Studies show that teachers struggle with meeting the needs of immigrant students, especially recent arrivals (Szente, Hoot, & Taylor, 2006; Tadesse, Hoot, & Watson-Thompson, 2009). To some extent, this is due to the instructional method and unfamiliar curriculum to the students. This column presents elements of one teacher's literacy instruction…

English-Language Learners (ELLs, English-Learners, ELs) are a particularly challenging sector of the student population in United States schools. They constitute an increasingly larger presence in most school districts, growing 51 percent in ten years to 5.1 million in 2006. Despite becoming more common, schools have yet to figure out ways to meet…

This paper addresses the role of multimodal fluency in establishing agency in the second language classroom. The focus of the paper is on the semiotic resourcefulness of an English Language Learner in an English as a Second Language classroom in the United States. Framed from a social semiotic perspective, fine grained multimodal analysis of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess the bilingual writing of adolescent English language learners (ELLs) using quantitative tools. Linguistic measures were applied to the participants' writing at the lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels, with the goal of comparing outcomes at each of these levels across languages (Spanish/English)…

Previous research has suggested that very young children learning English adhere quite rigidly to a grammatical constraint on the possible contexts for contraction of "want" and "to" into the reduced form "wanna". Two elicited production studies reported here suggest that young children do produce "wanna" in illicit contexts. One study identifies…

In settings where speakers of two or more different languages coexist, language brokering, the act of interpreting and translating between culturally and linguistically different speakers, is commonly practiced. Yet the examination of language brokering and its implications in classroom settings have not received much attention in the literature.…

Maori language education policy documents reflect an underlying ambivalence about the desired outcomes for non-Maori learners participating in "as-a-subject" Maori language learning. The view of the Maori language as a national language may be in the process of being replaced by a view that identifies the language primarily as a cultural…

Despite the recent increase of structural equation modeling (SEM) in language testing and learning research and Kunnan's (1998) call for the proper use of SEM to produce useful findings, there seem to be no reviews about how SEM is applied in these areas or about the extent to which the current application accords with appropriate practices. To…

This article reports on a study of second language (L2) French learners' self-generated use of gesture to think through and resolve a metalinguistic awareness-raising task during small-group work with an expert mediator. Although the use of gesture in L2 communication and pedagogy has recently received increasing attention, little research has…

Covert metalinguistic activity has received little attention in the field of second language (L2) education, even though the few studies that have examined this type of attention to language note that it plays a role in L2 learning and use. However, little is known about this phenomenon. The study reported in this article focuses on the knowledge…

In this study, the author analyzes the websites of 32 universities' Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) to explore two specific issues: (a) how individual IRBs define "vulnerable populations," and (b) the guidelines those IRBs offer with respect to participants who may have limited or no English language proficiency. Analysis indicates wide…

While press materials, are widely used both as an ESP materials resource and as a research source by ESP practitioners, press headlines in English confront the Non Native Speaker (NNS) and to some extent the Native Speaker (NS) with a notorious paradox: headlines are crafted to raise communication potential and yet, rather than communicate, they…

Despite the high stakes attached to students' performance on assessments of academic writing, we still know little about the challenges students face when composing in academic contexts. To begin to address this problem, two studies were designed with the following aims: to identify and describe the most prevalent types of academic writing at the…

This special issue of the "Heritage Language Journal", guest edited by Silvina Montrul, unites four papers on different aspects of heritage Spanish speakers' linguistic abilities. In this commentary, we reexamine these important contributions with an eye toward implications for instruction and toward general trends for the field. In particular, we…

The article supplies an overview of UK modern languages education at school and university level. It attends particularly to trends over recent years, with regard both to numbers and to social elitism, and reflects on perceptions of language learning in the wider culture and the importance of gaining wider recognition of the value of languages…