Based on my fieldwork with Burmese teachers in Thailand, I describe the drawbacks of using IRB-mandated written consent procedures in my cross-cultural collaborative ethnographic research on education. Drawing on theories of intersubjectivity (Mikhail Bakhtin), ethics (Emmanuel Levinas), and translation (Naoki Sakai), I describe face-to-face…

The integration of translation tools into the Google search engine has led to a huge increase in the visibility and accessibility of such tools, with potentially far-reaching implications for the English language classroom. Although these translation tools are the focus of this study, using them is in fact only one way in which English language…

Objective: This study, nested within a large cohort study, sought to explore how well Vietnamese mothers with pre-school children understood the dental health education material commonly available in New South Wales, Australia. Design: Qualitative research. Setting: Home-based interviews. Method: Vietnamese-speaking mothers ("n" = 24)…

Recent evidence demonstrates that American Sign Language (ASL) signs are active during print word recognition in deaf bilinguals who are highly proficient in both ASL and English. In the present study, we investigate whether signs are active during print word recognition in two groups of unbalanced bilinguals: deaf ASL-dominant and hearing…

This article investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of two expressions of the semantic feature [definite] in Russian, a language without articles, by English and Korean native speakers. Within the Feature Reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2009), Slabakova (2009) has argued that reassembling features that are represented overtly in the…

Integration of the four language skills can be enhanced by focusing on back translating--translating an English text into the students' first language and then back into English. This article describes a three-step process for using back translation in reading classes as a way to help students identify gaps in their English competence.

This paper examines whether the Swedish steering documents for English-language education are ethnically biased, that is, whether Swedish culture and language or "Swedishness" are used as norms when teaching and assessing students. To examine whether such bias exists, the central curricula and syllabi from 1994 and 2000, as well as local…

Despite criticisms set against methods by postmethodologists who believe that teaching methods must be cast aside, new methods can be proposed that better meet learners' needs as a continuation of the chain of former methods introduced in the past. The present study proposes some language teaching techniques after introducing the theoretical…

The progressive education movement was known in Spain from its very inception, and in fact many of its pedagogical theories and practices reached Spain before reaching other European countries. Yet traditional historiography has always maintained that Spain was never integrated in the progressive education movement, a misconception that helps…

In several of his papers, Charles S. Peirce illustrates processes of interpreting and understanding signs by examples from second language vocabulary teaching and learning. The insights conveyed by means of these little pedagogical scenarios are not meant as contributions to the psychology of second language learning, but they aim at elucidating…

In this article, the authors offer an alternative to traditional methods of teaching English that often included translating structures from the target language to the mother tongue. Although this method seems antiquated, it is still commonly practiced, as original dictogloss procedures were intended to provide an alternative to traditional…

The data reported in this article come from a large project whose goal was to explore how Latin American students in Catalonia, Spain use their two languages--Spanish and Catalan--to support their learning of mathematics in small groups with other students who are Spanish- or Catalan-dominant. For 5 years, lessons from bilingual mathematics…

This study explores how the language minority provisions in the Voting Rights Act (VRA) affect Latino voter registration. We are particularly interested in how these provisions affect Latino citizens with varying levels of English language proficiency. Using data from the 2006 National Latino Survey, we find that Latino citizens with limited…

Translation equivalents (TEs) characterize the lexicon of bilinguals from the early stages of acquisition, as reported in studies involving English and other languages in which most cross-language synonyms are dissimilar in phonological form. This research explores the emergence of TEs in Spanish-Catalan bilinguals who are acquiring two languages…

Language and gesture are viewed as highly interdependent systems. Besides supporting communication, gestures also have an impact on memory for verbal information compared to pure verbal encoding in native but also in foreign language learning. This article presents a within-subject longitudinal study lasting 14 months that tested the use of…