This paper takes stock of the state of language learning in the UK, as the country teeters on the edge of Brexit and becomes used to being led by the first Prime Minister in over 50 years to have studied Languages at university. The author, Megan Bowler, a Classics student at the University of Oxford, looks at the broad benefits to individuals,…

The object of the present linguistic study is the linguistic phenomenon of gender as a grammatical category of the English noun. We witness an upsurge of interest to the problem nowadays in the context of the prescription of gender-fair English. Gender-fair (neutral) English language has gained support from major text-book publishers and academic…

Reading aloud is apparently an indispensible part of teaching. Nevertheless, little is known about reading aloud across the curriculum by students and teachers in high schools. Nor do we understand teachers' attitudes towards issues such as error correction, rehearsal time, and selecting students to read. A survey of 360 teachers in England shows…

Watching foreign language programmes and films with captions (same-language subtitles intended for the deaf and hard-of-hearing) has been shown to assist learners in phonetic retuning, vocabulary acquisition and listening comprehension [e.g. Mitterer and McQueen, 2009. Foreign subtitles help but native-language subtitles harm foreign speech…

This paper analyses teachers' engagement with collaborative and open educational practices to develop their pedagogical expertise in the field of modern language (ML) learning and specific learning difficulties (SpLD). The study analyses the findings of a staff development initiative at the Department of Languages, Open University, UK, in 2013,…

Whether the study of languages should be a core element of a balanced and broadly based curriculum for all pupils in England's 11-16 state-funded secondary schools is also part of a wider debate concerning how to harness England's rich linguistic and cultural diversity and improve the quality and range of language skills of the country. While…

It has long been claimed that stories are a powerful tool for language learning. Storytelling is often used as a discrete pedagogical approach in primary modern foreign language (MFL) lessons in England. There has, however, been little investigation into how storytelling might impact on vocabulary learning in the primary classroom. This article…

The aim of this study is to understand the main principles of the CEFR and to what extent Anatolian High Schools' 9th grade EFL curriculum meet the principles advocated in that document. Hence, document analysis was used as a method to seek answers to the research questions set by a comparative analysis of the CEFR and Anatolian High Schools'…

The newly formed Linguistics and Modern Languages subject area at University of Huddersfield sought to revamp our curriculum to embed employability into our teaching so that students could understand the relevance of their subject to life outside and after university. To this end, we decided to adapt and specialise the generic placement module…

This dissertation addresses a significant gap in the historiography of science: the nature of the language sciences as "science." Focusing on disciplinary and intellectual developments in the context of Imperial Germany (1871-1918), the project anticipates, complicates, and helps to explain a widely recognized theoretical shift, namely,…

Although academic dishonesty has received considerable attention in recent years, there is little research on how non-serious cheating issues in a discipline such as biology or chemistry can become highly serious offenses in the context of instruction in the modern languages (MLs). One of these "grey areas" is (unauthorized) editing by a…

Purpose: According to the 2014 joint report drafted by the Quality Assurance Agency and Higher Education Academy (QAA/HEA), universities have a key role to play in the development of sustainability literate graduates who can contribute to an environmentally responsible society. This paper aims to assess language students' understanding of…

This article is a narrative résumé of a year-long collaborative critical inquiry into teaching methods with teachers of modern languages in Irish secondary schools. Putting myself, a cultural stranger and first-time qualitative researcher, at the core of this self-study, I discuss first the context and methodological framework of the study to…

This study investigates Korean English teachers' responses to the current English Language Teaching (ELT) policies and reveals the attributes of their professional identity from their responses. Data collected from different narratives demonstrate that the teachers value the principles of communicative language teaching, but are not supportive of…

Online course design has experienced an upheaval recently with the arrival of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), turning the model which underpins many online courses on its head. In contrast to MOOCs, conventional online courses have usually been designed for small private groups of participants, giving access to closed content and online…