In this study 18 Mexican teachers of English as a foreign language in Guanajuato, Mexico were asked for their professional opinion about the teaching of English to Mexican immigrant students in the U.S. Teachers responded to a questionnaire that asked about attitudes toward the U.S. educational system, ways to support Mexican immigrant students,…

For many years, the term "special education" was used to denote the education of students with disabilities in either segregated or mainstreamed classrooms. The term "special education" is swiftly fading from the lexicon of academia. In today's schools, all education is considered to be "special." Educational reformers are embracing the concept of…

From 1981 to today, the encouragement Jim Pusack and his colleague Sue Otto gave faculty to develop and/or implement CALL into the curriculum has been vital to our L2 teaching evolution. This article describes how their efforts evolved over the last two and a half decades and the ties that bind their efforts with today's CALL development.

The centrality of culture and language learning in foreign language instruction is highlighted in the "Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century" (National Standards, 2006) and the MLA report, "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World" (MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages, 2007).…

The essay is a conceptual analysis from an instructional design perspective exploring the feasibility of using three-dimensional digital game-based learning (3D-DGBL) environments to assist in second language acquisition (SLA). It examines the shared characteristics of narrative within theories of situated cognition, context-based approaches to…

Previous language learning research reveals that the statistical properties of the input offer sufficient information to allow listeners to segment words from fluent speech in an artificial language. The current pair of studies uses a natural language to test the ecological validity of these findings and to determine whether a listener's language…

This article describes the experience of integrating a class blog into an advanced Italian course, in order to provide an out-of-class forum for language practice and for sharing course-related ideas and information. It also reports on an evaluation of the blog's effectiveness, drawing on an analysis of the students' blog contributions and their…

Einar Haugen brought Norwegian language planning to prominence in the 1960s, describing a series of language reforms ultimately intended to bring the two written standards, Bokmal and Nynorsk, together. Since Haugen's time language policy in Norway has changed direction, and developments over the past 40 years have led to increased autonomy for…

English language learners are increasingly present in early care environments. In 2005, for example, 14.7 percent of children in nonparental care in the United States came from homes where only one parent or neither parent spoke English. Approximately 29 percent of children participating in Head Start programs spoke a language other than English.…

This article considers language learner agency from a poststructuralist perspective, focusing on how agency is discursively constituted as individuals position themselves and are positioned as (potential) agents within ideologically defined spaces. As such, I regard agency as inherently unstable and as a discursively mobilized capacity to act.…

Based on sociocultural theory, this article examines two activities constituted by a parent and child as jointly constructed bi-literacy practices. Bi-literacy practices enable the parent and child to co-construct conceptual meanings and sense across two languages. Concept development in young children "begins" with meaning in one language and…

Since the mid-20th century, graduate schools in the USA have witnessed a growing participation of international students, many of whom do not speak English as their first language. Previous research has often portrayed non-native-English-speaking (NNES) students in US doctoral programs as disadvantaged because of the presumed primacy of English in…

Early and accurate identification of special needs, coupled with an appropriate course of treatment and educational plan, is important to academic progress, in particular for economically disadvantaged children with fewer family resources to catch up if they fall behind. A first step in improving mechanisms to promote early identification is to…

This article adds to the growing body of research focused on second-language (L2) variation and constitutes the first large-scale study of the production of potentially variable grammatical structures in Spanish by English-speaking learners. The overarching goal of the project is to assess the range of forms used and the degree to which native and…

This study examines the relationship between learners' production of modified output and their working memory (WM) capacity. The task-based interactions of 42 college-level, native English-speaking learners of Spanish as a foreign language were examined. A relationship was found between learners' WM test scores and their tendency to modify output.…