Learning to juggle has become popular among corporate training programs because it shows participants how to appreciate mistakes and use "Intelligent Fast Failure" (learning quickly by daring to make a lot of simple mistakes at the beginning of a process). Big business also likes the way juggling can get executives "out of the…

This article discusses a method of organizing Business English studies for students who learn it as a foreign language at schools of business and universities outside English-speaking countries. These students typically lack both previous practical experience in business and opportunities to watch business being done in English or to participate…

Help young students master concepts of print, phonemic awareness, and alphabet knowledge--the key predictors of early literacy success and school readiness. This resource will show what children need to know about print in order to become successful readers, how to connect children's development with learning about print, and how to provide a…

This paper describes two Internet-based French language courses that help students acquire fluency in a nontraditional format. The Annenberg/CPB Project's "French in Action Online" was originally offered as a free online adjunct to a television course. The Coastline Community College's French 186AB French Topics Online is a stand-alone…

This teacher's guide is intended for the instruction of both French as a first language and French as a second language in an immersion setting. It provides a host of strategies for teaching listening skills in the classroom in Grades 6 through 12. The first section is designed to bring the teacher's awareness to the training procedure. It…

This paper describes audio-feedback as a teaching method for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) writing classes. Using this method, writing instructors respond to students' compositions by recording their comments onto an audiocassette, then returning the paper and cassette to the students. The first section describes audio-feedback and explains…

Teaching Japanese as a second language is relatively new in the United States. The learning experience of the Japanese language learner is typically quite different from the learner of a European foreign language. It is also more challenging for the teacher, because the support and experience base for teaching Japanese is not nearly as rich or…

There has been a longstanding interest among second and foreign language educators in research on language and the brain. By understanding how the brain learns naturally, language teachers may be better able to enhance their effectiveness in the classroom. This digest examines current brain research and discusses its implications for second…

This study examined whether linking classes with a common syllabus would have a positive impact on students' English progress and attitudes toward language learning. Participants were Japanese college students studying English as a Second Language. Their program required three English classes taken concurrently per week over one academic year. The…

In this monograph, convergent pedagogy, which is a foreign language education approach to develop functional bilingualism in students, is described as a new approach to teaching language in bi- or multilingual contexts. Convergent pedagogy was introduced to the Mali educational system as a language education experiment in 1987. This monograph is a…

This paper examines trends in second language communication strategies (CSs), explaining that when language learners concentrate on form or accuracy, they encounter problems, and when they recognize the mismatch between their linguistic resources and communicative intentions, they try to solve these problems using CSs (e.g., appeals for help,…

This digest examines critical literacy and discusses why it is important to include it in instruction for adults learning English as a Second Language (ESL). Critical literacy takes learners beyond the development of basic literacy skills such as decoding, predicting, and summarizing and asks them to become critical consumers of the information…

The idea of content-based instruction (CBI) is at odds with the curricula of most English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teacher preparation programs. Nor does it fit easily with the skill-based texts and learning packages that are used widely in the field. There is also little agreement about the methods to be used to effect it at various levels of…

This paper examines the pedagogical implications of ascribing to sociocultural theory in the classroom, reviewing commonplace terms and concepts that may have lost their true meaning and intent through interpretation and misuse. The paper returns to the initial focus of sociocultural theory, cognition and the mind. Through transcripts of a…

Acting as a sliding signifier, the term "critical thinking" has been bandied about for years now by educators who often ascribe widely varying meanings to it. Researchers and writers mainly stress the "thinking" half of the phrase, often leaving unexamined what it means to be "critical." Those in the fields of critical pedagogy and critical…