This article describes an email project carried out jointly by the Institute of Modern Languages and the Department of Applied Languages at Antonio de Nebrija University in Madrid and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) in the US during the first semester of the academic year 2004-2005. Students worked with a partner exchanging…

Foreign-language cinema has generally been relegated to a minor role in language education. This paper reports on and analyses the results of a survey of attitudes towards foreign film among UK university students of French, German and Spanish. The findings reveal students' limited exposure to and relative lack of familiarity with non-anglophone…

The 2008 Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, a joint conference with the Michigan World Language Association, focused on learning about the diverse backgrounds and needs of today's students and discovering new ways to help them succeed in reaching the goal of language proficiency. A wide variety of workshops and…

This study sought to address three questions related to the pronunciation of Spanish by non-native speakers: (1) does the pronunciation of upper-intermediate become "fossilized?"; (2) is their a relationship between quality of pronunciation and amount of improvement?; and (3) when judging degrees of "foreignness," are…

Each of the seven annotated bibliographies in this volume is concerned with the acquisition of English as a Second Language (ESL) by groups of learners who share a common first language or culture. Each bibliography was compiled by an advanced ESL student who is a native speaker of a language referenced by the bibliography. The first bibliography,…

Chicano student dropout and persistence is discussed in terms of the theories of Tinto and Astin on student integration and involvement. An overview of each theory is presented with references to Chicano student retention, and a review of the literature on Chicano students is provided. The studies reviewed here identified Chicano student…

The problem of evaluating instructional materials in foreign language courses in terms of educational relevance is examined in this survey of a third-semester, college, Spanish class. Students were given reading materials in the social sciences in lieu of the more traditional literary selections and asked to evaluate them through an attitudinal…

Testing of a second-language phonological acquisition model with four beginning learners of Spanish supported the claim that transfer processes decrease over time while developmental processes increase and then decrease. Analysis also revealed a hierarchical organization of processes in second-language acquisition and an interaction of the native…

Examined the efficacy of the keyword method versus rote rehearsal in learning foreign language vocabulary. Findings revealed that in experienced foreign language learners, rote learners' performance excelled that of keyword learners, whereas in experienced learners, rote and keyword learners recalled the same proportion of words, although the…

Examines the hypothesis that learners focus their attention on lexical instead of grammatical items when processing input for semantic information. The study measured language processing via reconstruction of propositional content and recognition of verb tense within a passage. Results indicate that lexical cues improved reconstruction of a…

This study extends previous research on the relationships among intelligibility, perceived comprehensibility, and accentedness. The researchers obtained accent and comprehensibility ratings and transcriptions of accented speech of Cantonese, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish intermediate English-as-a-Second-Language students from native English…

Tested the interlanguage structural conformity hypothesis by examining how frequently young adult, native Spanish speakers in Mexico modified English two- and three-member onsets. Results indicate that three-member onsets were modified significantly more frequently than were two-member onsets and that epenthesis occurred more frequently after…

Describes activities in Spanish language classes inspired by popular movies and television programs such as "Evita,""The Sound of Music,""The Wizard of Oz,""Carousel,""I Dream of Jeannie,""I Love Lucy," and "Charlie's Angels." Notes that these programs' familiarity establishes a familiar context in which to practice grammar, vocabulary, and other…

The locus of control, whether internal or external, is an influential concept in second-language learning. One observes it, for example, in Puerto Rican students returning to Puerto Rico to take university-level courses. Explanations address a teaching method relying on use of problems with examples in such a way as to empower students. This also…

Examines two tenets of communicative language teaching--authenticity of the input and authorship of the language user--in an electronic environment. Reviews research in textually-mediated second language acquisition and analyzes two cases of computer-mediated language learning: the construction of a multimedia CD-ROM by American college learners…