class taught with the…

Of all the recent budget cuts made by the Eagle County, Colorado, school district--the loss of 89 staff jobs through attrition and layoffs, a 1.5 percent across-the-board pay cut, and the introduction of three furlough days--none sparked as much anger or faced the same scrutiny as the decision to cut three foreign-language teaching positions and…

As we have seen throughout this paper, the education of Latino/a students is in crisis. At the same time, based on our review of promising practices and creative projects, we also believe that this is a time of great opportunity. There are a number of areas that are especially crucial in improving the education of Latinos/as. Based on our critical…

In the 21st century, global flows politically, socially, economically, and environmentally are creating widespread movements of people around the world and giving rise to increased resettlements of immigrants and refugees internationally. The reality in most countries worldwide is that contemporary populations are multifaceted, multicultural,…

Recently task-based language teaching has attracted many researchers', testers' and syllabus designers' attention and consequently a lot of studies are carried out in this field. This study was conducted in the task-based realm too. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of teacher's presence on learners' performance in doing…

Although classroom assessment is one of the most frequent practices carried out by teachers in all educational programs, limited research has been conducted to investigate the dependability and validity of criterion-referenced tests (CRTs). The main purpose of this study is to develop a criterion-referenced test for first-year Japanese university…

This dissertation study examined a broad question of whether computer-based grammar tutorials are effective and welcome tools to review grammar for language learners by investigating effects of three different modes of such tutorials on learners' knowledge and satisfaction. For this study, I developed experimental tutorials in three different…

This article analyzes whether the distribution of the hours of classroom practice has any effect on students' foreign language gains by comparing two types of EFL (English as a foreign language) programs: one in which the hours of instruction are distributed in long sessions over a short period (intensive course) and another in which the students…

Those in America are confronting a stark alternative: either open themselves to an appreciation of human plurality and the diversity of cultures around the globe or limit themselves to a narrowly normative culture. Will American schools and colleges provide students with opportunities to learn to understand other voices, or will the educational…