Chinese learners are often stereotyped as high achievers and overlooked in literacy research. This year-long, qualitative study in a combined Grade 4/5 classroom presents the cases of two struggling Chinese-Canadian learners. The study offers a new perspective on struggling learners by revealing a complex, multilayered understanding of these…

Over the last 15 years, the rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICT) has facilitated a revolution in how we use language. Online environments have facilitated creative and variable spelling using code hybridization and stylistic use of mechanical conventions such as punctuation and capitalization, lexical coinages, new…

At Pima Community College's Downtown Campus, the ESL lead faculty, library intern and librarian collaborated to create a comprehensive, progressive information literacy curriculum, based upon principles and best practices in both Second Language Acquisition Theory and the Information Literacy Competency Standards for a suite of ESL courses. The…

This paper reports the redevelopment and subsequent evaluation of a unit in dialectology within a foreign language curriculum (German). In doing so it is a case study which serves to offer insight into the student experience of studying linguistics within a foreign language curriculum, the potential of online/electronic pedagogies for the teaching…

Recent innovations in technology allow foreign language learners and their instructors to interact both inside and beyond the classroom using a variety of communicative tools. As a consequence, the classroom has been transformed into an extended learning environment which has had a profound effect on both student and teacher roles. However, the…

The purpose of this study is to investigate how focus-on-forms instruction in second language teaching affects attention to forms in two different types of task: constrained and free production. These two different types of task were administered to 87 university students enrolled in a first-year French as a second language course before and after…

Carr (2002), in her investigation of boys' alienation from languages and language learning, addressed the question of an "appropriate curriculum" for boys and boys' understanding of masculinity. Boys reported in that research that they preferred physical activities so found the written text orientation of language learning to be "hard" and…

Studies in SLA have debated the importance of context of learning in the process of developing linguistic skills in a second language (L2). The present paper examines whether study abroad, as it provides opportunities for authentic L2 context, facilitates the acquisition of Spanish phonology. The corpus of this investigation is composed of speech…

Four groups of second language (L2) learners of English from different language backgrounds (Chinese, Japanese, German, and Greek) and a group of native speaker controls participated in an online reading time experiment with sentences involving long-distance "wh"-dependencies. Although the native speakers showed evidence of making use of…

This article discusses the role of a multimedia learning environment in teaching foreign languages to engineering students. Arguing for a subject-specific and skills-oriented approach in teaching Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) in the university, it outlines possible targets and skills for a language course for engineers. The paper goes on…

While plurilingualism is not necessarily a novel concept, the author argues that the ability to speak several languages will help Europeans to develop a European identity and to deconstruct existing cultural and even genetic barriers. To this aim it would make sense to be introduced at a very early age to elements of language and culture from…

This paper explores the political, social, and cultural contexts of current early literacy federal policies in the United States. Building upon existing critiques of the policy and its epistemological stances, this paper first analyses the planning and discussion surrounding the introduction of the policy to state leaders and also how it is first…

This paper outlines work undertaken by FIPLV as an affiliate of UNESCO in the development of a document outlining linguistic human rights. The paper examines how subsequent drafts have been modified and identifies some of the difficulties experienced in developing the drafts. After more than two decades of work, the process is still incomplete.…

In this paper, I argue that it is important to bring proficiency in written English language into the frame of a critical pedagogy for academic literacy. This may at first seem a counter-intuitive goal with connotations of constraint and convergence rather than opening up and diversity. However, what is often not taken into account in the notion…

The People's Republic of China has employed two means of literacy promotion: a campaign approach and a legislative approach to meet the needs of nation-state building through education. From 1949 through to the late 1970s, the campaign approach was motivated by a political rationale, but later an economic rationale also became important. From the…