In this essay, ESL students in their first year of college discuss their feelings about the use of literature in composition courses and offer qualified support for its inclusion. In particular, the lit-comp issue is especially complex where ESL students are involved, as literary texts in English can prove daunting to read and write about for…

Thirty-three preschool children who were learning English as a second language participated in 16 weeks of either comprehension-oriented or letter/rhyme-focused small group instruction. Pretests and posttests of book vocabulary, story comprehension, print concepts, letter naming, writing, rhyming, and English oral proficiency were given. Children…

It has now become commonplace to state that foreign language learning should be viewed in an intercultural perspective. The main objective of foreign language education is no longer defined strictly in terms of the acquisition of communicative competence. Teachers are now required to teach intercultural communicative competence. The aim of the…

For most middle school-level students, summarizing main ideas can prove to be difficult, especially for those with low vocabulary and language acquisition skills. Working specifically with students who are English Language Learners (ELLs) and in a special education program, we discovered that teaching summarization as a reading strategy increased…

This article challenges the pervasive notion that linguistic and ethnic diversity are causes of the perceived gap in achievement in schools highly affected by Spanish-speaking students participating in programs of bilingual education. The study examines existing data from the state of Colorado with regard to student achievement and compares these…

There is a curious disjuncture in the current discourse(s) on the schooling of immigrant and minority students. The official discourse, as has been communicated through the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 rhetoric and the concomitant focus on standards and assessment, says that minority children, especially English language learners…

This article reports on an introspective study that examined the relationship between first language L1; Farsi lexicalization of the concepts represented by the second language L2; English target words and learners' inferencing behavior while reading English texts. Participants were 20 Farsi-speaking university students of English as a foreign…

This article is a collaborative initiative of the TESL profession in Manitoba. It reflects the authors' attempts to articulate the role of the ESL teaching profession and practice in Canadian multiculturalism. Recognizing ESL teachers' historical roles as agents of assimilation, the authors consider how the field can reorient itself to serve…

Significant progress has been made toward greater professional recognition for adult ESL instructors in Canada over the past decade. At the same time, an ever-increasing demand for English-language teachers, particularly abroad, has resulted in a substantial growth in the number of private companies offering short-term ESL/EFL teacher training.…

During the past five years, an increasing number of younger international students from mainland China have appeared on Canadian campuses to pursue their first university degrees. What is it like being a international student studying in a foreign language and culture at such a young age? Through narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000),…

The aim of this paper is to describe a task-cycling pedagogy for language learning using a technique we have called "Stimulated Reflection". This pedagogical approach has been developed in the light of the new technology options available, especially those that facilitate audiovisual forms of interaction among language learners and teachers. In…

Despite the new possibilities that speech synthesis brings about, few Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) applications integrating speech synthesis have found their way onto the market. One potential reason is that the suitability and benefits of the use of speech synthesis in CALL have not been proven. One way to do this is through…

In the present study we investigate sentence production in the German interlanguage of Turkish students who have learned German as a first and English as a second foreign language. The students know both languages at an (advanced) intermediate level. Nevertheless, we observed some properties of the German interlanguage that seem to indicate an…

Malta has experienced various linguistic influences over the course of time. Maltese and English are presently the official languages of the island. Nevertheless, Italian was never completely erased from the Maltese linguistic scene and over the past years its popularity has increased considerably because of the influence of Italian television…

This article examines processes of gender identity construction in the classrooms of two ESOL teachers living in their first year of teaching. Drawing from a year-long study of beginning teaching, the author explores the complex relationship among the physical body, language pedagogy, and socially constructed understandings of beauty, then goes on…