As language pedagogy evolves and the pressure to articulate the value of the humanities in undergraduate education mounts, new curricular models are needed more than ever. The course "Sustainability in Germany: Recreation, Education, Innovation" is a response to that need. Originally designed to include a short-term study abroad…

A follow-up to the "ACTFL Integrated Performance Assessment Manual" published in 2003. This book provides readers with expanded guidelines for how to design integrated performance assessment (IPA) tasks to inform the backward design of a unit. Suggestions on how to provide effective feedback and how to improve learner performance are…

In China many non-English majors, who often score high on English exams that emphasize reading comprehension and grammar, have difficulty finding the English words they need to express their ideas in speaking and writing. This problem is not unusual, and it is often difficult for students to use their receptive reading and listening vocabulary for…

This volume in the TESOL Classroom Practice Series asks one fundamental question, "How can teachers teach the students, not the book?" The response, given within "Using Textbooks Effectively", is to move beyond the textbook as a separate entity and view it instead as part of the ESOL curriculum process and as a tool for student learning. The…

Much of L2 teacher feedback research is conducted with advanced students in process-oriented classrooms in the United States. There is less published research about how school teachers in EFL contexts respond to student writing. Specifically little is known about why teachers respond to writing in the ways they do, and if discrepancies exist…

Grammar is not a four-letter word. Learning vocabulary is not a form of punishment. They are the basis of any language, and a student who wants more than a tourist's booklet of useful phrases will need to learn them sooner or later. The second edition of this popular little book takes the sting out of the exercise and even makes it a pleasant…

Recent research on grammar pedagogy advocates the use of form-focused activities which require learners to produce output collaboratively. This paper reports on the results of a study carried out with 14 high-intermediate/advanced adult English as a foreign language (EFL) learners who completed five form-focused activities collaboratively. The…

The United States is viewed by many as a country where immigrants can enjoy freedom and economic prosperity, and, recently,more of these newcomers are settling in the state of Tennessee. The 2000 United States Census reveals that 4.8 percent of Tennessee residents live in households where the primary language spoken is not English. That is an…

In this article, the author describes the place of the oral proficiency guidelines as the only nationally recognized criteria for the assessment of communicative competence in speaking across languages and discusses learning outcomes studies based on the proficiency guidelines. The guidelines are now 20 years old, but learning outcomes are not…

A curriculum development project undertaken by English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teachers resulted in a major reorientation to reading instruction for adult ESL students. The course uses materials, often developed by the teachers, that systematically address reading problems, ongoing revision, and student interests. (Author/CB)

A study investigated the hypothesis that topic familiarity and assessed difficulty of a second language text correlated positively with performance on reading comprehension tests in languages for special purposes (LSP). Subjects were 177 advanced students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at Ben Gurion University (Israel). Faculty from the…