The Review (Dearing & King, 2007) will doubtless be judged less on its detailed content and standpoint and more on the impact it has on politicians' and ministers' priorities for teaching languages. For the Review is concerned with language "teaching" much more than with "learning". This is evident, for example, in the discussion of the consensus…

This article is an extension of a presentation that won "Best Exercise" at the Eastern Academy of Management, 1998. The authors introduce an experiential gourmet approach using "food stories" to stimulate an aura of acceptance and appreciation for human commonalities before delving into human differences. The authors use a semester long…

High school teacher Melissa Troise challenges students to recognize the relationships that exist between literary theories, such as Marxism, feminism, and postcolonialism, and urges students to expand their contexts for reading texts by accessing and combining theories. Troise believes theory provides students with the potential to better…

This study investigates how portfolios support pre-service teachers' learning to teach. The findings revealed that the portfolio provides pre-service teachers with productive learning experiences which help them develop their "library use, knowledge, skills, attitudes, personal traits, motivation to learn, interpersonal relationships"…

Interview guides and a questionnaire were developed in order to find what factors demotivated students in Japanese high school English classrooms. Five college students who were attending two private universities and one public university shared their views about demotivation in the interviews. Forty-two students at a public university responded…

Animated models explicate the procedure to solve a problem, as well as the rationale behind this procedure. For abstract cognitive processes, animations might be beneficial, especially when a supportive pedagogical agent provides explanations. This article argues that animated models can be an effective instructional method, provided that they are…

In this paper we report the results of a questionnaire survey conducted with 1777 Hungarian primary school children aged between 13 and 14 studying English and German. In our research we investigated the differences in the motivational and intercultural contact measures as well as determinants of motivated behaviour between learners of English and…

The present research examined whether individual differences in extropunitive (i.e., distrust, dislike, and discriminatory expectations of Whites) and intropunitive (i.e., internalization of society's disparaging views) responses to prejudice account for African Americans' concrete attitudes toward school (i.e., experience-based doubts about…

This study examines the relationship among five independent variables--integrative motivation, instrumental motivation, the need to fulfill a foreign language requirement, grade point average (GPA), and previous years studying Spanish--as predictors of five dependent variables: scores on a simulated oral proficiency interview (SOPI), final exam…

Past research has suggested that students need to be motivated by themselves (intrinsic learning motivation) and use higher-order cognitive skills so as to excel in problem solving, decision-making, and analytical reasoning in real-life situations. In this study, we examined the role of intrinsic learning motivation (ILM) and cumulative GPA in…

For more than two decades, the concept of student engagement has grown from simple attention in class to a construct comprised of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components that embody and further develop motivation for learning. Similarly, the goals of student engagement have evolved from dropout prevention to improved outcomes for lifelong…

The goal of this study is to understand ten Taiwanese graduate students' personal experiences with language anxiety and cultural adjustment while studying in an American university. This study focuses not only on language anxiety but also on cultural factors in participants' daily lives inside and outside of the classroom. The study utilized an…

This study is performed by conducting a survey analysis to investigate students' attitudes and preferences towards learning English at Kuwait University in non-English major ESL students. The sample size will be roughly 21-22% of a total of 4950 college level English Language learners at Kuwait University where specific English courses are part of…

This study was conducted in the Faculty of Creative Multimedia, Multimedia University, Malaysia and investigated students' perceptions while working on a multimedia project that was embedded within a constructivist-based learning environment. We studied the impact of using multimedia on students who have little experience with working in a…

Research indicates that online learning often situates control of implementation with the learner. Recently, scholars have turned attention to the importance of self-directed learning (SDL) skills for online learning environments. Existing frameworks for understanding SDL focus primarily on process and personal attributes in face-to-face settings.…