Pragmatic competence is essential for oral fluency and listening comprehension, allowing speakers to use and interpret language appropriately in varied contexts. The use of technological applications for teaching pragmatics is on the rise (Taguchi & Sykes, 2013), in part because they are well-suited to the types of awareness-raising tasks…

This article discusses perceptions of and performance in listening by a group of heritage and non-heritage learners of Portuguese. Our data include a survey containing background information and perceptions about listening, two listening tasks and a post-task self-report on how learners arrived at their answers. Quantitative and qualitative…

The influence of sex-role identity on academic achievement behaviors and attitudes is just beginning to be understood. This paper examines two subject areas, mathematics and English, which have traditionally been sex-typed as male and female domains, respectively. Two mechanisms by which sex-role identity may affect achievement behaviors--value of…

Students in eight urban and three suburban high schools were asked for their perceptions of social studies, mathematics, and English. Although most students thought that learning all three subjects was important, they believed that learning social studies was less important than learning mathematics and English. The majority thought that their…