The relevance of English as a Second Language (ESL) courses to the "real world" of college writing is an ongoing issue for those who teach ESL. Ideally, ESL composition classes should help students make connections between what they learn about writing and the ways they might need to write later on in their academic careers. Unfortunately, as with…

For the last two years the author has used Repeated Reading (RR) to teach reading fluency in English as a Foreign Language classrooms in colleges and universities in Japan. RR is a method where the student reads and rereads a text silently or aloud from two to four times to reach a predetermined level of speed, accuracy, and comprehension. RR…

This paper explores the effects of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) instruction on the oral production of 15 high-school learners of English. The learners' use of the L1s (Basque and Spanish) in discourse markers and repair sequences as well as the learners' overall morphosyntactic development were analysed at two testing times (age…

Community college campuses around the United States serve an increasingly diverse student body. A report from the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights highlights this growing trend by outlining a plan to increase racial diversity at four-year institutions by encouraging transfers from community colleges, primarily because community…

To effectively address the needs of second language (L2) learners in college writing courses, many postsecondary institutions, especially those located in cities with high concentrations of immigrants, offer college-level courses for L2 students. Such courses include noncredit English language courses in an intensive English program, developmental…

In 2008, Miami Dade College received a $1.9 million Title V grant from the US Department of Education to develop an Accelerated Content-Based English for Academic Purposes (EAP) track called Project ACE for ESL students. The ACE curriculum is anchored by the principles of flexibility, contextualization, and faculty buy-in--critical matters given…

Contrastive rhetoric studies the writing of second language learners to understand how it is affected by their first language and culture. The field of contrastive rhetoric is as multidimensional as second language writing is complex. It draws on the work of contrastive analysis, anthropology, linguistics, pedagogy, culture studies, translation…

To writing, painting, drawing, and photography as artistic media, the author would like to add teaching as a creative endeavor as well. Especially in a classroom where English is not the first language for many students, the writing teacher needs to be creative with assignments and activities that address nontraditional ways of learning. Her…

The author has worked as a language teacher, teacher educator, and second language acquisition (SLA) researcher for over forty years. During this time grammar has figured largely in his thinking, in part because it has traditionally been so central to language pedagogy and in part because he became fascinated with how the human mind grapples with…

This article features Language Partners, an ESL program offered at the Danville Correctional Center, a medium-security men's prison in central Illinois. The program in which prisoners teach ESL classes, supported by volunteer teacher-trainers, is a learning community with immense and sometimes unforeseen value. The authors discuss reasons for…

In this essay, the author describes her own attempt at incorporating Web 2.0 technology into her teaching: a wiki project that she used in her English as a second language (ESL) composition course. The theme she traces throughout the rest of this essay is the wiki's ability (or inability) to make "connections" of various kinds. Like any text, the…

The theory of learning multimodality is receiving greater attention. Its application in language learning classes is also increasing in number. Since Chinese-speaking EFL learners are likely to be visual learners, as an instructor of Taiwanese EFL students, I have come to believe that arts integrated, multimodal projects help less confident and…

The teaching practicum is often considered as a compulsory activity for enculturating new members into the teacher community by providing opportunities to experience teaching in action. However, the practicum is rarely conceptualized in terms of its transformative potential. In this study, we report the results of a two-year ethnography study of a…

How many students in K-12 schools in the United States are studying foreign languages? Are these numbers on the increase or decrease--and in which languages? What do educators, administrators, and researchers need to know about these trends? This publication presents enrollment data in U.S. public schools in two years: 2004-05 and 2007-08,…

This study assesses the influence of a two-year language program evaluation on program directors and faculty career development. The study makes use of mixed-paradigms (positivism and qualitative interpretive), mixed-strategies (survey research and qualitative evaluation), one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and a post-hoc test of multiple…