An important first step to globalizing and decentralizing foreign language education is to clarify current language teachers' perceptions of language varieties and how these perceptions influence their pedagogy. The present study looked at English and French language classrooms in K-12 and university settings in the United States to compare…

This study explored Chinese heritage language learners' prior Mandarin experiences and their current Mandarin-learning experiences to reveal factors that influence their motivation and intention to continue or discontinue their Mandarin coursework. Using a Grounded Theory approach, we conducted demographic surveys and semi-structured interviews…

Language program evaluation is a complicated field of practice, especially for models that are not commonly implemented in higher education. This article features Languages Across the Curriculum (LAC), a lesser-known program model, reporting on a qualitative evaluative program study taking place in a Northeastern university. It identifies…

The overarching objective of the World Language Professional Life Survey (WLPLS) was to determine the K-20 World Language (WL) profession's familiarity with both the "World Readiness Standards for Learning Languages" (5 Cs) and with the Can-Do Statements (Can-Dos). The survey strove to identify how both sets of principles might…

This article focuses on the construct of linguistic risk-taking and outlines a new pedagogical initiative implemented at a Canadian bilingual postsecondary institution. The Linguistic Risk-Taking Initiative aims at encouraging language learners to target specific challenges and seek opportunities to practice their second official language (French…

Duolingo is a commercial language-teaching platform that offers free courses on the web and on mobile apps. This study reports the ACTFL listening and reading proficiency levels of adult Duolingo learners who had completed beginning-level courses in Spanish or French. The participants (n = 225) were learners residing in the United States, had…

The COVID-19 pandemic enabled an unprecedented remote teaching experience for world language faculty who had to move their courses online in spring 2020. Previous studies show that faculty background characteristics affect their perceptions of and experience with online teaching. The present study examined the effect of two college-level world…

Critical pedagogy and social justice education have gained increasing attention in recent years in many subject matters, and world language education has been no exception to this trend. There are a number of works dedicated to critical pedagogy in world language education. At the same time that such concerns have gained attention, another…

This study investigates the role of motivation and learner variables in bilingual vocabulary development among first language (L1) Japanese students attending hoshuukoo (i.e., supplementary academic schools for Japanese-speaking children) in the United States. One hundred sixteen high school students ages 15-18 from eight hoshuukoo completed…

The demand for Spanish for specific purposes (SSP) university courses in the United States has prompted widespread curricular change in language departments over the last two decades (Klee, 2015; Sánchez-López, 2013). However, many instructors lack the tools and training needed to design SSP curricula that meet learners' communicative needs in…

The present study examined the use and effectiveness of a large corpus--the Corpus del Español (Davies, 2002)--in a 300-level Spanish grammar university course. Students conducted hands-on corpus searches with the goal of finding concordances containing particular types of collocations (combinations of words that tend to co-occur) and tokens (any…

The goal of this study is to describe the acquisition rate for gender acquisition in Spanish and to show whether individual variability and language contact may affect this rate. The participants were intermediate second language Spanish (first language English) learners in the study abroad and at-home contexts over a 4-month period. The…

This article presents a writing project whose primary goal is the development of linguistic, cross-cultural, and meta-cognitive competencies through the study of a dark episode in French history--the German Occupation. Students create personas who all lived in the same building in 1939 and write their memoirs 60 years later. Following a brief…

This article describes an interdisciplinary collaboration that combined the study of German language with instruction in environmental issues (sustainable development). The project, involving both an independent study and a classroom unit, allowed students to make connections between disciplines, establish contact with German-speaking communities…

This article reports on an extensive survey administered to advanced heritage language (HL) learners to examine their language behaviors, attitudes, and backgrounds. To date, there have been no detailed categorizations of advanced HL learners to guide classroom instruction and curriculum design. Thus the present study is a first attempt to fill…