Academic literature on the topic 'French-speaking learners'

This paper uses data mining from a French project management MOOC to study learners’ performance (i.e., grades and persistence) based on a series of variables: age, educational background, socio-professional status, geographical area, gender, self- versus mandatory-enrollment, and learning intentions. Unlike most studies in this area, we focus on learners from the French-speaking world: France and French-speaking European countries, the Caribbean, North Africa, and Central and West Africa. Results show that the largest gaps in MOOC achievements occur between 1) learners from partner institutions versus self-enrolled learners 2) learners from European countries versus low- and middle-income countries, and 3) learners who are professionally active versus inactive learners (i.e., with available time). Finally, we used the CHAID data-mining method to analyze the main characteristics and discriminant factors of MOOC learner performance and dropout.

White (1989) has shown that L1 English-speaking learners of L2 French appear to be more successful in acquiring the postverbal location of French manner and frequency adverbs than L1 French-speaking learners of L2 English are in acquiring the preverbal location of English manner and frequency adverbs. One implication of recent work by Pollock (1989) on the structure of English and French clauses is, however, that the task of acquiring the placement of manner and frequency adverbs should be the same for both sets of learners, because English provides learners with as much positive syntactic evidence for preverbal manner/frequency adverbs as French does for the postverbal location of such adverbs. The problem, then, is to explain why there should be this difference in success. On the basis of a detailed study of the developing intuitions of English-speaking adult learners of L2 French it is suggested in this article that the English-speakers' success is only apparent. Both groups of learners have great difficulty in resetting a parametrized property of the functional category Agr, but the English- speaking learners of French are able to make use of nonparametrized properties of Universal Grammar to handle surface syntactic differences between English and French, properties which are not so readily available to the French-speaking learners of English. It is suggested that this finding is in line with an emerging view about the role of parametrized functional categories in second language acquisition.

Abstract This research presents the results of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the use of the Dutch placement verbs zetten (‘put’) and leggen (‘lay’) by French-speaking learners of Dutch. The experiment consisted of a productive task. The results confirm that the use of Dutch placement verbs is problematic for French-speaking learners, but they also reveal some important tendencies. First, our analysis demonstrates that French-speaking learners tend to underuse these verbs, which can be explained by the fact that placement events in French are often described by means of a neutral verb such as ‘mettre’ (‘put’) as opposed to the more specific verbs in Dutch. Secondly, the learners occasionally also tend to overuse the placement verbs in contexts where such verbs are not allowed, an observation which is seemingly paradoxical to the first one. Thirdly, learners also tend to confuse ‘zetten’ with ‘leggen’ and vice versa.

This article explores the widely documented difficulty with object clitics in the acquisition of French. The study investigates the effects of L1 transfer and processing limitations on the production and comprehension of object clitics in child L2 learners of French with different L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Spanish). The Spanish-speaking learners performed better than Chinese-speaking learners on clitic-related tasks, indicating a facilitative effect of transfer when the L1 also has object clitics. Yet no evidence was found for (negative) transfer of null objects from Chinese to French, as learners consistently rejected interpretations requiring referential null objects on a receptive task. The frequency of Chinese-speaking learners’ object omissions in production was negatively correlated with an independent measure of working memory (backward digit span), consistent with the hypothesis that object clitic omission is affected by processing limitations. These findings are discussed within a psycholinguistic model of syntactic encoding during language production.

Demographic changes in the Canadian population have also brought a more diverse community of learners to French immersion programs. This study responds to the changes in the immersion student population by comparing the French and English proficiency of three groups: Canadian-born English-speaking students, Canadian-born multilingual students and immigrant multilingual students in Grade 6 early French immersion. The quantitative data from English and French tests showed that the immigrant group outperformed the Canadian-born English speaking and the Canadian-born multilingual groups on French proficiency measures of reading, writing, and speaking, whereas there were no significant differences among the groups on the English test components.

Abstract Acquiring a foreign or a second language differs strongly according to the proximity of the target language and the mother tongue. In the case of distant languages, the learner tends to simplify the structure of his/her mother tongue and use semantax. On the other hand, the learner of a cognate language could consider the target language as a dialectal variant of his/her own mother tongue. The resulting adaptation would be an innate adaptation, a linguistic superposition. The didactic strategy would then consist in supervising this process of superposition and devising a teaching system based on 'cognate comprehension' of the closely related languages. Such a strategy could be used in the teaching of French to English-speaking learners, though English and French are not commonly considered closely related languages.

Many studies on gender assignment in French have focused on the effect of the final morpheme of the noun on the identification of the gender of the noun and the subsequent agreement with any determiners. The present study considers the effect of a noun’s initial vowel on gender accuracy in conversations with 36 Dutch-speaking French foreign language learners. The analysis of 1540 indefinite article + noun sequences revealed that gender accuracy was significantly lower when the noun started with a vowel. This effect was significant for French L3 learners but weaker among more advanced French L2 learners. It thus seems that an initial vowel, and the resulting gender syncretism, delays the correct identification of a noun’s gender among French L2 learners.

This paper reports an analysis of errors made by English-speaking learners of French. Forty learners learned a set of French words, and were subsequently tested in their ability to produce a correct phonetic form for these words. Nearly two-thirds of the attempts were incorrect, but a detailed analysis of these incorrect forms showed that not all parts of the target form were equally liable to error. Initial consonants are particularly stable, while subsequent parts of words are not reliably recalled. These results share some similarities with studies of slips of the tongue in English.

The present paper probes the use of French grammatical accents by English-speaking learners of French in a multilingual country: Cameroon. Its aim is twofold. First, it highlights the extent to which the various appropriative uses of French by French-speaking Cameroonians influence the form of the language spoken by their English-speaking counterparts. Then, it checks the effect of the language spoken by these learners on their written language. The data were collected among 160 Form 3 and Form 4 pupils from two high schools in the town of Maroua, Far North Region, Cameroon. Six tests and fifty tape recordings were carried out among the target population. Also, four French teachers were tape recorded during the exercise. The analysis of the errors made by the informants revealed significant patterns of acute and grave accents in the spoken language of respondents. These patterns of oral usage were found to strongly correlate with their written production. It therefore appears that Cameroon French displays some specific phonological characteristics, which severely spoils the acquisition of grammatical accents by English-speaking Cameroonians. These findings may revive the debate over whether French in former colonies should adapt to its contexts or keep its native purity.

The present paper probes the use of French grammatical accents by English-speaking learners of French in a multilingual country: Cameroon. Its aim is twofold. First, it highlights the extent to which the various appropriative uses of French by French-speaking Cameroonians influence the form of the language spoken by their English-speaking counterparts. Then, it checks the effect of the language spoken by these learners on their written language. The data were collected among 160 Form 3 and Form 4 pupils from two high schools in the town of Maroua, Far North Region, Cameroon. Six tests and fifty tape recordings were carried out among the target population. Also, four French teachers were tape recorded during the exercise. The analysis of the errors made by the informants revealed significant patterns of acute and grave accents in the spoken language of respondents. These patterns of oral usage were found to strongly correlate with their written production. It therefore appears that Cameroon French displays some specific phonological characteristics, which severely spoils the acquisition of grammatical accents by English-speaking Cameroonians. These findings may revive the debate over whether French in former colonies should adapt to its contexts or keep its native purity. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Much of current generative research into non-native language (L2) acquisition of morphosyntax has focused on L1 transfer and access to Universal Grammar. Subject-Verb agreement (1) has figured more prominently than nominal agreement ((1 )-(2)) in this debate, but empirical findings remain inconclusive. For instance, Hawkins & Franceschina (2004) conclude that UG features (e.g. [GENDER]) not realised in the L1 cannot be acquired, whereas White et al. (2001) argue the opposite. The present study examines the acquisition of nominal and verbal agreement marking in L2 Spanish through acceptability judgement, comprehension and production tasks carried out amongst adult L2 acquirers matched for at least two levels of proficiency, with L1s which vary in terms of the realisation of nominal and/or verbal agreement: I demonstrate that the fact that L2ers can produce or recognise agreeing morphological markers is not sufficient to ascribe to them knowledge of syntactic agreement (and hence of the relevant functional features). The experiments address this issue by examining (non)agreement in non-contiguous ('long' distance) contexts with a complex sentential subject consisting of a head noun and an intervener (as illustrated in (3a-b) for nominal gender marking). Such test items systematically contrast contexts where the head noun and intervener have matching (3a) versus opposite (3b) agreement features L2ers at lower proficiency level perform significantly better at contexts with matching than opposite gender agreement features, suggesting that they rely more on linear word order and hence general cognitive learning strategies. The most advanced L2ers, however, demonstrate native-like 'long' distanceagreement in all contexts, suggesting (hierarchical) structure dependency and hence acquisition that is specific to Language (contra Hawkins & Chan's (1997) Failed Functional Features Hypothesis, but supporting access to UG as defined by Schwartz & Sprouse's (1996) Full Transfer/Full Access Theory). The data also reveal that not all types of morphosyntactic agreement are equally acquirable. For all L2ers regardless of their L1, nominal and verbal [NUMBER] are less problematic than [PERSON] and [GENDER]. These L2A findings differ from the results of studies into the L 1A of Spanish agreement morphology. L1 children master gender agreement before they start producing nominal number agreement (Marrero & Aguirre 2003, Hernandez Pina 1984) and produce distinctions between different verbal persons (1st and 3rd)before plural verb forms emerge (Bel2002, Grinstead 2000, López Ornat 1997).The L2ers' L1 does play a role, however, in the initial stages of L2A, particularly in the field of L2 morphology. Problems with remapping syntactic features onto surface morphology cause difficulties for L2ers whose L1 operates a different morphological system to L2 Spanish. L 1 French speakers, for instance, have fewer problems with the acquisition of separate morphemes for nominal gender and nominal number agreement in L2 Spanish than Dutch and Swedish L2ers whose L1 uses a portmanteau morpheme to realise both features. These problems in the field of 'morphological competence' (Lardiere 2005) appear more relevant than issues of syntactic transfer as predicted by Schwartz & Sprouse (1996). Indeed, L 1 English learners of Spanish do not seem to experience more problems building up a morphosyntactic system for nominal agreement from scratch than the Swedish and Dutch L2ers who need to 'remap' (i.e. disentangle and reassemble - Lardiere 2005) syntactic features to agreement morphemes. The finding that mapping problems between syntactic features and lexical forms prevent some L2ers from producing concording agreement morphology is also confirmed by the discrepancy between L2ers' ability to interpret and judge agreement marking, as reflected in the acceptability judgement and comprehension tasks, and the L2ers' more limited ability to produce agreement marking. Moreover, the least marked features often act as defaults, as demonstrated by the overgeneralization of [+MASC], [+3P] and [+SG] markings.

Dans cette thèse, nous présentons les résultats d’une recherche expérimentale portant sur 150 italophones adultes qui étudient le français en milieu universitaire : à l’Université Catholique du Sacré-Cœur de Milan, à l’Université La Sapienza de Rome et à l’Université de Palerme. Elle a pour but de contribuer à l’analyse du traitement sémantique du figement linguistique et à la didactique de la phraséologie en français langue étrangère. Nous avons ainsi pu formuler et vérifier des hypothèses permettant d’expliquer les procédés de figement afin de donner, d’une part, des outils aux enseignants en vue de leur didactisation et, d’autre part, des moyens pour leur appropriation par les apprenants. Ce travail nous a permis de mieux comprendre l’identification et le traitement de différents types de phraséologies, de relever et d’analyser les traductions et les erreurs de traductions produites par les étudiants. Pour ce faire, nous avons élaboré deux questionnaires : le premier, dit d’autoévaluation, avait pour finalité de mieux connaître les sujets testés. Le second, questionnaire, celui des expressions, portait sur le traitement, la traduction et la compréhension de sept constructions phraséologiques au moyen de huit exercices inspirés de travaux en phraséodidactique et en sémantique cognitive, notamment, les grammaires de construction, les théories de la métaphore conceptuelle et de la motivation
In this PhD thesis, we present the results of an experimental research on 150 Italian-speaking adults studying French in the university context: the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan, La Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Palermo.The aim of this study was to contribute to the analysis of the semantic processing of lexicalization and to the didactics of phraseology in French as a foreign language.We have thus been able to advance and verify hypotheses explaining the process of lexicalization in order to give, on the one hand, tools to teachers for its didactisation and, on the other hand, means for learners for its appropriation. This work allowed us to better understand the identification and processing of different types of phraseologies, to identify and analyze translations and translation errors produced by students.To do this, we submitted two questionnaires: the first one, called "self-assessment" questionnaire, was intended to better understand our sample.The second questionnaire, called "Expressions", focused on the treatment, translation, and comprehension of seven phraseological constructs using eight exercises inspired by phraseodidactics and cognitive semantics, including construction grammars approach, conceptual metaphor and motivation approach

Ce travail s'intéresse à l'application de la phonétique expérimentale [acoustique et perceptive] à la didactique de la prononciation des langues étrangères. Le propos est illustré par les difficultés d'apprentissage par des japonophones des voyelles du français ; les expériences portent spécifiquement sur les voyelles -u y ø-. Le but est d'élucider les difficultés que présentent ces phones selon que leur statut phonémique et leur réalisation phonétique diffèrent ou non entre la langue maternelle et la langue apprise. Le -u- français diffère phonétiquement de son équivalent phonémique, le -u- japonais. L'étude confirme que le -u- français, phonémiquement " similaire " au -u- japonais, est plus difficile que la voyelle " nouvelle " -y-, qui n'a pas d'équivalent ni phonémique ni phonétique en japonais. La production du -ø-, qui est " nouveau " phonémiquement mais proche du -u- japonais au plan acoustique, semble présenter encore moins de difficulté. La thèse apporte également une réflexion sur la didactique de la prononciation. L'analyse de manuels généralistes de français publiés au Japon suggère que les apprenants et les enseignants sont rarement conscients de la différence de difficultés des -u y ø-. Quelques méthodes d'enseignement de la prononciation - certaines traditionnelles, d'autres innovantes - sont proposées, dans l'idée de favoriser la conscientisation de ces difficultés. Le but de cette thèse est une contribution à l'éclaircissement des processus d'apprentissage de la prononciation des langues étrangères, et à l'amélioration de son apprentissage et de son enseignement.

The two cross-sectional studies reported on here ( N = 70; N = 91) were designed to explore the relative influences of lexical asp aspect and first language (L1) knowledge on the second language (L2) acquisition of verb morphology. The participants were adult French-speaking learners of English who represented a wide range of proficiency in their knowledge of simple past. The analyses examined the degree to which the learners' appropriate and inappropriate use of tense/aspect markers in past contexts supported the predictions of the aspect hypothesis (Andersen and Shirai, 1994; Bardovi-Harlig, 1994), and the degree to which it showed influence from French, their (L1). The findings showed that both factors played a role. French-speaking learners were significantly more successful in using past morphology with telics (accomplishments and achievements) and had the most difficulty with statives. Lexical aspect also appeared to influence the forms that competed for simple past: there was greater use of progressive with activities, and simple present with statives. These findings are consistent with the predictions of the aspect hypothesis, and partially consistent with previous research with L2 learners of English from other L1 backgrounds. Francophones also showed evidence of L1 influence in their inappropriate use of perfect (a French-influenced form) with telics, a finding that has not been reported in previous research. The interpretation of the findings takes into account individual variation and developmental constraints. The thesis concludes with some discussion of the potential implications of the findings for second language pedagogy.

This thesis reports findings from a cross-sectional study of the second language (L2) acquisition of the Japanese locative particles 'ni', 'de', and 'e', features that are polysemous, not salient, and can be omitted in informal speech (Aida, 1993). Although each particle is associated with separate spatial relationships---'ni'/existence, 'de'/location of action and 'e'/direction---there is semantic overlap: 'ni' also indicates direction, and is required to link actions with directions, or if 'actions' are state-like (habitual). Its 'existence' function does not however extend to special events, which are marked by 'de'. The polysemous nature of Japanese particles allows for the investigation of two factors thought to play roles in L2 acquisition. One is the use of prototypes to establish core meanings (Taylor, 2003). Also, because spatial relationships are expressed differently across languages, first language (L1) influence (Inagaki, 2002) may be an important factor

This book presents an illustrated history of English as told through all the things that are weird about it. Maybe you have been speaking English all your life, or maybe you learned it later on. But whether you use it just well enough to get your daily business done, or you are an expert who never omits a comma or misplaces a modifier, you must have noticed that there are some things about this language that are just weird. Why are there so many silent letters? Why do we have irregular verbs? The book answers these questions and many more. Along the way, it tells the story of the many influences—from invading French armies to stubborn Flemish printers—that made the English language the way it is today. Both an entertaining send-up of linguistic oddities and a deeply researched history of English, the book is essential reading for anyone who has paused to wonder about this marvelous mess of a language.

Jessica and I thought that it would be easier to explain our background and ideas using our voices. At the beginning of each segment, we indicate who is speaking to help the reader follow along with the conversation.Terence: To introduce ourselves, I am a 27-year-old male. After years of filling out what my ethnicity is, I am half Hispanic and half Caucasian. I do not fall into any stereotypes. I do not speak Spanish, but I can understand some from growing up in a mostly Hispanic culture in California. I learned French in high school. I also lived in the Netherlands for two years during a religious service mission. Growing up, I had a very diverse group of friends. Most of them had both parents in their life. The father was mostly always away at work, and the mother stayed at home, no matter what ethnicity or religion they came from. I didn’t notice any divorces or separations. That seemed like a rare thing, even when there were financial problems, which seemed to be the norm....

Is the Internet erasing national borders? Will the future of the Net be set by Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? Who's really in control of what's happening on the Net? In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet's challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It's a book about the fate of one idea--that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google's struggles with the French government and Yahoo's capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay's struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events the original vision is uprooted, as governments time and time again assert their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them. While acknowledging the many attractions of the earliest visions of the Internet, the authors describe the new order, and speaking to both its surprising virtues and unavoidable vices. Far from destroying the Internet, the experience of the last decade has lead to a quiet rediscovery of some of the oldest functions and justifications for territorial government. While territorial governments have unavoidable problems, it has proven hard to replace what legitimacy governments have, and harder yet to replace the system of rule of law that controls the unchecked evils of anarchy. While the Net will change some of the ways that territorial states govern, it will not diminish the oldest and most fundamental roles of government and challenges of governance. Well written and filled with fascinating examples, including colorful portraits of many key players in Internet history, this is a work that is bound to stir heated debate in the cyberspace community.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

This study explores a language learner’s screen while interacting from a desktop videoconferencing device as part of an intercultural telecollaboration exchange that connected teacher-trainees and French learners. Communicative tasks involving opinion exchanges require from language learners simultaneous speaking and listening comprehension skills, which may prompt linguistic difficulties. To compensate for their weaknesses, learners had access to online resources exposing them to various and complex language use. Based on Jonassen’s (1992) work on ‘cognitive tools’ as intelligent resources that contribute to knowledge construction, the author draws on multimodal interaction analysis to question the uses of an automatic online translator in the context of Synchronous Computer Mediated Communication (SCMC). This study illustrates a learner’s technical autonomy using Google Translate (GT) to search for vocabulary while interacting with his interlocutors. It reports the learner’s emergence of a linguistic need which is followed by a search for vocabulary leading in some cases to the searched translation’s integration within the pedagogical interaction. This study raises cognitive challenges that such a practice presents for language learning.

In a school in Namur, in the French-speaking part of Belgium, deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) pupils are co-enrolled in a mainstream school and are taught bilingually in French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) and in French. This program has existed since 2000. It was initiated by the parents of a deaf child who took advantage of a decree that allowed the schools to organize teaching by immersion in a language other than French. After a presentation of the context in which this setting emerged and the way it is organized in practice, this chapter develops issues related to the pedagogical implications of welcoming all profiles of DHH learners, the search for an appropriate bilingual pedagogy, the co-teaching approach, and the complementarity between teachers and interpreters. It shows that these issues are essential conditions for ensuring that DHH pupils can benefit efficiently from the expected advantages of a co-enrollment setting.

In reciprocal learning, learners of different mother tongues are paired so that each can help the other learn their language. Developments in ICT have broadened the possibilities for reciprocal learning, enabling synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC). This study focuses on 48 French-speaking learners paired with 48 British students. Each pair worked synchronously and quasi-autonomously on communication activities in a real-time, quasi-face-to-face environment via Skype. This article reports on the pedagogical potential of the above SCMC scheme. The data discussed are drawn from a quantitative study carried out during the scheme. Two instruments were used for data-collection during the investigation: a self-report questionnaire on motivation, and a battery of language tests completed after the SCMC encounters had taken place. The same tests were also taken by a control group (N=48). The findings suggest that SCMC improves oral expression and interactivity in that it helps learners to enhance language confidence and language knowledge gains.

With the mushrooming use of English and number of non-native speakers, the issue of teaching English in non-English contexts has been brought to the fore in discussions and empirical research. The question, who makes better language teachers of English, has received considerable attention in the literature on native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) and non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs). The current study examines the contributions of native and non-native teachers to an English Language Teaching (ELT) program in Ukraine. It contends that, in spite of a recent upsurge in writing on non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in the global discourse of English language teaching (ELT), the experiences of NNESTSs working within their own state educational systems remain seriously under-investigated. The purpose of the study is to explore the general perceptions of university students of NESTs and NNESTs in Ukraine. It also aims to find out with whom Ukrainian university students believe they learn more: with native or with non-native EFL teachers. This paper reports on the results of the study conducted at Oles Honchar National University with 158 undergraduate students majoring in German, French, Ukrainian Philology as well as International Relations to assess 2 male native English-speaking (NEST) and 10 non-native English teachers. A self-developed anonymous questionnaire is applied to seek their views about NESTs and NNESTs on rating scales relating to language skills, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, learning strategies, culture and civilization, attitudes and assessment. The study also views how these teachers are able to teach certain language skills and areas. Descriptive statistics were run for data analyses. It has been found out that the participants of this study have exhibited positive attitudes towards their NETs and NNETs. Though the results have shown an overall preference for NETs but it seems that the respondents also believe that NNETs effectively contribute by virtue of their own experiences as English language learners and their experience as teachers. It may be concluded that Ukrainian EFL learners represented by the participants of this survey believe that NETs are more successful in creating richer classroom environment, teaching/assessing speaking skills, listening skills, vocabulary and reading skills better. The findings reveal that NNETs use innovative strategies and explain lessons more clearly to make their students learn better. By virtue of their personal experiences as language learners themselves, they have been perceived to understand their students’ styles and language difficulties in a better manner that facilitate learning process. Therefore, it may be concluded that each group of teachers has been perceived to have their own particular strengths and weaknesses.

This small-scale study draws on a higher education context where French-speaking students, in situ at Bordeaux University, participated in the Sharing Perspectives Foundation’s flagship Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange (E+VE) program (2018-2019). French-speaking students interacted in English on the topic of Newcomers and Nationalism via weekly webinars with non-native English-speaking students from other participating universities in Europe and the Southern Mediterranean region. Authenticity is a complex concept involving the degree of implication and meaning speakers give to their interactions (Gilmore, 2007; Pinner, 2016; Widdowson, 2003). The study therefore addresses the question of how participant feedback can help us to assess E+VE in terms of authenticity. The methods used to investigate this research question were the qualitative analysis of the French students’ reflective journals, questionnaires, and interviews. The results show that E+VE is conducive to authentic learner experiences. This study has also enabled a definition of ‘authenticity’ as a transformative language learner experience in virtual exchange.