The purpose of this article is to investigate the perceptions and attitudes of such key stakeholders as students, parents, and teachers in Ontario's FSL program, and what potential impacts such attitudes could have on future participation in FSL learning in secondary schools in the province. It also examines some prevailing teaching and learning…

This book fills a large gap in our understanding of how to prepare teachers for the challenging but increasingly popular task of integrating content and language instruction. It brings together findings on content-based teacher education from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North America in order to inform researchers and teacher educators and…

Answering calls to map college-level proficiency development (Modern Language Association, 2007) and longitudinally chart language learning (Barkaoui, 2014; Ortega & Byrnes, 2008), we mapped the oral proficiency growth of 1,922 lower-division college students of Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish (in the second, third, or fourth semester of…

French immersion programs in Saskatchewan have traditionally served to further the goals of additive bilingualism between Canada's two official languages, French and English. Whereas these programs have historically consisted of predominantly Anglophone populations, recent trends in immigration have contributed to the increasingly diverse…

In this study, we explore the impact that parents have on the participation of their children in extracurricular activities (ECAs) in a sample of Canadian parents with children between the ages of four and 17. Employing a concurrent, nested, mixed methods strategy, we use the insights gained through semi-structured interviews with parents to…

There is sometimes an assumption among language educators that students find the transition from school to university language learning a challenging process (see for example Busse & Walter, 2011; Chambers, 2014; Macaro & Wingate, 2004). In this research we set out to explore this assumption through a small-scale study of first-year…

According to the big-fish-little-pond (BFLP) model, the self-concept is not only influenced in a positive way by one's own achievement, but also in a negative way by one's relative achievement in comparison with one's immediate peers. This study investigates whether the BFLP effect also holds for second language acquisition. A random sample of…

The Foreign Language Standards of Learning identify essential content, processes, and skills for each level of language learning in Virginia's secondary schools. Included are specific standards for levels I through IV of French, German, Spanish, and Latin, as well as generic standards adaptable for levels I through IV of other modern languages,…