This study explores the meanings that learners of English as a foreign language give to teachers' gestures. It is a qualitative, descriptive study of the perceived functions that gestures perform in the EFL classroom, viewed mainly from the language learners' perspective. The data for the study was collected through interviews with twenty-two…

This paper explores issues of teaching and learning Chinese as a heritage language in a Chinese heritage language school, the Zhonguo Saturday School, in Montreal, Quebec. With a student population of more than 1000, this school is the largest of the eight Chinese Heritage Language schools in Montreal. Students participating in this study were…

This study explored inter- and intraindividual immigrant group differences in children's English verbal ability over ages 6-16 in 4 racial/ethnic groups--White Americans, Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans (N=2,136). Although all children's mean verbal scores increased with age, immigrant children (except for Black Americans)…

Until recently, little attention has been paid to the language and academic needs of English as a second language (ESL) students in the social studies classroom. In the most recent review and one of the few written on social studies texts and instruction, Short (1998) found that ESL students do not receive the language and academic support they…

The purpose of this study is twofold: first, to estimate the contribution of discipline-related knowledge and English-language proficiency to reading comprehension in English for academic purposes (EAP) and, second, to specify the levels at which the compensatory effect between the two variables takes place for successful EAP reading. The…

Students learning English as a new language are the fastest-growing group in U.S. schools today. These students speak many languages, their reading levels cover a wide range, and they experience great cognitive demands as they learn both language and content in order to participate fully in class. Literature can play a critical role in immersing…

This article presents the results of a meta-analysis of 30 hemodynamic experiments comparing first language (L1) and second language (L2) processing in a range of tasks. The results suggest that reliably stronger activation during L2 processing is found (a) only for task-specific subgroups of L2 speakers and (b) within some, but not all regions…

This paper analyses the contribution of student agency and teacher contingency in the construction of classroom discourse in adult English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) classes for refugees and asylum seekers, for whom the identity of student itself can constitute a stable point in a highly unstable and potentially threatening lifeworld.…

This article reports on the Slovene share in the European project called Janua Linguarum--The Gateway to Languages. It highlights its forerunners and its outcomes, and gives an illustrative example of how primary school students encounter and explore various languages by using a relatively novel, plurilingual approach. All the materials produced…

This paper aims to explore advanced ESL learners' ability to make improvements in grammatical accuracy by autonomously noticing and correcting their own grammatical errors. In the recent literature in SLA, it is suggested that classroom tasks can be used to foster autonomous language learning habits (cf. Dam 2001). Therefore, it is important to…

This study investigated the effect of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) on elementary-prep school students' improvement in English as a foreign language (EFL). Eightythree students in Al-Tamayoz Elementary-prep School, United Arab Emirates, were selected and divided into experimental and control groups (43 and 40 participants…

Research has begun to address the question of transfer of language usage patterns beyond the idea that people's native language (L1) can influence the way they produce a second language (L2). This study investigated bidirectional transfer, of both lexical and grammatical features, in adult speakers of English and Spanish who varied in age of L2…

In this article, I describe mainstream middle school classrooms designed to re-think the conditions under which language minority students who have lived in the United States for a number of years can develop English language skills while also gaining access to a rigorous curriculum. I describe a variety of transactions that students used to…

This article reports on a project that situates language teaching in the subject matter classroom, illustrating how a functional linguistics perspective can raise secondary school teachers' awareness about the language challenges of their discipline and enable them to engage in discussion about language and content with their students. We report…

Although learner-centeredness has been widely applied in instruction in the world, this approach has only been cautiously adopted in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching at some institutions in Vietnam. Taking a social constructivist view, this case study explores how a learner-centred perspective is employed in EFL teaching at a teacher…