The Indonesian Ministry of National Education has, for the past two decades, been trying to reform English instruction at junior and senior high schools across the country. This paper describes the issues surrounding the reform initiative and the response the system has made to address the issues. It is asserted that the same problems that have…

This paper tells the story of Dr. J. Marvin Brown's life as a linguist and physicist in his quest to develop the means for adult, second language fluency. This is a combination of his auto-biography, which provides the context, and the lessons he learned in his 50 years as linguist, and language teacher. Brown's experiences indicate that adults…

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandate has pushed the debate on how to educate the limited English proficient child to the forefront. Thus, criticism abounds in several states surrounding the effectiveness of bilingual education programs in our nation's public schools. The opponents state that bilingual education is not working; it is an…

This paper begins with a literature review of research on syntactic maturity, defined as the developmental stages from one- and two-word utterances to the hierarchical structures of adult speech, and seeks to answer questions in the context of past and current research in this area. It attempts to study some of the ramifications of the movement…

The main purpose of this study is to determine whether a class addressing language learner passivity in conversations with native speakers will lead students to take a more active role. The thesis aims to determine if earlier research by Long and Holmen showing that language learners are passive in conversation with native speakers of English. It…

This guide describes step-by-step the decisions necessary for designing a curriculum for learning world languages. There are eight chapters in four parts. Part 1, "Creating Curriculum," includes: (1) "Introduction to Wisconsin's Standards for Learning World Languages" (e.g., the vision of Wisconsin's standards); (2)…

This presentation describes how to use reading to improve second language acquisition. Part 1, "Building Awareness of Reading Habits and Attitudes," has students report their habits and attitudes about reading in English and their native language and recognize the importance of reading for improving English skills. Part 2, "Choosing a Book," has…

This paper describes an elective course at Taiwan's Wen Tzao Ursuline College of Modern Languages, "Concise English Poetry Appreciation and Recitation." The course is based on the reader response approach and targets third year students, leading them into the world of poetry through various stages (traditional nursery rhymes and simple,…

This paper reports on an investigation of learning strategy applications in elementary foreign language immersion classrooms. The focus of the paper is on identifying strategies more and less effective learners use for classroom reading and writing tasks in the target language. Think-aloud data from third grade and fourth grade students were…

If communicative competence is defined by and organized around culturally-framed and linguistically-patterned communicative plans and goals and the linguistic resources of interactive practices, then interaction in the classroom is employed to create social engagement in regularly occurring interactive practices where communicative learning can be…

This document, comprising volume 5, issues 1-3 of Learning Languages: The Journal of the National Network for Early Language Learning (NNELL), includes the following articles: "Poverty, Race, and Foreign Language Immersion: Predictors of Math and English Language Arts Performance" (Stephen J. Caldas, Nicole Boudreaux); "Meet a…

This paper examines disagreement over how second language learning tasks create conditions needed for language acquisition by exploring and comparing three second language acquisition theories: input-based; output-based; and interactionist. Each theory is described, and some new conclusions are drawn. It is argued that a task should: be…

This keynote address by a native Vietnamese speaker who did not learn English until he was college-age, through the now obsolete "grammar-translation" method, recounts his difficulties in learning to converse orally in English. He stresses the need to teach conversational English to English Language Learners (ELLs) in addition to…

The current state of the knowledge base on the effectiveness of specific instructional practices for English-language learners was examined by conducting an exploratory meta-analysis on eight studies of instructional interventions and using qualitative synthesis to supplement this analysis. The first data source was the eight intervention studies…

Extensive reading (ER) programs involve students in silently reading large quantities of materials. These materials are usually at a level that permits students to gain at least a fair understanding of what they are reading without outside help. Such programs' benefits for first- and second-language (L1 and L2) learners are well documented (Coady,…