Critical thinking skills remain at the forefront of educational discussions. These higher order thinking processes, including but not limited to reflection, inference, and synthesizing information, enable individuals to make reasoned judgments not only in the classroom but in everyday life. School systems demand that critical thinking be…

This article introduces an instrument that has been developed to explore motivation and attitudes of students towards reading in a foreign language (FL). To develop the instrument, initially 123 students were asked a set of qualitative questions to determine their affective reactions to reading in a FL. A content analysis of emergent data yielded…

In much of the literature on the exploitation of corpora for language learning, the learners are viewed as researchers, who formulate and test their own hypotheses about language use. Having identified difficulties encountered in corpus investigations by our intermediate-level students of Italian in a previous study, we have designed a…

A strong case can be made for developing more flexible and relevant multilingual strategies for teaching and learning within the field of bilingual education. This paper aims to demonstrate how current linguistic and educational practices in countries like Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Ethiopia suggest new directions for research and practice. A…

Although the business community increasingly recognizes information literacy as central to its work, there remains the critical problem of measurement: How should employers assess the information literacy of their current or potential workers? In this article, we use a commercially available assessment to investigate the relationship between…

This paper reports on an investigation into the reactions of 147 participants of various ethnicities to a language practice in the USA that has been characterized as Mock Spanish, a special register in which Spanish words or phrases are used to evoke humor by indexing an often unflattering image of Spanish speakers. Research questions include…

While many students in a foreign language classroom are successful at learning the prescribed curriculum, they may never move beyond the grammar and vocabulary to experience transformative learning. On the other hand, students who do not achieve proficiency may experience a perspective transformation as a result of studying a foreign language.…

This paper examines cross-linguistic influence in third language acquisition relative to language typology, psychotypology and proficiency level. In particular, it observes how learners make use of their background languages when faced with a language they know little to nothing about. The participants, native French speakers with English as a…

This article adds to the limited body of research on study abroad for experienced world/foreign language teachers. It describes a 3-week institute sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities that took place in Lyon, France, during summer 2007. The study examines the institute's impact on a wide spectrum of the professional lives of the…

This article reports on a study that explored the use of e-journals to understand through students' personal narratives what factors (gender, living situation, classroom dynamic, social network) may have influenced their learning during the study abroad semester. Pretests on language measures were compared with posttest results, and information…

In this study, data and discourses on immigrant minority groups and languages other than Dutch at home and at school are presented in order to contextualise the status of Turkish and Moroccan communities and their languages in the Netherlands. Patterns of language use, choice and attitudes of Turkish (n = 63) and Moroccan (n = 64) youngsters in…

Is it possible to undo or reverse language attrition? In other words, has there been, in the case of attrition, a permanent change with respect to the speaker's L1 knowledge, or do we only see temporary effects on the control of that knowledge? It is proposed here that the concept of attrition should include the temporary loss of language skills…

To ensure fairness, it is important to better understand the relationship of language proficiency with the standard procedures of psychometric analysis. This paper examines how equating results are affected by an increase in the proportion of examinees who report that English is not their first language, using the analysis samples for a…

The growing importance of Spanish in the U.S. has generated an impressive growth in the number of university Spanish programs that offer community service learning. However, students' and community partners' misaligned expectations can create tensions and problems in these programs. Instructors must make a special effort to articulate and align…

The research on text-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC), while generally acknowledging the potential benefits afforded by the medium's capacity for extensive self-repair, has done little in the way of exploration of the nature of such text. Indeed, until quite recently, output logs have been favored almost exclusively at the…