Studies on teachers' beliefs about vocabulary learning and teaching have focused, so far, on English as a second language (L2), or foreign language (FL), in different contexts but little attention has been given to other L2s and FLs. In this study, 15 Spanish L2 instructors at large universities were interviewed in order to better understand where…

The purpose of this qualitative action research study was to explore improving first semester training practices for graduate teaching assistants (TAs) in the Spanish program at Arizona State University's (ASU) Tempe Campus. Adding to research on TA training in higher education, a communities of practice (CoP) framework was combined with concrete…

The highly diverse character of US universities provides an opportunity for writing programs to (re)examine the extent to which their current administrative, curricular, and pedagogical practices support a growing student population with unique linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds, resources, and needs. This dissertation research…

This paper reports the results of a narrative inquiry study on exchange programs, intercultural awareness, and professional development in eight former participants of the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant--FLTA--program. This study used written narratives to collect data from eight participants of the FLTA scholarship program who…

Technology has shaped the personal experiences of Teaching Assistants (TAs) of French at the collegiate level in the United States (US), what they feel about the technology tools that are accessible in their work environment, and how they use these tools in their practice of teaching. Yet, there is limited research on the specific topic of the…

There are two broad approaches to the research and teaching of second-language (L2) pronunciation--'bottom-up' and 'top-down'--which roughly align with structural and communicative approaches to language teaching. A bottom-up approach, explicitly focusing on de-contextualised linguistic forms, is structuralist and predominated in the second half…

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…

Language assistants have become an important resource for teachers in bilingual schools in Spain, especially in the Madrid region. Most language assistants come from English-speaking countries, especially from the United States. In their role as language assistants, they are expected to bring and share their knowledge about the cultural aspects…

Drawing on qualitative data gathered from interviews with twelve doctoral students in a composition program at a mid-size public university in the Northeast United States, this article documents graduate teacher-scholars' conceptual understanding of translingual pedagogy in the context of college writing instruction. I analyze and describe the…

Recent policy reforms in Scotland mean that all primary teachers are expected to teach a foreign language (FL) to children from age 5, introducing a second language around age 9. This small-scale research study aimed to ascertain 38 primary teachers' perceptions of their confidence to teach an FL to primary learners and what they felt would be…

Rhetorical word stress has been identified as a feature of public, presentational, and didactic speech styles in Spanish through theoretical descriptions, intuitive accounts, and laboratory-based empirical research. Most scholars agree that non-primary stress is acoustically marked by pitch and primary stress is marked by segment lengthening. The…

In countries such as the United States and Canada, an increasing number of non-native English speaking graduate students work in the capacity of university teaching assistants. Over the past several decades, a number of communication challenges between non-native English speaking International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) and native English-speaking…

There is a pressing need for language instructors and programs to develop a critical consciousness of how teaching and institutional practices may perpetuate harmful language ideologies and an urgency to promote structural changes (e.g., at the curricular level, via teaching training and equitable pedagogies) to meet the needs of both L2 and…

The 2007 Modern Language Association (MLA) report recommended that foreign language (FL) graduate students be provided with "substantive training in language teaching and in the use of new technologies". In the present study, I examined teaching methodology ("methods") course syllabi in order to gauge the extent of professional…

The possession of a foreign accent constitutes one of the challenges international teaching assistants have to deal with in their encounters in U.S. classrooms. This challenge often impacts their perceived competence and effectiveness in the classroom. Consequently, undergraduate students usually have existing stereotypes about international…