This article presents a writing project whose primary goal is the development of linguistic, cross-cultural, and meta-cognitive competencies through the study of a dark episode in French history--the German Occupation. Students create personas who all lived in the same building in 1939 and write their memoirs 60 years later. Following a brief…

This article presents an approach to literary texts that develops students' language proficiency, content knowledge, and analytical skills through the interweaving of three content areas--literary analysis, stylistics, and culture--at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels of the foreign language curriculum. Consistent with…

Using the National Standards' 5 C's as a framework, the authors examine student success in Spanish community service-learning at making connections across academic disciplines, to information and viewpoints that they encounter in the community, and to concrete social action. We use data from students, instructors, and community partners involved…

This article reports on an extensive survey administered to advanced heritage language (HL) learners to examine their language behaviors, attitudes, and backgrounds. To date, there have been no detailed categorizations of advanced HL learners to guide classroom instruction and curriculum design. Thus the present study is a first attempt to fill…

This study measures and analyzes improvements in students' oral proficiency during a study abroad semester in Germany. Oral proficiency interviews were conducted with participants before and after the program during three consecutive years. All interviews were assigned official ratings. Usage of two specific grammar structures associated with the…

The goal of this study is to describe the acquisition rate for gender acquisition in Spanish and to show whether individual variability and language contact may affect this rate. The participants were intermediate second language Spanish (first language English) learners in the study abroad and at-home contexts over a 4-month period. The…

This article examines the role of narrative in the learning process of language tutors in a university service-learning course involving collaboration between an institution of higher learning and public high schools in an urban setting. The tutors' personal narrative reflections offer multiple perspectives on interactions of tutors with high…

Although much attention has been given in recent literature to the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language (HL), few studies have been published on specific Spanish HL programs, especially in states such as Utah that have only recently seen a large increase in the number of heritage students of Spanish. This study reports the results of a…

The researchers investigated attributions for success, attitudes, and aptitudes for native language learning and foreign language learning success for 648 students enrolled in 100-level university foreign language courses (Spanish, French, and German). We examined relationships via correlational analyses and used structural equation modeling to…

This article explores international student teaching (IST) within the narratives of a prospective language teacher from the midwestern region of the United States. With a focus on one participant, the case study highlights significant factors that relate to the IST experience in Ecuador. A corpus generated from verbal protocols collected over a…

Many college students feel that learning a second language (L2) is necessary to bring value to their future. However, many also feel that during their years of learning an L2, the only experience they acquire starts when they enter the classroom and stops when they leave it. This view may bring a lack of engagement in learning the L2. Research has…

This study examined the relationship between student strategy use and the development of proficiency in a Korean as a Foreign Language classroom. A total of 66 English native speakers learning Korean as a Foreign Language were administered the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), Version 5.1. Findings indicated a low positive…

This study draws from sociocultural theory to examine how biographical factors interplay with contextual factors to shape the professional identity of a Spanish language teacher candidate. Specifically, it explores the student teaching experience of Marcos, a 30-year-old language teacher candidate from South America. Analysis of the data reveals…

This study investigates how motivation and interaction shape the speaking proficiency of study abroad (SA) and classroom or at home (AH) language learners. The author administered a motivation questionnaire, language contact profile, and pretest and posttest simulated oral proficiency interview. The data reveal that SA and AH students had similar…

This study explores the effectiveness of instructor-written corrective feedback for the improvement of writing accuracy by beginning college-level learners of German. The researcher investigated changes in error rates in six error categories in essay writing in correlation with three different corrective feedback types administered consistently…