Ninety percent of Puerto Rican public school students who graduate from high school lack the basic English skills needed to succeed in university studies. This lack may be the result of Spanish being used as the major language of instruction at all levels in the public school system; when students graduate, they are limited English proficient…

The purpose of safety training is to avoid or at least decrease the number of work-related accidents and deaths. This study was concerned with the role that native language plays in effective training of adult construction workers in New Mexico. Specifically, this study examined workers' and trainers' perceptions of the effectiveness of safety…

This article describes a pilot study conducted by teacher candidates (TCs) at an elementary level charter school in Buffalo, New York. The TCs, undergraduate and graduate level college students, enrolled in an English Language Arts/Social Studies methods course block, wrote bilingual English/Spanish information texts and used them in conjunction…

Developing an intercultural competence, where language is seen as a cultural construct, seems to be consensually advocated by contemporary theories in teaching and learning English as a foreign language. Given its grounding on cultural studies, intercultural education focuses its pedagogical orientation and strategies on popular cultures that are…

In this paper, we present a synthesis of a series of studies, carried out by our research groups, from the Greek educational context on teachers' and immigrant students' views on issues of bilingual acquisition and of heritage language learning and teaching. Albeit including heterogeneous samples and employing quantitative and qualitative…

It is widely assumed that the British are poorer modern foreign language (MFL) learners than their fellow Europeans. Motivation has often been seen as the main cause of this perceived disparity in language learning success. However, there have also been suggestions that curricular and pedagogical factors may play a part. This article reports a…

Instruction in English is a priority around the globe, but instructional methodologies have not always kept pace with the changing needs of students. To explore the benefits of the flipped classroom model for learners of English as a Foreign Language, the researchers used flipped learning and Wen's Output-driven/Input-enabled model to design a…

Transactional relations between children's positive social interaction skills, school engagement, and academic achievement were examined using a longitudinal panel model across the transition from preschool to first grade. Participants were Head Start children (N = 241; 49% girls, M age = 53 months, range 45-60); 78% were Mexican/Mexican-American;…

This quant-QUAL sequential explanatory mixed methods study describes a framework for evaluating the communicative competence (Canale & Swain, 1980; Canale, 1983) of non-beginner students of Chinese for placement purposes at U.S. four-year postsecondary institutions. A pragmatic lens was used to collect and analyze data that generated a…

The present study examines how glossing of second language (L2) texts affects L2 learners' reading comprehension as well as their learning of L2 grammar and vocabulary. It employed a pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest design with two treatment sessions. The target features were English unaccusativity and 10 pseudo-word items.…

This article documents the findings of a study concerning the perspectives on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in the monolingual context of Jaén. The research has involved the design, validation and administration of two sets of questionnaires to 745 informants (692 students and 53 teachers) within eight secondary schools with a…

Aimed at developing methods, tools and techniques for delivery and evaluation of an educational module, this article addresses the needs of academicians restructuring, adjusting and altering their curricula to meet European Higher Education Area standards. The paper focuses on two pressing issues -- the applicability of and adjustment to European…

The purpose of this study was to examine ninth grade EFL students' experiences and attitudes towards classrooms equipped with interactive whiteboards (IWB). The data were collected with a questionnaire about attitudes towards IWB use in EFL classes, and observations from three different classrooms in three different high schools. The study…

This paper investigates the effects of Content and Language Integrated Learning, CLIL for short, on both the attainment of the subject matter, mathematics in our case, hence the content aspect of CLIL. The second axes of research focuses on the effect of CLIL on the learners' proficiency vis-à-vis the language of instruction, epitomized here by…

In 2011, Taiwan's Ministry of Education conducted a national-scale appraisal of 92 CLIL programmes. However, we lack an effective model for examining by precisely how much improvement in the quality of the CLIL programmes will rise as a consequence of the increased language proficiency and the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge. To gain greater…