anglicky: Title of the thesis: Primary education of foreign languages in France and primary education of french in the Czech Republic Keywords: foreign language, french, primary school, education, class-books Abstract: The drift of my thesis is to appreciate how to educate foreign languges in France and the education of french in the Czech Republic at primary school. The informations for the first part of my thesis I have found in France or with the help of French institut of Prague or with internet. I had some problems with the second part, the education of french in our country, there are not so much informations of this dilemma. I wanted to summarise the informations of the education of french, because there is no document about this question, so it was my another butt of my thesis. I have also targot the practically respect, for example the book reviews or questionaries for children. My thesis gave me the enriching of the sphere, whitch is very important for me. There are two parts of my work- the first about the french education of foreign languages at primary school and the second about the czech education of french at primary school. Chapters and sub-chapters go into the profundity od the problem.

This degree project focuses on the English classroom in the Swedish language introduction program, more specifically on the use of translanguaging as a teaching tool for newly arrived students. This thesis is an attempt to better understand the classroom dynamics in the program during English lessons by answering the following questions: What are the challenges of teaching English in the language introduction program in Sweden? What do teachers think about translanguaging as a teaching tool in the language introduction classes? Is using it taking advantage of pre-existing knowledge? The research was conducted with three teachers from one school in central Stockholm, all coming from different socio-cultural backgrounds and having varying degrees of experience as teachers. The data was gathered through classroom observations and interviews, which allowed for triangulation, thus offering a better understanding and a deeper view of their teaching practices. Three lessons were observed, one with each teacher. These observations were conducted prior to the interviews, to facilitate the comparison between the teaching styles of each teacher. Doing so allowed for more exhaustive and informative interviews. Although the qualitative nature of the data does not allow for the results to be generalizable, triangulation does give the results legitimacy and transferability. The results of this research will be beneficial in understanding how to tackle a multilingual environment, given that that is the direction in which Sweden is heading.

In the decades following the Stonewall riots in New York, there has been an increasingly public acceptance and normalization of LGBTQ identities. In some spaces, however, like public schools, LGBTQ identities continue to be contested and positioned as problematic, creating challenges for teachers who seek to create safe and affirming spaces within the classroom and the curriculum. This study using a narrative inquiry methodology, examines the stories of seven teachers of foreign languages at the high school level as they seek to make sense of their work as it relates to LGBTQ identities. This research study using narrative inquiry methods describes the experiences of seven teachers of foreign language as they make sense of and negotiate LGBTQ identities in the context of their work as foreign language teachers. The teachers describe how and when LGBTQ identities manifest in their instruction, their knowledge base of LGBTQ identities, ways in which they address sex and gender normative practices and behaviors in their classrooms, and supports and barriers available to them as they work to create curriculum and classroom spaces that are inclusive of LGBTQ identities. The findings of this study address the unique ways in which foreign language teaching presents a unique site of study of the target language and culture, including LGBTQ identities that are present within those target languages and cultures and within the classroom environment. Teachers described barriers, like language proficiency, administration, perceived surveillance, and lack of materials as challenges to enacting LGBTQ inclusive teaching practices. They cited supports like colleagues, professional learning communities and opportunities to engage with one another on challenging topics, as well as the nature of foreign language teaching as beneficial in their work.

Each day, foreign language teachers are faced with issues that render the control of the K-12 classroom challenging, at best, and virtually impossible at worst. Even preservice foreign language teachers, those going through a teacher education program towards K-12 licensure, understand that no content can be taught or learned if there is mayhem in the classroom environment. Effective classroom management practices are often what consume these teachers' time and energy, even before the first page of the textbook is turned. However, it would be an error to over-generalize foreign language teachers' challenges with classroom management in an effort to introduce possible solutions without first considering the uniqueness of this particular teaching and learning environment. It was the researcher's contention that the foreign language classroom is unlike any other, and thus thrusts its teachers, both preservice and in-service, into management situations that are rare or non-existent in the classrooms of other subject areas. The purpose of this longitudinal study, therefore, was to describe five foreign language teachers' experiences with classroom management and to identify the distinct issues they have faced, both during their student teaching semester and currently as in-service teachers. The data gathered from the five subjects' weekly reflective journals and teaching philosophies, their observations of other classrooms, responses to a questionnaire, interviews, and observational field notes were analyzed qualitatively using a case study approach. The study confirmed that these foreign language teachers often contended with issues that were exclusive to their teaching field. Target language usage, the systemic lack of respect for the study of foreign language, and the inclusion of students who were heritage speakers of the language being taught were among the issues most commonly cited by these five teachers, and were shown to have a significant impact on student behavior, motivation, and attitude. Many teacher education programs already offer courses that explicitly present appropriate classroom management strategies. However, data from this study suggest that a further breakdown of how foreign language classroom management may differ from other subject areas may ultimately enable foreign language teacher educators to better prepare and better support both their preservice and in-service teachers.

Amid a recent wave of revived interest in citizenship and citizenship education, foreign language education is emerging as an important but under-researched site for the education of citizens under conditions of globalization and massive social, economic, and political changes. This qualitative study deconstructed the concept of good citizenship embedded in China's and America's foreign language curricula during the past decade. The study presented a comparative critical discourse analysis of four interwoven data sets: (a) foreign language policies and/or curriculum standards bounded by the two contexts of this study: Shanghai in China and Utah in the U.S.; (b) EFL (English as a foreign language) and CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) instructional materials developed for the 1st through 3rd and 10th through 12th graders in Shanghai and Utah, respectively; (c) media accounts relating foreign language education with citizenship education in the two countries; and (d) relevant academic publications. Together with a body of critical literature on ideology in curriculum, a two-dimensional citizenship matrix consisting of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, neoliberalism, and Confucianism assisted in the identification and comparison of the country-specific sociopolitical and sociocultural meanings associated with being a good citizen in China and the U.S. Three sets of findings were reported in response to the three research questions. First, among a jumble of meanings and expectations, the most widely shared imaginary embedded in China's EFL curriculum is an individual whose allegiance is to the nation and the market, whereas the second popular perception is someone who observes Confucian moral principles and adopts a global perspective. Second, the dominant good citizenship notion embedded in America's CFL curriculum is characterized by a marked neoliberal orientation. Third, the two cases demonstrated two chief differences and two major similarities. Due to the unique social contexts, cultural institutions, and global power differentials of China and the U.S., the good citizenship discursive fields of two cases were qualitatively different both in terms of intent and belonging. The discursive fields were similar in that the neoliberal-nationalism discourse was prevalent and the officially preferred good citizenship notion was oppressive in nature in both cases.

Self-repairs have been the subject of investigation in a number of research areas, notably psycholinguistics and conversation analysis. This study has aimed at the examination of self-repairs in second language classroom presentations. Specifically, it has sought to gain insight into self-repairs in naturally occurring talk and to explicate the possible relationships between the variables of age, sex, and educational background and self-repair behaviour of L2 speakers as well as the possible link between self-repair and proficiency. Accomplishing these required a scrutiny of individual self-repairs and their classification. However, the classifications which have traditionally been used in the psycholinguistic approach suffer from a number of shortcomings, as they are usually based on the analysis of surface forms of self-repairs. Because of the subjectivity involved in this process, there has been considerable variation in terms of classes of self-repairs and also the decision as to where a given self-repair belongs. An in-depth analysis of self-repair data revealed that self-repairs do cluster into categories. This analysis also yielded a set of features which are relevant to the study of self-repairs. In addition to showing that the established categories are mutually exclusive, comparison of major categories of self-repairs according to these features, which characterise the trajectory of self-repairs, resulted in the explication of a number of regularities in the way L2 speakers carry out self-repairs. Having established a data-driven classification of repairs, an attempt was made to see whether learner variables of age, sex and educational background have any significant effect on self-repairs. It turned out that none of these variables have a significant effect on self-repairs. In addition, it became clear that while beginning, intermediate, and advanced L2 speakers have been shown to demonstrate significant proficiency-related differences, these differences fade away when they come from the same proficiency level.

This study aimed to conduct an evaluation based on stakeholders&rsquo / perceptions of the effectiveness of the English Language Teaching Program at Atilim University, Preparatory School. Moreover, the study wanted to find out to what extent the program meets students&rsquo / expectations and whether there are any differences in stakeholders&rsquo / perceptions with regard to their ideal language teaching-learning environment and their real (classroom) practices. The sample included 62 instructors, including three administrators, and a teacher trainer and 216 students attending Prep. School in the academic term of 2008-2009. The data were collected through two questionnaires, developed by the researcher: one was designed for instructors and administrators / the other was designed for students. To support the close-ended items in the questionnaires, each questionnaire included some open-ended items. Data based on the questionnaires were analyzed through descriptive statistics. While, the qualitative data were analyzed through content analysis. Lastly, to validate the data and increase the credibility of the data, triangulation procedure was carried out. The findings of the study showed that the program at Atilim University Prep. School needs some improvements in the following areas: (1) the goals and objectives need to be clearly identified / (2) the content of the instruction needs to include all language skills / (3) the resources and materials need to be revised in terms of their content and compatibility with the goals of the school, and the proficiency exam / (4) the goals and the content of the testing means, especially proficiency exam, need to be redefined and made compatible with the content of the books and instruction.

This study investigated perceptions of EFL learners towards the benefits and the challenges of keeping a portfolio. The study also examined the students

This Report presents a variety of grammar teaching options for secondary school foreign language teachers in the U.S. Grammar teaching forms a large, and, in my opinion, important part of the foreign language curriculum in U.S. secondary schools. This Report presents grammar teaching methods in the form of a “grammar teaching toolbox” to encourage a variety-based teaching approach and allow teachers to enrich their pedagogical repertoires. All methods discussed in this Report involve explicit discussion of form and take place at the presentation or input/intake stage of grammar teaching. Sample lesson plans and helpful references for each methodology are presented. The first chapters of the Report present a discussion of the intended context, a brief history of grammar teaching, an analysis of the central issues in the debate over form-focused instruction and an outline for incorporating grammar into the contemporary communicative classroom. / text

This study is based upon the idea that foreign language (FL) classrooms exist apart from their target language communities. While historically, this has been a geographic truth, divides between FL learners and native speakers may also reflect symbolic social distance. Given the symbolic, if not geographic, isolation of the FL classroom from the real world, this study presumes that a challenge inherent to the endeavor of FL education is that the authentic, real-world language and culture under study are, by definition, not naturally present in the FL classroom. This study considers how this challenge, referred to as the challenge of authenticity, is managed in one FL classroom. Seven eighth-grade students and their teacher comprise Classroom 204, a beginning Spanish FL classroom at a private school in the southwest U.S. This qualitative case study uses classroom observations, audio-recordings, classroom artifacts, and participant interviews as data to consider not only how authenticity is imported, imagined, and conjured by participants in Classroom 204, but how authenticity is assigned value therein. Data is analyzed largely with discourse analysis of transcripts of classroom talk about (and classroom talk that constituted) various facets of authenticity, value, and the real world. Ecology theory serves as a broad theoretical lens through which to understand (and accept) the complexity inherent to the social phenomena being researched. Benedict Anderson's (1991) theory of imagined communities is adopted to understand the boundaries that delineate the inside of the FL classroom from the outside, and Bourdieu's (1992) notion of symbolic capital is used to understand the ways by which authenticity becomes valuable (and, conversely, how that which is valuable becomes authentic). Findings suggest that, while participants are largely oriented to real-world manifestations of Spanish language and culture, authenticity is not most present in Classroom 204 in the form of stuff imported from elsewhere. Rather, authenticity emerges out of the highly local, socially-immediate interactions and value systems unique to Classroom 204. Suggestions for both pedagogy and future research focus on approaches that acknowledge and capitalize on the power of local authenticity in the FL classroom, as cultivated by local social actors. / text