Within foreign language classrooms, one intervention gaining recognition is LinguaFolio, a portfolio-based formative assessment designed to increase self-regulated learning. The question emerges whether such an intervention impacts student motivation, learning, and achievement. Researchers conducted a classroom-based, quasi-experimental,…

This edited volume contains 11 short papers selected from the 2017 Innovative Language Teaching and Learning at University conference (InnoConf), which took place on the 16th of June at The Open University. The theme of the conference was "Integrating Informal Learning into Formal Language Education." The aim of the conference was to…

The purpose of this study was to examine factors that promote transformative learning experiences of college-level adult learners of foreign languages. This study was conducted to analyze how college-level adult learners of foreign languages experience transformative learning through educational and non-educational experiences. Mezirow's…

This qualitative study investigated the types of content-based student performance data World Language teachers used to improve instruction and student academic achievement, the purposes for which they used data, the issues they encountered, and the suggestions they made for more effective use of data. The Standards for Foreign Language Learning…

Multilingualism is a sensitive and complex subject in a global organisation such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the WTO legal texts, there is a need for full concordance, not simply translation. This article begins with an overview of the issues raised by multilingual processes at the WTO in the negotiation, drafting, translation,…

This article proposes a multiliteracies-based pedagogical framework for the analysis of computer-mediated discourse (CMD) in order to give students increased access to expanded discourse options that are available in online communication environments and communities (i.e., beyond the classroom). Through the analysis of excerpts and a corpus of…

This article explores the widely documented difficulty with object clitics in the acquisition of French. The study investigates the effects of L1 transfer and processing limitations on the production and comprehension of object clitics in child L2 learners of French with different L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Spanish). The Spanish-speaking learners…

The 2015 Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (CSCTFL) was held in Minneapolis, Minnesota together with the Minnesota Council on the Teaching of Languages and Cultures, who served as local host. This year's theme underscores the transformative nature of learning a foreign language. As language teachers we have a great…

For many language learners, studying a foreign language is a compulsory, high-stakes activity. It is perhaps for this reason that positive feelings about language learning are rarely mentioned in the literature on language learning. The focus is predominantly on negative feelings: the anxiety caused by being asked to speak in the foreign language…

Given that the linguistic articulators for sign language are also used to produce co-speech gesture, we examined whether one year of academic instruction in American Sign Language (ASL) impacts the rate and nature of gestures produced when speaking English. A survey study revealed that 75% of ASL learners (N = 95), but only 14% of Romance language…

Researchers on bilingual processing can benefit from computational tools developed in artificial intelligence. We show that a normalized Levenshtein distance function can efficiently and reliably simulate bilingual orthographic similarity ratings. Orthographic similarity distributions of cognates and non-cognates were identified across pairs of…

What does it mean to capably communicate across languages? This article introduces two theoretical models and a lesson plan format designed to facilitate the integration of proficiency, literacy, and culture teaching in foreign language teaching. The Second Symbolic Competencies Model configures proficiency and literacy as subordinate clusters of…

As a result of exposure, infants acquire biases that conform to the rhythmic properties of their native language. Previous lexical stress preference studies have shown that English- and German-, but not French-learning infants, show a bias toward trochaic words. The present study explores Spanish-learning infants' lexical stress preferential…

This document presents the proceedings of the 21st Annual Research Forum held June 30, 2016, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following 11 action research papers: The Use of Mexican Folk Art to Develop Oral and Written Language Ability and Cultural Awareness in the Secondary Spanish Classroom (Antonio…

In this paper plurilingual and autonomy building activities are described with reference to the CercleS European Language Portfolio and some parts of the original Council of Europe Language Portfolio. For this extracurricular plurilingual learning project in Portugal, eight second-year female students studying for a degree in Executive Secretarial…