Second Language Courses Research Articles

Improving Health Literacy of Migrants in Language Courses – Lessons Learned from a Qualitative Textbook Analysis

Health literacy (HL) programs for vulnerable groups with low HL, e.g., migrants and refugees, have been proposed to reduce health inequalities. Adult basic education and second language courses (SLC) are considered particularly important and effective. However, empirical evidence on the process of HL promotion in SLC is scarce. This study aimed to advance the understanding of HL promotion by analyzing SLC materials, deriving best practices, and informing innovative HL promotion programs. We conducted a scoping study, including a systematic literature search in seven academic databases and a grey literature search. We identified 21 manuals as eligible and qualitatively analyzed their content, theories, didactic-methodological principles, and the relationship between language and health. There are numerous, multifaceted ways to promote HL in SLC. Curricula cover various health topics, prioritizing situations in the doctor’s office, nutrition, and physical activity, others even mental and social health. Theories from three disciplines are drawn upon, and numerous methods target language skills: receptive, productive, interactive, and even advocacy skills. Three main approaches emerged: language for, information about, and skills for health, which are uniquely linked in each manual. No other educational setting is as far-reaching, innovative, and promising as SLC when implemented thoroughly by interdisciplinary teams.

Advancing the health literacy of migrants in second-language courses: Realist review

Background: Migrants and refugees are high-risk populations with often limited health literacy (HL). It is crucial to improve their HL early after arrival. One promising approach is to combine language and HL learning in second-language courses. Objectives: This study reviewed empirical evidence on the promotion of migrants’ HL in second-language courses and developed a theory of change to inform innovative projects. Methodology: We conducted a systematic realist review of HL in second language courses in seven scientific databases and a grey literature search. After screening titles, abstracts, and full texts, we identified 21 eligible publications from 13 programs. We systematically analyzed program context and characteristics, evaluation design, and outcomes and developed a theory of change based on the findings. Results: Programs promoting HL in second language courses are diverse in terms of contextual factors, formats, study designs, measures of HL, language improvements, effectiveness, relevant outcomes, and enabling factors. All studies reported improved HL after the program, but to varying degrees. The findings regarding second language improvement are mixed. Seven core components of HL as a social practice emerged. Numerous factors influencing course implementation, outcomes, and sustainability were described in detail. We conceptualized a theory of change for the HL promotion in second language courses. Conclusion: This realist review presents ample empirical evidence that second language courses can promote HL in various ways. However, these courses are complex, heterogeneous, and dependent on multiple factors. Despite these limitations, second language courses show promise as innovative and effective approaches that reach many migrants. Therefore, health promoters, medical professionals, adult educators, and policymakers should collaborate nationally and internationally to leverage this unique opportunity. The theory of change can serve as a blueprint for discussing existing programs thoroughly and developing promising, effective, and sustainable programs.

PROJE TABANLI FAALİYETLERİN EFL ÖĞRENCİLERİNİN KONUŞMA BECERİLERİNE ETKİSİ

Mainly, the criteria among people for someone whether s/he knows a language or not is his adequacy to speak that language. A huge percentage of students attend second-language courses because they want to learn how to speak the language. However, unfortunately, a majority of them cannot or will not be able to do it at the end. The matter for those students is that they may be prosperous in linguistic activities carried out in the classroom, but once outside, they cannot use what they have learnt. Therefore, what can be done to achieve real life communication in a language class room? The purpose of our study was to find out how far Project-based activities affected the speaking skills of the Preparatory Class intermediate level students in the Department Of English Language Teaching at Necmettin Erbakan University. Semi-Structured Interview and Focus Group Discussion was carried out for the 14 participants who attended the classes for one academic term. As the study was Qualitative, Content Analysis was used to analyze the data. The results showed that Project-based activities contributed a lot to the participants’ level of spoken fluency and hindered their anxiety to some extent.

Capitalism, migration, and adult education

Migration has become both a consequence of and support structure for global racialised capitalism. A presumed source of support for the people who migrate is adult education, especially the second language learning class. However, as a state organized institution, the policies and practices that govern second-language courses serve to inculcate the ideologies and values that support a racialised capitalist system. We draw on two case examples – the U.S. and Germany – to demonstrate these entanglements. We engage Freire’s critical pedagogy wherein learning contexts encourage students to question the realities of their lives, and Foucault’s ideas regarding heterotopian places where the hegemonic norm is suspended and different approaches of pedagogical work can be implemented. We conclude with the suggestion of different pedagogical paths – a ‘pedagogy of dreaming’ and a ‘pedagogy of courage.’

Neglected assets in migrants’ health literacy promotion: Translanguaging and second language teacher

Abstract Background Providing health care to migrants and refugees can be difficult due to language discordance, divergent cultural preferences and low levels of health literacy (HL). To improve it, experts suggest promoting newcomers' HL in second language courses (SLC). Yet, little empirical evidence exists on the promotion HL in SLC exist, and the HL debate ignored the plurilingual and pluricultural competencies defined in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. In the project SCURA, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, we explored the role of HL in SLC and developed interventions to promote it. This study's purpose was to understand how HL is addressed in SLC, what teachers contribute and how first language and culture are used to promote HL. Methods In our multi-method study, we conducted a realist review of SLC (N = 13 interventions), document analyses of SLC teaching materials worldwide (N = 22) and of German textbook-series (N = 8*3), participant observation in two language courses (N = 100 hours), interviews (N = 15) and focus group discussion (N = 14) with German SLC teachers and an online survey (N = 25) among SLC teacher and triangulated our results. Results Four topics emerged: SLC material include various units on health stimulating HL development. Newcomers possess many assets (experiences, language and cultural skills) and show various strategies for using these assets to acquire new HL skills such as translanguaging, digital devices, social support. Teachers play a crucial role in promoting HL in informal conversations, by modelling and in developing interactive, asset-valuing HL-promoting activities. Conclusions HL interventions in SLC can draw from a wealth of assets and can be more promising by strengthening translanguaging and transculturing skills and providing discussion stimulating materials. Key messages Migrants’ health literacy practices are characterized by a unique use of translanguaging and transculturing. Second language teachers can promote migrants’ health literacy especially by facilitating learning opportunities that encourage them to use their assets.

Migrants and refugees’ children’s role in promoting the family health literacy in second language courses

Abstract Background Recent research on health literacy (HL) stresses the importance of the social context for children's HL, especially among vulnerable groups such as migrants and refugees. However, reaching migrant is difficult, so experts recommend adult second language courses (SLC) as promising settings to promote HL of migrants and their families. Yet, empirical evidence of promoting family health literacy (FHL) in SLC is scarce. The project SCURA, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, therefore aimed at exploring how FHL is addressed in SCL and to develop an FHL promoting intervention. Methods We conducted a mixed-method study, including a scoping study on empirical evidence of HL in SLC (N = 17), analyses of international curricula (N = 22) and of German textbooks (N = 24), participant observation in two SLC (100 hours), expert interviews (N = 15) triangulated the findings and conceptualized an FHL intervention. Results Whereas health is a preferred topic in SLC because it is interesting, and engaging and included in the standard SLC curricula, FHL is rarely targeted and not defined. Qualitative data reveal a vast scope of FHL related occasions offering possibilities to improve parents' health knowledge, communication skills and health literacy. Based on the results, we developed and implemented a multi-modal diversity sensitive FHL program, integrated into SCL, that targets parents' and children's physical, mental and social health topics, promotes FHL, and empowers migrant families to make good health decisions within their new context. Conclusions Currently, standard SLC rarely target FHL in the curriculum, but FHL topics are informally discussed. Hence, training teachers to use the upcoming FHL topics to teach the second language is a win-win-solution for it achieves both aims: increasing HL and language skills.

Illuminating (digital) health literacy practices using applied linguistics

Abstract Background Health literacy (HL) is key to making well-informed health decision in analogous and virtual social situations and organizational contexts. Multiple models and instruments of HL exist, but an in-depth understanding of the various HL-related everyday life situations and their digital and linguistic requirements are scarce. Here, the expertise of second language courses (SLC) can be of great value as they support newcomers acquiring the necessary skills for everyday communication, including health. In the project SCURA, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, we explored the German SLC, attended by 2.1 million migrants and refugees since 2005, and developed interventions to promote HL in it. The aim is to understand what everyday situations require (digital) HL skills, what characterizes them and what can we learn for HL models and interventions. Methods We conducted a qualitative content analysis (Bowen 2009) of the 8 newest, approved German second language textbooks series, identified all tasks related to HL, analyzed the situation, topic, language skills, analogue/digital and HL dimension and compared the findings with the HLS-EU conceptual model of HL. Results We identified 180 HL-related communication situations, including 33 tasks related to digital HL. Compared to the HLS-EU conceptual model, the HL activities in SLC reveal a broad understanding of HL including physical, mental and social aspects of HL, linguistic, cultural and digital skills and even critical HL. 5 HL-related dimensions emerged: communication for health, health literacy, health knowledge, health behaviour and life-skills. The differentiation and activities can help to develop further models and interventions that target specific situations requiring digital HL more effectively. Conclusions The analysis of the SLC curricula specified the various (digital) HL-related everyday life situations and! the differentiated model helps to develop promising interventions.

26.E. Workshop: Context and practice of health literacy foundations

Abstract The Shanghai declaration (WHO 2016) stated the role that health literacy (HL) may play in the struggle for more equitable society. Moving from good intentions to social practices of HL reveals that the social context where HL is embedded is a key determinant of the establishment of social practices that may play a critical role in wellbeing and quality of life. Exploring how the translation of HL into a social context is achieved or how the social context may determine strategies to face the challenges that HL production need, is a relevant domain in the public health and health promotion agenda. The aim of this workshop is to share with the audience an opportunity to immerse in five social contexts and explore their HL practices. The first perspective is from Cameroon and the emphasis is on HL role in increasing health knowledge. The authors share the results of an ethnographic analysis of the role of school children in the development of HL in families. The second presentation will unveil one of the topics that is influencing health and well-being of children today when a large struggle to counter act sugar beverages is at the root of obesity. Therefore, a study case from Portugal will focus on HL impact on nutrition status and water intake in children showing the relevance of the social context considered a way forward in the struggle for health promotion. From Germany a third presentation will consider migrants and refugees children's role in promoting the family HL. Recent research on HL stresses the importance of the social context for children's HL, especially among vulnerable groups such as migrants and refugees. However, reaching migrants is difficult, so experts recommend adult second language courses (SLC) as promising settings to promote HL of migrants and their families. Yet, empirical evidence of promoting family health literacy (FHL) in SLC is scarce and therefore addressing such a topic is seminal towards improving the Shanghai HL vision above referred. In Switzerland, adolescent's mental health promotion is the focus of a psychoeducational tool in the pediatric primary care (PPC) that will be considered in the fourth presentation. The aim is to scrutinized this social context, increase mental health literacy of adolescents by implementing proactive mental health strategies and create an opportunity for open discussion with their pediatrician about mental health. Finally, the fifth presentation aims at illuminating (digital) HL practices using applied linguistics. HL is key to making well-informed health decision in analogous and virtual social situations and organizational contexts. Multiple models and instruments of HL exist, but an in-depth understanding of the various HL-related everyday life situations and their digital and linguistic requirements are scarce. Here, the expertise and necessary skills for everyday communication, including health, are the object of an ethnographic research to help fill this gap. Key messages The relevance of the social context and how changes of this context can lead to transformations that influence health literacy of children is a way forward in the struggle for health promotion. share with the audience an opportunity to immerse in five social contexts and explore their HL practices.

Snapping the Quijote: Examining L2 Literature, Social Media, and Digital Storytelling through a Cervantine Lens

This paper focuses on an advanced Spanish literature seminar I taught at Kansas State University dedicated entirely to Cervantes's Don Quijote de la Mancha. In an effort to appeal to twenty-first-century students in rural Kansas, I designed my seminar to explore traditional questions of authorship, translation and reading, metafiction, self-invention, and parody, but through the lens of contemporary pop culture, including the graphic novel and mobile applications (apps). Unlike a traditional research paper, this course's non-traditional final assessment required students to place academic scholarship in an alternative, accessible format. It also promoted innovative, analytic interpretations of the novel through the juxta-position of text, images, video, and sound in a medium in which students already excelled: Snapchat. In what follows, I describe this alternative Snapchat project and its pedagogical justifications, then reflect on the results, student feedback, successes, and limitations. Ultimately, I propose rethinking or reimagining the traditional Don Quijote seminar- and second-language (L2) literature courses and assessments more broadly- by embracing purportedly non-academic technologies like Snapchat, whose reliance on a variety of semiotic tools has the potential to teach traditional skills of literary analysis and increase students' engagement with and understanding of narrative processes.

Estimating the effects of procrastination on performance: A small sample study

Previous studies have found student procrastination to compromise learning outcomes using initial test scores to control for the influence of unobserved ability. The validity of such analysis rests on the assumption that students do not react to initial test scores. Utilizing daily information on student behavior, this paper shows that feedback effects were negligible in a student sample from a university second-language course. The paper then objectively quantifies the degree of procrastination, and finds evidence for detrimental effects of procrastination on test scores, corroborating previous studies. The result lends confidence to the value-added specification of the education production function.

Enhancing Latin American Women's Self-Concept: A Group Intervention

ABSTRACTThis study attempts to explore the self-concept of Latin American immigrant adult, women and measure the effectiveness of an “Enhancing Self-Concept” workshop on improving their self-concept. The sample consisted of 74 adult women aged 20 to 60 who were selected from first-level second-language courses from various educational institutions in Montreal. Participants were randomly assigned to either an experimental group who received an “Enhancing Self-Concept” workshop or a control group who received a series of information sessions. Outcome measures consisted of scores on the Tennessee Self-Concept. Scale (TSCS) and a Post-Intervention Questionnaire (PIQ). Participants were tested before and after their respective treatments, depending on the measure used. The results are discussed in relation to effectiveness of the “Enhancing Self-Concept.” workshop in improving immigrant. Latin American women's self-concept. Implications and suggestions for future research are included.

Sciencepoetry and Language/Culture Teaching

As critics are quick to point out, we live in a fragmented, often contradictory world. Somehow, the sciences have become divorced from the humanities, as if these two aspects of intellectual endeavor were not on speaking terms with one another. Similarly, the field of teaching lives and is practiced as if divorced from the teaching of While the fragmentation is evident, the contradictions of these divisions are less so: after all, language is and is culture. The first step in resolving this apparent schism is a recognition of its nature: that is, the illusion, or myth, of vs. culture, science vs. humanities. In his Cienciapoesia, Rafael Catala outlines a poetic genre based on an vision of reality (13). In this genre, the humanities and the sciences are criticized as existing at opposite poles of the academic, or intellectual, spectrum, as supuestamente antag6nicos and maintaining una desastrosa comunicaci6n entre humanistas y cientificos (14). According to Catali, humanists, of which poets comprise one part, have not integrated the most important operative paradigms of the twentieth century, which for the most part come from the sciences, including quantum physics, relativity, and others. Scientists, on the other hand, have been producing technological and environmental changes in and to society and to the planet as a whole, seemingly ignoring the ecological and human consequences of their actions: evidence can be seen in such phenomena as acid rain, as well as nuclear power, genetic engineering, even the questions of when life begins and should end. In short, the humanists cannot ignore this scientific age, and the scientific community is in great need of what Catala terms a major dose of ethics (17). This notion of a fragmented collective consciousness is not a new one, as Catala himself points out in quoting Jose Marti. What is new in Sciencepoetry (written as one word) is the development of it as a praxis of integration, a methodology leading to a more interdisciplinary, holistic approach to learning, or to use Freire's term, concientizagdo. While the notion of sciencepoetry can be examined from many perspectivesanthropological, sociological, political, and of course, scientific and poeticthis paper will be limited to a narrow examination of it and an application of some modern scientific principles to the teaching of language/culture. It is news to no one that the teaching of in second-language courses has always taken a back seat to grammar instruction. In Spanish texts, sections at the back of each chapter tend to fetishize, stereotype, and oversimplify cultural phenomena, even in the better textbooks. Is it rationally conceivable that a chapter introducing vocabulary on clothing, then reflexives, idiomatic expressions with tener, and relative pronouns, be followed with a culture section on La M6isica en Espafia? (Allen, ch. 8) Or, a more recent example of an allegedly proficiency-oriented textbook confines its sections to marked-off boxes and certain colored pages, as if to send the message, Hey, over here! These are the pages for quick reference! (Knorre, et al.) In short, the state of affairs regarding a holistic approach to the teaching of is no less *Members are invited to send material to: Dr. Stella T. Clark, Department of Foreign Languages, California State University, San Bernardino, 5500 State University Parkway, San Bernardino, CA 92404. Maximum length is 15 double-spaced pages. Please send a typed original and a copy for each paper submitted, and include a self-addressed envelope and loose stamps to cover return mailing of the manuscript.

Communicative Testing in a Second Language

has paid increasing attention to the or message transmission aspect of language, as opposed to an earlier almost exclusive emphasis on grammatical forms and the ways in which they could be combined to form grammatical sentences. This shift in our understanding of what it is that native speakers of a language know and do has led to widespread rethinking about what the content and organization of second-language courses should be. More recently, attention has increasingly been given to how the ability of second-language speakers can be tested. Some excellent discussions of this question now exist in the literature.' This article is an attempt to synthesize for the informed reader some of the main principles as well as some of the unresolved issues which have emerged from these investigations of aspects of language, and to describe several promising approaches to developing communicative tests.