The 2023 Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages was held in Columbus, Ohio on March 9-11. This year's theme, Empathy, Equity, and Empowerment is reflective of the vital work educators do in classrooms every day across the country. The Wikipedia definition of empathy is "the capacity to understand or feel what another…

This study was designed to investigate the nature of activities in an immersion English class and a non-immersion English class in the mainland of China, and to find out the differences between these two types of class through data gained from observation and interviews. Spoken discourse analysis was used to analyze the data, where Engestrom's…

What is the role of the teacher in developing learner autonomy? The limited research in this area is seldom situated in theory and often based on self-reported data. This study is situated in sociocultural theory and draws on two constructs, the zone of proximal development and imitation, to explain the teacher's role in developing autonomy. The…

This paper explores L2 novices' ways of soliciting teacher attention, more specifically, their summonses. The data are based on detailed analyses of video recordings in a Swedish language immersion classroom. The analyses illuminate the lexical shape of summonses in conjunction with prosody, body posture, gestures, and classroom artefacts. As…

The present study focuses on young EFL learners' use of the L2 to convey various linguistic functions (ask for information, talk about personal things, etc.). Based on the functional categories identified by Halliday (1975) and Painter (1999) in the development of the L1, and after having observed the use of these functions in a full-immersion EFL…

Grounded in sociocultural theory, this study uses an ecological approach to examine how student interactions within a dual-language school context may offer affordances for increased linguistic and conceptual understanding. Using qualitative analysis of student discourse, this paper focuses on data from recorded interactions between pairs of…

This workbook is intended as a text for the learner of German as a foreign language. The workbook is complete with exercises that require students to provide information about themselves. Students provide information by reading questions and filling in the blanks. Questions are asked about families, friends, likes and dislikes, hobbies, and even…

Class activities for French native and second-language immersion classes using the souvenir program of a 1988 Manitoba travel festival are outlined. Activities involve global manipulation of the document and specific uses for information seeking and information manipulation. (MSE)

A variety of French language classroom activities are described, including a game to familiarize immersion students with Canada; exercises using songs; a teacher-student competitive vocabulary game; communicative activities; three games to practice verb conjugations, previously learned structures, and vocabulary; and a whole-language activity…

An elementary school Spanish-as-a-foreign-language immersion program in Social Science is described. Explanations for the teacher are offered, and activities are described in detail. Exercises and evaluations are also offered. Different aspects of the Japanese way of living are used to practice the Spanish language. Some of the aspects presented…

Outlines a variety of suggestions for classroom activities for second language instruction and immersion. Most activities focus on the use of illustrations or illustrated materials. The descriptions of the activities are in French. (MSE)

Study of the effects of a functional approach to grammar teaching on a sixth-grade French immersion class found that those subjects exposed to an experimental set of teaching materials outperformed control subjects at the end of eight weeks. There were no significant differences between the groups after three months. (Author/CB)

Illustrates how the pedagogical strategies of French immersion teachers are shaped by various aspects of those teachers' representations of language. (35 references) (Author/CK)

A French immersion program in Brazil took a group of adults to a mountain retreat for a weekend of intensive language use through fantasy scenarios. (MSE)

Teaching methods based on activity-centered learning applicable to ESL, French, and immersion programs are examined. Examples are given of activities fostering learning both in the classroom and on excursions, along with the psycholinguistic principles on which they are based. (MSE)