As digital technologies proliferate throughout classrooms in the United States, iPads and other mobile tablets have been heralded as tools for enhanced peer collaboration. However, little research has examined exactly how students interact with and around iPads during collaborative learning tasks. This study employs multimodal interaction analysis…

In this empirical study, we analyse how five-year-old children are socialised into particular interpretive practices indicative of a literate mind. The data come from translation activities where children with their teacher listen to and then talk about how to understand the lyrics to a popular children's song. The setting is a Finnish-Swedish…

Purpose: This study aims to document the impact of an 80-h virtual Spanish language immersion program on four elementary school leaders in Kentucky. Design/methodology/approach: This study used a mixed methods approach. Each subject participated in three semi-structured interviews with the researcher and a standardized oral language assessment.…

At the intersection of social studies and world language curricula are opportunities to explore students' prior learning with vocabulary-rich content designed to support language acquisition goals. "Funds of knowledge" is defined as socio-cultural, economic, and historical knowledge from home and community settings. The instructional…

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…

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…

Drawing on Language Awareness (LA) approaches developed for francophone classrooms and a sociocultural theoretical perspective on language and learning that posits the genesis of new knowledge construction is situated in social interactions and shaped by socio-historical context, we conducted a small-scale case study of the implementation of LA…

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…

Describes the successful organization of 2 foreign language days for middle school students and provides a synopsis of why an immersion day is an important activity and what steps a teacher might take in order to attempt such an endeavor. Guidelines for planning an immersion day are included. (Author/VWL)

The second language (French or English) learning activity portion of Katimavik, a nine-month volunteer community service and experiential learning program for 17 to 21-year-old Canadians, provides an opportunity for living in a French language environment with other people who speak French, or, for participants whose native language is French, to…

This document describes a language immersion environment, a summer camp for learning languages, and the technology-rich projects that these learners were involved in. Technology projects and what is thought to have been accomplished through them is examined. It is discussed that many of the same things in a more typical school environment could be…

A total immersion program at North Rose-Wolcott High School, Wolcott, New York, involves speaking in the target language over a period of hours or days, the assistance of at least one fluent speaker for each six students, and a planned schedule of activities. Programs have varied from activities at the home of a teacher, all-day interaction at…

Presents activities that demonstrate how productivity software can be used to motivate beginning middle-school foreign- language students (or elementary-school foreign-language- immersion students.) The exercises employ word-processing tools to increase language fluency, spelling, and agreement skills. (Author/LRW)