The primary aim of this paper is to explore a common dichotomy that characterizes debate about what has come to be termed "appropriate methodology". It is that between "traditional" and "communicative" approaches to language teaching, a distinction that persists despite arguments by some that the term…

This essay explores a midrange teaching and learning issue regarding the teaching of biblical languages and one strategy for addressing the issue. Seminary students do not yield a great enough return in exchange for the investment they are required to make in learning biblical languages. Students invest great time and money, but they do not learn…

The task of teaching non-territorial languages such as Yiddish at the university level is a complex undertaking. The teaching of Yiddish has its own particular difficulties due to an ever-diminishing population of native speakers available to students, a lack of contemporary cultural materials, and an abundance of outdated teaching materials. A…

Study abroad is often treated in terms of individual student outcomes, and has recently been discussed as potentially detrimental to smaller language programs--in that student participation in semester- or year-long programs subtracts from enrollments in upper-level courses. In this article, the promotion of study abroad in a small German program…

Cross-/inter-cultural development, language acquisition, employment potential, and the impact of homestays, program duration, direct enrollment, even grading policies have been analyzed in the pages of "Frontiers" and other journals. This analysis more often than not utilizes methodologies particular to social science research. What has been…

The number of students with learning disabilities (LD) attending postsecondary institutions has increased steadily over the past two decades. Many of these students have language-based learning difficulties that create barriers to success in foreign language (FL) courses. Many institutions have responded by providing these students with exemptions…

A case study of the foreign cultures represented in two English language textbooks used by Hong Kong secondary schools was conducted. Its aim was to investigate whether the representation of foreign cultures in these textbooks reflected the status of English as an international language. In order to do this, references to foreign cultures were…

Public education in the United States is nominally inclusive and open to all, but is also nuanced and complicated, particularly for students with special learning needs or for English language learners. For refugee students, who may also belong to either or both these two groups, the challenge can be compounded by previous traumas to themselves…

This paper makes a link between two activities in which the author is engaged, i.e. between work on "saving" languages and work on "teaching" languages. Since it is an invited address, the Keith Horwood Memorial Lecture, the author begins by making further, and chronologically prior, to Keith Horwood. Then he addresses three themes of the…

Jurgen Meisel argues that "grammatical variation...can be described...in terms of parametric variation", and--crucially for his arguments in this paper--that "parameter settings do not change across the lifespan". To this extent he adopts the standard generative view, but he then departs from what he calls "the literature on historical…

This research examines the processes which native Spanish-speaking learners of English and English-only students engage in when inferring meaning for unknown English words that have Spanish cognates. Conducted within the context of a large-scale vocabulary intervention that taught word inferencing strategies, including a cognate strategy, this…

English rhythm is related to contrast between the stressed and the unstressed in duration structure. In native English speech, in general, an intra-speaker average duration of stressed syllable is longer than that of syllable as a whole. On the contrary, that of unstressed syllable is shorter than that of syllable as a whole. In the previous paper…

Three experiments using a priming lexical decision paradigm were conducted to examine whether cross-language activation occurs via decomposition during the processing of derived words in Korean-English bilingual readers. In Experiment 1, when participants were given a real derived word and an interpretable derived pseudoword (i.e., illegal…

This study presents and analyzes the comprehension of relative clauses in child and adult speakers of Russian, comparing monolingual controls with Russian heritage speakers (HSs) who are English-dominant. Monolingual and bilingual children demonstrate full adultlike mastery of relative clauses. Adult HSs, however, are significantly different from…

The present study is concerned with the upper limits of SLA--specifically, mastery of the syntax-discourse interface in successful endstate learners of second-language (L2) French (near-native speakers). Left dislocation (LD) is a syntactic means of structuring spoken French discourse by marking topic. Its use requires speakers to coordinate…