In monolingual areas such as the southern Spanish Autonomous Community of Andalusia, the progressive introduction of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programmes in a wide range of primary and secondary schools has probably produced the biggest turning point in Spain's modern educational history. CLIL is initially focused on…

This article describes a model used to explore cultural understanding in English as a foreign language reading in a developing country, namely Argentina. The model is designed to investigate, analyse and describe EFL readers' processes of cultural understanding in a specific context. Cultural understanding in reading is typically investigated…

Films and TV series are widely used to support teaching in English language classrooms. They are seen largely as a source of authentic language, as a way of motivating students or as a means of conveying knowledge about another culture. There is less emphasis on their use as a focus for developing intercultural competence. This is particularly the…

This article reports on an action research case study conducted at a university in Japan, which explored how student identity-development can be made visible in potentially assessable ways through materials design in intercultural communicative competence (ICC)-oriented foreign language education. It suggests that identity-development can be…

Language learners' increased mobility and the ubiquity of virtual intercultural encounters has challenged traditional ideas of "cultures". Moreover, representations of cultures as consumable life-choices has meant that learners are no longer locked into standard and static cultural identities. Language learners are better defined as…

This study has been prompted by a concern that the term intercultural understanding (IU) has appeared in English curriculum policy texts in order to address macro issues with scant pedagogical attention to its effective implementation at the micro level in the modern foreign languages (MFL) classroom. The article investigates pupils'…

Since the 1980s the field of language teaching and learning has emphasised the interplay between language, culture and identity and promotes both communicative and intercultural competencies. This mirrors a general trend in the social sciences after the so-called "cultural turn" which brought about a concentration on culture, identity…

Teachers' subject knowledge is recognized as an essential component of effective teaching. In the foreign language context, teachers' subject knowledge includes language proficiency. In New Zealand high schools, foreign languages (e.g. Chinese, French, German, Japanese and Spanish) have recently been offered to learners earlier in their…

This article explores the use of blogs for pre-service language teacher education in two national settings, the UK (University of Cambridge) and the US (University of South Florida). Taking two approaches to blogging and to learning through blogging (one based on self-reflection and a constructivist approach and one based on social and…

The importance of teachers' beliefs in understanding the effectiveness of language teaching and learning is well documented. This research investigates the exact relationship between a set of beliefs and classroom practice through an example of one experienced secondary school EFL teacher in the People's Republic of China, using…

Studies of reflective practices among pre-service teachers focus mostly on teaching practice and very rarely on the acquisition of academic knowledge. The aim of this study was to examine the reflections of 25 pre-service teachers in online forums and weblogs focused on their learning in two literary pedagogical courses. A total of 97 online forum…

This study examines existing research in the field of language learning advising (LLA) with the aim of establishing a professional validation framework which can inform the development of a systematic and structured preparation of language learning advisers with appropriate associated authority. The role of language learning advisers emerged about…

In this article, we discuss an ethnographic case study of the teaching practice (practicum) experience of a student teacher, Lynn, in a university partnership school in mainland China. Drawing on Activity Theory, we conceptualise Lynn's practicum as boundary-crossing between two different activity systems: those of the school community and…

Over the last 20 years, the study of language teachers' beliefs has attracted much attention. One important strand of this research has been the exploration of the relationship between teachers' beliefs and their practice, generating a recurring research theme of identifying "consistency" and "inconsistency" between…

Vocabulary is an essential component of language. It is central to reading ability, writing ability and listening ability, and the most important aspect of second-language (L2) knowledge for academic achievement. The aim of this paper is to investigate quantitatively some of the factors that make some L2 words more difficult to learn and retain…