This article describes the evolution of communication technologies, accompanying transformations in everyday communicative activity, and pedagogical possibilities these tools support in second and foreign language (L2) settings. We begin with an overview of synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) and uses of the Internet to mediate…

International schools are increasingly identifying Functionally Multi-Lingual children in their student populations. These students, bilingual or multilingual at surface levels of conversation, have not established academic competence in any single language. In many cases, the teacher may assume that another, more robust language exists, when in…

School- and university-based writing tasks make demands on cognitive processing and socio-cultural knowledge that vary with the discipline in which the writing is situated. The variation in socio-cognitive demands makes the use of self-accessed, computer-mediated writing instruction more promising than conventional, teacher-fronted instruction. To…

The assumption that the "purpose" of school foreign language teaching is to serve "instrumental" ends may largely underlie the present adolescent dropout. In this article the author proposes a two-stage foreign language apprenticeship. A two-stage apprenticeship would include a carefully planned diagnostic element, preparing…

This article presents a writing portfolio project whose primary goal is to integrate the development of proficiency skills, content knowledge, and grammatical competence through literary study. Excerpts from Queneau's (1947) "Exercices de style," which tells the same story 99 times, serve as the basis for this portfolio project: These excerpts are…

This study investigates Chinese immigrant high school students' perceptions of cooperative learning and their interactions during cooperative learning activities in English as a second language (ESL) classes. The findings present a complex picture of cooperative learning in the ESL classroom. The interview results demonstrate that the Chinese…

This paper examines how context is configured in ESL students' language learning practices through computer-mediated communication (CMC). Specifically, I focus on how a group of ESL students jointly constructed the context of their CMC activities through interactional patterns and norms, and how configured affordances within the CMC environment…

This study investigated growth in reading, vocabulary, and memory in children (ages 5 to 10) learning English as a second language identified at risk for reading disabilities (RD). A growth curve analysis showed that RD children were significantly below children not at risk in English and Spanish reading, Spanish short-term memory (STM), Spanish…

This paper takes a sociocultural approach to exploring the factors that enhance young children's bilingual development. The language excerpts presented were gathered as part of a three-year Early Childhood Centre of Innovation project funded by the New Zealand government. Data gathered in this project challenge Krashen's (1981) position that young…

This preliminary study provides an interpretive reading of focus group interviews of four Korean American children in the Phoenix metropolitan area. It examines how these Korean American children are negotiating their ethnic identity as Korean Americans while learning Korean as a heritage language. It shows that maintaining heritage language is…

This article describes the development of an English spelling measure designed to assess the progress made by Spanish-English bilingual children from Grade 2 to Grade 5. Different stages of developing the measure are described, such as selecting the focus features, the prepilot and pilot phases, and the operational version. Two underlying…

This study examines interviews with 46 undergraduates to explore if participants with differing language and cultural backgrounds view plagiarism or textual appropriation primarily as a) a language problem because of a lack of words of one's own, or b) a cultural challenge as a result of either some first language (L1) cultural training to…

In this article, we draw on disruptive scenes in a postsecondary classroom to examine a critical incident concerning conflicting readings of the film "Pearl Harbor" (2001). We raise crucial questions for pedagogical work with popular film: Who speaks for whom about the meaning of a given film? Under what conditions do students resist…

This study explored whether the learner ethnicity has any influence on the frequency and the choice of language learning strategy use by investigating learners of Japanese through the use of the SILL. The participants were 151 students of Japanese at an American University. The results of the mean SILL scores of each ethnicity revealed that the…

This study examined how three different sources of stimulus variability--overall amplitude, fundamental frequency, and speaking rate--affect second language (L2) vocabulary learning. Native English speakers learned Spanish words in presentation formats with no variability, moderate variability, and high variability. Dependent measures were…