Foreign language teachers have long been frustrated by learners' written errors. Traditional approaches to the problem--grammar instruction and error feedback--when used alone are not effective. Explicit instruction in proofreading provides a missing link. When instruction in proofreading is embedded in grammar instruction and when learners use…

The Languages Review Consultation Report recommends exploiting the potential of communications technology for the enhancement of curricular offerings. Newly developed instructional software is credited with opening doors to the cultures of young people while serving as an infinitely patient and supportive tutor. Thus, in the UK as in the US,…

Looked at from a certain distance, the "Languages Review" (Dearing & King, 2007) was seen by some in the foreign language (FL) education community, when it first came out, as a major disappointment because the authors had decided not to opt for the one measure that would reverse the falling numbers of students studying a foreign language at…

The Review (Dearing & King, 2007) will doubtless be judged less on its detailed content and standpoint and more on the impact it has on politicians' and ministers' priorities for teaching languages. For the Review is concerned with language "teaching" much more than with "learning". This is evident, for example, in the discussion of the consensus…

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…

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority's (QCA) radical decision to allow bilingual dictionaries in GCSE modern languages examinations from 1998 was subsequently reversed, and by 2003 dictionaries were no longer allowed in any public examinations at any level. The removal of dictionaries appeared to be based on one study that concluded that…

As readers of this journal will know, 2010 will see all KS2 (ages 7-11) pupils in England entitled to learn a modern foreign language in normal curriculum time. This development of the commitment to primary language learning should provide an excellent opportunity and experience for pupils, while at the same time requiring some radical changes for…

Language teaching has traditionally been a task for teachers to teach vocabulary items and grammatical rules and to explain to students how a foreign language works in reference to their mother tongue. For a long time, language teaching was a means to the end of understanding a written culture. This had two practical corollaries: to grade the…

This is a challenging time for sectors traditionally associated with modem foreign languages (MFL) education. MFL departments in secondary schools are striving to encourage their able linguists to continue with their language studies at Key Stage 4 (KS4); further education colleges are trying to make their numbers viable to run AS and A2 courses;…

This article describes a small-scale research project in two schools using content and language integrated learning (CLIL), one English and one Austrian, where in both cases there had been considerable misgivings about appropriate forms of assessment to match the different kinds of language skill developed in the CLIL process. Teachers were…

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…

This article presents the author's speech for the languages leader event on September 21, 2005. This speech focuses on the importance of learning languages, and in particular, the role that the Higher Education sector can play in making a reality of the Department's National Languages Strategy. In his speech, the author describes how UK fares…

How beginning teachers learn to teach has been the focus of a substantial amount of research. The process is complex, and a number of theories and models have been put forward. For example, Fuller and Bown's (1975) well-known classification of beginning teachers' concerns into self, task and impact (and the sequential nature of these categories)…

This article reports on a study which investigated the effects of correction of learners' grammatical errors on acquisition. Specifically, it compared the effects of timing of correction (immediate versus delayed correction) and manner of correction (explicit versus implicit correction). It also investigated the relative effects of correction of…