Many struggling readers, students with English as a second language, and children with disabilities do not engage in the strategies that good readers use when reading for understanding. Reading comprehension depends upon the students' ability to successfully use strategies to monitor and control their own comprehension. Teachers need to help…

Cultural difference is an important topic of discussion in second language education. Yet cultural difference is often conceptualized as fixed, objective, and apolitical based on an essentialist and normative understanding of culture. This article challenges such conceptualizations by examining and politicizing multiple and conflicting meanings of…

Traditionally, the arts have been absent from Jewish day schools' curricula, and have been relegated to occasional visual art classes, choral music courses, or extra-curricular classes after school hours. Lately, along with a surge of new Jewish day schools, the arts are making their way back into the Judaic study curriculum. In this paper, the…

Although the Italian system of address pronouns is relatively complex, scant attention is paid to the issue in L2 manuals designed for English-speaking learners of Italian. After showing that Italian L2 manuals are not necessarily accurate in the limited detail they provide, we examine specifically the frequent claim that so-called informal…

This article explores how teachers, students, and other stakeholders collaboratively develop classroom-based assessment procedures for the evaluation of oral skills. By considering crucial issues in assessment such as validity, teacher-learner collaboration, and contextual factors, the authors provide a checklist that will help ESL/EFL teachers…

Nearly all Western loanwords in Japanese are first introduced to the public by a small number of individuals with most Japanese people having never heard or read the word before, and having no role to play in their borrowing. Because of this presumptuous use of foreign words by, for example, academics, government bodies, and the media, the…

In response to the American Association of Applied Linguistics' presentation of the Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award for extraordinary contributions to the fields of language learning, teaching, and testing in May 2004, Merrill Swain described her own work as "moving in cycles of research, theory and practice." These "spirals" ("cycles…

In this study, the authors explored the effect that particular patterns of communicative interactions may have on young children's understanding of representations and the link between knowledge of a 2nd language and theory of mind. The authors tested 140 single language users and 57 dual language users (aged 3-4 years old) on a deceptive task…

If producing quality research and meeting the attendant demands of thesis and dissertation writing is a difficult process for native speaker students, it is often doubly so for non-native speakers. ESL/EFL students may have the level of language proficiency for admission to their course of study, without yet possessing the necessary textual…

In 1991, the Bilingual Bicultural Education Program (BBEP) was launched in Chihuahua, Mexico, as a way of responding to the educational needs of the indigenous Tarahumara populations and the growing threat to their language and culture. Using a conceptual framework based on the literatures of curriculum inquiry, language shift and maintenance,…

The goal of the study reported in this article is to analyze ways students in the first course of a three-quarter college preparatory sequence in reading and writing write about their experiences in their essays. The student participants were three native speakers of English and three native speakers of Punjabi, who had lived and studied in the…

This article describes an email project carried out jointly by the Institute of Modern Languages and the Department of Applied Languages at Antonio de Nebrija University in Madrid and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) in the US during the first semester of the academic year 2004-2005. Students worked with a partner exchanging…

This research article describes the English acquisition of three, young, high-achieving, Korean, bilingual students, their academic development and their social/psychological adjustment in school. All observations and interviews were conducted in the natural classroom setting. The Korean children underwent different school experiences, partially…

Jim Burke is a master at making pedagogical principles accessible with practical teaching aids, most notably graphic organizers. In this article, he asks two questions, "What can teachers do that makes a difference for all students, that meets them where they are and helps get them where they need to be as reader and writers--as students?" and…

This paper describes a project involving EFL learners in synchronous electronic discussions. The output of the students' interactions was analyzed qualitatively to uncover the main linguistic and interactional features. It was observed that the students' discussions contained a large number of spelling, usage, and grammatical errors, an almost…