While a growing body of research indicates that Spanish language courses can promote Spanish maintenance and lead to overall improved educational outcomes among heritage speakers, there is little ...empirical or longitudinal evidence of factors that shape their enrollment in Spanish language courses at the secondary level. To address this issue, the current study takes a large-scale, longitudinal approach to investigate rates of enrollment in secondary school (6th-12th grade) Spanish and other non-English language courses, as well as factors that predict heritage speakers' enrollment and performance in non-English language courses.
We analyzed subsample data from the Miami School Readiness Project (MSRP), a large-scale, longitudinal study consisting of 17,341 heritage speakers of Spanish (47% female, 95.4% Hispanic/Latino, 82.8% received free/reduced-price lunch, and 18.3% with a disability) who were followed from 4 years old until the end of high school.
In general, Heritage speakers enrolled in Spanish language courses at a higher rate than other non-English language courses (52.2 and 25.3%, respectively). Enrollment patterns varied across different type of languages and grade level. Student-level factors including disability status, poverty status, early behavioral problems, and prior academic achievement significantly predicted students' enrollment in Spanish and performance in non-English language courses.
Findings shed light on the long-term patterns of language study of this growing segment of the US school population with implications for future research and school policies that seek to improve heritage language learning and maintenance as well as equitable access to language education for language-minority students.
The pandemic amplified the educational disparities that Latinx students face in virtual courses. This research project describes Spanish Heritage Language (SHL) learners’ experiences with remote ...instruction, and it proposes using the Community of Inquiry Model (Garrison et al., 2000) and modified versions of the Theory of Social Presence (Fayram, 2017; Hauck & Warnecke, 2012; Strong et al., 2012; Whiteside, 2015) as guiding frameworks to obtain information about social presence (SP) aspects in the online classroom. A total of 126 SHL learners took a validated online survey to evaluate the challenges of switching to a remote modality of instruction. This research emphasizes the need to design effective online courses that foster SP as a key element to diminish feelings of isolation and encourage active participation in the classroom. We propose that teaching presence is an important component of social presence in online SHL courses, and we offer pedagogical implications for practitioners.
Under the guidance of foreign language curriculum design theory, foreign language courses in colleges and universities should construct a foreign language course teaching system from the aspects of ...reconfiguring the course objectives, updating the course content, and designing a diversified evaluation system. This paper combines the 5Ds framework with the GFKE model to establish the teaching system of foreign language courses in colleges and universities, designs the blended teaching mode of foreign language courses in colleges and universities, and constructs the corresponding course evaluation index system. Taking Z University in H province as the research object, the relevant teaching process of foreign language courses was designed, the coefficient of variation method solved the weights of evaluation indexes, and the teaching effect of foreign language courses in universities was comprehensively evaluated by set-pair analysis. On this basis, a validation analysis was carried out using the dimensions of teaching effect and teaching evaluation. The reading scores of students in the Experiment 1 class went up by 3.31 points, and the average score of students’ writing test scores went up by 53.86%, as per the findings. In the posttest of the depth of knowledge of English vocabulary, the experimental 1 class scored 25.83 points, which was 45.28% more than the control 2 class’s score. Blending foreign language courses based on the GRKE model can promote the improvement of students’ foreign language learning ability, and teaching evaluation results will be more accurate.
This study aimed to examine the relationships between English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ language mindsets (i.e. entity and incremental beliefs about general language intelligence, second ...language aptitude, and age sensitivity in language learning) and graded performance by considering the mediating roles of their perceived instrumentality as well as four aspects of engagement (i.e. agentic engagement, behavioral engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement) within English classes. A total of 526 EFL students voluntarily participated in the present study. A latent factor correlation analysis, a series of multiple regression analyses, and a structural equation modeling analysis were conducted to analyse the data. The results showed that EFL students’ language mindsets, four aspects of engagement, perceived instrumentality, and graded performance were significantly and selectively related to each other. The results also demonstrated that the relationship between incremental beliefs about second language aptitude and graded performance was fully mediated by perceived instrumentality, that the relationship between incremental beliefs about general language intelligence and graded performance was fully mediated by agentic engagement, and that the relationship between perceived instrumentality and graded performance was partially mediated by agentic engagement. Theoretical and practical implications for EFL learning, teaching, and educational policymaking processes are also discussed in the study.
Emerging evidence has highlighted the important role of local contexts for integration trajectories of asylum seekers and refugees. Germany's policy of randomly allocating asylum seekers across ...Germany may advantage some and disadvantage others in terms of opportunities for equal participation in society. This study explores the question whether asylum seekers that have been allocated to rural areas experience disadvantages in terms of language acquisition compared to those allocated to urban areas. We derive testable assumptions using a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) which are then tested using large-N survey data (IAB-BAMF-SOEP refugee survey). We find that living in a rural area has no negative total effect on language skills. Further the findings suggest that the “null effect” is the result of two processes which offset each other: while asylum seekers in rural areas have slightly lower access for formal, federally organized language courses, they have more regular exposure to German speakers.
Although research about group interactions during second or foreign language (L2 or EFL) collaborative writing has proliferated in the last few decades, little is known about the role of ...psychological factors, like learners’ knowledge about collaborative writing, in affecting students’ patterns of interaction and learning in collaborative writing. Informed by metacognitive theory, this study used a mixed-method approach to investigate whether and how L2 students’ knowledge about collaborative writing affected their participation (patterns of interaction) and learning (languaging opportunities) during the collaborative writing process. Two parallel classes (one with explicit collaborative writing knowledge taught; one without) were compared and multiple sources of data (interviews, reflective journals, pair talk) were analysed for patterns of interaction, quality and quantity of language-related episodes (LREs). The statistical analyses of the data indicated that the participants who were provided more exposure to knowledge about collaborative writing tended to exhibit more collaborative patterns of interaction and produce more LREs. Qualitative analyses revealed that knowledge about collaborative writing affected participation and learning during three distinct stages: planning, writing, and revising. This study fills a gap in collaborative writing research to include a metacognitive theory perspective and sheds new light on L2 collaborative writing pedagogy.
This article considers Intensive English Programs (IEPs) affiliated with higher education institutions of the Global North from the perspective of a decolonial option in which English is viewed as a ...tool of modernity used for colonization and the maintenance of unequal socioeconomic and power structures. Via nuanced description (Pennycook and Makoni 2020) of two colonizing practices typical to IEPs—namely, recruitment and advocacy—the article argues that the traits of resiliency, innovation, and genius commonly ascribed to IEPs are qualities that lend themselves to the refoundation, reconfiguration, and reconstruction (de Sousa Santos 2019) of alternative visions. In this way, IEPs have the opportunity to promote the liberatory visions of applied linguistics’ practitioners and to positively influence decolonialization of the field. Because of their historical involvement in English language teaching and the industry it has spawned, applied linguists have an obligation to foster these changes, which need not affect the ability of IEPs to conduct language pedagogy or to provide the field with opportunities for research, teacher training, and professional development.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Extended Reality (XR) have been employed in several foreign language education applications to increase the availability of experiential learning methods akin to ...international immersion programs. However, research in multi-modal spoken dialogue in L2 combined with immersive technologies and collaborative learning is thin, limiting students' experiences to solo interactions focused mostly on vocabulary and grammar in such settings. We intend to fill this gap as we present the Cognitive Immersive Language Learning Environment (CILLE). The AI in CILLE can hear, see, and understand its users and can engage with them in non-dyadic multimodal conversations. The XR offers students a feeling of being somewhere else without the use of intrusive devices and supports multi-party, multi-modal interactions. Together, AI and XR create naturalistic conversational interactions targeted towards comprehensive foreign language acquisition. We evaluate CILLE as a Chinese-as-a-foreign-language (CFL) education tool through a seven-week, mixed-methods study with university students (N = 10). Results display statistical significance and retained improvement in CFL vocabulary, comprehension, and conversation skills. Coupled with an analysis of student feedback and researcher observations, we show how CILLE is designed and experienced by students to learn CFL.
Abstract
Considering the recent criticism of the competence-oriented concern of the PISA study, the present paper proposes a practical teaching concept that opposes the isolated practice of reading ...skills. In the era of Post-truth, this contribution presents a lesson plan for Robert Musils’s novel “The Man without Qualities”, which aims at promoting aesthetic sensibility in the universityGerman courses for advanced levels.
This longitudinal study examined growth patterns of written syntactic complexity of Turkish learners of English. Using a nonexperimental corpus of 852 writing samples by 284 English as a foreign ...language (EFL) learners over three semesters, the study addressed the following questions: which indices of syntactic complexity characterize the writing of EFL learners most saliently at elementary, pre-intermediate, and intermediate levels? How do levels of the indices of syntactic complexity change over time as learners progress from elementary to pre-intermediate and intermediate levels? Results suggested that lower proficiency level (levels 1 and 2) writers produced similar patterns of written syntactic complexity (reliance on phrasal coordination), while at proficiency level 3, they demonstrated constructions that were more complex and of greater variety. Findings revealed that over time, learners experienced significant syntactic changes in multiple aspects of complexity; however, these changes were not necessarily straightforward or incremental across the three levels. These findings underscore issues of unpredictability and linearity in second language acquisition, while also cautioning us about the role of intensity of classroom instruction in L2 development.
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