This article presents research findings investigating the fundamental characteristics in online Spanish instruction (at the university level in the United States) designed to maximize learning outcomes. The researcher collected data to develop a rubric of the fundamental characteristic in online Spanish instruction and then to determine whether…

In this article, the author describes his "Business German" course. His course sought to narrate a dialectic of agency and institution. He started by asserting a distinction between the intending subject--with its plural desires, interests, and identifications--and the world it acts in, through and upon. This distinction between acting subject and…

This paper reports on the pairing of Spanish-speaking in-service teachers and Turkish-speaking pre-service teachers in a telecollaborative intercultural project in which English was used as a lingua franca. The authors of this paper were the course leaders. Participants' discourses were examined to understand how they communicated their cultures…

Presented at the Advanced Placement Annual Conference (APAC) in Las Vegas, July 2007. This presentation explores the demographic and course-taking patterns that have been identified behind what students take AP exams and how to best reach the population of students that are not currently taking AP exams.

To promote inter-American understanding, a number of public-school systems, teacher-preparing institutions, State and county education departments, and the U. S. Office of Education recently cooperated in a series of experimental or demonstration centers. This bulletin describes the work carried on by 22 of these centers aided by a grant from the…

The town of Greeley, perched on northern Colorado's prairie, is like many other communities across the United States that are experiencing an influx of immigrants. The picturesque town of 85,000 people had a 30 percent minority population as of the 2000 U.S. Census. Estimates place that figure closer to 40 percent today, most of whom are Hispanic.…

The relationship between attention to linguistic form and accuracy or to meaning and fluency in language learning has been explored by language learning researchers for many years. They point to the potential difficulties for learners in attending to form and meaning at the same time and the importance of exposure to meaningful target language…

This study analyzed the implementation of a pre-writing activity that was designed to address L2 student writers' tendency to focus on grammatical accuracy to the exclusion of content and structure. The participants, students in a university-level Spanish composition course, were given a rubric with which to evaluate three previously written…

This study compared the narratives of three groups of advanced speakers of Spanish with different learning backgrounds. The first group was made up of heritage speakers; the second group was composed of missionaries that had recently returned from a two-year sojourn in a Spanish-speaking country; and the third group comprised students who had…

This paper describes the development of Spanish-language proficiency in bilingual preservice teachers at a university on the Texas--Mexico border. A survey with open-ended questions was administered to preservice teachers in bilingual and English as a Second Language certification programs. The purpose of this study was to investigate the paths…

For 15 years, "Newark Kids Count" has provided insight into the challenges facing Newark's children and families. This report presents the portrait of Newark children in 2010. A special section on Newark charter schools is also presented. Advocates for Children of New Jersey's (ACNJ's) goal in choosing this topic was to inform the…

Score linkages between the Verbal and Math sections of the SAT® I: Reasoning Test and the corresponding sections of the new version of a Spanish-language admissions test, the Prueba de Aptitud Academica® (PAA™) were investigated. A bilingual group design was employed. A language proficiency measure (ESLAT) was used to define the bilingual group…

This bulletin reports on the contributions of the Federal Government to the improvement of language and area studies. This report indicates that two fundamental conclusions have become readily apparent: (1) non-Western studies have received material assistance under the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (NDEA) without which the present high…

In the fall of 1996, the Arkansas Archeological Survey and the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville received a $180,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Teaching With Technology program. The goal of this grant initiative was to encourage creation of content-rich, computer-based materials…

This study systematically examines the strength of the connection between synchronous CMC and pragmatic instruction by measuring the effects of three types of synchronous group discussion (written chat [WC], oral chat [OC], and traditional face-to-face [FF] discussion) on the acquisition of the speech act (refusals of an invitation) in the target…