Innovative Second Language Education in North America

1997 ◽  
pp. 165-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna Christian ◽  
Nancy Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
North America ◽  
Language Education ◽  
Second Language Education

Verstaanbaarheid als interactioneel en contextgebonden fenomeen

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-170
Author(s):  
Ellen Simon ◽  
Chloé Lybaert
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Language Education ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
Second Language Education ◽  
Communicative Success ◽  
And Migration

Abstract As a result of growing mobility and migration flows, the number of non-native speakers of Dutch in Belgium and the Netherlands have gradually increased over the past decades and so have the number of people enrolled in Dutch as a Second Language education. While there is huge variation in the profiles of these non-native speakers, they almost exclusively have in common that their Dutch sounds, in some way and at some stage, accented. In line with worldwide trends in foreign language teaching, the pronunciation goal in Dutch as a Second Language education has shifted from native-like to intelligible. Indeed, the notion of intelligibility has become prominent in language teaching and assessment. In this paper, we discuss the complexity of this notion and set it off against related terms like ‘comprehensibility’ and ‘foreign accent’. Through a literature review, we argue that intelligibility is an interactional and context-sensitive phenomenon: it is as much a responsibility of the speaker as it is of the listener or conversational partner(s) in general, whose attitudes will have an impact on the intelligibility and thus on the conversational flow and communicative success. After reviewing literature on the intelligibility of Dutch as a Second Language, we end by formulating some promising lines for future research.

Living With Ambiguity: Toward Culture Exploration in Adult Second-Language Classrooms

2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 01 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roumiana Ilieva
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Language Education ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Community Culture ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Second Language Education ◽  
Culture Teaching ◽  
Language Classrooms

On the basis of personal experiences with immigration and current conceptualizations of culture in anthropological and culture teaching literature, this article outlines an approach to cultural instruction in adult second-language education, named "culture exploration," which calls for the recognition of ambiguity embedded in cross-cultural encounters. Culture exploration consists of employing techniques of ethnographic participant observation in and outside the classroom and holding reflective, interpretive, and critical classroom discussions on students' ethnographies. It is argued that through culture exploration students can develop an understanding of humans as cultural beings, of the relationship between language and culture, and of the necessity of living with the uncertainty inherent in cross-cultural interactions. Through this process of naming their experience of the target community culture and reflecting on it, it is hoped that students will be in a position to develop their own voice and will be empowered to act to fulfill their own goals in their new environment.

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