This paper investigates the effect of daily journal writing on enhancing the listening and reading comprehension skills in a fifty-week Modern Standard Arabic course taught at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, California. In the field of foreign language (FL) teaching, writing has long been considered a supporting skill for…

Through an analysis of students' reactions to transcription exercises, this exploratory study examined some of the differences between two forms of written help enhancing listening passages--second language (L2) captions and transcripts. This primarily qualitative analysis highlighted the role that student proficiency levels may have played in…

Background/Context: English language learner (ELL) students are lagging behind because of the extra challenges they face relative to their peers in acquiring academic English language proficiency, and the added burden of learning content in a language in which they are not proficient. The mandated inclusion of ELL students in the nation's…

The Language Profile of Bilingual Students in California was undertaken to determine: (1) students' range of performance on specific language tasks across four age groups in both Spanish and English; (2) the relationship of this performance to proficiency on two tests currently used in California; (3) how the development of the two languages…

This guide communicates the increasing need in California for young people to develop skills in languages other than English, and to direct attention to assessing these skills in terms of language use competency in realistic situations rather than in terms of courses taken or units earned. The guide recognizes successive stages of competency and…