Virtual Exchange (VE) in second language education refers to a technology-enabled, interactive, intercultural experience that is designed to increase learners' intercultural communicative competence and performance. In this paper the findings of a bilingual (English/Turkish), synchronous video communication project among 31 US and Turkish college…

The subject of this paper is embedded in the context of the issues of cultural and religious studies on the grounds of the contemporary glottodidactics, since it contains the characteristics of the selected textbooks for learning Arabic as a foreign language in the aspect of the content of the cultural thematic corpus. Three various textbooks,…

The author examines discourses of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and World Englishes (WEs) in the commercials for 2 standardized English tests: the International English Language Testing System for study abroad in English-dominant countries and the Canadian English Language Proficiency Index Program for Canadian permanent residency and…

Learning a language involves knowledge of both linguistic competence and cultural competence. Optimal development of linguistic competence and cultural competence, however, requires a high level of acculturation attitude toward the target language culture. To this end, the present study explored the acculturation attitudes of 70 Iranian…

This article reveals how test-based performativity pressures interfere with the pedagogical approaches preferred by teachers of second-language learners. Our findings derive from ethnographic research conducted in two non-mainstream high schools: one in a US city and other one in a Swedish city. Both schools serve immigrant students who speak…

Assessments developed and field tested for the mainstream student population may not be accessible for students with disabilities (SWDs) as a result of the impact of extraneous variables, including cognitive features, such as depth of knowledge required, grammatical and lexical complexity, lexical density, and textual/visual features. This study…

This study presents an investigation of oral narratives collected from heritage Egyptian and Palestinian Arabic speakers living in the United States. The focus is on a number of syntactic and morphological features in their production, such as word order, use of null subjects, selection of prepositions, agreement, and possession. The degree of…

In today's culturally diverse classrooms, students possess and use many culturally, ethnically, and regionally diverse English language varieties that may differ from standardized English. This book helps classroom teachers become attuned to these differences and offers practical strategies to support student achievement while fostering positive…

The present study investigates the degree to which social, experiential and usage-related factors correlate with Spanish linguistic competence among adult Hispanic Heritage Language (HL) speakers in the United States. Two online survey instruments were developed in furtherance of this research aim: a Likert-scale survey measuring five areas of…

The Modern Language Association (MLA) supports a broad, intellectually driven approach to teaching language and culture in higher education. To study the best ways of implementing this approach in today's world, the MLA Executive Council established an Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages. The committee was charged with examining the current…

A referential communication task was used to compare the effects of linguistic structure on the encoding and decoding performances of 120 five- and seven-year-old children. Results suggested that differences in adjective ordering rules and stylistic variation affect encoding and decoding accuracy. (Author/MP)

What is the probability that Spanish, as a vernacular language, will survive in the U.S. with an increasing usage and prestige? Or will its usage, its speakers and its importance diminish rapidly in number and geographical extension? Can it be retained or will there be a shift into English? This article, written in Spanish, addresses these…

The dual mandate of modern language learning is considered to be linguistic competence and scholarly expertise in literature or in philology. The need for the systematic study of culture in modern language studies is discussed, and programs in the United States and Great Britain are compared. (MLW)

This paper reviews the history of contrastive analysis (CA) against the background of its objectives and its present problems and presents an outline of procedures which seem to be necessary to make the methods meet the objectives of applied CA. CA in the United States was closely connected with structuralism, which was an obvious cause for later…

The language problem of emigrant children has two major aspects: (1) concern for mother tongue maintenance; and (2) concern that the children are not learning the second language, which is the official language of the host country. The first is primarily the concern of the family, whereas the second is the concern of the entire community. Massive…