This paper focuses on issues of reproduction and the manufacturing of national/ethnic and religious identities in the deterritorialized space of the Moroccan immigrant diaspora. More specifically, this paper examines Moroccan immigrant children's language socialization into pan-Arabic and Islamic identities in relation to the teaching of the…

When the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) asked the author to undertake a review of modern language provision in England, it was in response to concerns in the sector about falling numbers and diminishing funding. The challenge therefore given to him by HEFCE was both to review the situation and to make recommendations that…

Giving students a purpose and a passion for sharing their thinking through authentic learning experiences and giving them tools for writing through which they can risk new vocabulary, new language, and new thought is critical for the linguistic and cognitive development of students. Furthermore, students develop a deep understanding of content…

Mobile devices offer unique opportunities to deliver learning content in authentic learning situations. Apart from being able to play various kinds of rich multimedia content, they offer new ways of tailoring information to the learner's situation or context. This paper presents the results of a study of mobile media delivery for language…

This article concerns a particular application of Vygotsky's concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) wherein conventional assessment situations are reorganized to allow for cooperation between assessor and learner as they jointly complete assessment tasks and work through difficulties that arise. This approach, known as Dynamic…

With China's growing power and influence on the global stage, efforts are burgeoning to promote teaching the official Chinese language in U.S. schools. And while those activities are getting help from a variety of sources--including the U.S. government--one key player taking an increased role is the Chinese government itself. Just this year, the…

This study consists of two instructional experiments. Within the framework of dual coding theory, the study compares the learning effects of two instructional encoding methods used in Chinese vocabulary instruction among students learning beginning Chinese as a foreign language. One method uses verbal encoding only, and the other method uses…

The efficacy of a cognitive-based remediation program was investigated with 14 English-as-a-second-language (ESL) poor readers in Grade 4 who had significant difficulty in comprehension and 14 normal ESL readers in Grade 4 who received no remediation. Both groups were selected from 2 English-medium schools in India. We examined pretest-to-posttest…

America has always been a nation of immigrants, and many school libraries serve students whose first language is not English. In AASL's 2009 "School Libraries Count! Survey," 14% of the 5,824 respondents reported a student population with 25% or more English language learners. Yet 91% reported that less than 5% of their collections are…

This study examined the interrelationships between learners' attributions and self-efficacy and their achievements in learning English as a foreign language. Participants were 192 ninth-grade English learners in Korea who were asked to provide attribution and self-efficacy ratings upon receiving test grades. Results indicated that learners with…

Learning vocabulary in a foreign language is a laborious task which people perform with varying levels of success. Here, we investigated the neural underpinning of high performance on this task. In a within-subjects paradigm, participants learned 92 vocabulary items under two multimodal conditions: one condition paired novel words with iconic…

While L1 transfer and L2 learnability have been studied extensively in the domain of syntax and the syntax/semantics interface, purely semantic phenomena have received little attention in the L2 literature. This paper presents two experiments examining the relative scope assigned to disjunction and negation by English-speaking learners of Japanese…

In an effort to understand how children's literacy is affected by their life experiences, this article analyses the natural disposition of children to engage in musical activities that connect them to previous experiences and allow them to build new thoughts. Music is inherent to children's experiences and is related to sounds heard everyday,…

The need to broaden the notion of literacy has been continually emphasized within the field of New Literacy Studies in recent years. This is necessary because of the advent of information and communication technology (ICT) in our everyday, school and workplace literacy practices. A broader notion of literacy is needed to pay attention to the…

Language learning strategies are used with the explicit goal of helping learners improve their knowledge and understanding of a target language. They are the conscious thoughts and behaviors used by students to facilitate language learning tasks and to personalize language learning process. Learning styles on the other hand, are "general…