The purpose of this brief commentary is to determine which language skill Polish higher school learners think ought to be practiced most frequently during Spanish classes. Fifteen undergraduate students who study at AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland were surveyed, and the authors found that most learners (73%) want to practice…

The European Language Portfolio (ELP) was developed and piloted by the Language Policy Division of the Council of Europe, Strasbourg, from 1998 to 2000. It was launched on a pan-European level during the European Year of Languages as a tool to support the development of plurilingualism and pluriculturalism…

Task-based teaching is an area which has emerged from the upsurge of interest in cognitive approaches to language learning and teaching of the mid-1980s. Being a current vogue in communicative language teaching, task-based language learning contains dangers if implemented without care. In particular, it is likely to create pressure for immediate…

Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requires state education agencies to develop progress and attainment benchmarks for school districts, called annual measurable achievement objectives (AMAOs), for English language learners (ELLs). AMAOs must be based on annual assessments of English proficiency in the domains of listening,…

Speakers often perform impromptu translations during bilingual interaction. Such translations can hold a wide variety of socio-pragmatic functions including reiteration, emphasis, recasting, and repair. When translations occur in multi-party talk where the interactants are of mixed linguistic proficiencies, they may also serve to include…

Recent studies suggest that focus-on-form (FonF) instruction has a positive effect on the second language proficiency of young learners. However, few have looked at learner perspectives on different FonF tasks, particularly in those young learners. This study investigates children's attitudes towards four FonF task-types in three Primary 5 English…

Models such as Eckman's markedness differential hypothesis, Flege's speech learning model, and Brown's feature-based theory of perception seek to explain and predict the relative difficulty second language (L2) learners face when acquiring new or similar sounds. In this paper, we test their predictive adequacy as concerns native English speakers'…

A home stay is typically defined as a period of time in which a person resides with a family in a home located outside his or her country of residence. Living with a host family is frequently connected to learning a language and immersion in a foreign culture. Study abroad students often participate in home stays, but there is little academic…

This paper investigates the foreign language management strategies of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Lazio, Italy. Based on empirical data from a questionnaire survey and ethnographic interviews, it also aims to validate the hypothesis that macro-level language planning (on a national scale) may not reflect language problems…

This article presents a series of studies focusing on L2 production and processing of adjective-noun collocations (e.g., "social services"). In Study 1, 810 adjective-noun collocations were extracted from 31 essays written by Russian learners of English. About half of these collocations appeared frequently in the British National Corpus (BNC);…

This study investigated the effectiveness of a multicomponent reading intervention implemented with middle school students with severe reading difficulties, all of whom had received remedial and/or special education for several years with minimal response to intervention. Participants were 38 students in grades 6-8 who had severe deficits in word…

Research has increasingly pointed to a range of cognitive and social reasons behind ESL students' transgressive textual appropriation, defined as students' source use that contravenes acceptable borrowing practices. However, one aspect that has received little attention is the role of the immediate pedagogical context in this type of textual…

Language production, or output, is not simply a product to demonstrate learning but part of the learning process. The output hypothesis, a theoretical model of second-language acquisition, proposes that second-language learners must produce the language they are learning in order to obtain a level of proficiency similar to that of native speakers.…

In Canada, as in other anglophone countries, classrooms are becoming more diverse as the number of English language learners (ELLs) increases. More and more teachers are faced with the task of meeting the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students. In this article, I share excerpts of dialogue between ELL students, native…

This article presents a case study of phonological types of internal evaluation in the personal oral narrative of one non-native speaker of English. The purpose was twofold: (1) to study whether laughter and exhaled breath can serve the functions of expressive phonology; i.e., phonological features which provide commentary and point of view for…