Since the inception of computer assisted language learning (CALL), computers have been successfully used to provide leaning and assessment opportunities for groups or individual learners. This article describes a use of computer that is fundamentally different to most CALL approaches, and yet contributes to language learning. While presenting a…

Portfolios have attracted considerable interest among ESL writing and assessment specialists since the 1980s. Whether they have fulfilled the promise their proponents envision is a question still under investigation. This paper describes two case studies which looked at student experiences with portfolios in two ESL writing courses where the…

This article presents a selective review of the work carried out recently in second language acquisition (SLA) research which makes use of oral learner corpora and computer technologies. In the first part, the reasons why the field of SLA needs corpora for addressing current theoretical issues are briefly reviewed. In the second part, recent…

Background: Even though action research has been employed in an increasing number of fields of practice including teaching, nursing, and business, application in learning has been scarcely reported. This case study is one of the first attempts to apply action research principles to help learners improve their learning performance. Purpose: This…

The Special Education and Disability Act (SENDA) 2001 required post-16 institutions to have implemented the Disability Discrimination Act Part IV (DDA) 1995 by September 2005. In this paper a lecturer in Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) and a specialist teacher of the visually impaired from the Centre for Special and Inclusive Education at a…

Examination boards are often criticized for their failure to provide evidence of comparability across forms, and few such studies are publicly available. This study aims to investigate the extent to which three forms of the General English Proficiency Test Intermediate Speaking Test (GEPTS-I) are parallel in terms of two types of validity…

For its 53rd annual meeting, the Association of Educators and Researchers met in Charlotte, North Carolina at the Marriott Charlotte City Center. This year's conference theme was "Building Literacy Communities", which was also used as the title for this year's Yearbook, Volume 32. This organization has long been the home of some of the nation's…

Comprehensive and user-friendly, this ideal graduate text and professional reference provides a developmentally informed framework for assessing 3- to 6-year-olds in accordance with current best practices and IDEA guidelines. The authors are leading clinician-researchers who take the reader step by step through selecting appropriate measures,…

This paper assesses reading theory and its applications for methodology in second language reading. The investigation focuses on how the methodology recommended for teaching the commonly taught languages informs the teaching of a language such as Hindi. To accomplish this assessment, a teacher of Hindi at the U.S. State Department's Foreign…

A researcher undertook a study of her own second language learning progress, focusing on development of pragmatic competence in Japanese and the relationship between language and social identity while living and working in Japan. The study addressed three areas: the formal instructional context of studying Japanese in Japan; the influence of the…

A first grader of Vietnamese descent (recently arrived in Hawaii from China) participated in the class activities in a 6-week summer course that focused on language arts and mathematics but only found his "voice" and the acceptance of his peers through art activities. The course included many language arts activities such as silent…

The experiences of a teacher of English as a second language in teaching reading in English to an enthusiastic and illiterate Ethiopian woman married to an American and living in the United States are described. The Ethiopian woman was eager to talk on the telephone, take messages for her husband, go to the store by herself, read to her…

A list of linguistics-related holdings in the Middlebury College (Vermont) library is presented as an example of a well-developed library collection for an undergraduate linguistics program. The materials are listed under 10 headings corresponding to the best-represented subareas in the collection: linguistics, semantics, grammar (comparative and…

A case study in second language learning was conducted by the researcher on herself in a specific sociolinguistic context, Trinidad, and with reference to a specific first and second language relationship, standard English and Trinidadian English Creole. The study attempted to: (1) demonstrate the complexity of social, cultural, psychological, and…

A case study is presented of the development of communication between two adults, one a native speaker of English and the other of Mandarin, over a 5-year period in Taiwan and the United States. Based on diary records, tapes, and letters, it was found that social changes in the couple's lives marked changes in their pattern of communication. Ten…