The view according to which second/foreign language teaching should include an intercultural dimension has gained ground during recent decades. The basic aim of teaching a second/foreign language concerns not only the acquisition of communicational competence, but also the acquisition of intercultural communicational competence. This paper…

This paper addresses the complicated issue of attribution of gender in French nouns. Firstly, it presents a range of views on how native speakers address noun gender allocation, plus some insight into why they are accurate with most, but by no means all, gender attributions. Secondly, the paper explains some of the inconsistencies in noun gender…

This article presents a critical comparison of the usefulness and practicality of six CMC video chat tools (CUworld, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Paltalk, Skype, and Yahoo Messenger) from the perspective of language teaching professionals. This comparison is based on the results of a semester-long project between graduate students at an American university…

Content-based instruction (CBI) has been touted as an effective curricular approach in a wide range of educational contexts, including immersion and English as a second language. Yet this approach to curriculum design is rarely implemented in conventional K-16 foreign language (FL) programs in the United States today. The phenomenological study…

"Process-oriented pedagogy: facilitation, empowerment, or control?" claims that process-oriented pedagogy (POP) represents the methodological perspective of most practising teachers and that outcomes-based education (OBE) poses a real and present danger to stakeholder autonomy. Whereas POP may characterize methodological practices in the inner…

The use of semantic links or networks in L2 vocabulary acquisition has been a popular subject for numerous studies. On one hand, there is a strong theoretical background stating that presenting words in related fashion facilitates the learning of L2 vocabulary. On the other hand, research evidence indicates that semantically related vocabulary…

The study investigates the effects of second-year university students' metacognitive beliefs and strategies on learning Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL). The analysis shows that metacognitive beliefs, which identify students who are confident about their ability to learn a foreign language, are positively associated with students' CFL…

Heritage language speakers constitute a unique cultural and linguistic resource in the United States while also presenting particular challenges for language educators and language programs. This paper examines the potential of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) in a curriculum for Spanish second language learners/heritage speakers, with…

Information gap tasks have played a key role in applied linguistics (Pica, 2005). For example, extensive research has been conducted using information gap tasks to elicit second language data. Yet, despite their prominent role in research and pedagogy, there is still much to be investigated with regard to what information gap tasks offer research…

Following growing interest in vocabulary acquisition, a number of researchers have proposed how learners' vocabulary knowledge can be measured both in terms of how many words they know (vocabulary size) and how well they know those words (depth of knowledge). However, most of the depth measures have addressed only a single depth aspect (often for…

The author provides an overview of the prevailing assessment and instructional issues related to culturally and linguistically diverse students with special education needs. Also, the author presents current trends and prevalence rates of students with disabilities who are also English language learners, in addition to general guidelines for the…

Motivation to learn foreign languages is a significant determinant of successful language acquisition. The subject has been widely researched in the past, and since the early 1990s a great deal of empirical research related to the classroom environment has been proposed to expand theory into everyday classroom practice. I present an empirical,…

This study investigated the situation of teaching and learning idioms at a university level in Vietnam, a foreign language context. It also examined the evaluation of the idiom teaching process in three language classes over a 15-week period for pre-service teachers of English. The data were collected though questionnaires, in-depth interviews and…

Task-based language learning using the benefits of online computer-assisted language learning (CALL) can be effective for rapid vocabulary expansion, especially when target vocabulary has been pre-arranged into bilingual categories under simpler, common Semantic Field Keywords. Results and satisfaction levels for both Chinese English majors and…

This study reports the impact of a professional development course on experienced, highly qualified secondary school teachers of English as a foreign language in preparation for their becoming paid assessors of student teachers on practicum. The course concerned a literacy-oriented pedagogy informed by literacy pedagogical content knowledge…