Investigates a first-year undergraduate program in TESOL consisting of three strands: a language-based course, a theme-based course, and a sheltered-content course. Learners rated different aspects of their development in language, skills, and strategies--as well as motivational factors--over two semesters. Author/VWL)

Suggests that action research is appropriate for foreign language teachers because of its emphasis on research perspectives that are particularly illuminating in foreign language classrooms, tracing the conceptual contours of action research to set the stage for two case studies by graduate teaching assistants in German who engaged in action…

Presents a case study that tests a mathematical model for its ability to predict second language vocabulary gains achieved through reading. To overcome the problem of small word gains noted in earlier studies of incidental acquisition, an adult learner of Dutch read a lengthy text and was tested on hundreds of words. The participant's gains were…

Reports on exploratory ethnographic research on language acquisition and use in a village located in the Mandara Mountains, Cameroon. Indicates that members of the community share several beliefs and practices related to multilingual communicative competence and its development. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on the way multimedia developments are challenging established literacy practices and skills. Suggests that the traditional dominance of verbal representation is progressively giving way to new visual forms, and that the relationships between the verbal and the visual are being negotiated. Implications for English-as-a-Second-Language…

Analyzes second-language learners' processing of linguistic data within the target language, focusing on input and intake in second-language acquisition and factors and cognitive processes that affect input processing. Input factors include input simplification, input enhancement, and interactional modifications. Individual learner differences…

Reports an Australian study of adult English-as-a-Second-Language learners of intermediate proficiency that compared their performance and examined their attention to grammar on four collaborative tasks. Data from researcher observations, recordings of student pair talk, and individual student retrospections indicated that attention to grammatical…

The World Wide Web offers language teachers a new source of authentic materials. This article situates the use of Web sites in language learning within concepts of resource-based learning, offering various activities that introduce the range of resources available to teachers and students of French, including a Web browser, a range of foreign…

Presents examples of ways that different institutions have responded to the crisis in foreign-language education, emphasizing the importance of focusing on foreign-language departments in training future K-12 teachers and describing three institutions that integrate teacher education with other parts of the curriculum (the University of Delaware,…

Describes how Richland College, Texas, created a division of world languages to address the contemporary language acquisition of an increasingly diverse student body, noting the importance of today's students studying languages to prepare for tomorrow's global marketplace. The paper discusses changing student markets, fiscal support and staffing…

Investigated students' expectations of advanced business-Spanish courses at a graduate school of international management. Surveys indicated that students did not expect to discuss the same topics, use the same materials, and practice the same activities in Spanish-language seminars and in business classes. They preferred cultural topics in a…

Information about how learners navigate in a multimedia learning environment is necessary for evaluation. Verbalization of learners using the program Vi-Conte was used to create navigational patterns. Researchers found the type of navigation often related to specific learner variables. (Author/SM)

To study the effect of direct test preparation on TOEIC gain scores, two samples of students (i.e., English majors and nonmajors) at a Japanese university were divided into three treatment groups: (1) TOEIC preparation, (2) business English, (3) general (four-skills) English. TOEIC preparatory materials were concluded to have little benefit to…

Examined the view that the variation in bilingual short-term memory capacity is determined by differential rates of subvocal rehearsal between the languages. Auditory memory span and articulation time were measured for three bilingual groups who spoke Finnish at home and Swedish at school, and either Finnish of Swedish in both the home and the…

Examined why adults learning second languages make frequent errors in lexical form. More and less fluent bilinguals in English and Spanish performed a translation recognition task in which they had to decide whether the second of two words was the correct translation of the first. Less fluent participants experienced more interference for…