We report on a small-scale exploratory study of Japanese students' reactions to the use of a bilingual language assistant on an EFL study-abroad course in the UK and we give an insight into the possible effect of using bilingual assistants on speaking production. First-year university students were divided into three groups all taught by a…

Second language listening has historically proved to be a difficult skill. Strategy instruction studies have sought to bring about improvements in subjects' listening but with mixed results. This lack of success might be due to the nature of listening strategy theory and its influence on conceptualizations of listening strategy instruction. The…

All primary school children in England are to be entitled to learn a foreign language by 2010, based on the belief that an early start is beneficial for language learning in the long run. However, the evidence of the benefits of an early start is inconclusive, and it is also unclear what type of curriculum and pedagogy would be most appropriate…

In this study we tracked the development of the "passe compose" in second-language learners of French whose first language is English. Although the "passe compose" is a highly used tense among native speakers of French and it appears to present particular difficulty for first-language English speakers, its second-language development has been…

This article outlines some of the key issues involved in developing a programme of strategy training for learners of French, in listening and in writing. It highlights the theoretical perspectives and research findings on listening and writing that informed the selection of strategies to teach learners and thence the development of appropriate…

This article reports on a descriptive and exploratory study of near-beginner learners of French in English secondary schools, their cognitive and metacognitive strategies, and their general approaches to writing. There is virtually no research on foreign language writing at this level, conceived in this study as including the copying of words and…

The editors and guest editors of Volume 35 have very kindly asked me to write an end-piece to this special issue of "The Language Learning Journal" that has focused on language learner strategies (LLS). Particularly they have asked me to evaluate the extent to which the papers presented in this volume adhere to some sort of theoretical consensus.…

Mailed surveys investigated modern foreign language inservice provisions offered by English and Welsh local education authorities since the introduction of the national curriculum, comparing this analysis with expressed inservice needs of secondary school department heads. Teachers' choice of inservice course content was primarily in response to…

Presents the results of a research project involving language teachers in Italy, their use of the target language (TL) and its interrelationship with collaborative and independent learning. The investigation was conducted by asking 21 Italian teachers of English to fill in a questionnaire concerning their beliefs regarding classroom use of TL. (15…