Van Lier's [2004. "The Ecology and Semiotics of Language Learning: A Sociocultural Perspective." Boston: Kluwer Academy] concept of ecology of language learning is applicable to our focus on children's active engagement in bilingual preschool classroom activities, which are conducive to language learning. The aim of this study was to…

The 2023 Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages was held in Columbus, Ohio on March 9-11. This year's theme, Empathy, Equity, and Empowerment is reflective of the vital work educators do in classrooms every day across the country. The Wikipedia definition of empathy is "the capacity to understand or feel what another…

Written from the perspective of a Grade 5/6 French Immersion teacher, this paper examines the role of music, poetry, and the visual arts in enhancing learner identity, in the context of the elementary school classroom. It begins with a focus on artistic metaphors that represent cultural and linguistic hyphenation. It then addresses practical…

This study was designed to investigate the nature of activities in an immersion English class and a non-immersion English class in the mainland of China, and to find out the differences between these two types of class through data gained from observation and interviews. Spoken discourse analysis was used to analyze the data, where Engestrom's…

What is the role of the teacher in developing learner autonomy? The limited research in this area is seldom situated in theory and often based on self-reported data. This study is situated in sociocultural theory and draws on two constructs, the zone of proximal development and imitation, to explain the teacher's role in developing autonomy. The…

This paper explores L2 novices' ways of soliciting teacher attention, more specifically, their summonses. The data are based on detailed analyses of video recordings in a Swedish language immersion classroom. The analyses illuminate the lexical shape of summonses in conjunction with prosody, body posture, gestures, and classroom artefacts. As…

The present study focuses on young EFL learners' use of the L2 to convey various linguistic functions (ask for information, talk about personal things, etc.). Based on the functional categories identified by Halliday (1975) and Painter (1999) in the development of the L1, and after having observed the use of these functions in a full-immersion EFL…

Grounded in sociocultural theory, this study uses an ecological approach to examine how student interactions within a dual-language school context may offer affordances for increased linguistic and conceptual understanding. Using qualitative analysis of student discourse, this paper focuses on data from recorded interactions between pairs of…

In this paper, we explore the intersection of practice, identity, resources and literacy central to the New Literacy Studies and recent second language research informed by sociocultural theories of learning and language. Drawing on the construct figured worlds of literacy that describe how representations of literacy practices invoked in relation…