Given that societies across the globe are increasingly multicultural and multilingual, the notion of communicative competence grounded in constricting definitions of national cultures and languages reflects neither our instructional realities nor the sociolinguistic reality of the languages and cultures we teach. To foster students' development of…

During several non-participant observations of two advanced College English classes at Jiangsu University, it was noticed that most of the students did not engage in class discussions. To ascertain what the problem was, but from learners' perspectives, this research was conducted. Seventy-one students enrolled in College English at Jiangsu…

Although several studies have investigated the self-assessment (SA) of writing skills, most research has adopted a cross-sectional research design. Consequently, our knowledge about the longitudinal development of SA is limited. This study investigated whether SA instruction leads to improvement in SA accuracy and in second language (L2) writing.…

This volume presents a selection of eight papers presented at three symposia on English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) that were held at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. The experiences detailed in the chapters offer a representative sample of the diversity of approaches to teaching and assessing…

This article describes a significant revision of an existing upper-division German course to include more global perspectives of the long 19th century. The revision was undertaken in collaboration with an advanced undergraduate student. The course provides an important opportunity to upend preconceptions students might have about German-speaking…

This study attempts to ascertain if the WebCAPE placement exam can be used to measure improvement in an upper division grammar course. The WebCAPE online placement exam is a widely used instrument designed to help university language programs place students into the basic language course best corresponding to their proficiency level. This is done…

Total enrollments (undergraduate and graduate) in languages other than English dropped by 9.2% between fall 2013 and fall 2016, as reported in the Modern Language Association's twenty-fifth language enrollment census. Despite the overall drop, there were gains in nearly half of all language programs (45.5%) that mitigate somewhat the downward…

This article describes an action research experience carried out in an advanced English as a foreign language classroom of the language program at a university in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2010. The study proposes the inclusion of authentic literary texts in the English as a foreign language classroom through the implementation of four constructivist…

Recently, the Modern Language Association (MLA) called for a major reorganization of undergraduate academic programs and even the structure of foreign-language departments. Typically, the initial two years of language instruction are taught by non-tenure-track instructors with little or no voice in the department. Faculty members mainly teach the…

This paper presents a field study carried out with learners who used a grammar checker in real writing tasks in an advanced course at a Swedish university. The objective of the study was to investigate how students made use of the grammar checker in their writing while learning Swedish as a second language. Sixteen students with different…