Argues that a transcript of a whole class of primary children who were video-recorded while engaged in a role-play activity provides support for the view that children's learning can be seen as a socio-historically and culturally-constituted dialogical process of meaning making. Draws on Bakhtin's ideas about the power of dialogic engagement to…

Highlights two speaking activities for use in the English-as-a-Second-Language classroom that aim to meet students' specific conversational needs. Provides a sample feedback form and suggestions on how to implement it that will increase the effectiveness of the proposed activities. (Author/VWL)

Presents the results of a study investigating the acquisition of English tense and aspect by Persian speakers. A cross-sectional study of 45 second language learners at three levels of proficiency was conducted using a grammaticality judgment task. Findings showed that the acquisition of tense and aspect followed the universal entailment of…

Discusses the notion of communicative competence and more specifically, strategic competence. Examines problems Arab learners of English face and looks at problems specific to Arab World University (Jordan) English language majors. Concludes with the pedagogical implications of communicative strategy use. (Author/VWL)

Examines the effects of Urdu, a phonologically transparent orthography with regular letter-sound correspondences, on the development of reading in English. Finds that children with high levels of vocabulary knowledge and phonological awareness in Urdu were more likely to do well with English reading tasks as opposed to visual memory tasks. (CMK)

Examines the relationships between the first (L1), second (L2), and third (L3) language in immersion programs for Russian-speaking students in Israel. Two parallel and similar immersion programs, which were carried out for the same population, but with different target languages (L2 Hebrew and L3 English), are described. Presents tentative…

Explores the experiences of immigrants who completed a health care aide training program that combined occupational skills and English-as-a-Second-Language training. Focus was on the employment barriers and personal benefits associated with program completion. Findings revealed participation in training had a major impact on the employment,…

Uses a discursive perspective to study the role of emotion in adults' mathematical thinking. Considers emotion to be distinct from thinking, but not separate from it. Adopts a provisional characterization of affect and emotion as "charges" on ideas. Uses the idea of positioning in social practices to analyze the context of a person's…

Describes the author's experiences with fifth-grade students who were English Language Learners in a social studies class. Explains how the teacher used photography within the social studies classroom and took the children on a field trip to see historic sites. Discusses the outcomes of the project for the students involved. (CMK)

Describes how the University of the Free State (South Africa) remedied educational disparities created by the apartheid system, through an academic bridge program that helps scholastically disadvantaged students succeed at tertiary institutions. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on Korean English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' knowledge of the locative alternation and its relationship to theories of language-particular and language-universal properties. Results are discussed with reference to universality of linking, to the transfer of argument structure, and to Pinker's learnability theory. (Author/VWL)

Argues that abstract, figurative senses of polysemous words are better retained when learners are given core senses as cues, because providing a core sense helps learners develop a "precise elaboration." Results of a series of vocabulary studies involving Dutch learners of English show that providing a core sense results in better guessing and…

Discusses the nature and causes of a common problem encountered by elementary English-as-a-Second-Language learners in Hong Kong--the placement of the intensifying adverb "very" in sentences involving a degree expression. Suggests an algorithmic approach to error correction to help students overcome the problem. (Author/VWL)

Emphasizes that the introduction of new technologies in the learning process of second languages should entail more didactic efficiency, educational effectiveness and pedagogical efficacy. Describes the Didascalia framework of criteria for added value. This framework requires an accurate, objective and adaptable specification of the added value of…

Presents a fine-grained analysis of extensive empirical data on the automatization of explicitly learned rules of morphosyntax in a second language. Results indicate that the learning of morphosyntactic rules is highly skill-specific and that these skills develop gradually over time, adhering to the same power function learning curve as the…