This article derives from a three-year ethnographic project carried out in Norway focusing on language practices of Brazilian families raising their children multilingually. Analyses of interview data with two Brazilian parents demonstrate the relevance of examining intersectionally the participants' orientation to categorisations such as social…

The author went to the United States to study applied linguistics. Although he was there for nine months, his English proficiency did not improve as much as he had hoped, considering that he was using English almost exclusively every day. After his time in the United States, he spent 10 months in Australia working and traveling on a working…

One of the key topics on any Modern Languages Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) course in the United Kingdom is the hotly debated issue of target language (TL) use. When and why do teachers use the TL in delivering lessons and when and why do they code switch into the learners' language? Does their practice change over time? Does it…

It is late at night, after working all day on her postdoctoral research Laura Colombo is trying to wind down while drawing and jotting down thoughts in her notebook. She is in the living room/office of her apartment in Buenos Aires, the city where she was born and left when she was 26 years old to pursue her graduate studies in the United States…

While previous research has indicated that learners with field-dependence (FD) and field-independence (FI) cognitive styles benefit differentially from different instructional modes, previous corrective feedback studies have ignored the issue of matching error correction strategies to learners' cognitive style. To shed some light on this issue,…

This paper investigates the extent to which Chinese students are prepared for academic writing in higher education in the UK, by seeking evidence from a group of 40 Chinese students at a UK university. A mixed-methods approach combining both questionnaires and interviews was adopted to generate data. The main conclusion was that the training that…

Research and theory on second language reading has reached heightened dimensions in recent years. It is through reading that learners access much information concerning the target language and culture, and consequently reading is an important part of almost all language programs across stages of acquisition. The purpose of this article is to offer…