Foreign language education Archive

The Legitimacy Gap: Multilingual native language teachers in monolingual foreign language departments Foreign-born language instructors who teach their native language in the U.S. face the difficult task of mediating between two worlds that often seem historically, socially and culturally incompatible. While they are expected to represent the stereotypical native speaker and to make their students…

Blended learning: a new (and better) approach to beginning Italian Alessia Blad, University of Notre Dame The study of foreign languages faces numerous opportunities and challenges in today’s increasingly globalized world. In the United States, many foreign language programs are disappearing or in decline. Meanwhile developments in technology and the creation of new media challenge…

Beyond Citizenship and the Liberal Arts: Reforming the Humanities PhD by Russell Berman, German Studies and Comparative Literature, Stanford University Instead of defending the humanities with the dubious claim that they make for better citizens, we need to consider the real experience of college education, the character of learning processes and vocational prospects. Doctoral education…

Language Teaching and SLA: Understanding the Limits and Possibilities of the Research-teaching Interface by Lourdes Ortega, Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University Language teachers often feel unsure of the value of second language acquisition (SLA) research, wondering if studies about language teaching are relevant and realistic enough to give them insights that can inform and improve…

Where is the language classroom today?: Reconsidering the place/s of language learning with technology by David Malinowski, Berkeley Language Center, University of California, Berkeley Labeled increasingly as “traditional” or “brick-and-mortar”, the physical university classroom has been criticized for fostering a teacher-centered, top-down, and formulaic model of education, whose resistance to innovation is symbolized by the…

Teaching as a Subversive Activity—Revisited by H. Douglas Brown, Professor Emeritus of English, San Francisco State University For virtually every language teacher, some of the primary driving motives for teaching language are rooted in our desire to be “agents for change” in this world, our desire to help people to communicate across national, political, and…

Featuring Mark Kaiser (MK), Claire Kramsch (CK), and Sirpa Tuomainen (ST) MK: Both of you are back from sojourns in Europe. Can you tell us about what you were engaged in there? CK: I had a semester sabbatical and I spent it in Paris, where I grew up. It gave me the opportunity to go…

This mixed methods study explored the development of cross-cultural understanding in a unique population of students in the U.S.: English-dominant students who had attended French or Spanish elementary immersion schools. Despite the fact that immersion schools have as a goal ...

The article addresses the didactic questions of what, why and how aspects of culture and history can be—and should be, it is argued—an integral part of all foreign and second language teaching and learning. In particular, it is argued that the study of literary fiction within tertiary foreign language education can function as a gateway ...

This article critically examines current discourses of internationalizing higher education both inside and outside the humanities and considers whether some contemporary practices and positions taken on by departments of languages, literatures and cultures might actually undermine ...