Japanese EFL international students may experience high levels of apprehension when communicating in English due to their culture, educational background, attitudes towards the role of English in their society, and lack of opportunities to practice speaking in English. Although the students in this study had studied English before joining the…

The rapid growth of Mandarin Chinese and English dual-language (DL) programs and the differences between these two languages have fostered the need to investigate the early literacy performance of young students in a Mandarin/English DL program. This study used the interactive transfer framework (Chung et al., 2019) to understand the Mandarin and…

Research focused on learning mathematics in a 2nd language is generally located in individual 2nd-language contexts. In this ethnographic study, I investigated mathematics learning in 4 different second-language contexts: a mainstream classroom, a sheltered classroom for Indigenous students, a welcome class for new immigrants, and a…

Pinyin is a sound-annotating system for Chinese characters using Roman letters. Teaching and learning Pinyin has been an important educational practice in Mainland China for native Chinese children, and it is also typically taught to beginning learners of Chinese as a foreign/second language in tertiary-level classrooms. However, whether it should…

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is a rapidly growing area of both research and practice in all parts of the world, especially in Europe and Asia. As a young discipline, CLIL has a good potential of distinguishing itself from monolingual L2 immersion education models by becoming more flexible and balanced about the role of L1 in…

This paper looks at reading in French immersion and how learning French is seen more as a skill rather than a social practice that could be examined through a more critical lens. Most of the teachers often teach students how to read but rarely will they discuss the role of French in Canadian society and how this is manifested in the texts they…

As a language, Irish is unique to Ireland and is, therefore, of crucial importance to the identity of the Irish people, to Irish culture and to world heritage. The Irish language however has had a turbulent and traumatic history and has endured a complex and varied relationship with the Irish people. Since the foundation of the Irish Free State,…

This review of the extant research literature focuses on research about content-based language instruction (CBI) programmes in K-12 foreign/second language education in the USA. The review emphasises studies on one-way language immersion (OWI) and two-way language immersion (TWI) programmes, which are school-based and subject matter-driven. OWI…

Greater China is used in this article to refer to mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Macao. While a holistic approach is adopted to present and compare the rapid spread of English and development in English language education in these geographically close, and sociopolitically, culturally and economically interrelated but hugely…

The role of the first language (L1) in the learning of a second language (L2) has been widely studied as a source of cross-linguistic influence from the native system (Gass and Selinker, "Language Transfer in Language Learning," John Benjamins, 1992). Yet, this perspective provides no room for an understanding of language as a cognitive tool…

Given the raised graduation requirement of the proficiency Enhancement Program (PEP) to attain proficiency levels of "2+," "2+," and "2," the importance of target language use has been highly emphasized across language schools at Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC). This article discusses some of the challenges associated…

It is an underlying principle of Australian Education Review (AER) 54 that active efforts should be made to cultivate the latent bilingual potential within Australia's wider population and that this should be linked to major improvements in the quality of language teaching in schools. A combined approach of this kind will require investment in…

A study investigated the academic, sociocultural, psychological, and linguistic adaptation of a shy four-year-old native Cantonese-speaking child enrolled in early French immersion in Canada, learning English and French simultaneously. Areas of future research on trilingualism are suggested, and the popular belief that immersion works only for…

An interview with Guy Roy, adjunct minister of education and professional education in Manitoba (Canada), explores the role of French, French language instruction, and French-language education outside Quebec Province, and specifically in Manitoba. Issues discussed include language and cultural maintenance, immersion education, language attitudes,…

Describes the Canadian program of French immersion in terms of current issues in the theory of second-language (L2) learning, including the role of consciousness, optimal timing of L2 learning, communicative competency classification, and the role of the first language. Implications for L2 pedagogy and requirements for a new language pedagogy are…