Speaking tasks involving peer-to-peer candidate interaction are increasingly being incorporated into language proficiency assessments, in both large-scale international testing contexts, and in smaller-scale, for example course-related, ones. This growth in the popularity and use of paired and group orals has stimulated research, particularly into…

This paper concerns the teaching of English to learners who are studying, or will soon study, engineering and who are expected to do at least part of their studying through textbooks written in English. Such students, especially in universities in developing countries, often find themselves very poorly equipped by their secondary education for…

This article explores one element of collaborative practice: the integration of English language learner-focused instruction and discussion in a secondary English methods course. Drawing on the authors' expertise, they examine revisions made to a secondary English methods course to better address the academic and individual needs of diverse…

Despite the lack of empirical evidence, the term "foreign language learning disability" (FLLD) has become popular in the learning disabilities (LD) and foreign language literature. I contend that there is not a unique "disability" for foreign language learning and suggest instead that foreign language skills run along a continuum of very strong to…

This article reports on a two-year project located within one local authority (LA), Brighton and Hove City Council, which was selected in 2003 to become a Primary Foreign Language Pathfinder. The main aim of this Pathfinder was to work with 18 other LAs across the country to pilot fresh approaches towards delivering foreign languages in the…

This paper describes a pilot study centred on the technology-enhanced self-development of competences in lifelong learning education carried out in the challenging context of the Association of Participants Agora. The pilot study shows that the use of the TENCompetence infrastructure, i.e. in this case the Personal Development Planner tool,…

This article reports findings of a Study in Mexico program and its potential for transforming teacher beliefs and observations about schooling in Mexico. This particular program has been in existence for 17 years; however, findings for this study are limited to data collected during two consecutive summers. The study was qualitative in design, and…

This study examined opinions about some theoretical and practical tenets of bilingualism and bilingual education, as well as about the instructional use of English language learners' (ELLs) native languages in the classroom, of 77 teachers from Spain working in California as part of the California/Spain Visiting Teachers Program. In their…

This paper investigates the development of referring expressions in the narratives of children learning English as a second language (L2). Spoken narratives in English were elicited from sixty Chinese-speaking participants at four ages--five, eight, ten, and young adults--using the wordless picture book "Frog, where are you?" (Mayer, 1969).…

This mixed-method study examines the proficiency in and perceptions of French language learning of Grade 8 students who were exposed to an instructional approach called the Accelerative Integrated Method (AIM). Six AIM classes (n = 125) and six non-AIM classes (n = 135) were observed and their students tested using a four-skills French as a second…

Acquiring an adequate vocabulary is a cognitive challenge for foreign language learners. Varied exposures to newly acquired words as they occur in meaningful contexts may facilitate the process of vocabulary learning. In this study we investigated the effects of such a multiple-strategy-based vocabulary teaching approach. We conducted an…

Second language acquisition (SLA) researchers strive to understand the language and exchanges that learners generate in synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC). Doughty and Long (2003) advocate replacing open-ended SCMC with task-based language teaching (TBLT) design principles. Since most task-based SCMC (TB-SCMC) research addresses an…

This study investigated pre-service and credentialed teachers at 2 universities in the Southwestern United States (N = 24), who participated in education-abroad programs in Mexico over 1 summer. This study examined the literature within a framework for developing cultural competence to describe and understand students' experiences. Following a…

This study examined behavioral and emotional adjustment in family contexts in which there was high versus low demand for adolescents to serve as language brokers in a sample of 73 recently immigrated Latino families with middle-school-aged adolescents. Language brokering was conceptualized as a family process rather than merely an individual…

This qualitative study presents sociolinguistic characteristics of peer-talk of 44 children in a Mandarin-English-speaking preschool in Taiwan where English was taught as a foreign language (EFL). Key findings: teacher-dominated talk influences children's peer-talk; EFL and code-switching emerge in spontaneous peer-talk; children actively engage…