Incidental focus on form is one of several ways to direct language learners' attention to formal aspects of language within meaningful communicative contexts. Learners can benefit from focus on form, but the extent to which incidental focus on form, or any other type, is available to learners in advanced foreign language literature classes has not…

Focusing on code-switching from conversation analysis and sociolinguistic perspectives, this paper examines interactions between 10-12-year-old language learners of immigrant origin and locally born students as they are engaging in verbal pair work. All are students attending language classes in state primary schools in Barcelona in which Catalan…

Deaf and hearing students' knowledge of English sentences containing universal quantifiers was compared through their performance on a 50-item, multiple-picture task that required students to decide whether each of five pictures represented a possible meaning of a target sentence. The task assessed fundamental knowledge of quantifier sentences,…

In this article, I explore language practices in Nigerian primary school classrooms against the backdrop of the policy of mother tongue education. Findings from the study show that there is a classroom bilingual practice that is rather unstructured in terms of curricular application and levels. The study shows that rather than implementing the…

The article examines changes in language testing textbooks in English since Lado (1961) and proposes that two trends may be discerned. The first shows how the growing professionalism of the field has required an expansion in teaching materials to meet the need for new training programmes. What the expansion also shows is the desire, again a mark…

Since learning English is very popular in non-English speaking countries, developing modern assisted-learning tools that support effective English learning is a critical issue in the English-language education field. Learning English involves memorization and practice of a large number of vocabulary words and numerous grammatical structures.…

Previous studies have shown that teacher cognitions and practices can be inconsistent, particularly with claims about communicative teaching practices. This article describes the practical theory of a state school EFL teacher in Armenia who claimed to be using a communicative approach to language teaching by considering her stated cognitions and…

During Phase 1 of the Intercultural Language Teaching and Learning in Practice (ILTLP) Project Nhu Trinh, a teacher of (Mandarin) Chinese, was one of a number of teachers who worked with project team members in a feedback process to develop intercultural units of work and longterm programs for their classes. The changes to Nhu's programming that…

The present study investigated the perception and production of English /w/ and /v/ by native speakers of Sinhala, German, and Dutch, with the aim of examining how their native language phonetic processing affected the acquisition of these phonemes. Subjects performed a battery of tests that assessed their identification accuracy for natural…

Drawing on Language Awareness (LA) approaches developed for francophone classrooms and a sociocultural theoretical perspective on language and learning that posits the genesis of new knowledge construction is situated in social interactions and shaped by socio-historical context, we conducted a small-scale case study of the implementation of LA…

In this case history, the author describes how her journey as a reader evolved from a poor reader who did not like to read in elementary school into an avid trilingual reader in graduate school. Once she discovered the joy of reading, each language in which she read had its own purpose and emotional connection. She credits self-selected reading…

This case study explores the professional identity of one reading specialist, Marsha, who struggled with testing pressures at her urban elementary school in the U.S. It offers an in-depth look at how Marsha's instructional decisions and practices in a pull-out reading program aimed at helping English Language Learners (ELL) shifted when she was…

While the use of mobile devices for language learning has sparked the interest of an increasing number of researchers in recent years (e.g., Aizawa & Kiernan, 2003; Thornton & Houser, 2005), our knowledge of learners' preferences for the mobile platform and their usage patterns remains limited. Are learners prepared to use mobile phones…

This longitudinal mixed-methods study compared the oral fluency of well-educated adult immigrants from Mandarin and Slavic language backgrounds (16 per group) enrolled in introductory English as a second language (ESL) classes. Speech samples were collected over a 2-year period, together with estimates of weekly English use. We also conducted…

This study analyzes the goals and realities of four educated, working, adult Latina, English as a Second language (ESL) students living in North Carolina, a region seeing particularly intense migration of Latino immigrants. The study conceptually frames adjustment issues confronted by these Latina immigrants in terms of gender, language,…