Dance is an essential cultural product often overlooked in curriculum and lesson design in favor of sports, literature, visual arts, music, and other products from the target language culture. Given the similarities between the national standards for dance and for learning languages, movement and dance activities merit a greater role in world…

This paper argues for bringing insights from linguistics into the world language classroom. At any level of study, such insights can add intellectual interest to the study of a target language (TL), and can also help students accept and acquire aspects of the TL that are different from their first language or that are inherently challenging. As a…

Native Spanish speakers from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, who are also English language learners, are a growing population of students in the K-12 classrooms throughout the United States. This particular group of students is oftentimes placed in Spanish-as-a-foreign-language classes that fail to meet their linguistic development…

This study uses a cohort model--a combination of a study group, with readings and discussion, and collaborative curriculum design as a professional development tool--as a context for investigating a group of middle and high school world language teachers' beliefs about effective curriculum. The study explores whether this model could shift…

In an effort to make the learning of the target culture a meaningful and motivating experience for foreign language (FL) learners, the researchers designed and implemented a semester-long project in which intermediate Spanish students used Pinterest to pin and comment on cultural artifacts and websites in the target language (TL) that were of…

This study examines the formative aspects of teaching in the World Language community college classroom: formative feedback, reflection, and assessment, and then recommends a new educational technique that applies the aforementioned formative elements into the classroom. To this end, in the fall semester of 2015, three sections of Spanish I at the…

The goal of this study is to analyze the implication of integrating activities driven from critical pedagogy into the curriculum of a Spanish language classroom using a critical ethnographic research methodology. The activities used in this course were out-of-class activities, multicultural activities, analyses of written and visual texts…

While the role of culture in second and/or foreign language (L2/FL) learning and teaching has often been unquestioned, empirical research on culture learning and teaching in L2/FL education has been less common than opinion-oriented writings in relevant journals. This article offers a summary and synthesis of 52 empirical studies on L2/FL culture…

This article reports on the implementation of a Spanish information literacy tutorial and its effects on undergraduate research capacities. Information literacy, which refers to the ability to locate, evaluate, and use information, is key within the wider realm of digital literacy yet has often been overlooked in foreign language education. This…

Presents a method for managing and teaching oral presentation in the conversational foreign language class. (Author/VWL)

Addresses the help that heritage speakers and other native Spanish speaking students can provide in a Spanish phonetics class. These students can improve the pronunciation of Spanish learners while enhancing their own self esteem, and can also make learners aware of different dialects of Spanish. (Author/VWL)

Discuses the use of micro stories--shorter short stories--in the Spanish language classroom. Highlights the use of one micro story--Monterrosos'"El dinasauro"--as a point of departure for teaching literary reading skill to intermediate college and secondary level students. (Author/VWL)