This paper argues that Japanese education should place more emphasis on teaching students to write effectively in English. It notes that the Japanese Ministry of Education has put more emphasis in recent years in teaching students to listen and communicate orally in English. It is argued that in the age of the Internet, when so much information is…

During the 1994-1995 school year, the town of Sierre/Siders implemented and evaluated the first bilingual kindergarten class in the Valais canton of Switzerland. The following year the towns of Sion/Sitten and Monthey in the same canton also launched bilingual education classes. In these bilingual classes German is introduced as a second language…

The purpose of this highly quantitative study is to manifest the direct effects of communicative learning in the context of public high school teaching in Japan. A small-scale (n=12) experiment was conducted to reveal intergroup differences. The experiment was based on the assumption that there are clear differences in the amount of input from and…

The document describes the Changes Project, a participatory action research project conducted by adult learners at five adult literacy and education programs in Western Massachusetts. It is a 3-year project aimed at examining the impact of welfare reform, immigration reform, and the changing workplace on adult learners. The Changes Project is…

A 50-item, five-point Likert scale inventory was designed to be a valid and reliable group-administered instrument to provide a profile of the declarative knowledge of electronic mail (e-mail) strategies used by students learning English as a second language (ESL) or foreign language (EFL). The inventory was developed primarily for voluntary use…

Presents the results of an April 1996 survey on articulation between and among Japanese programs. Attempts to offer commentary about articulation from the perspective of Japanese and about the results of the survey, and to tie these results to more general issues. Suggests that articulation is an ongoing problem for virtually all language…

Presents an analysis of the responses German college students of English gave on a questionnaire regarding their attitudes toward and use of English grammars. Results found that several factors affected students' attitudes, and suggestions were made on how to improve the design of future grammars and on how to instruct students in the use of…

Compares the effects of two visual advance organizers on comprehension and retention of a written passage in a FLES (Foreign Language in the Elementary School) Program: (1) "Video" and (2) "Pictures + Teacher Narrative". Investigators randomly assigned 62 students to 1 one of 2 conditions. "Video" was the more effective organizer of the two. (23…

Describes four computer-assisted Japanese language and culture projects using word processing and the World Wide Web conducted in a college-level third-year Japanese class, and reports on the impact of the projects as assessed by student pre- and postquestionnaires, reflective comments from students, and instructors' reflective observation notes.…

This study, undertaken to assess the feasibility of the integration of a multimedia learning provision into a university language curriculum, reports results from a questionnaire of 107 undergraduates' attitudes toward the use of a multimedia program. Implications are that multimedia can play a beneficial role in the curriculum and may facilitate…

This article deals with part of a project set up to investigate the assumptions and beliefs about communicative language teaching of a group of primary language teachers in the Darling Downs Region of Queensland, Australia. The project was conducted by a questionnaire, interviewing six randomly-selected teachers, and videotaping the six teachers'…

Analyzes the effect of training on perception of English vowels by native speakers of Basque and Spanish. University students who took a training course in English phonetics completed questionnaires and vowel perception tests. Findings confirm that training exerts a positive effect on the perception of English vowels and that this effect is also…

Examines the concept of authenticity and the way this notion has evolved in language testing and general education. Presents a study looking at the importance of authenticity for test takers, and shows that test takers are willing and able to identify the attributes of a test likely to affect their performance. More research is needed if the…

In the bilingual contexts of two regions of Spain, Asturias (Asturian/Spanish) and Eastern Aragon (Catalan/Spanish), and given the relationship between language attitudes and linguistic proficiency, our study has two objectives. Firstly, the attitudes to the two contact languages are described. Secondly, the variables that can explain such…

Carr (2002), in her investigation of boys' alienation from languages and language learning, addressed the question of an "appropriate curriculum" for boys and boys' understanding of masculinity. Boys reported in that research that they preferred physical activities so found the written text orientation of language learning to be "hard" and…