This paper is concerned with the aspect of intercultural understanding as a component in the revised Key Stage 3 (ages 11-13) Modern Foreign Languages curriculum in England. It critically examines the extent to which recent initiatives have been conducive to promoting the development of intercultural understanding (IU) amongst pupils at Key Stage…

Program and/or course evaluation is a process in which different types of data are collected systematically in order to study the virtues and weaknesses of a language instruction program. Program evaluation is, in fact, one of the essential aspects of any curriculum. It is a kind of quality control in which various aspects of an instructional…

We explore the relationship between accentedness and intelligibility, and investigate how listeners' beliefs about nonnative speech interact with their accentedness and intelligibility judgments. Native German speakers and native English learners of German produced German sentences, which were presented to 12 native German speakers in accentedness…

Nasals are cross-linguistically susceptible to change, especially in the syllable final position. Acoustic reports on Mandarin nasal production have recently shown that the syllable-final distinction is frequently dropped. Few studies, however, have addressed the issue of perceptual processing in Mandarin nasals for L1 and L2 speakers of Mandarin…

According to generative linguistic theory, certain principles underlying language structure are innately given, accounting for how children are able to acquire their mother tongues (L1s) despite a mismatch between the linguistic input and the complex unconscious mental representation of language that children achieve. This innate structure is…

Following on from my state-of-the-art article on "Language Awareness and language learning" (Svalberg 2007), in this paper I will discuss specific research tasks which are centrally concerned with different aspects of language awareness (LA): "explicit knowledge about language, and conscious perception and sensitivity in language learning,…

British learners acquire very little vocabulary in their foreign languages, compared to pupils elsewhere in Europe, particularly learners of English as a foreign language. Could the materials used for teaching help explain this difference? An analysis of the vocabulary loading of a textbook for French as a foreign language commonly used in…

English teaching professionals working with children in primary school, adolescents in secondary school, or adults at university know that learners nowadays think and behave differently than those from previous generations. These students were born into a world of information technology; they prefer to multitask rather than focus on one thing at a…

Lexical access in bilinguals is known to be largely non-selective. However, most studies in this area have involved bilinguals whose two languages share the same script. This study aimed to examine bilingual lexical access among bilinguals whose two languages have distinct scripts. Korean-English bilinguals were tested in a phoneme monitoring task…

This paper examines the ways in which world Englishes studies are developing into a distinct academic discipline, and discusses the consequences of this regimentation of knowledge for teaching and research. By first outlining the various ways in which bodies of knowledge are organized into discrete disciplines, and then surveying the history and…

Previous studies suggest that whereas the left hemisphere (LH) is involved in fine semantic processing, the right hemisphere (RH) is uniquely engaged in coarse semantic coding including the comprehension of distinct types of language such as figurative language, lexical ambiguity and verbal humor (e.g., and ). The present study examined the…

The aim of this study was to review the Chinese translation errors in 31 English/Chinese bilingual children's picture books. While bilingual children's books make definite contributions to language acquisition, few studies have examined the quality of these books, and even fewer have specifically focused on English/Chinese bilingual books.…

There is an increasing need for quality assurance in higher education, given the changes taking place around the world (Biggs & Tang, 2011). Yet another challenge for educators is to find ways to address this in a systematic way. This study presents a systematic endeavor towards this aim in an English language teaching (ELT) department in a…

In a bilingual society like Singapore, home language environment (HLE) of Singaporean children is becoming increasingly concerned, especially for those who are yet to have formal education in schools. The reported rapid shift of family language has increased the tensions among families, schools and communities. This study examined some of the many…

This study investigated the effect of mother tongue instruction and gender on second language acquisition using a causal-comparative quantitative research design. The two distinguishing groups compared were (i) learners that were taught in their mother tongue (Afrikaans) and (ii) learners that were not taught in their mother tongue but in English,…