"If"-conditionals are a highly valuable resource in academic discourses, whether spoken or written, as they can be used to hypothesize, hedge, manage interaction with the addressee, and promote or on the contrary circumscribe the scope of research claims. This article analyses how "if"-conditionals are brought into play in three genres of medical…

Given the increasing numbers of ESL students in Canadian classrooms, this study investigated how teachers of mainstream classes assess the written work of ESL students and whether they use different assessment strategies for ESL versus non-ESL students. Interviews were conducted with seven mainstream teachers from a private high school in Ontario.…

This study was an exploration of how high school language learners and their teacher jointly constructed word meanings through multimodal representation and the sociopolitical reality of learners' lives as mediating factors in the context of simultaneous multiple learning activities. Thirty-three high school Advanced ESL 3 students were taught…

This paper discusses issues surrounding the development of a learning object repository (FLORE) for teaching and learning French at the postsecondary level. An evaluation based on qualitative and quantitative data was set up in order to better assess how second-language (L2) students in French perceived the integration of this new repository into…

While recent studies have found that viewing glosses with multimedia annotations can help students learn and retain vocabulary words (Chun & Plass, 1996; Al-Seghayer, 2001), O'Bryan (2005) found that when providing pictorial glosses for select words within an online reading unit, few students took advantage of the clickable gloss function allowed…

Multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs) are quickly gaining importance as tools for foreign language instruction by promoting collaboration and social presence in a lifelike 3-D environment. One of the largest and fastest growing of these MUVEs is Linden Lab's "Second Life" (SL). With an international membership of over 9,000,000 residents, SL is…

In this article we propose the pedagogical model "bridging activities" to address advanced foreign language proficiency in the context of existing and emerging internet communication and information tools and communities. The article begins by establishing the need for language and genre-focused activities at the advanced level that attend to the…

An ethnographic study of a Canadian, undergraduate, advanced Hebrew course composed of heritage language learners of diverse backgrounds examined the fluctuating notion of nation and shifting national membership affiliations. Data collection techniques included participant observation and in-depth, semistructured, focus group and individual…

The present study employed multi-faceted Rasch measurement (MFRM) to explore the rater bias patterns of native English-speaker (NES) raters when they rate EFL essays. Forty NES raters rated 40 essays written by female Japanese university students on a single topic adapted from the TOEFL Test of Written English (TWE). The essays were assessed using…

For the last two decades the foreign language education profession has spent considerable energy establishing professional guidelines for foreign language teacher preparation. This article discusses research that suggests that the profession should now direct its energies toward developing protocols to assist preservice teachers whose mental…

The effects of data-gathering methods on pragmatic data have been well documented, yet an inquiry into the interactive effects of assessment tasks with pragmatic instruction has received scant attention. This study investigated the interaction between two assessment tasks (e-mail and phone) and two types of pragmatic instruction (explicit and…

Numerous researchers have stressed the critical need for preservice teachers, especially White middle-class teachers, to be educated in strategies and philosophies that are culturally responsive to an increasingly diverse K-12 student population. To this end, Geneva Gay's framework of culturally responsive pedagogy, which includes caring,…

This article investigates the dyad-based communication of two groups of non-native speakers (NNSs) of English involved in real time interaction in a type of text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) tool known as a MOO. The object of this semester long study was to examine the ways in which the subjects managed their L2 interaction during…

In the present study I describe the 150-year history of school-based English language assessment in Japan. The history is divided into four major periods according to the purposes of English language education set by the government in the different periods: (1) 1860 to 1945, when English was first introduced and taught in schools mainly for elite…

Assessment of learners' academic achievement in a second language presents important challenges to the fields of educational research and educational practice. Although these challenges legitimately concern learners' familiarity with a second language, the challenges are more complex, particularly in the contexts of large-scale assessments that…