Volume 7, Number 1, June 2010
This inquiry interprets participant experiences of a Mexican English teacher international professional development/Spanish language monitor program in Canada. Given the laissez-faire nature of such programming, and that the Mexican English teachers were to teach Spanish and not English, we aimed to understand the participants’ development as they experienced it and to identify relevant curricular factors in program design. Our narrative emplotment of two participants’ experiences echoes the tales of “The Princess and the Pea” and “Cinderella”: The first recounts the search for the recognition of authentic merit; the second is about the
emergence of inherent ability and confidence. Factors influencing the degree of success include cultural immersion, work schedules, interactions with local teachers, professional homestay, active engagement in classes, time for reflection, imposed roles and professional identity assertion, and (lack of) attention to language development.
This paper describes a video-making project in which twenty-four Russian language students at a Malaysian university made their own digital videos in Russian. The article argues that the activity supports a constructivist perspective on education, based on such tenets as the active construction of knowledge by learners, the
social nature of learning, the authenticity of the learning situation, and the ability of students to determine their own learning goals. This study describes stages in the video project implementation, gives a brief overview of two student-produced videos, and reports the learners’ opinions about the activity. The students’ perceptions of the video project reflected the four constructivist assumptions adopted in this study. The paper concludes that involving language learners in video projects is conducive to the application of constructivist principles in the foreign language classroom and that the activity enhances the pedagogical effectiveness of language teaching.
This study investigates the impact of structured reading lessons on the development of critical thinking skills
in college students learning English as a foreign language. This study took place during the first level of English in their academic program. Two groups of students were included in the study. One group received traditional reading instruction while the other group had structured reading lessons that intended to create opportunities to operate in higher order thinking levels. The gains in critical thinking skills were assessed on the basis of each group’s comparative results on the California Critical Thinking Test (Facione, 1995) between
the pre-test and post-test. Results showed that students who had structured reading lessons did not improve in a significant way compared to the results of the control group in the post-test.
In 2004, the Austrian Ministry of Education stipulated an English proficiency of B2 (Independent User/Vantage) according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of
Europe, 2001) as the exit standard for upper secondary education. The present study examines whether this B2 target represents a reliable entrance standard for tertiary education. For this purpose, first-year students (n=3,186) from three Austrian tertiary institutions were subjected to an English placement test. The findings
indicate that only about half the test-takers attained the required B2 level, with freshmen from exclusively English-taught study programmes reaching substantially higher scores. Nonetheless, the figures suggest that
tertiary institutions cannot rely on the majority of freshmen meeting the expected standard. The study also finds that graduates of secondary academic schools score significantly higher results than those from secondary vocational schools. The results therefore indicate that the required B2 standard is not equitable for the different school types involved, nor is it attainable for a clear majority of school leavers. This implies that two of four criteria for appropriate target-setting laid down in Juran’s Quality Handbook (Juran & Godfrey, 1998) are not met, which in turn suggests that a revision of Austrian educational standards for English at the upper secondary level may be in order.
Factors Affecting Language Learning Strategy
Reported Usage by Thai and Vietnamese EFL Learners (pp. 66–85)
This paper is a report on an investigation into the relationship between three variables and language learning strategy use by Thai and Vietnamese university students using Oxford’s 80 item Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL). Two main objectives of this study are: 1) to determine three factors: how gender, motivation and experience in studying English affect the choices of language learning strategies; and 2) to compare the roles of these factors and the pattern of language learning strategy used by Thai and Vietnamese students. The analysis revealed that, amongst these three factors, motivation is the most significant factor affecting the choice of the strategies, followed by experience in studying English, and gender, respectively. Following the taxonomy of Oxford’s language learning strategies, the analysis also showed that lowly-motivated and inexperienced Thai female students tend to use the six strategy categories less than their Vietnamese counterparts. This study’s findings would be beneficial to Thai and Vietnamese educational planners and methodologists in general, and classroom teachers in particular, facilitating the better understanding
of the roles of crucial variation in learning English exiting between male and female, motivation and experience in studying English.
This study investigates the learning experiences of university students who studied advanced-level Japanese through interpreting and translation. In particular, it looks into the reasons why students generally evaluate their learning experiences positively, utilising the concept of Intercultural Language Learning proposed by
Liddicoat, Papademetre, Scarino and Kohler (2003) as a theoretical framework. The interview discourses of 10 volunteer students who were enrolled in the subject show that students are engaged in active learning
through interpreting and translation activities. Interpreting and translation encourage learners’ ‘intercultural exploration,’ which in turn promotes a deeper understanding of both L1/C1 and L2/C2. In addition, interpreting and translation require learners to work within various constraints, which actually encourages intercultural language learning among students. Furthermore, the study indicates that the students felt that they acquired various skills including “cognitive skills” (The Asian Languages Professional Learning Project [ALPLP], n.d.). We therefore argue that interpreting and translation are suitable for language teaching at the university level.
Reviews
Review of “Thai Reader Volume 1” (pp. 96–97)
Review of “Teacher Language Awareness” (pp. 98–99)