The United States is formally represented around the world by approximately 14,000 Foreign Service officers and other personnel in the U.S. Department of State. Roughly one-third of them are required to be proficient in the local languages of the countries to which they are posted. To achieve this language proficiency for its staff, the State…

In 2014 the Washington state legislature approved career- and college-ready (CCR) requirements for high school graduation that better align with career pathways and with admissions standards at the state's public universities than previous requirements did. The CCR requirements increased the total number of credits needed to graduate, from 20 to…

These are the appendixes for the report, "Implementation of Career- and College-Ready Requirements for High School Graduation in Washington" (ED606463). The study looked at differences in the percentages of 2018 graduates who met the requirements and of 2018 graduates who did not across student groups (by socioeconomic status, English…

This article reports on an autoethnography by two authors who analysed the interrelationship of their experiences as foreign language learners, educators, and researchers. Both participant-researchers had taken advantage of the accessibility of online learning resources to learn new languages, had incorporated digital tools into their teaching…

This dissertation explores sociocultural factors which influence the choices of language teacher educators deciding what to include in coursework and programs. The term "curricularizing" is used to describe the complex process of selecting, planning, and delivering teacher education content. Conflicting social values create dilemmas for…

Linguistic ideologies are informed by social stereotyping to maintain the "standard" variety which is often interpreted as morally superior to "nonstandard" varieties. Consequently, these ideologies racialize "nonstandard" varieties, leading to even more negative stereotypes. One outlet of such stereotypes can be…

Castañeda v. Pickard (1981) mandated that educational programs for emergent bilinguals be tested for program efficacy. Since English language development (ELD) curricular materials are one part of an instructional program, we assess this mandate by examining the effectiveness of ELD materials in Texas. Using local linear matching, we find that…

The learner-centred and experiential pedagogical approach encouraged by the revised "New Zealand Curriculum" can be problematic for teachers who are used to delivering courses in teacher-fronted ways. Using the Learning Languages learning area as the context, this article presents the case of one New Zealand teacher who completed an…

According to the National Conference of State Legislature (NCSL), the total population of individuals (including authorized and unauthorized immigrants) in the United States is 319 million, and one in five U.S. residents speak a language at home other than English (Camarota & Zeigler, 2014). With the increasing number of English Language…

Inverted ("flipped") pedagogical models are rapidly increasing in prevalence within language education. These models are particularly relevant for language learning given that they promote learner agency and encourage the use of artifacts to mediate cognition. However, the specific methods used in these models are often not anticipated…

This article provides a narrative overview of research on online fan practices for language and literacy learning, use, and identity work. I begin with an introduction to online fan communities and common fan practices found in these online affinity spaces, the best known of which is fan fiction, fictional writing that reinterprets and remixes the…

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft are ideally suited to encourage and facilitate second language development (SLD) in the extramural setting, but to what extent do the language learners' actual trajectories of gameplay contribute to SLD? With the current propensity to focus research in digital game-based…

Chinese idioms are mostly four-character phrases and are called Quadra-syllabic Idiomatic Expressions (QIEs). It has long been reported that learning of Chinese QIEs poses a great challenge for both young L1 speakers and adult L2 learners as the condensed form is often associated with complicated figurative meanings. The present study explored the…

This exploratory study analyzes learner-learner interactions within a virtual environment when collaboratively reading Spanish poetry in a Hispanic literature course at the college level via an ecological theoretical perspective (van Lier, 2004). The goals of the study are (a) to present empirical data that illustrate the theoretical construct of…

Prior research has shown that intermediate-level adult learners of Russian who worked interactively with partners using text chat improved their vocabulary and oral production skills more than students who worked independently (Tare et al., 2014). Drawing on the dataset from Tare et al. (2014), the current study follows up to explore the nature of…