Employers in the UK recognise that a lack of language skills can limit their company's international growth. Many students on language degrees, however, feel unprepared for working in a business environment. The final year "Working with Languages" module on Leeds Beckett University's language degrees aims to help the students to expand…

This case study examines student perceptions of the experiential value of a work placement carried out as part of a languages degree programme. The data for the case study consists of a corpus of 67 reports submitted from 2011 to 2015, reflecting on placements carried out in Europe, Japan, the UK and the US. The data offers a student view of the…

This book presents an approach to teacher education and professional development that emphasizes carefully deconstructing fundamental instructional practices that are complex and often not visible through observation, definition, or brief explanation. Its goal is to assist teachers in learning how to enact specific practices, referred to as…

Japanese university English instructors are increasingly requiring students to use their personal smartphones for activities in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom activities. Because of this, it has been recommended that studies be conducted to ascertain Japanese university students' perceptions of using smartphones in EFL language…

This mixed-methods study explores the self-efficacy beliefs of foreign language teachers in central Appalachia, which encompasses eastern Kentucky, north-central Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and southwestern West Virginia. The participants in this study are high school foreign language teachers in the region; 81 participants completed an…

The application of interactive learning is directed towards increasing the quality of communication in the teaching process. The focus of the research in this paper is the influence of the communicative approach on the quality of the teaching process, and the purposeful interaction that has been both the method and the aim of the communicative…

The English language day by day is becoming ever increasingly important in the world. Music in foreign language education can be seen as a helpful method that spontaneously livens the learning atmosphere. In this paper, we are arguing for (the use of) songs that stir and inspire "social change" and that are an "authentic" part…

Purpose: Public schools in Washington State have a growing and increasingly diverse English Learner (EL) student population that is subject to the standards and accountability outlined in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). For high school ELs in particular, academic standards and their corresponding assessments, along with the necessary task of…

This study develops a model of analytic rating scales to assess L2 Chinese oral performance. It uses Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to identify a model and employs Confirmative Factor Analysis (CFA) in a separate dataset to test the degree of model fit. The researcher videotaped ten speeches and ACTFL professional raters assessed the oral…

Background: Little is understood about how kindergarten students respond to literacy-enriched engineering activities and how engineering-centered literature (picture and story books) can be used to support engineering engagement and content understanding. Purpose: This study sought to understand the effect of engineering-centered literature and…

This research intends to exemplify one of the new practices that can be used for the assessment of prospective English language teachers' qualifications. Thus, the scope of this research covers the prospective EFL teachers and the implementation of European Profiling Grid (EPG) aimed to be commonly used for language teacher education in Europe.…

Explanation and justification require cognitive ability which selects and organises relevant information in a logical way, and linguistic ability which enables speakers to encode the information with linguistic knowledge. This study aims to investigate the development of Chinese oral explanation and justification in Singapore primary students. The…

This article provides introductory, step-by-step explanations of how to make a specialized corpus and an annotated frequency-based vocabulary list. One of my objectives is to help teachers, instructors, program administrators, and graduate students with little experience in this field be able to do so using free resources. Instructions are first…

This case study examines how one study abroad student oriented to social interaction during a semester in Spain. Using an activity theoretical approach, the findings indicate that the student not only viewed social interaction with his Spanish host family and an expert-Spanish-speaking age peer as an opportunity for second language (L2) learning,…

Language learners' language experience is predicted to display a significant effect on their accurate perception of foreign language sounds (Flege, 1995). At the superasegmental level, there is still a debate regarding whether tone language speakers are better able to perceive foreign lexical tones than non-tone language speakers (i.e Lee et al.,…