This study looks at the effectiveness of an intervention to improve student retention on a distance language course. Of the six beginners' language courses offered by the UK's Open University, the beginners' Welsh course has consistently had the lowest retention rates since it was first presented in 2008. In order to address this, a project was…

The questions of how to teach culture, which culture(s) to teach and how to lead students to intercultural competence and understanding are common questions for language teachers. The current project employed wikis to systematically integrate culture and authentic texts into beginning German courses at a large south-eastern university in the…

This article reports a small-scale study carried out in a beginners' Spanish class of second year undergraduate students. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effectiveness of a vocabulary task in terms of its impact on vocabulary acquisition, the learners' approach to vocabulary learning and their motivation and engagement. The task…