This paper investigates English language literacy practices among teenagers, focusing initially on three young Singaporean students who are struggling to do well in English. By employing a conceptual framework that builds on a recent treatment of style as identity construction and drawing on interview data that recount the students' practices of…

One common procedure for oral performance testing of Foreign Language in the Elementary School (FLES) learners is one-on-one interviewing wherein the interviewer asks questions and the child candidate responds to them. While existing research has focused primarily on outcomes elicited by such procedures, this study examines the processes…

This study explored the differing perspectives of principals and foreign language department chairs on one state's teaching standards and the use of professional teaching portfolios as part of the hiring process. A 17-item questionnaire completed by 61 participants revealed that both groups strongly agreed with state teacher standards as accurate…

This article compares previous language gain studies in foreign languages with new data on language gain in the instructed second language acquisition of Russian. The acquisition of listening, reading, speaking, and writing proficiency shows a significant correlation not only with hours of classroom instruction in immersion and nonimmersion…

A key issue in the field of second language acquisition has been the difficulty of specifying accurate measures of implicit language knowledge. This paper describes the development of an elicited imitation test. Its design differs from that of most other elicited imitation tests in that it (a) requires test takers to focus attention first on the…

Acquiring proficiency in different discourse genres involves an awareness of which syntactic structures are the most appropriate to the communicative context and purpose. This article examines two scientific research genres--conference proceedings articles and conference presentations--and compares the syntactic behaviour of a group of native…

Previous research on interlanguage pragmatics revealed that, under implicit pragmatic instruction, some learners noticed the target pragmalinguistic features, whereas others receiving the same instruction did not. This suggests possible effects of individual difference (ID) variables on learners' noticing of pragmalinguistic features. Among the ID…

This paper examines the language use of a small group of interlingual families of a Japanese parent and a Filipino parent with their offspring living in Japan and qualitatively explores possible explanations for their particular language use. Although the data collected from the subject group are limited, the data analysis does reveal some…

The role of metalinguistic knowledge in learning a foreign/second language is the subject of continuing debate. In this paper we report on a study which explores this issue further with reference to undergraduate students of Chinese as a second/foreign language. The first part of the paper describes the process of developing and validating an…

This article reports on a small-scale study involving adult L1 Swedish learners of L3 German. The main aim of the study was to investigate the effects of group interaction on written German output employing the dictogloss technique. Three short texts were selected for reconstruction, the first and third ones individually, and the second one…

In this article, "Fragebogen" (1992) by Max Frisch is shown to contain appropriately challenging linguistic constructions for use in courses as a supplement to traditional anthologies in conversation/composition courses. Frisch's eleven questionnaires on topics ranging from "Heimat," marriage and private property to humor, money and death serve as…

This study focuses on the source of reading problems of English as a second language learners at the high school level. The results indicate that while reading comprehension is impacted by level of receptive vocabulary knowledge, the ability to select and implement word-appropriate lexical inferencing strategies can compensate for low receptive…

Comparing data from two ethnographic studies of bilingual teachers and their students in the United States, the authors present a cross-case analysis that illuminates how issues of language are inextricably linked with issues of race, class, and socioeconomic status. The authors show how portraits of teachers' practice help to examine some of the…

This article reports on a study exploring the respective contributions of first language (L1) listening comprehension ability and second language (L2) proficiency to L2 listening comprehension ability. The participants were 75 Grade 8 English-speaking students learning French. The students completed tests in French and in English that required…

Universities and colleges in Canada and other English-speaking countries have become increasingly concerned with linguistic and cultural diversity and internationalizing their campuses, both to enhance local and international students' experiences on campus and to prepare them to function in their careers and the larger society. Most international…