This qualitative multiple comparative case study investigated attrition in online Spanish language courses, from both instructor and student perspectives. Attrition rates in online courses have been found to be up to 50% higher than attrition rates in face to face courses, when studying the phenomenon of attrition in higher education. Attrition is…

Since the introduction of gender themes into university teaching in geography in Spain in 1989, significant gains have been made but challenges remain in relation to placing gender into undergraduate curricula and developing teaching resources in local languages. Geographers in Spain have to meet those challenges in the near future in order to…

This paper describes three case studies, where language learners were invited to use "LingoBee" as a means of supporting their language learning. LingoBee is a mobile app that provides user-generated language content in a cloud-based shared repository. Assuming that today's students are mobile savvy and "Digital Natives" able…

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…

Including speaking tasks in the foreign language paper of the Spanish University Entrance Examination (PAU) has been inexistent in the last 15 years. However, the implications can be seen in shape of pressure on teachers to get students ready for such tasks in just three years (2009-2012). Because of the high stakes consequences attached to this…

The 2014 Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages took place in St. Louis, Missouri with the cooperation of the Foreign Language Association of Missouri. The 2014 conference focused on ways in which foreign language teachers, "unlock" or help to open up lines of communication between their students and people who…

As digital devices play a more critical role in daily life than ever, more opportunities arise for innovative learning technologies--a trend on full display in the "Educational Media and Technology Yearbook" for 2013. This latest edition from the Association for Education, Communication, and Technology (AECT) notes the most current…

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,…

Undoubtedly, different learning contexts offer different opportunities for foreign language practice. This article focuses on context effects, and reports on the findings of the "Study Abroad and Language Acquisition" (SALA) project, which has examined in depth the impact of two learning contexts, SA within the European Community Action…

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…

The key role of administrative staff in the implementation of specific institutional policies at university has often been ignored when analysing policies or attitudes related to higher education. Consequently, little is known about the administrative staff's attitudes and involvement relating to the processes of internationalisation and…

The areas of Pragmatics and Second Language Acquisition have existed separately in the field of Linguistics for some time. Their connection, however, has more recently seen a great deal of study by researchers like Scarcella and Brunak (1981), Rintell (1981), Brown and Levinson (1987), Koike (1992, 1996), Saito, Beecken (1997), Felix-Brasdefer…

In this article, I examine literacy artifacts placed by students in different locations of a state-run secondary school in the city of Madrid, Spain. The data were gathered as part of a two-year long multilevel ethnography focused on the social and academic trajectories of immigrant students in Spanish compulsory secondary education. The analysis…

In the new European higher education space, Universities in Europe are exhorted to cultivate and develop multilingualism. The European Commission's 2004-2006 action plan for promoting language learning and diversity speaks of the need to build an environment which is favourable to languages. Yet reality indicates that it is English which reigns…

Professional development was conducted to assess the effects of dialogic reading (DR) on child outcomes related to vocabulary development in English and Spanish. Six teachers and 72 children enrolled in a state-funded public universal prekindergarten program, partnering with higher education, participated in the study. The content of the…