Mathematics teaching and learning are inherently complex practices, and reports suggest that American teachers are not as successful at teaching mathematics as the authors might hope. In this article, the authors explore how a seemingly ubiquitous new technology--the personal audio/video player--just might help teachers improve mathematics…

The current study examined 24 Japanese university students' processes of negotiation in conditions of self revision and of peer revision about their English as a foreign language (EFL) writing. Analyzing their negotiation episodes and text changes, I categorized within a common coding scheme the types of negotiation from (a) think-aloud protocols…

Sharing classroom practices across international borders can add new dimensions to teaching methods, no matter where one calls home. With this idea in mind, the authors (two U.S. early childhood teacher educators and a Kenyan-born U.S. early childhood teacher) have corresponded for several years through e-mail with a small group of early childhood…

The purpose of the study was to examine the effects of gender differences on the application of CALL programs for second language acquisition. Gender difference is an important theme in linguistic education because it influences the design of curriculum, teaching method, instructional strategy, and students' learning processes. This study applied…

Learning invariably proceeds by relating new facts to the already familiar and present in the conceptual structure. In the context of FL study the familiar is, of course, the student's mother tongue. Drawing on the learner's L[subscript 1] (or another mastered tongue) and showing comparisons and contrasts between the languages mirrors, facilitates…

Ten high-school students of English as a second language (ESL) intensively studied the modified version of "The Cay" (retold by Strange, 1997). During their study the teacher asked questions designed to elicit students' comprehension and understanding of racism and prejudice as the main themes of "The Cay". Analysis of classroom discourse data…

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is a term widely used in Europe to refer to different forms of content based education, often conducted in English. Earlier research on CLIL has tended to focus on matters of language learning or content mastery rather than on details of classroom interaction. This paper investigates how English is…

This article presents perceptions of Portuguese teacher education students concerning their participation in the Galanet project's plurilingual online communication (with Romance languages) and, particularly, the contribution of this participation in the development of their educational competence in relation to personal, intercultural and…

This article reports the potential of online role-playing games to be a powerful tool for English as a second language (ESL) learning. When Professor Edd Schneider and game designer Kai Zheng suggested to attendees gathered in San Francisco last spring for the annual Game Developers Conference that massively multiplayer online role-playing games,…

This article explores teachers' identity formation through a narrative inquiry of the professional identity of an EFL teacher, Minfang, in the People's Republic of China. Drawing on Wenger's (1998) social theory of identity formation as a dual process of identification and negotiation of meanings, it examines the lived experience of Minfang as an…

This article presents a case study of academic language instruction in a high school "English Learner Science" course. It illustrates how a teacher's understanding of academic language affects her instruction and students' opportunities for learning. We examine a transcript of classroom discourse for the "didactic tension" that exists between this…

This article outlines some of the key issues involved in developing a programme of strategy training for learners of French, in listening and in writing. It highlights the theoretical perspectives and research findings on listening and writing that informed the selection of strategies to teach learners and thence the development of appropriate…

Cross-study comparison of the impact of strategy instruction (SI) is problematic because of differences in learning settings, the periods of time over which it is undertaken and the nature of the SI itself. Few studies indicate how the choice of skill areas and strategies has been tailored to meet the learners' age, stage and proficiency level,…

Learners' pronunciation errors when reading aloud in the L2 often suggest an inability to use the language's sound-symbol relationships, or grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs). UK teaching methodology has failed to provide systematic instruction in L2 phonological decoding, and there is an absence of research on the effectiveness of teaching…

Second language acquisition is a hard task for teachers, since to achieve the motivation from students to practice a language simulating a real context is very difficult. On the one hand, students are often influenced by their mother tongue and more when they are practising a second language with a partner from the same nationality. On the other,…