This report, the last in a series of four 1996 releases of students' opinions, represents a continued effort by MetLife to provide insight and understanding to current issues of education in American public schools. The survey assessed student opinions and interests in learning about multicultural topics. Public school students from middle and…

A study investigated the effects of the Directed Reading Thinking Activity on Egyptian first-year secondary stage EFL students' referential and inferential reading comprehension. The study utilized a pretest-posttest control group experimental design. The subjects consisted of 72 first-year secondary students in Menouf Secondary School for Boys at…

This paper highlights the substantial overlap in recommended practices from two emerging areas of educational research: research on the academic literacy development of adolescents and research on English language learners (ELLs) in secondary schools. Specifically, this paper examines instructional principles related to the connection between…

Tasks have become an essential feature of second language (L2) learning in recent years. Tasks range from getting learners to repeat linguistic elements satisfactorily to having them perform in "free" production. Along this task-based continuum, task-based scenario interaction lies at the point midway between controlled and…

This edited volume brings together 14 diverse articles dealing with various aspects of language policy and pedagogy. Chapter titles include the following: "Language Practice, Language Ideology, and Language Policy" (Bernard Spolsky and Elana Shohamy); "The Status Agenda in Corpus Planning" (Joshua A. Fishman); "The Way…

To prepare American preservice teachers for online teaching and for reaching diverse learners, an e-mail correspondence partnership was created between American and Taiwanese university students. Students explored the theory and practice of online instruction, corresponded as "keypals" to teach the English language and American culture,…

Synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC), more commonly known in the Internet world as "chatting," has become an increasingly popular way to communicate for a variety of purposes. While CMC is still primarily recreational in character, educators are waking up to the possibilities of harnessing this activity for pedagogical…

Critical pedagogy brings a new sociopolitical view of linguistics and language teaching that is beginning to influence the teaching of English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) field. This paper aims to do two things: first, to convey an understanding of what these new views are, why and where they originated, whose voices are important, what…

This paper is built on the assumption that sound language learning is based on high quality teaching, and that foreign language teachers therefore play a very important role in the effectiveness of foreign language education. This leads to several questions: How can foreign language teachers be prepared in their pre-service teacher education…

Student testing in Japan is not effectively used. In many cases test results are used only for ranking and sorting students into whatever the designated purposes of the tests are. They are not focused on monitoring individual student progress. This is an especially inadequate approach for teaching oral communications courses. This paper proposes a…

This study examined how journal writing could improve language minority students' language acquisition. Participants were Serbo-Croatian and Laotian second and third graders from two elementary schools. Initial student surveys and writing assignments, conducted in September to document the problem, found that students lacked writing skills,…

This issue includes the following articles and reviews: "Lexical Issues in the University ESL Writing Class" (Mary Lowry); "Interlanguage Pragmatics: What Can It Offer to Language Teachers?" (Aya Matsuda); "Promoting Collaboration: Using Computer-Mediated Communication Tools in the Practicum Course" (Lia Kamhi-Stein);…

Researchers worked with French, Japanese, and Spanish immersion teachers in metropolitan Washington, DC elementary schools (grades 1-6) to implement language learning strategies in their classrooms. Workshops, materials, and observations were provided for professional support. Teachers were debriefed on the effectiveness of the teacher training…

This document comprises the two 1997 issues of the journal. Articles include the following: "The Importance of Learning English: A National Survey of Hispanic Parents" (Michael La Velle); "The Languages of Immigrants" (Charles L. Glenn); "Follow-Up Study on the Bethlehem, PA School District's English Acquisition…

This document provides a brief overview of the results of the recent research and data synthesis funded by the U.S. Department of Education on effective educational approaches that promote the acquisition of English language arts and skills and grade-appropriate content for limited-English-proficient (LEP) students. This group, also known as…