This study details the development of a local test designed to place university Spanish students (n = 719) into one of the four different course levels and to distinguish between traditional L2 learners and early bilinguals on the basis of their linguistic knowledge, regardless of the variety of Spanish they were exposed to. Early bilinguals…

This study describes how length of stay in a foreign country influenced personal adjustment, language acquisition, and culture learning among a convenience sample of 150 United States student volunteers participating in a short-term cross-cultural living/learning situation in Mexico. Short-term was defined as two, four; six, eight, or ten weeks.…

The native language use in the target language classroom has recently gained the attention of second language acquisition research. This study analyzes such issue in the context of Dominican university students, ranging from 18 to 35 years old, studying in an English immersion program, who have been speaking their native language, namely, Spanish…

The learning process of English as a Foreign Language is a tricky challenge to face when it comes to deal with Spanish native speakers. Most of the time, people compare the structures and uses of both languages (the native and the target one), which causes an interference in the learning process and may result on failure or poorly achieved…

This article presents a model for a short-term interdisciplinary study abroad program designed specifically to foster intercultural competence. It provides a description of a one-month interdisciplinary General Education Summer Abroad Program in Valencia, Spain, that attempts to sensitize students to cultural differences, to engage students to a…

Second Life is one of the many three-dimensional virtual environments accessible through a computer and a fast broadband connection. Thousands of participants connect to this platform to interact virtually with the world, join international communities of practice and, for some, role play groups. Unlike online role play games however, Second Life…

This study addresses the development of the request strategies used in two service encounter scenarios by 31 nonnative speakers of Spanish spending 4 months living and studying in Valencia, Spain. The main method of data collection was an open role-play in which participants interacted with a Spanish native speaker. Results show that while there…

The 23rd EUROCALL conference was held in Cyprus from the 24th to the 27th of August 2016. The theme of the conference this year was "CALL Communities and Culture." It offered a unique opportunity to hear from real-world CALL practitioners on how they practice CALL in their communities, and how the CALL culture has developed in local and…

Describes an immersion program for native Spanish-speaking university students from the University of California, Los Angeles, that was created to help them fulfill the language requirement. Reasons for the program, student characteristics, language characteristics, expected goals and outcomes of the program, and program observations are provided.…

Repair behavior in university-level students was investigated to determine if students who study abroad use repair behavior differently from students who do not. The Mexico group (N =24) studied Conversational Spanish at La Salle University, Cancun. The U.S. group (N = 9) completed the same course at Friends University, Wichita, Kansas. Pretest…

Background: Integrating reading in foreign language (FL) classes is sometimes a difficult task because of lack of appropriate methodology and poor textbook support. In addition, college students find many readings too difficult to understand or not interesting. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate how a teacher-researcher…

Explores what it means to think in a target language, discusses those factors determining planned and unplanned use of more than one language for thinking, considers the role of target-language thinking in improving language ability, and examines mental translation in the reading of intermediate college French. The article concludes that benefits…