This article presents the of history of the Southern Conference on Language Teaching (SCOLT) from 1990-2010. The article ends with a look at the future and a SCOLT history timeline of 1980-2010.

This study examines how specific experiences of disability (i.e. hearing loss) come into being and how they are articulated within foreign language educational practices. It particularly explores issues of social justice and equity regarding the discursive embracement of power relations and situated contextualization of hard-of-hearing students'…

English Language Learners (ELLs) are the fastest growing group of students in American public schools. According to Payan and Nettles (2008), the ELL population doubled in 23 states between 1995 and 2005. Yet ELL achievement remains among the lowest of all students. For example, on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 72% of…

Pulling together the most up-to-date research on the effects of restrictive language policies, this timely volume focuses on what we know about the actual outcomes for students and teachers in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts--states where these policies have been adopted. Prominent legal experts in bilingual education analyze these policies…

The achievement gap problem is a growing phenomenon in the United States of America. In many schools, minority student populations are failing at alarming rates and are looking at different outcomes than those of their White and Asian counterparts. However, a few schools are breaking through the barriers of poverty, poor school attendance, low…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires that English Language Learners, who are reclassified as Fluent English Proficient, be monitored for two years. Short of requiring states to annually submit numerical data on these students, there are no specific instructions on how this monitoring is achieved in practice and little has been written…

The benefits of instruction on learners' production and awareness of speech acts is well documented (see Alcon and Martinez-Flor, 2008, for a review of pragmatics in instructional contexts). However, few studies examine the influence that instruction may have on the cognitive processes involved in speech act production (Felix-Brasdefer, 2008). In…

A methodological shortcoming in previous second language (L2) acquisition studies has been that researchers have assumed an overly homogenous first language (L1) ignoring dialect differences. In the current study English and German vowel production data were collected from 72 English-speaking learners of German from three distinct North American…

Affective factors in language learning have long attracted attention. While research findings indicate substantial links between affect and achievement, further inquiry into the role and contribution of affect in language learning has been limited by a narrow focus on single emotions and on the disruptive effects of emotion. Drawing on social…

Portuguese is the sixth-most-spoken native language in the world, with approximately 240,000,000 speakers. Within the United States, there is a growing demand for K-12 language programs to engage the community of Portuguese heritage speakers. According to the 2000 U.S. census, 85,000 school-age children speak Portuguese at home. As a result, more…

This study employed the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), version 7.0 (ESL/EFL) developed by Oxford (1990) to examine differences in language-learning strategy use. It focused on how learner factors such as gender, age, nationality, and proficiency level influence the choice of language-learning strategies. The participants were 75…

There are abundant studies on second/foreign language learners' identities. However, there appears to be insufficient longitudinal research on the construction of learners' L2 identities in systematic interactions between fixed dyads in an out-of-class context. Adopting a critical discourse analysis framework (Fairclough, 2003) and suitably…

When reading traditional texts printed on paper, students start reading from the top left-hand corner and finish at the bottom right-hand corner. Their eyes move in a straight line, which is a linear activity. However, when reading hypertexts, students can click a hyperlink to find out certain information. As they click the various hyperlinks,…

Most university FL courses currently include some form of writing as part of their curricula. However, FL instructors do not seem to agree with respect to how writing should be utilized in the classroom. Some attempt to integrate insights from the broader field of second language (L2) writing research, teaching their students to use rhetorical and…

Like middle school students, adults would never want to go into a new school not being able to speak the language. Most teachers aren't signing up to teach in Mexico or China unless they know how to speak with their fellow educators and their students. But English Language Learners (ELL) don't have the choices that teachers do. They have been…