Various newspaper articles report that British ministers, university representatives, exam chiefs and business bodies agree that foreign languages skills in primary, secondary and tertiary UK education are in crisis. Lower funding and policy changes have caused language skills deficiencies felt gravely in the business sectors. Funding and support…

The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released joint guidance on January 7, 2015, reminding states, school districts, and schools of their obligations under federal law to ensure that English Learners (ELs) have equal access to a high-quality education and the opportunity to achieve…

This quant-QUAL sequential explanatory mixed methods study describes a framework for evaluating the communicative competence (Canale & Swain, 1980; Canale, 1983) of non-beginner students of Chinese for placement purposes at U.S. four-year postsecondary institutions. A pragmatic lens was used to collect and analyze data that generated a…

This study explored the perceptions of teacher educators regarding the changes in the English Language Teacher Education Program introduced by the Turkish Higher Education Council (HEC) in 2006. Employing a qualitative design, open-ended questionnaires were administered to 18 lecturers working at five different state universities. The analysis of…

In a non-immersion, preschool world language program, what learning outcomes are reasonable to expect? Since exposure to and engagement with new languages is typically limited in these so-called "low-input" programs, we should anticipate no more than modest gains in linguistic proficiency. Rather, early childhood language programs can,…

This study aimed to evaluate an ESP textbook in terms of McDonough and Shaw (2003) based on external and internal evaluation. The ESP textbook was "Special English for Computer Sciences" (2010) by Hojjat Baghban. This study also discussed the external evaluation and a detailed evaluation of a chapter of the ESP textbook. This ESP…

This article proposes to incorporate Freirean philosophy with a technique used in academic (monolingual) English courses: the multigenre research paper. When applying this technique in the ESL classroom, it is crucial to also use global and international texts of various genres in order to support students' cultural identities and also instill a…

This article peers through the lens of one district's journey of World Languages program refinement, and identifies a blueprint for success by aligning targets. The author begins by proposing the following questions: (1) Is your program where you want it to be? (2) Is it producing desired results? and (3) Are students yielding the greatest results…

Clickers are catching growing attention in education. This study, using data collected from a questionnaire, forty content words, and a vocabulary knowledge scale, aims to identify if clickers can enhance EFL (English as a foreign language) vocabulary knowledge and raise students' satisfaction level compared with the traditional multimedia-based…

From previous research on second language acquisition and early language learning, educators know that young children have a cognitive advantage to learning a foreign language over other age groups (e.g., Garcia-Sierra et al.; Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson; Singleton and Ryan; Werker et al.). More recently, an increase in functional benefits for…

In recent years increasing research attention has been devoted to the definition and development of presentation skills. As an interactive oral discourse type, the presentation is characterised by specific speech acts, of which cooperative acts have proved to be of a highly developmental nature (Sazdovska, 2009). The aim of the present paper is to…

The integration of smartphones in the language learning environment is gaining research interest. However, using a smartphone to learn to speak spontaneously has received little attention. The emergence of smartphone technology and its video recording feature are recognised as suitable learning tools. This paper reports on a case study conducted…

This article explores the theoretical foundation of the NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements, developed by the National Council of State Supervisors for Languages (NCSSFL) and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), describes why and how to use these progress indicators in language education and reveals the value and impact on…

This study was conducted in order to inspect the impact of podcasts as learning and teaching tools on Iranian EFL learners' motivation for listening as well as on their listening comprehension ability. It also investigated the learners' perception towards podcasts. 34 intermediate learners who were homogeneous in terms of listening ability were…

This article presents a small qualitative study which aimed to gain an understanding of how lecturers and international students perceive the English language policies and practices at their institutions. The findings show that most participants perceive current policies and practices as unfair. However, there were discrepancies in lecturers' and…