Modern languages have always been about transition -- as practitioners, we challenge our students constantly to move between their own cultural and linguistic reference points and those of others. Our dynamic, interactive teaching methodologies have had to adapt to the pandemic context, necessitating the interrogation of past practice and…

The demand for Spanish for specific purposes (SSP) university courses in the United States has prompted widespread curricular change in language departments over the last two decades (Klee, 2015; Sánchez-López, 2013). However, many instructors lack the tools and training needed to design SSP curricula that meet learners' communicative needs in…

This volume represents the first collection of empirical studies focusing on peer interaction for L2 learning. These studies aim to unveil the impact of mediating variables such as task type, mode of interaction, and social relationships on learners' interactional behaviors and language development in this unique and pedagogically powerful…

Tasks and interactional feedback have received much attention in instructed second language acquisition research in recent years. However, little research exists that has investigated feedback and task factors together during naturally occurring teacher-student interaction in classroom settings. To bridge this gap, the current study explored the…

This year's volume of the Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (CSCTFL) Report centering on the conference theme of MultiTasks, MultiSkills, and MultiConnections focused on the importance or world language use within the classroom and beyond with articles extending the conversation on target language use in instruction,…

Projects related to the European Language Portfolio (ELP) carried out at the Language Centre of the University of Trieste are concerned to examine whether and to what extent "can do" descriptors can be extended to courses in Languages for Specific Purposes. The project reported in this article had two aims. The first was to explore what…

This study examined the second language (L2) development of adult learners of Spanish at three levels of proficiency during and after a semester of instruction. A fundamental goal was to identify cognitive and psychosocial individual differences (IDs) that can explain between-learner variation over time in order to expand our understanding of the…

Investigated whether planning opportunity results in increased focus on form at the level of strategic attention to form during planning time, as well as at the level of production outcomes during task performance. Results provide support for the claim that planning before doing a second language task can promote an increased focus on form.…

Investigated the effects of modality, information type, and language experience on recall by foreign language learners of Spanish. Fifty-four intermediate and advanced level university students participated in the study by reading and listening to an expository passage, and then performing a recall task. The protocols were then statistically…

Explored how third-year-level university students represented an assigned reading-to-write task as indicated by the type of papers they produced, and the relationship between the linguistic quality of those papers and the type of task representation. Findings suggest that the ability to interpret a reading-to-write task appropriately is dependent…

Investigates the effects of awareness, or lack thereof, on 32 adult second or foreign language learners' subsequent intake and written production of targeted Spanish morphological forms. Think-aloud protocol data were used to measure awareness or lack of it, and morphological learning was assessed by the learners' performances on two postexposure…

Discusses the development of a foreign language (Spanish) test battery that was designed for two purposes: to place students in study-abroad programs appropriate to their language ability and to provide information on designing useful instruction for prospective study-abroad students. Results are presented into task and rater variability in the…

Studies the role played by native language transfer and task formality in the second-language acquisition of the Spanish voiced stop phonemes /b d g/ and their spirantized variants to identify specific problems affecting learners. Results indicate that native language transfer markedly inhibits acquisition of the voiced spirants. (21 references)…

Examines strategies students use while performing a listening comprehension task and the relationship between strategy use and listening ability. Eighty-three students registered for first-, second-, third-, and fourth-semester Spanish participated. The first-semester students scored the highest and the second-semester students, the lowest on…

Articles in this issue include the following: "Chat in EFL: Communicative Humanistic Acculturation Techniques" (Daniel Evans); "Task Interpretation and Task Effectiveness: A Vygotskian Analysis of a French L2 Classroom Task" (Lindsy Myers); "Envisioning a Standards-Based Methods Course: Preparing Second Language Educators…