Text classification and text gradation are important for language teachers. Profiling and readability studies examine textual and linguistic features that determine text difficulty. Arabic, as an under-resourced language, suffers from a lack of such studies which results in material developers and textbook writers relying on their intuitions and…

Although the use of corpus data in language learning is a steadily growing research area, direct access to corpora by teachers and learners and the use of the data in the classroom are developing slowly. This paper explores how teachers can integrate corpus approaches in their practice. After situating the topic in relation to current research and…

This article presents one part of a wider study which looks at the space afforded to MFL teachers to make decisions about their teaching at the planning stage and in the classroom. The article focuses on the classroom observations which were one of the sources for the collection of rich data. In an attempt to quantify the space available, the…

Language teaching has traditionally been a task for teachers to teach vocabulary items and grammatical rules and to explain to students how a foreign language works in reference to their mother tongue. For a long time, language teaching was a means to the end of understanding a written culture. This had two practical corollaries: to grade the…

How beginning teachers learn to teach has been the focus of a substantial amount of research. The process is complex, and a number of theories and models have been put forward. For example, Fuller and Bown's (1975) well-known classification of beginning teachers' concerns into self, task and impact (and the sequential nature of these categories)…

Whilst formative assessment is now well established as a valuable practice in improving the involvement and attainment of pupils, its specific implementation in particular school subjects has received little attention. This paper sets out to discuss the development of formative assessment practices in the learning of languages. A general…

This article reports on the practitioner research conducted by the English participants in a European Co-operation Programme project entitled "Lateral Language Learning." The project was based on the belief that there is much that teachers of a first foreign language can do to prepare their students to access other languages in the…

As readers of this journal will know, 2010 will see all KS2 (ages 7-11) pupils in England entitled to learn a modern foreign language in normal curriculum time. This development of the commitment to primary language learning should provide an excellent opportunity and experience for pupils, while at the same time requiring some radical changes for…

In the following article the author presents a methodological framework for the teaching of intercomprehension. Competence in intercomprehension is seen as a realisation of the general human faculty for using and understanding language, which includes the ability to comprehend texts and utterances in "unfamiliar" languages. This competence can be…

The Special Education and Disability Act (SENDA) 2001 required post-16 institutions to have implemented the Disability Discrimination Act Part IV (DDA) 1995 by September 2005. In this paper a lecturer in Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) and a specialist teacher of the visually impaired from the Centre for Special and Inclusive Education at a…