The obligatory use of the preposition a with animate, specific direct objects in Spanish ("Juan conoce a Maria" "Juan knows Maria") is a well-known instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM; Torrego, 1998; Leonetti, 2004). Recent studies have documented the loss and/or incomplete acquisition of several grammatical features in Spanish heritage…

This article examines the oral proficiency in French of students in core French, intensive French (IF), and post-IF to determine the effectiveness of these programs. Between 2003 and 2009, students in nine jurisdictions were assessed using the New Brunswick Middle School Scale (MSS). Students were tested prior to beginning IF (multiple grade…

This article examines student attitudes towards and perceptions of technological activities in the language classroom. Data collected from students (n = 71) in the French language departments of five Canadian universities were used to examine which technological activities students preferred, whether and to what degree different activities were…

Large corpora such as the British National Corpus and the COBUILD Corpus and Collocations Sampler are now accessible, free of charge, online and can be usefully incorporated into a process writing approach to help develop students' writing skills. This article aims to familiarize readers with these resources and to show how they can be usefully…

The literature on English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has largely ignored one of its most distinctive features: many ESP teachers have to teach subject-specific texts from areas outside their primary areas of expertise. This paper addresses this issue by investigating the teaching practices and cognitions of three teachers of maritime English in a…

Corpus consultation is gaining in prominence as a language learning tool. This approach to language analysis has made its way into the language classroom where its presence ranges from the presentation of printed concordance data with accompanying tasks to the direct use of concordancing software by learners themselves to carry out analyses of…

Drawing from a one-year qualitative research study, this article explores the transnational lives and experiences of three young women and their little sisters in New York with close ties to the Dominican Republic. Using ethnographic research methods--life history interviews, focus groups, participant observation, and document analysis, I examine…

Brownsville Independent School District in Texas garnered the Broad Prize for Urban Education in 2008 by narrowing the gap between its largely immigrant Hispanic enrollment and other low-income children in the state. Its efforts are notable for the district's ability to move English language learners to proficiency in a few years by its reliance…

In an effort to develop an engineering design project that would deliver the necessary content and reach out to the English Language Learner (ELL) community, faculty in the Engineering Academy at Springdale High School in Springdale, Arkansas instituted the ELL Engineering Collaborative. The ELL Engineering Collaborative has four primary goals…

Technology is not currently used in ESP classrooms at the College of Home Economics. Therefore, an attempt was made to use online learning in ESP instruction from home, in addition to traditional classroom instruction. Comparisons of pre- and posttest scores of ten graduate students revealed significant differences in students' achievement.…

The Russian language has incorporated many English words into it and these enable the Russian people to understand more about the American culture than we understand of theirs.

Topics are: questions regarding intensive learning, awareness of goals and methods as a pre-requisite for effective pupil activity, exposition of typical pupil activity and suggestions for meaningful homework assignments. Examples are given. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)