Whereas there exists a plethora of research on collocations and formulaic language in English, this article contributes towards a somewhat less developed area: the understanding and teaching of formulaic language in German as a foreign language. It analyses formulaic sequences and collocations in German writing (corpus-driven) and provides modern…

This study presents an insight into content and language integrated learning (CLIL) practices in the Australian state of Queensland. The article comprises four main sections. The first section outlines the context of CLIL in Australia and Queensland; there follows a brief review of the literature on stakeholders in CLIL programmes, such as…

This article reports a small-scale study that investigated the effect of (1) an instructional method, viz. directing learners' attention to formulaic sequences (FS) in a text, and (2) typographic salience, i.e. bold typeface and underlined, on foreign-language (FL) learners' recall of FS and single words (SW). Twenty-eight FL learners read a…

This paper describes and evaluates an action research project carried out by a teacher in an English comprehensive school, where a class of 13- to 14-year-olds was taught personal, social and health education and German through content-language integrated learning (CLIL) over a six-week period. The purpose of the study was to explore how CLIL…

The task of teaching non-territorial languages such as Yiddish at the university level is a complex undertaking. The teaching of Yiddish has its own particular difficulties due to an ever-diminishing population of native speakers available to students, a lack of contemporary cultural materials, and an abundance of outdated teaching materials. A…

This article reports on a collaborative research project which involved first-year distance learners of Chinese, French, German, Japanese and Spanish at a New Zealand university. Drawing on the principles of Allwright's exploratory practice, the study aimed to gain an insight into the learners' experiences and conceptualisations in terms of their…

What drives students to study German at university level? Although motivational research has been booming in recent years, students' motivation to pursue a modern foreign language beyond school level has not received much attention in the UK. This article sheds light on the various reasons that drive students in the UK to pursue a modern foreign…

Learners' pronunciation errors when reading aloud in the L2 often suggest an inability to use the language's sound-symbol relationships, or grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs). UK teaching methodology has failed to provide systematic instruction in L2 phonological decoding, and there is an absence of research on the effectiveness of teaching…

This paper describes a pilot questionnaire study conducted with a class of Year 9 beginners in German in a comprehensive school, which set out to elicit information on learners' beliefs about speaking a foreign language, including their awareness of strategies. Findings revealed that most pupils showed knowledge of a range of cognitive, social and…

This article examines the nature and influence of peer group perceptions on pupils' attitudes to learning German and French. It begins with an overview of key findings from the literature, before reviewing selected results from a large PhD attitudinal survey using a multi-stage qualitative research design. The article focuses on the perceptions of…

Literary hypertext has often been acknowledged as the embodiment of poststructuralist literary theory (e.g. Coover, 1992; Landow, 1997; Bolter, 2001). The only literary medium that is produced, edited, published and received electronically, it encourages readings that defy the conventionally linear decoding process. With respect to text…

The Special Education and Disability Act (SENDA) 2001 required post-16 institutions to have implemented the Disability Discrimination Act Part IV (DDA) 1995 by September 2005. In this paper a lecturer in Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) and a specialist teacher of the visually impaired from the Centre for Special and Inclusive Education at a…

The Specialist Schools Initiative in England has urged schools to plan their teaching of foreign languages in relation to the linguistic needs and preferences of their local communities. The changing multilingual fabric of many parts of Britain make such a goal a potentially difficult and controversial process. This paper explores the views of a…

Current figures (CILT, 2005) indicate that, whilst the numbers of students taking post-16 modern foreign language public examinations in England, Wales and Northern Ireland have declined overall between 2000 and 2004, one of the biggest drops is for German, which has experienced a steady year-on-year decline over the same period at the full A…

A co-educational comprehensive school in North Yorkshire, concerned at the gap between boys' and girls' performance in French and German at GCSE, opted to teach Year 8 languages classes as single-sex groups. 2003-04 was to be a pilot year, at the end of which pupils' performance, motivation and attitude, as well as the experiences and views of…