Explores the contribution of cognitive-academic language proficiency to second language acquisition in instructional contexts, using Cummins' concepts of bilingual education. Discusses Albania's educational practices and reviews a joint project by Austrian and Albanian universities that shows how cognitive academic proficiency, along with…

Reports findings of a survey on genre analysis of 117 commercial letters in English exchanged by fax between a Brazilian company and two European companies. The letters were analyzed in terms of shared communicative purposes and rhetorical features that together contribute to the building-up of the resulting generic structure named "Business…

Studies the collaborative output of students engaged in grammar dictation tasks in a British English-as-a-foreign-language context. Investigated the effect of pre-task focus on form work on task output processes. Focus is on how the framework of Language Related Episodes used by other researchers was refined to analyze second language output…

Examines the differences in the reported use of reading strategies of native and non-native English speakers when reading academic materials. Participants were native English speaking and English-as-a-Second-Language college students who completed a survey of reading strategies aimed at discerning the strategies readers report using when coping…

Using FACETS, investigates how judgments of trained teacher raters are biased toward certain types of candidates and certain criteria in assessing Japanese second language writing. Explores the potential for using a modified version of a rating scale for norm-referenced decisions about Japanese second language writing ability. (Author/VWL)

Describes the Thai Learning System, which is designed to help learners acquire the Thai word order system. The system facilitates the lessons on the Web using HyperText Markup Language and Perl programming, which interfaces with natural language processing by means of Prolog. (Author/VWL)

Demonstrates recent curriculum developments in the German Studies Program at an Australian University by describing a case study as an example of the integration of literature into an advanced German course. (Author/VWL)

Provides an overview of issues in the literacy policy field from a social practices perspective. Outlines a central dilemma in both theory and practice in adult literacy work: that practice theory has not impacted on literacy policy in large parts of the world. Suggests there is an ever-widening gap between literacies of everyday life and the…

Suggests another perspective in viewing the effect of style on English-as-a-foreign-language learners' errors. Suggests that for consonant clusters, what varies in accordance with style is the learners' choice of syllable simplification strategies rather than error rates. (Author/VWL)

Research-based professional development is essential for districts and teachers across the nation that face the challenge of providing a quality education for increasingly diverse student populations. In this study, the researchers surveyed 729 teachers in one midwestern suburban district recently impacted by high numbers of immigrant and refugee…

This paper provides effective strategies for early childhood teachers to use with children who are English language learners (ELLs). The strategies were compiled from interviews with 20 early childhood educators from two culturally and linguistically diverse communities in Massachusetts. Emphasis was placed on the strategies that the greatest…

This paper analyses the national key stage 2 test results for 2300 11-year-old pupils in an inner London LEA. A range of concurrent pupil background data was also collected, including whether pupils spoke English as an additional language (EAL), and if so, their stage of fluency in English. EAL pupils at the early stages (1-3) of developing…

This study investigated second-language (L2) learning to gain a better understanding of learning mechanisms that also operate in child first-language L1 learners. The research was inspired by research on the beneficial effects of child-directed speech CDS. We tried to examine whether such benefits can be observed in the domain of inflectional…

In this article I put forth the core argument that Second Language Acquisition (SLA) needs to account for the psychological and emotional dimensions of second language (L2) learning, but that a number of epistemological and methodological difficulties must be surmounted before this new research program can be a reality. To illustrate my arguments,…

This paper addresses the theme of the special issue by looking at the development of student autonomy in learning in the French programme at the University of the West Indies St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. The paper explains why a focus on autonomy is apt to meet both the programme's linguistic goals and its larger societal goal of preparing…