This article interprets teachers as change agents in light of the Transformational Teaching (TT) framework (Slavich & Zimbardo, 2012). Contributing to the understanding of teachers' transformation, we report on a case study that explores how of a graduate student's conceptualization of and engagement with the core methods of TT emerged and…

Second-language (L2) testing researchers have explored the relationship between speakers' overall speaking ability, reflected by holistic scores, and the speakers' performance on speaking subcomponents, reflected by analytic scores (e.g., McNamara, 1990; Sato, 2011). These research studies have advanced applied linguists' understanding of how…

This article contributes to the literature on the value of Virtual Exchanges (VEs) in the field of technology-mediated language learning. Specifically, we report on a pilot program for high school English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Slovakia and English as a Second Language (ESL) learners in Michigan, USA who engaged in a 10-week,…

As part of a larger effort to support Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) instruction in the United States, the LCTL Partnership at Michigan State University (MSU) and the LCTL Collaborative Partners initiative at the University of Chicago (UC) are supporting online LCTL courses to be offered to students across multiple institutions. As the…

The Center for Language Teaching Advancement (CeLTA) at Michigan State University (MSU) was awarded a U.S. federally funded two-year grant in 2014 to investigate the status of proficiency, and the promotion of proficiency, in foreign language programs. The grant was awarded to Paula Winke and Susan Gass, as principal investigators. The purpose of…

This program profile describes how teachers and administrators have collaborated in the design and implementation of a number of linguistic, cultural, and transmodal pedagogical and curricular initiatives. Strategies that writing teachers can implement to best meet the needs of multilingual students across a range of institutional contexts are…

Scholars such as Diane Kelly-Riley and Patricia Bizzell have argued that the student writing feature most likely to place a student into a basic writing course is the presence of dialect other than standard academic English. This essay examines how assessment practices can foster students' diverse languages rather than inhibit them. I conducted a…

Finding an effective instruction mode for ESL students in the US educational system has not been an easy task. The country's secondary and tertiary institutions continue to struggle to meet the needs of their large non-native student populations. The article revisits the debate whether sheltered instruction is an effective model to follow. In our…

This article reports the findings of a study in which we investigated the possible effects of word order on the acquisition of case marking. In linguistic typology (e.g. Greenberg, 1963) a very strong correlation has been shown between dominant SOV (subject object verb) word order and case marking. No such correlation exists for SVO (subject verb…

In this "First Person Singular" essay, the author describes her education, teaching experience, and interest in understanding the learning of language. Anyone reading this essay will not be surprised to learn that the author's questions about language learning and optimal teaching methods were only met with further questions, and no…

This study extends the evidence for implicit second language (L2) learning, which comes largely from (semi-)artificial language research, to German. Upper-intermediate L2 German learners were flooded with spoken exemplars of a difficult morphological structure, namely strong, vowel-changing verbs. Toward the end of exposure, the mandatory vowel…

The role of world languages in the internationalization of college campuses in the United States (U.S.) has become a recurring theme of discussions in academic, government, and private sectors. Topics have ranged from the lack of a common definition of internationalization to a review of college curricula. Klee (2009) and Bettencourt (2011) have…

This paper is a study of a method for teaching German gender and plural assignment developed by the late Donald Steinmetz. My primary source for classroom material was the unpublished handbook for students that Steinmetz co-authored with Donald Nelson, The Joy of Gender: A Student Handbook made available to me by his son, Erik Steinmetz. In the…

A key element in vocabulary instruction is to get the students to "feel" the vocabulary and make it a part of their new language identity; that is, helping the students to "own" the terms is a top priority of language instructors. Using verbpathy as a tool meets this goal. The idea of using verbpathy in vocabulary instruction…

This piece, a preface to a reprinted 1971 article on communication practice, focuses on the need for real communication in the language classroom. In this article, the author drifts back to inspiring times in the 1960s and reflects on some events that prompted him to write the article in the first place.