Diversity--social, cultural, linguistic and ethnic--poses a challenge to all educational systems. Some authorities, schools and teachers look upon it as a problem, an obstacle to the achievement of national educational goals, while for others it offers new opportunities. Successive PISA reports have laid bare the relative lack of success in…

Technology-informed approaches to L2 research and teaching have prompted great interest by both researchers and practitioners alike. This book highlights the relationship between digitally-mediated technologies and second language pragmatics by presenting exemplary applications of technology for both research and pedagogy. Part I presents…

This study aims to investigate when and why to use Arabic as L1 in the Saudi Arabian EFL classroom. For this purpose, 45 classroom observations were performed for beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels of students. 5 classes were chosen randomly for each level and each class was observed three times. Based on the classroom observations,…

Since the language used by people has the potential to signal a membership in a discourse community, it is significant that prospective teachers speak the appropriate social language to be able to claim a strong membership in the community of teachers. This qualitative study explores a group of pre-service teachers' professional language use and…

"Voices of Pedagogical Development" is a collection of articles written by teacher-researchers at the University of Jyväskylä Language Centre. It shares the fruits of their ideas and development work in the areas of academic literacies, new forms of teaching and learning, and internationalisation. Part one aims at establishing and…

Formulaic language is widely recognized to be of central importance to fluent and idiomatic language use. However, the mechanics of how formulaic language is acquired are not well understood. Some researchers (e.g. Nick Ellis) believe that the chunking inherent in formulaic language drives the language learning process. Others (e.g. Wray) claim…

This study examined a language and cultural literacy program for Hispanic fathers to promote their children's literacy development. This study had two phases: (a) training the teachers and (b) educating the fathers. The results indicated that the fathers learned how to promote their Hispanic children's literacy development using their family's…

Biostatistics is traditionally a difficult subject for students to learn. While the mathematical aspects are challenging, it can also be demanding for students to learn the exact language to use to correctly interpret statistical results. In particular, correctly interpreting the parameters from linear regression is both a vital tool and a…

Inspired by the rise of Communicative Language Teaching, some scholars have vehemently rejected any use of L1 in L2 learning classes (e.g., Atkinson, 1987) while others have advocated the use of L1 as an efficient tool to facilitate communication (e.g., Nation, 2003). However, caution has been raised against the excessive use of L1 (Nation, 2001).…

The article aims at presenting a description of languages and cultures and the effect on the teaching of English as a Foreign Language in schools in Papua. It starts with a general picture of the uniqueness of languages and cultures in Papua: its geography, the originality of the people, and the languages and cultures of both NAN and AN. The word…

The purpose of this study was to examine how fourth-grade Spanish-English speaking bilingual students in the USA participated differently in English-as-a-second-language (ESL) literature groups when they were invited to use all of their linguistic resources vs. when they were restricted to communicate in English only. The theoretical underpinning…

Task-based learning has been recommended in immersion classes in order to provide relief from the usual teacher-fronted lessons and increase the opportunities for student output. This paper presents one aspect of the data collected during the on-going evaluation of a late partial immersion French programme in an Australian school. It presents the…

There has been a continuous debate over a long period over the issue of using the learner's mother tongue in teaching the second language. We have two schools in this regard--monolingual approach and bilingual approach. Those advocating the monolingual approach have claimed that learning is determined by the quantity of exposure to the target…

Utilizing the critical race theory (CRT) construct of majoritarian stories and the already identified story of English-is-"all"-that-matters in the education of multilingual learners and their teachers, this study illustrates the influence of this powerful narrative in classroom practice. By promoting English-only instruction,…

This article reports key findings from a project that focused on the academic literacy development of children who are born and/or begin their formal schooling in Canada but are raised in homes where the societally dominant language is not the primary idiom. Analyses involved characterizing students' home ecological environments; assessing the…