The Critical Period Hypothesis for L2 Acquisition: An Unfalsifiable Embarrassment?

This article focuses on the uncertainty surrounding the issue of the Critical Period Hypothesis. It puts forward the case that, with regard to naturalistic situations, the hypothesis has the status of both “not proven” and unfalsified. The article analyzes a number of reasons for this situation, including the effects of multi-competence, which remove any possibility that competence in more than one language can ever be identical to monolingual competence. With regard to the formal instructional setting, it points to many decades of research showing that, as critical period advocates acknowledge, in a normal schooling situation, adolescent beginners in the long run do as well as younger beginners. The article laments the profusion of definitions of what the critical period for language actually is and the generally piecemeal nature of research into this important area. In particular, it calls for a fuller integration of recent neurolinguistic perspectives into discussion of the age factor in second language acquisition research.

The Use of Short, Supplemental Content Videos in the Ad/PR Classroom

The objective of the research reported in this article was to evaluate the usefulness of supplemental videos in the advertising and public relations (PR) classroom, featuring luminaries in these same fields. Students in an introductory course in advertising and PR were given an assignment based on videos from an online library of short videos. Through a survey, students shared their attitudes and open-ended opinions toward the assignment and the videos. The findings suggest that having an assignment that incorporated videos was a useful addition to stimulate students' understanding of course materials. The videos were regarded positively along a number of important dimensions and motivated students to learn more about the advertising industry. This paper also includes five suggestions for incorporating the videos in an instructional setting.

The Multimodal Mediation of Knowledge: Instructors’ Explanations in a Scientific Café

In this paper, we present an in depth study of the interplay between various semiotic modes in the specific instructional setting of a scientific café. We analyzed the multimodal performance of five female instructors delivering a monologue explanation during instruction on the following dimensions: speech, gesture (hand gestures, head orientation and gaze) and use of written didactical material. Results first point out the crucial role played by referential hand gesture together with gaze-body behavior both in representing new concepts (conceptual mediation) and in building bridges between information displayed in several modes (semiotic mediation). They also show cross-individual differences in instructors’ multimodal performance, that we propose to interpret as three diverse modes of mediating knowledge, guiding being the only one providing both conceptual and semiotic mediation.

Promoting Sophisticated Word Use in the Elementary Music Classroom

Because acquisition of vocabulary has been shown to affect reading comprehension and verbal capacity, one initiative that has gained momentum in elementary schools is the promotion of sophisticated words across grade levels. Music teachers, like other educators, should provide a vocabulary-rich environment to encourage the use of academic language by all students. This article presents reasons for increasing children’s lexicons in any instructional setting and then offers strategies for inspiring word consciousness and integrating academic terms during instruction so that they become part of students’ quotidian language. Sample lists of terms are included.