This document consists of four issues of a quarterly newsletter for educators at the elementary school level. Each issue features two articles and a column by an ACEI Executive Board vice president. The Fall 2000 issue features an article on reducing the amount of teacher control in elementary school learning centers, thereby providing benefits…

This book is designed to help Peace Corps Volunteers figure out how they learn best and how they can capitalize on this to learn a new language. It teaches volunteers to identify and reflect on their learning style, attitudes, and motivation; organize their learning; and experiment with various strategies and tools for learning a language on their…

Aligned with its 1998 standards for first and second language learning, Alberta Learning has published lesson plans that aim for a closer relationship between learning and evaluation. Each volume in this series presents a specific task for students that involves planning, carrying out, and evaluating their work. The task for seventh grade students…

The report, entirely in French, describes Alberta's curriculum for high school French immersion, as revised in 1998. An introductory section offers background information on the curriculum revision, links between the core curriculum and French immersion, underlying principles of second language instruction, the revised curriculum's objectives and…

Project Great Start is designed to provide non-, limited-, and near-native English proficient students with improved, intensified, and increased learning opportunities for accelerated English acquisition and significant academic achievement. It focuses on three groups: students, parents, and school staff. Students and parents benefit from separate…

A study of the decline in second language enrollments in Scotland's upper secondary schools is summarized. A survey conducted in 1998, sent to a random sample representing 25 percent of all secondary schools in the country, elicited administrator and language teacher opinions concerning factors influencing language enrollments. Some students were…

Bilingualism is a reality that many Americans still find difficult to accept; hence the prominence of English-only activism in American politics. This collection of essays analyzes the sources of the anti-bilingual movement, its changing directions, and its effects on education policy. This book also explores efforts to resist the English-only…

This booklet is the fourth in a series designed to assist parents who are home-schooling their adolescent children and focuses on teaching a foreign language, history, science, and physical education. The articles in this booklet are: (1) "Habla Espanol? Tackling Foreign Language," examining effective and ineffective foreign language instruction…

This document consists of online instructional materials designed for adult education use. It is a seven lesson course designed to help the student develop better spelling and grammar skills, write with greater purpose and focus, and exercise better word choice through an enriched vocabulary. Detailed lessons, complete with worksheets and…

This descriptive study investigates the uses of SMART Board, an interactive electronic whiteboard, in secondary school foreign language classes. The paper first discusses how SMART Board can facilitate the teaching process. SMART Board supports the foreign language teaching process in three main ways: it helps the presentation of new linguistic…

This paper presents a descriptive examination of the effects of high school learners of Spanish who complete a series of Internet-based assignments using a popular online Spanish tutorial. The study is designed to measure the knowledge acquired from the World Wide Web by administering and comparing a pretest and a posttest to both a sample and a…

This paper investigates the potential relationship of Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) to gesture and second language learning. It is asserted that the ZPD is both a tool and a result, not a tool for result; it is both product and process at the same time. The process of learning a new language/culture in the case of a person who is…

This study examined the perceptions of preservice teachers tutoring non-native English speakers in a local public school. A group of 14 predominantly female preservice teachers participated, nine white and five Hispanic. Participants completed interviews asking about their tutoring experiences. Results found two common themes: most participants…

Learning academic English is probably one of the surest, most reliable ways of attaining socioeconomic success in the United States today. Learners cannot function in school settings effectively without it. This variety of English entails the multiple, complex features of English required for success in public schooling and career advancement. It…

This unit was created as a result of a summer institute sponsored by the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa. The Center's goal is to improve student learning of foreign languages in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12). To this end, the Center provides professional support for foreign language…