This paper discusses the broad educational context of the 21st century, focusing on the prevailing language landscape. It examines language use around the world, particularly the place of English as the preeminent international language, which challenges foreign language education in English-speaking countries. The paper discusses possible…

This paper describes several methodological decisions made during a study of linguistic development of French in British classroom learners, highlighting the significance of choosing suitable tools for collecting, transcribing, and analyzing oral interlanguage data and noting the usefulness for interlanguage research of the CHILDES (Child Language…

This study examined whether linking classes with a common syllabus would have a positive impact on students' English progress and attitudes toward language learning. Participants were Japanese college students studying English as a Second Language. Their program required three English classes taken concurrently per week over one academic year. The…

This paper focuses on the speaking proficiency of advanced foreign language learners. It looks at performance on two different tasks: oral presentations and group discussions. Success in giving an oral presentation in front of an audience is assessed with the help of evaluations, which are then measured against various linguistic phenomena…

Foreign language teaching assistant (TA) training is affected by structures and hierarchies at all institutional levels, but it is most immediately influenced by the discipline-specific practices of departments of national languages and literatures, practices that are rooted both in the broader history of TA education and in the tension between…

In this monograph, convergent pedagogy, which is a foreign language education approach to develop functional bilingualism in students, is described as a new approach to teaching language in bi- or multilingual contexts. Convergent pedagogy was introduced to the Mali educational system as a language education experiment in 1987. This monograph is a…

The purpose of this study was two-fold: (1) to investigate the effects of visual information, background knowledge, and academic reading experience, and (2) to identify the non-native readers' problems in comprehending Japanese academic texts. Sixty-three foreign students studying at universities and graduate schools in Japan participated in this…

This paper examines trends in second language communication strategies (CSs), explaining that when language learners concentrate on form or accuracy, they encounter problems, and when they recognize the mismatch between their linguistic resources and communicative intentions, they try to solve these problems using CSs (e.g., appeals for help,…

This paper first gives a brief chronological overview of reading theory development and a short introduction to schema theory, and then comprehensively reviews, comments, and synthesizes research-based studies, published between 1980 and 2002, that examined the effect of text structure (reader effect and text effect) on L1 and L2 reading…

This book for beginning readers presents the story of the South African Nkosi family. The seven members of the family share their feelings, likes and dislikes, and hopes and dreams. Readers are encouraged to figure out what the characters like, want, feel, and dream and to share their own likes, desires, feelings, and dreams. The book is written…

This book is about the acquisition of temporal expression in a second language. Temporal expression has come into its own as an arena of research in adult second language acquisition. The investigation of temporal expression includes all linguistic means of reference to time. The study of tense-apart morphology has been the focus of many…

This paper asserts that helping students to clarify and commit to realizable learning goals increases learner motivation and retention. It is recommended that any adult English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teacher should do some sort of "goals work" with their students and that program-wide strategies to address learner motivation and retention be…

This guide contains concise information on the International Phonetic Alphabet, a universally agreed system of notation in use for over a century, for the sounds of languages, and guidance on how to use it. The handbook replaces the previous edition, "Principles of the International Phonetic Association," which has not been revised since 1949.…

This book is a collection of conference proceedings, papers, comments, and other documents that was compiled as a response to the national controversy that erupted in the aftermath of the resolution on Ebonics by the Oakland Unified School District in late 1996. That resolution affirmed the need to incorporate an explicit focus on Ebonics in…

This digest examines critical literacy and discusses why it is important to include it in instruction for adults learning English as a Second Language (ESL). Critical literacy takes learners beyond the development of basic literacy skills such as decoding, predicting, and summarizing and asks them to become critical consumers of the information…