From the perspective of two practitioners who have been influenced by work in the area of critical pedagogy and critical theory, this article examines bilingual education, education reform, and the achievement gap in relation to Latino English Language Learners. The authors integrate personal experiences as they examine underlying assumptions of…

A new urban legend claims, "As a result of the state dropping bilingual education, test scores in California skyrocketed." Krashen disputes this theory, pointing out that other factors offer more logical explanations of California's recent improvements in SAT-9 scores. He discusses research on the effects of California's Proposition 227,…

This paper draws on data used in the pilot application of data-driven pedagogical strategies for dealing with non-nativeness in the writing of advanced FL learners of French to expose attendant practical problems and theoretical issues. The discussion focuses on the question of vagueness in academic writing and involves a three-way comparison of…

This descriptive study analyzed the emergence of the imperfect in the written production of 30 beginning learners of Spanish. The analysis focused on the use of the imperfect and the morphological marking of state verbs. The results follow the patterns predicted by the aspect hypothesis (Andersen and Shirai, 1994), and support some refinements of…

This commentary addresses the use of nativelikeness and non-nativelikeness in research relating to the age factor in L2A. I suggest that, in the context of the Critical Period Hypothesis as it applies to L2A, the criteria of nativelikeness and non-nativelikeness may be subject to abuse. I also argue that the use of the monolingual native standard…

This paper centres on published research reports produced by members of the TESOL discourse community. The analysis extends the Hallidayan concept of given/new information from its origins (used for capturing information structure at the clause level) and relates it to the analysis of the macro-structural organisation of TESOL research reports.…

Although a number of studies have associated recasts with second language development, the actual mechanisms by which recasts work to impact learning are still little understood. In particular, researchers have sought to gain a deeper understanding of the connections among recasts, learners' responses to recasts, and subsequent development. To…

Language differences in the United States are largely viewed as problems that schools must remedy. This paradigm has created the pervasive belief that Spanish is a root cause of underachievement for Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs). This article examines teacher beliefs systems with regard to the above paradigm. It also examines…

The purpose of this study was to examine the special education referral and decision-making process for English language learners (ELLs), with a focus on Child Study Team (CST) meetings and placement conferences/multidisciplinary team meetings. We wished to learn how school personnel determined if ELLs who were struggling had disabilities, to what…

This paper makes a usage-based contribution to the learning and teaching of German via the tools of contrastive learner corpus analysis (Granger, 1998; Granger, Hung, and Petch-Tyson, 2002; Nesselhauf, 2004). On the basis of an integrated learner and native speaker corpus of "telecollaborative" discourse (Belz, 2005), an empirically rich…

Curriculum surveys are used periodically to validate the use of Advanced Place Program[R] (AP[R]) Exams as assessments of skills required for advanced college-level study. In the case of AP German Language, the target level is third-year college language study. This article presents results from a 2003 curriculum survey completed by third-year…

Purpose: This study was conducted to examine whether the expressive language characteristics of typically developing (TD) children learning English as a second language (ESL) have similarities to the characteristics of the English that is spoken by monolingual children with specific language impairment (SLI), and whether this could result in the…

Given the decline in French majors and enrollments in French junior year study abroad programs, educators have increasingly turned to short-term study abroad for first- and second-year students. These programs can motivate students fulfilling the language requirement, while also internationalizing the curriculum through interdisciplinary and…

This study compares 27 sixth grade students who have been learning Spanish since kindergarten with 5 who have had Spanish for only 1 year using a battery of Spanish oral and written tests. The students who started early out performed the new students in listening, speaking, and writing Spanish. Those who started early also displayed a positive…

This article reports on the results of a research study that investigated the effectiveness of using an algorithmic approach to error correction to help Hong Kong English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners overcome persistent lexico-grammatical problems. Ten error types were selected for the experiment, and one set of remedial instructional…