This article ethnographically analyzes the everyday negotiations of a language policy at a private religious educational institution whose explicit educative mission is the transmission of religious beliefs, values, and practices. Specifically, it explores a Hebrew-only language policy at a Jewish day school located in New York City, and focuses…

Using data from a large-scale, mixed-method study involving 222 K-12 foreign language (L2) teachers and their supervisors (see Kissau, Yon, & Algozzine, 2011), in this article the researchers explore differences in beliefs across four demographic groups: experienced and inexperienced teachers, teachers with L2 teacher training and those without,…

The increasing number of international students enrolled in Australian universities over the last decade has met with a corresponding concern that many non-English-speaking background (NESB) students experience considerable difficulty in their courses. Consequently, concerns about admission procedures have been raised regarding how English…

This article presents a qualitative study demonstrating how teachers who are non-native speakers (NNS) of the target language and who have learned the target language in a similar environment as their students can use their past learning experiences as pedagogical tools in their classes. An analysis of transcripts from classrooms with NNS and…

This article is a review of two dominant approaches to academic writing instruction in higher education, English for Academic Purposes (EAP), which is used internationally, and Academic Literacies, which has become an influential model in the UK. The review was driven by a concern that Academic Literacies has been mainly focused on the situations…

In today's audiovisually driven world, various audiovisual programs can be incorporated as authentic sources of potential language input for second language acquisition. In line with this view, the present research aimed at discovering the effectiveness of exposure to news, cartoons, and films as three different types of authentic audiovisual…

This quasi-experimental study is aimed at (a) teaching learners how to provide corrective feedback (CF) during peer interaction and (b) assessing the effects of peer interaction and CF on second language (L2) development. Four university-level English classes in Japan participated (N = 167), each assigned to one of four treatment conditions. Of…

This article explores, through interview data with 125 respondents in Canada, whether the study of foreign languages can be considered as important as the study of the "core" STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine) subjects in school and university curricula. Five categories of interviewees, including those…

Complex linguistic, acculturative, and social needs of English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners challenge the K-12 education system to develop cultural competence in working with culturally diverse families. This study surveyed 242 self-identified ESL students and their parents from four of Alberta's major school boards. Results of the survey…

One reason for teacher attrition is that a gap exists between pre-service teacher preparation and in-service teacher development, in that most novice teachers suddenly have no further contact with their teacher educators, and from the very first day on the job, must face the same challenges as their more experienced colleagues, often without much…

Contrastive rhetoric studies the writing of second language learners to understand how it is affected by their first language and culture. The field of contrastive rhetoric is as multidimensional as second language writing is complex. It draws on the work of contrastive analysis, anthropology, linguistics, pedagogy, culture studies, translation…

This study investigated the English writing skills developed by 42 children participating in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) program for approximately 315 hr, spread over 18 months. The English writing abilities were measured 3 times in terms of grammar, content, coherence, spelling, and text length. A repeated measures multivariate…

This study examined the motivation to learn English of Indonesian junior high school pupils, 13-14 years of age, in three distinct contexts: a metropolitan city, a provincial town, and a rural district. Utilizing Dornyei's second language (L2) Motivational Self System as the theoretical framework, this study employed a 50-item questionnaire to…

Distributional learning is a proposal for how infants might learn early speech sound categories from acoustic input before they know many words. When categories in the input differ greatly in relative frequency and overlap in acoustic space, research in bilingual development suggests that this affects the course of development. In the present…

The number of school age international students and their parents matriculating in U.S. schools continues to increase. These students and their families have a myriad of unique needs that are multidimensional and continue to evolve as they transition into U.S. culture. Strategically placed to help these students become familiar with school…