Language educators' goals include promoting cultural understanding and improving the language skills of their students. Virtual Exchange (VE) is a powerful means to do this. Students in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms often have few opportunities to communicate with other users of English. VE gives them virtual mobility, enabling…

The oral translation courses at the University of Northern Iowa are described and suggestions are given for applying the approach to other university language courses and to secondary school language courses. After the initial organizational periods, each eighty-minute class period consists of translating an interview that was recorded in the…

"Application Performance," a supplemental drill in the Japanese language program at Oregon State University, is described as a way to develop students' communicative competence. The approach is a type of role play, with pairs of students preparing a dialogue according to a situation provided by the instructor and then performed in class.…

In 1980, Oregon State University began a program going beyond the usual procedure for students of English as a second language (ESL), which involved putting them in intensive English programs until they could pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language and then sending them on to a regular academic program. It was found that this traditional…