Search results for "Language education"

Implementing language policy for deaf students in a Texas school district

2013

Language policy implementation is a complex, multilayered process. Understanding this process can be achieved by identifying the agents, layers, and processes of language planning and policy activities, analyzing the layers independently, and examining the relations among the layers. Considering these dimensions, this article explicates how U.S. special education policy functions as de facto language policy for deaf students. Turning to implementation in local contexts, data from a larger multi-sited, qualitative case study of a Texas school district is presented to show how individuals act as policy-implementing agents and how their beliefs about language and education policy influences th…

Hands-on tasks in CLIL science classrooms as sites for subject-specific language use and learning

2015

This paper is concerned with content and language integrated learning (CLIL), i.e. classrooms where a foreign or second language (L2) is used as the means of instruction and where content and language learning objectives merge. More specifically, it explores the potential of hands-on tasks in CLIL chemistry and physics lessons to serve as sites for using and learning subject-specific language, conceptualised as both special concepts and terminology as well as subject-specific ways of constructing meaning. Using discourse analysis, attention was directed to hands-on tasks as well as pre-task and post-task phases. The findings indicate that despite the evident content orientation in the tasks…

The teaching of frozen expressions through the graphic novel Persépolis

2019

The constant search for suitable teaching materials to achieve the linguistic skills provided by a language teaching course, finds in authentic documents an important instrument for teaching foreign languages. The scientific literature attesting to the effectiveness of the authentic material is wide and consolidated; indeed, a text conceived by a native for a native, and, therefore, not developed for the sole purpose of teaching a foreign language, is intrinsically carrying a cultural richness and a linguistic variety, which are rarely present in any didactic artifact. The authentic material therefore represents an opportunity to meet the fixed expressions that are part of the communicative…

Introduction: classroom discourse at the intersection of language education and materiality

2021

This special issue provides a collection of research that examines the relationships between classroom materials and discourse in various second language education contexts. Together, these studies...

Item transformation for computer asisted language testing: The adaptation of the Spanish University entrance examination

2010

Since the Spanish Educational system is changing and promoting the use of online tests, it was necessary to study the transformation of test items in the 'Spanish University Entrance Examination' (IB P.A.U.) to diminish the effect of test delivery changes (through its computerization) in order to affect the least the current model. The purpose of this study was to describe and suggest the properties of a new test item taxonomy for the Spanish University Entrance Examination. After a convenient study and piloting by using previous research in computer-based language testing, the researchers created a taxonomy of test items for the I.B. PAU Keywords: Language test; item design; computers; edu…

ELT in Finland

2018

Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923–1934, by Matthew D. Pauly, University of Toronto Press, 2014

2016

American historian Matthew D. Pauly’s book Breaking the tongue: language, education and power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923–1934 is a multi-layered work that not only reconstructs a complicated period in...

Teachers’ Use of Internet Resources for Preparing English Lessons

2011

The twenty-first century is unquestionably the age of the Internet, which is an inexhaustible source of information instantly available. Multimodal texts obtained via the Internet, cheap, authentic and varied, may be successfully used in the process of teaching foreign languages. The paper presents the results of a survey which aimed at diagnosing if and how teachers of English as a foreign language use Internet resources in their teaching. The results reveal that almost all the respondents, young of age and of teaching experience, are skilled Internet users who strongly rely on this resource also in their professional activity. They use the Internet to find teaching materials that suppleme…

Corpus Analysis and Register Variation: a field in need of an update

2013

Abstract This study reviews the development of research on register variation (RV) over the last century to the present, emphasizing the influence of corpus analyses on its greatest advances and also on its major weaknesses and ambiguities. In search of practical and useful methods to analyse language registers, in the second part of the paper, the authors sketch a different approach to RV which has been used over the last ten years in language teaching at university level and professional communication training.

"Translation and Language Contact in Multicultural Settings. The Case of Asian Migrants in Sicily”

2008

This article addresses the role of translation in the construction of cultural identities in multicultural and host settings. Approaching migration as a form of translation in terms of relexification, cannibalism and hybridization, the essay discusses the example of a new English variety which was developed by Asian immigrants who moved to Sicily. It is suggested that this Indian-Anglo-Italian hybrid variety has been built upon a process of relexification during which Asian immigrants translate their local language into English by keeping the syntactic structure of their native language in the English sentence and by adding a mixture of Sicilian-Italian words. In this context, immigrants ar…