This article reports on a collaborative action research study carried out on three groups of Spanish beginners during the implementation of a strategy awareness raising programme (SAR). The objective was to analyse the impact of the SAR programme on the students' learning process in three main areas: strategy awareness, strategy use in learning…

A strong case can be made for developing more flexible and relevant multilingual strategies for teaching and learning within the field of bilingual education. This paper aims to demonstrate how current linguistic and educational practices in countries like Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Ethiopia suggest new directions for research and practice. A…

This study addresses differences between pre- and in-service teacher beliefs about readiness and self-competency in helping English language learners' (ELL) language and academic achievement in content area classes. It also examines the role of gender and certain background factors in mediating differences in beliefs while providing suggestions to…

The controversy over the place of translation in the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is a thriving field of inquiry. Many older language teaching methodologies such as the Direct Method, the Audio-lingual Method, and Natural and Communicative Approaches, tended to either neglect the role of translation, or prohibit it entirely as a…

In this age of accountability and assessment, classroom teachers need to be encouraged to become action researchers. Action research helps them look at a challenge in the classroom in depth and adjust the curriculum, their teaching methods, or both when they find that current practices are not meeting the needs of some or all students. If…

The development and implementation of the program "Inclusion of Repatriated Greek and Foreign Immigrant Students in School Education" (referred to as the "Program") by the University of Athens, in collaboration with the National Ministry of Education, initially formed an innovative, external support initiative to schools in the…

This article describes the development and evaluation of a computer-assisted language learning approach which integrates a finite state dialogue engine with an animated pedagogical agent. The design of the request game is theoretically motivated by interlanguage pragmatics and Long's Interaction Hypothesis. The tutoring system creates a venue in…

The literature on corrective feedback (CF) that second language writers receive in response to their grammatical and lexical errors is plagued by controversies and conflicting findings about the merits of feedback. Although more recent studies suggest that CF is valuable (e.g., Bitchener, 2008; Sheen, 2007), it is still not clear whether direct or…

Foreign language anxiety (FLA) has been the focus of many studies into affect in classroom settings. However, the growing numbers of distance language learners worldwide in recent years calls for greater attention to be paid to this increasingly important constituency of language learners. Following on from Hurd's investigation into FLA with…

This qualitative study focused on the classroom experiences of 14 English Language Learners (ELL) students in urban high schools. The authors argue that specific structures within classrooms and schools affect ELL students' agency, or their ability to access and appropriate resources to meet their learning and social needs. Using a narrative…

In this article, I return to the interactions of Augusto and his teacher in an "English Learner Science" classroom in a demographically-transitioning US Midwest community (Richardson Bruna and Vann in Cult Stud Sci Educ 2:19-59, "2007") and further engage a class-first perspective to achieve two main conceptual objectives.…

The article reports the views of 20 Chinese English as a foreign Language (EFL) students on the strengths and weaknesses of native English-speaking (NES) teachers in EFL teaching. Responding to an open-ended questionnaire and in-depth interviews, EFL students named the following as NES teachers' strengths: native language authenticity, cultural…

Four first-grade teachers used discussion prompts to encourage thinking about and responding to text in different ways. This article describes how the teachers introduced the prompts and provides examples of how the prompts were integrated into classroom activities. Teachers found that using the prompts was an effective way to initiate and…

This article examines teachers' relationships with foreign students during eras marked by large waves of immigration to the United States and by policies that shifted from cultural assimilation (1900-1920) to present-day accountability. We compare teachers' understandings of and instructional practices regarding foreign-born English language…

A key challenge facing professional communication teachers is the need to bridge the gap between the culture of the classroom and the reality of the workplace. One area of difference between the two contexts is the way in which collaborative activities surrounding the construction of written text are enacted. Differences in collaborative practices…