Learning a language is a lifelong process and requires motivation, patience, a great deal of effort to continuously observe, reflect, and apply the acquired knowledge and skills in practice. Building on an experiential learning approach to support lifelong learning offers a wide range of ways in which instructors can create and deliver engaging…

English as an additional language (EAL) adult literacy learners have special needs and unique characteristics. The various challenges they face include decoding, comprehending, and developing basic skills for reading and writing. At the same time, it is extremely important to understand EAL adult literacy programming, as the right approaches for…

Teachers face many challenges, including that of educating English language learner (ELL) students. These students are often placed in regular classrooms and create extra demands on the classroom teacher. Many strategies can be employed with ELLs that relate to best teaching practices. Potential trouble areas are discussed, as are the strategies…

Older adults bring considerable experience and knowledge to the table, and many are already proficient in several languages, they just need to add English to their repertoire. The article describes different challenges that older English learners face and provides examples and ideas for accommodations that ESL instructors can provide to support…

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) administers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), with the mission to increase food security and reduce hunger. The study summarized here seeks to understand how the 53 SNAP State agencies -- 50 States, District of Columbia (DC), Guam, the U.S. Virgin…

The words in a language or language variety are often rank ordered in lists that are meant to reflect the relative importance of those words to language users and learners of a language. This rank ordering is done on the basis of the relative prevalence of words in a corpus. Lexical prevalence is often operationalized as measures of frequency,…

This article explores relevant conceptual frameworks and design principles for the planning and implementation of a virtual reality (VR) learning environment in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts. The primary focus is on what knowledge teachers need to acquire when designing and implementing a spherical video-based training world that…

This article introduces the CELI corpus, a new learner corpus of written Italian consisting of ca. 600,000 tokens, evenly distributed among CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) proficiency levels B1, B2, C1 and C2. The collected texts derive from the language certification exams administered by the University for Foreigners…

This article describes the implementation of project-based learning in an upper-level German as a Foreign Language writing course at a North American university. This pedagogical approach focuses on active learning, learner autonomy, collaboration among peers, tangible products, and developing transferable skills with meaningful, real-world tasks…

Meeting the needs of English learners (ELs) effectively must be an individualized, purposeful, and data-driven process. Progress monitoring can help practitioners to target their EL students' most significant academic and linguistic needs and, subsequently, develop and deliver instructional programming that may help students develop to their…

The redesigned "TOEIC Bridge"® tests are designed to measure the reading, listening, speaking, and writing proficiency of beginning to low-intermediate English learners in the context of everyday adult life. This report describes the comprehensive and multifaceted process used to enhance the meaningfulness of TOEIC Bridge test score…

This article considers best practices for writing articles in science, technology, and policy, focusing on writing for international scholarly journals in nuclear security. Its two main audiences are technical communication educators/researchers and internationals wishing to publish their work in English-medium scholarly journals. I discuss…

Teachers in a Nevada district office have been reading and discussing Sandra Cisneros' book, "Hairs/Pelitos," and are collaborating on a poster that uses figurative language to describe 38 a character from the text. The participating teachers are preparing to lead this same activity with their elementary students who are newcomers to the…

Online writing labs (OWLs) have assisted writers since the mid-1990s. Recently, increasing interest in creating OWLs outside of North America has arisen (Gu & Ding, 2002; Paiz, 2017, 2018; Tan, 2011). This interest in OWLs specially designed to address second language (L2) writers and their particular concerns, results from an interest in…

On the surface, learning a second language may seem to be a simple one- to two-year undertaking. Research shows, however, that it's a far more complex endeavor. This article considers the depth of learning required to become academically proficient in a second language. For instance, language learners learn the basics of reading in a second…