Culture has not always played a major role in foreign language instruction. Indeed, it was only in the 1980s that educators began giving serious thought to employing culture for language learning purposes. Exploring issues of otherness in Pepe Danquart's film "Schwarzfahrer", this article illustrates how one can address the more controversial…

There has been a growing interest in and concern for the teaching of listening in the last 40 years. Looking back over the years, we can see how the emphases on teaching listening and the focus of listening instruction have changed. Although instructional practices were initially heavily influenced by models of the written language and a…

This study seeks to uncover the characteristics of foreign language instructors' discourse styles implemented in the classroom when teaching students the target language. Foreign language classrooms are unique to academia because the teachers of the language, depending on whether they are native or non-native speakers of the target language,…

This introduction to the 2009 "Modern Language Journal" Focus Issue uses the lens of an ecological perspective on the acquisition of second languages to provide additional insights into the contributions by various computer-assisted language learning (CALL) scholars to this update on Garrett (1991), "Technology in the service of language learning:…

The purpose of the study is to provide a guideline for the pedagogical approaches to teach Thai students the grammar of the Chinese adverbs "zai" and "you". Questionnaire results revealed that the reasons for the misuse of "zai" and "you" by Thai university students can be classified into three causes: (1) "zai" and "you" suggest repeatedness and…

Design of the Integrated English Language Curriculum has been blamed for falling standards of students' competence in the subject. Teacher input in the curriculum design has rarely been considered in the centralized curriculum development approach used in Kenya. However, it is now recognized that teacher input is critical if curriculum is to be…

The present paper reports on an approximate replication of Foster's (1998) study on the negotiation of meaning. Foster investigated the interactional adjustments produced by L2 English learners working on different types of language learning tasks in a classroom setting. The replication study duplicates the methods of data collection and data…

Although research in the area of listening processes and strategies is increasing, it still remains the least understood and least researched of the four skills (Vandergrift, 2007). Based on research in listening comprehension, task design and strategies, this article uses a mixed methods approach to shed light on the development of four…

Taking broadly sociocultural or sociolinguistic perspectives, the five contributions to this special issue investigate various aspects of the co-construction of knowledge, as this is manifested in K-16 classrooms in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. While the authors of these papers address different educational settings, student…

This study investigated the differential effects of prompts and recasts, in the context of dyadic interaction, on the acquisition of grammatical gender by adult second language learners of French. Participants were 25 undergraduate students enrolled in an intermediate-level French course at an English-speaking university. All students were exposed…

Intriguingly, at a time when the ELT market is inundated with state-of-the-art coursebooks teaching modern-day English, a 30-year-old series enjoys continuing popularity in some secondary schools in Hungary. Why would teachers, several of whom are school-based teacher-mentors in the vanguard of the profession, purposefully choose materials which…

This dissertation investigated the concepts of literacy held by Thai teachers of university-level Foundation English courses, the connection between concepts of literacy and EFL literacy instruction, teachers' literacy-teaching practices, and the challenges these teachers faced in teaching EFL literacy. The relationship between the concepts of…

This study attempts comprehensively to investigate the effect of form versus meaning-focused tasks on the development of collocations among Iranian Intermediate EFL learners. To this end, 65 students of Mashhad High schools in Iran were selected as the participants. A general language proficiency test of Nelson (book 2, Intermediate 200A) was used…

The primary focus of this study was to determine the effect of portfolio assessment on final examination scores of EFL students' writing skill. To determine the impact of portfolio-based writing assessment 40 university students who enrolled in composition course were initially selected and divided randomly into two experimental and control…

This article presents some of the results of a qualitative research project about the influences of the pedagogic strategies used by a mediator (graduate student in applied linguistics) in the supervision process of a Teletandem partner (undergraduate student in languages) on her pedagogical practice. It was done within the project…