There is a growing interest in the quandary of literacy and proficiency amongst K-12 students in the United States. Similarly, because of uncharted research about biliteracy amongst African-American students in urban schools and benefits of Spanish fluency, communicative gaps are increased and fluency is breached. If advantages are properly…

A curriculum is a form of politics (Apple, 1993). The politics of a curriculum defines what is legitimate and valued and what is not. In Taiwan, the objectives of vocational high school (VHS) education are to prepare students to acquire relevant professional knowledge and practical skills and to integrate them into their future career development.…

This study was conducted in order to inspect the impact of podcasts as learning and teaching tools on Iranian EFL learners' motivation for listening as well as on their listening comprehension ability. It also investigated the learners' perception towards podcasts. 34 intermediate learners who were homogeneous in terms of listening ability were…

This study investigates two types of high schools in South Korea as a social environment for the formation of social capital: selective (foreign language high schools, FLHS) and non-selective (general high schools, GHS). By analyzing in-depth interviews with 22 graduates of FLHS and GHS who attended the same elite university, we found that FLHS…

The use of humor in EFL across the world has been widely discussed as an effective way to create a more comfortable, productive classroom environment in language learning. However, student-perceived benefits of both teacher and student-produced humor in the more specific context of a Japanese language classroom have not been explored in any great…