Schools in the United States have historically conducted language policing in favor of standardized American English. The current study examines links between language policies in eight immigrant families in relation to educational language policies of two public elementary schools operating under an English-only policy in Massachusetts. The study…

This paper considers the languages on offer in secondary schools in England and the possibility of enacting curriculum change with a view to reducing the dominance of French, Spanish and, to a lesser extent, German as a possible way to increase take-up of modern foreign languages post-14. Questionnaires were completed by 666 students aged 14-15,…

This article reports on part of a mixed-methods study framed by sociocultural theory and aimed at assessing the impact of an intervention to promote metalinguistic awareness in language study abroad sojourners. Participants utilized a social media platform as a space to develop personalized e-portfolios for the purpose of in-depth metalinguistic…

Answering calls to map college-level proficiency development (Modern Language Association, 2007) and longitudinally chart language learning (Barkaoui, 2014; Ortega & Byrnes, 2008), we mapped the oral proficiency growth of 1,922 lower-division college students of Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish (in the second, third, or fourth semester of…

This study draws on sociocultural perspectives of identity to understand the ways in which Mexican-origin undergraduate students are recruited into the "figured world" of engineering. The analysis of in-depth, ethnographically situated interviews with 14 participants revealed three sets of recurrent discourses in students' accounts of…

University professors use film as a medium to examine social issues, although little is known about the tangible effects that socially minded films have on viewers. This study examined how combining film studies with a philanthropy project was beneficial to students' understanding of global social concerns. Survey data showed that with this…

Learners of a second language often have limited access to the native culture of that language in an authentic way, resulting in them committing linguistic and intercultural mistakes. One of the main advantages of task-based learning is that it can expose students to real-world circumstances, which makes learning a language more meaningful and…

This article investigates how engaging students to discuss topics that reflect their ideologies in lingua franca (LF) virtual exchanges can help facilitate global citizenship development. A six-week virtual exchange is explored with students from universities in Mexico, Poland, Spain, and the USA. This study utilizes five key elements of…

This study integrated reading and bilingual theories to examine the reading behaviors of second grade Latinx students in a Dual Language program. It explored how the students' differing language backgrounds (simultaneous bilinguals and sequential bilinguals who had developed Spanish as a home language) might influence their early reading…

This article presents the SONAR project ("Subtitulación sOcial para proporcioNar Accesibilidad audiovisual en la univeRsidad" [SOcial subtitliNg to provide Audiovisual accessibility at the univeRsity]). Conducted to assess the validity of the creation of social subtitling networks, its ultimate goal is to better understand the role that…

This study identified the reading comprehension strategies that English-speaking college students enrolled in beginner, intermediate, and advanced Spanish language classes at a major Midwestern university in the United States used to comprehend a text in their second language. The findings suggest that readers tended to use the same comprehension…

In this article, I explore practical implications of the theories of language of M.M. Bakhtin within university second language writing classrooms. Specifically, I examine the presence of Bakhtinian intertextuality within online intercultural exchanges involving the use of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) technology. I describe a CMC exchange…

The structure and instruction of foreign language classrooms have changed to meet the needs of the growing number of Hispanic heritage language learners (HLLs) entering university settings. To understand the impact of these reforms, interviews were conducted with 11 HLLs about their experiences in Spanish classrooms designed for their unique…

Coventry University Institution Wide Language Programme (IWLP) offers beginners language learning modules to approximately 3,000 students. Each module is taught over 11 weeks for a total of one hour and 40 minutes and two of the weeks are used for in class tests, so tutors generally agree that students need to practise their skills outside the…

This study examined relationships between language learning motivation and the longitudinal development of second language (L2) pronunciation. Twenty-six English-speaking learners of Spanish recorded a simplified picture description task 5 times over a year-long period spanning their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th semesters of Spanish language instruction.…