Sally Sieloff Magnan

Developing second-language skills : theory and practice

Developing second- language skills: theory and practice , Developing second- language skills: theory and practice , کتابخانه مرکزی دانشگاه علوم پزشکی ایران

Reexamining the priorities of the National Standards for Foreign Language Education

The National Standards for Foreign Language Education offer goals for student learning. During the past decade, they have been used increasingly as objectives for foreign language teaching. In the Standards document, the five Standards are presented in a hierarchical order: 1. Communication, 2. Cultures, 3. Connections, 4. Comparisons, and 5. Communities. Looking to Dell Hymess portrayal of communicative competence and building on notions from sociocultural theory and the concept communities of practice, this paper questions this hierarchical ordering especially in terms of the primacy of Communication over Cultures and Communities. It is suggested that, of the five Cs, Communities should be considered the most fundamental.

Thank You to the Profession: Editor's Farewell Reflections

OVER ITS 91-YEAR HISTORY, THE MLJ HAS been led by 18 editors. I am proud to have been among them for 14 years. Some editors have been highly visible in the Journal, with editorials and editorial notes expressing personal views on professional issues and making direct attempts to influence the professional agenda. I have chosen a more distanced stance, with no editorials, with editorial announcements inserted briefly as page fillers, and with select introductions for special issues or to mark hallmarks for theJournal. I hoped that this professionally neutral stance would situate the MLJ as an open forum for scholarship from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, as well as for research undertaken in different languages and learning situations. I believe that a scholarly journal should be a collaborative space in its articles, through the review process that leads to their selection, and under the direction of the editorial board that frames