Blogs and podcasts open new ways for global communication and development of intercultural awareness. This article reports a Spanish-American telecollaborative project through which students created blogs and podcasts for intercultural exchanges in light of the sociocultural perspectives. The article outlines the methodology for the project…

Communicative language teaching (CLT) is promoted in teacher education programmes around the world, although the appropriateness of this methodology in contexts outside the English-speaking West has been questioned, often from a theoretical perspective. In fact, very little empirical research has been conducted into the practical knowledge of CLT…

This study draws on research conducted with participants of a professional development project focusing on serving the needs of English language learners in U.S. public schools. We analyze the reflections of two preservice teachers as an assessment of our ability to meet our goal for social justice in teacher education. Qualitative analysis of the…

In New Zealand, as in other countries, increasing numbers of students are learning English through immersion in the mainstream curriculum. These students are reliant on their teachers' planning for language form in their content teaching. In addition, there are many native speaker students whose learning difficulties are linguistic in origin and…

The present study examines the effects of 3 kinds of glosses--first-language (L1) Chinese glosses plus second-language (L2) English example sentences, L1 in-text glosses, and L1 marginal glosses--in comparison with a no-gloss condition in reading an English passage, to explore whether providing glosses can facilitate reading comprehension and…

This paper concerns the teaching of English to learners who are studying, or will soon study, engineering and who are expected to do at least part of their studying through textbooks written in English. Such students, especially in universities in developing countries, often find themselves very poorly equipped by their secondary education for…

This article explores one element of collaborative practice: the integration of English language learner-focused instruction and discussion in a secondary English methods course. Drawing on the authors' expertise, they examine revisions made to a secondary English methods course to better address the academic and individual needs of diverse…

This article reports findings of a Study in Mexico program and its potential for transforming teacher beliefs and observations about schooling in Mexico. This particular program has been in existence for 17 years; however, findings for this study are limited to data collected during two consecutive summers. The study was qualitative in design, and…

This study examined opinions about some theoretical and practical tenets of bilingualism and bilingual education, as well as about the instructional use of English language learners' (ELLs) native languages in the classroom, of 77 teachers from Spain working in California as part of the California/Spain Visiting Teachers Program. In their…

This mixed-method study examines the proficiency in and perceptions of French language learning of Grade 8 students who were exposed to an instructional approach called the Accelerative Integrated Method (AIM). Six AIM classes (n = 125) and six non-AIM classes (n = 135) were observed and their students tested using a four-skills French as a second…

Acquiring an adequate vocabulary is a cognitive challenge for foreign language learners. Varied exposures to newly acquired words as they occur in meaningful contexts may facilitate the process of vocabulary learning. In this study we investigated the effects of such a multiple-strategy-based vocabulary teaching approach. We conducted an…

Second language acquisition (SLA) researchers strive to understand the language and exchanges that learners generate in synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC). Doughty and Long (2003) advocate replacing open-ended SCMC with task-based language teaching (TBLT) design principles. Since most task-based SCMC (TB-SCMC) research addresses an…

Providing feedback is one of the foreign language writing teacher's most important tasks (Ferris, 2007). However there is less certainty about the techniques that should be used (K. Hyland & F. Hyland, 2006). This article reports on research that investigated the effects of two types of teacher feedback, on-tape and written, and of the absence…

In the light of recommendations made by the Tomlinson and Dearing reports, this article explores the distinctive contribution that vocational language courses can make to the language learning experience of secondary-school pupils. It starts by presenting an overview of vocational options currently on offer to stem the disaffection with modern…

The mnemonic keyword method is an effective technique for vocabulary acquisition. This study examines the effects on recall of word-meaning pairs of (a) training in use of the keyword procedure at the time of retrieval; and (b) the influence of the self-rated ability to image. The performance of students trained in bidirectional retrieval using…