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Communicative approaches to language teaching that emphasize the importance of speaking (e.g., task-based language teaching) require innovative and evidence-based means of assessing oral language. Nonetheless, research has yet to produce an adequate assessment model for oral language (Chun 2006; Downey et al. 2008). Limited by automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, which compares non-native speaker discourse to native-like discourse, most tests exclusively focus on accuracy while ignoring how examinees use language to make meaning. In order to offer stakeholders more trustworthy evidence of how examinees might use language in target language domains, a model anchored in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is put forth. Specific examples are given of how SFL might be used to evaluate test task types, such as the story retell:three examinees' responses are contrasted using genre analysis (Derewianka 1990) and transitivity analysis (Ravelli 2000) in order to demonstrate elements in their linguistic profiles that ASR-based assessment would overlook. In so doing, implications are drawn regarding the potential of SFL models for enhancing automated scoring procedures by focusing on the meaning-form relations in the linguistic construction of narrative.

Research has shown a disjunction between language instruction at the lower and upper levels of foreign language (FL) study. Whereas lower-division courses focus on grammatical patterns, upper-level courses focus on specific content. The third-year writing course is in a unique position to help learners prepare for the types of learning that they will encounter in more advanced language use contexts. Using grounded classroom ethnography, this multiple case study of two classrooms chronicles how a collaborative partnership between an instructor and an applied linguist facilitated the integration of two types of technology into a third-year Spanish writing course at a North American University. Technology was carefully chosen based on pedagogical considerations and teacher goals. Students in these courses included a mixture of heritage and FL Spanish learners with a mean age of 21 years. Findings included four ways that technology played a role in third-year Spanish language learning, including as: (a) a way to alleviate their workloads, (b) a motivator, (c) a way to improve the quality and quantity of feedback students received in the course, and in some cases (d) antagonistic to language learning. Implications of classroom ethnography for research on blended learning are drawn. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Marked inequities or disparities in health care and health outcomes exist for millions in the United States of America. Urban apartheid and increasing social stratification separate social groups making it difficult for them to understand each other. Many U.S. health care professionals, including nurses, hold negative stereotypes toward the urban poor and disenfranchised. Creating vehicles for understanding and respect between health care professionals and the social groups they care for is needed. Cultural humility uses self-reflection, self-critique, openness and transcendence to address power inequities between providers and clients. "Critical service-learning" is a type of "service-learning" that adopts the tenets of critical theory and pedagogy in engaged partnerships to foster social responsibility and a justice-oriented framework. The purpose of this article is to showcase Project Horizon, an innovative university-based health and social advocacy partnership that uses critical service learning with the urban community to foster cultural humility. Project Horizon outcomes show that this long-term engaged partnership is an effective vehicle for developing and enhancing cultural humility among health care professionals participating in the endeavor. Implications: Replication of social and health advocacy projects such as the one conducted through Project Horizon can be made in other settings to increase the capacity for democratically oriented nurses and other health care professionals who have an enhanced sense of cultural humility.

Despite the recent vogue in studies on Futurism, writer and artist Benedetta Cappa Marinetti has received little critical attention. Few scholarly works have focused on her essays regarding woman and the Fascist state, and in particular the role of mother. It has been argued that these texts support not only the position that women futurists - in adhering to a movement remembered for its disprezzo della donna - were victims of their self-accepting inferiority, but also the view that Futurist attitudes towardswomen were a precursor of Fascist-era gender politics. Larkin challenges this position, and discusses crucial new archival research, which reveals how maternity in Benedetta's works is actually linked to her radical new reformulation of Futurism. Far from seconding woman's inferior position within the avant-garde, or indeed the Fascist state, Benedetta uses the issue of maternity subtly to subvert her status - in both the movement and society - from within. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

The current study investigated the impact of a German television program on changes in 4th-semester German students' reflections on cultural perceptions over the course of 1 semester. Sixty-nine students at the University of Texas at Austin watched 4 episodes of the popular German television program Lindenstrasse. After viewing, students were asked to reflect in written response papers on cultural features and patterns of behavior and on cultural differences and similarities. The study results suggest that students' perceptions of another culture can become more sophisticated when being exposed to authentic filmic material and asked to reflect in writing about observed plot features and cultural manifestations. The key to these results is a strategy for assessing not just students' recall of cultural content, but also their strategic competencies in negotiating cultural difference. Changes in students' cognitive styles were tracked by a scale that rewards students' strategic ability tomanage details of cultural knowledge and sociolinguistic content, including the following categories: (a) rhetorical organization; (b) content; (c) comparative point of view; and (d) interpretive substance. The article provides a model for the assessment of cultural competency (MACC), which can be adapted to assess students' engagement with the culture represented in various materials.

Bilingualism is defined as a speaker's ability to use two languages for communication. Due to the complexity of its nature, the study of bilingualism relies on several fields within linguistics, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and education. The study of bilingualism describes language behaviors of bilingual speakers, social and pragmatic patterns of using two languages, language development, and acquisition and loss, among other issues. Researchers attempt to explain the effect that bilingualism has on human cognition, societal relationships, and education of bilingual children. This article discusses bilingualism and learning from three perspectives: types of bilingualism, bilingual processing, and bilingualism and academic learning.

This study provides an account for a long-term selective loss of L1 (Russian) morpho-syntactic and content components in early immigrants to the US. The analysis of naturally occurring data is carried out from the perspective of two theoretical approaches - three models developed within language contact (Myers-Scotton 2002, 2005) and the Activation Threshold hypothesis as a component of a neurolinguistic approach to bilingualism (Paradis, 2004, 2007). The results show that the language contact approach is useful in identifying morpheme types that are most vulnerable to attrition. The second approach helps explain the differential rate of loss of content morphemes in a variety of topics and account for variability in the rate of attrition of late system morphemes through frequency factors. The study demonstrates that by crossing the boundaries of one theory, and one view of language researchers can achieve a stronger explanatory power and identify the common and complementary features that both models provide.