This article explores Hispanics' concepts of cultural and linguistic identity. It is based on the findings of a recent study conducted by the author in Iglesia hispana de Cristo, a Hispanic church community in Western New York. Data come from ethnographic interviews conducted with 48 participants aged 13 to 80 years and with church leaders and…

Aims of the current study were to explore teachers' background, beliefs, attitudes, and sense of self-efficacy, as well as instructional supports and innovative practices in response to cultural and linguistic diversity in classrooms serving Spanish-English speaking children of migrant workers. A total of 22 teachers participated in…

In this study, 64 master's students and program graduates in French, Spanish, and TESOL evaluated their online experiences in two areas in which learning effectiveness is often questioned in online settings: linguistic proficiency and cultural knowledge. This study was informed by national data documenting attitudes toward online learning,…

As a result of a university partnership, elementary students at two midwest Catholic elementary schools have been provided with exploratory world language instruction (FLEX) from pre-service teachers. To investigate students' attitudes and learning of Spanish, researchers interviewed second and fourth graders. The students' parents and pre-service…

Spanish spelling, especially the use of written accent marks, is a major stumbling block for Spanish heritage language (SHL) learners (Carreira 2002). In fact, Mikulski (2006) found that most SHL learners ranked bettering their spelling and grammar as a very important learning goal. Despite its importance in literacy development and its perceived…

Several decades of ePortfolio research confirm the power of the tool for helping students make meaning of varied curricular and personal experiences. For first-time users, however, the learning curve may be steep, and the gap between institutional or instructor goals and student experiences may be wide. Some studies suggest that students…

This chapter reports on a qualitative investigation on the development of adult Spanish language learners' intercultural sensitivity while using Web 2.0 technologies to explore living abroad. Comments provided by 33 participants on wikis, Pinterest, and journal entries were analyzed using a line-by-line interpretative approach (Charmaz, 2006).…

This comparative case study evaluated the role of foreign language study within the Library and Information Science (LIS) curriculum of two programs in the United States and Honduras. The purpose of this research was to understand the significance and usefulness of language courses from the perspective of the students enrolled. Students who had…

The purpose of this qualitative inquiry was to understand how four in-service Spanish teachers interpreted their participation in a summer study abroad program and how the experience contributed to their ongoing professional development and language proficiency. Using a multiple case design (Simons, 2009; Stake, 2005; Yin, 2009), the researchers…

The present investigation seeks to determine whether and under what circumstances can adult bilinguals deploy segmentation strategies characteristic of their two languages, or of their dominant language. To that end, we inquired whether the context language employed during the segmentation experiment (i.e., the language in which participants…

This study examines the formative aspects of teaching in the World Language community college classroom: formative feedback, reflection, and assessment, and then recommends a new educational technique that applies the aforementioned formative elements into the classroom. To this end, in the fall semester of 2015, three sections of Spanish I at the…

In recent years, much research has shown that the first language (L1) is being used in the majority of foreign language classrooms. However, these findings have often failed to include secondary foreign language teachers and their teaching context. The current mixed-methods study explores Spanish teachers' use of and beliefs about first and target…

Oral history is presented in this article as an interpretative exercise for historical events in a Spanish course for heritage language learners at the university level. Through the interview of a Latino immigrant family, students re-examined the history of their own families and increased their linguistic self-esteem. They were guided to become…

This article describes a telecollaboration project about the environment in the primary English as a foreign language classroom carried out in 2013/2014 between Argentina and Denmark. It combines English language teaching with intercultural citizenship education and forms part of a network of projects in Europe, the US and East Asia. This is the…

Acquiring English in Puerto Rico involves the perceived advantages of bilingualism in contact with socio-political and economic forces that encourage and constrain the development of a population that is bilingual and biliterate in Spanish and English. Using a mixed design we report the perspectives of 86 experienced English teachers on the…