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…

Relatively few public school students are currently learning the Chinese language, but experts predict the number of K-12 schools offering such instruction will soon soar. With China poised to become the next global economic superpower, policymakers say it is essential that American schools expand their Chinese studies. Here, the author discusses…

The purpose of this study was to enlist practitioners in language immersion programs in the identification and elaboration of issues and challenges in immersion language teaching. Through focus groups and extensive individual interviews, 6 elementary Spanish-language immersion teachers in 3 school settings served as informants. (Author/VWL)

This study analyzed the production of voice onset time (VOT) for /p, t, k/ in Japanese and English by English-speaking children (n = 15) in a Japanese immersion program. The immersion children produced Japanese voiceless stops with significantly longer VOT values than the monolingual Japanese children and the immersion teachers, but they produced…

Language teachers are called upon to understand both the nature of students' intercultural competence and their own role in its development. Limited research attention has been paid to the relationship between the types of behaviour that language teachers model and the intercultural competence their students acquire. This article reports on a case…

This article presents an autoethnographical account of my foray into Spanish immersion education in Costa Rica as a professor of multilingual education at a university in Canada. This language-learning journey was inspired by curiosity about the growing trend for Internet marketing of second-language learning as a form of tourism, which I label…

The role of the subject matter teacher, the pedagogical and linguistic adjustments required, and the role of the language teacher in "sheltered" courses in which traditional subject matter is taught in a second language are discussed in the context of a University of Ottawa experiment. (MSE)

A recent survey of teachers in a French early partial immersion program revealed concerns for those who teach English as to whether an immersion program is suitable for all children. Teachers believed, among other things, that the problems of children who were learning English and French as second languages were compounded by the program.…

A study in which students in a teacher training program completed one of their compulsory subjects through immersion in French is reported. Results suggest that the immersion model can achieve success in both language and content areas in the Australian setting and that tertiary-level immersion could be an effective way of training non-English…

Provides a dialogue that is a series of semi-structured interviews with a language educator who taught French for 4 years before becoming a full-time mother. After 9 years, she became involved in teaching in a French immersion program in Canada. The interviewer is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia. (Author/VWL)

It is an underlying principle of Australian Education Review (AER) 54 that active efforts should be made to cultivate the latent bilingual potential within Australia's wider population and that this should be linked to major improvements in the quality of language teaching in schools. A combined approach of this kind will require investment in…

Seven essential components of an immersion teacher preparation program are proposed, based on an analysis of the immersion approach to second language teaching and analysis of a survey of 120 teachers using French as the language of instruction for the majority of the school day. (MSE)

Describes the experience of 11 Michigan bilingual teachers attending an immersion program in Mexico involving 15 days of intensive seminars dealing with Mexican history, geography, mythology, folklore, politics, and education. (CB)

This study acoustically analyzed the production of single and geminate stops in Japanese by English-speaking children (N = 19) at three different grade levels in a Japanese immersion program. Results show that both their singletons and geminates were significantly longer than those of Japanese monolinguals and the bilinguals' immersion teachers,…

Short stays, such as a summer course, in the country where the target language is spoken have been recognized as advantageous to the second language learner. However, they have not been the object of much research. Therefore, a study was carried out to describe changes of attitudes towards country, culture, and language learning which occurred…