This article reports on an examination of the communication needs of a group of Thai civil engineering students. Twenty-five stakeholders helped identify the communication needs of the students by participating in individual interviews. These included employers, civil engineers, civil engineering lecturers, ex-civil engineering students of the…

This paper explores what it means to engage as an ethical researcher in the conduct of critical ethnography. During the years in which this critical ethnography of new language learners in a midwestern high school, the ethnographer actively participated in the life of the site. This paper poses the question of what such active involvement means…

This paper offers an autobiographical narrative that draws on the experiences of one learner of Bantu Education (originated in 1953) who also studied in apartheid higher education institutions. By offering an account of learning to read and write in English as an additional language (EAL) within Bantu Education, the paper highlights the power of…

This paper focusses on the teaching of non-linguistic subject matters in a second or third language through bilingual education. We investigate how this specific educational framework influences the development of linguistic competence as well as disciplinary knowledge. Based on a large-scale corpus of classroom interactions collected in bilingual…

At least 5.1 million U.S. students in kindergarten through 12th grade are English Language Learners today--10.5 percent of the entire student population. That amount is expected to grow to 25% by the year 2025. Numbers on the educational levels of these students' parents vary, though it appears that at least one-third of the heads-of-household…

When English language learners (ELLs) don't speak in class or make friends outside their language group, teachers often attribute the problem in the student's cultural background. It's possible, however, that the method of teaching ELLs is part of the problem. A growing number of schools are trying to roll back that problem by launching…

This study proposes that communication problems may be procedurally managed in intercultural interaction. Drawing upon a number of office-hour interactions between international teaching assistants and American college students, this paper examines the linguistic and cultural sources of communication problems. The close analyses of these…

Immigrant children from diverse language backgrounds face not only linguistic challenges when enrolled in mainstream English-medium classrooms, but also difficulties adjusting to an unfamiliar learning community. The culture of primary school classrooms in New Zealand typically reflects conventions across three dimensions: interactional,…

Traditionally, the goal of foreign language education has been to teach learners linguistic and cultural knowledge so that they could function successfully in the target language and cultural environment. But does demonstrating knowledge always help learners accomplish their interactional goals? To explore this question, this study investigate…

This paper highlights the crucial role of phonological instruction in early second language English learning. Although older learners can acquire grammar and vocabulary efficiently, younger learners appear to have a greater facility with the learning of sounds. Thus, it makes good sense to focus on articulatory skills for these early learners. By…

Combining two metaphors we argue that apart from official educational policy, there exists a "palimpsest" of cumulatively added prior policies sedimented in teachers' pedagogy, in addition to quasi-official "phantom" policies formed at the local level. We argue that these affect teachers' practices and beliefs in ways that may…

The paper explores the status of English in Jordan as reflected in newspaper job advertisements (ads) published in 1985, 1995 and 2005, and English language documents in the educational domain. The study shows a steady increase in the percentage of English ads paralleled with a steady decrease in the percentage of Arabic ads. Further, it reports a…

This article reports the results of an eye-tracking experiment that investigated the effects of structural distance on readers' sensitivity to violations of Spanish gender agreement during online sentence comprehension. The study tracked the eye movements of native Spanish speakers and English-speaking learners of Spanish as they read sentences…

This article presents a selective overview of studies that have investigated auditory language processing in children and late second-language (L2) learners using online methods such as event-related potentials (ERPs), eye-movement monitoring, or the cross-modal priming paradigm. Two grammatical phenomena are examined in detail, children's and…

When the author first started teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) students, she was incredibly naive about the second language acquisition process. One of the first moves she made was to look at the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) goals, and she began to think about the purposes and situations in which her…