IN INTRODUCING THE LAST PERSPECTIVEScolumn on the role of foreign language (FL) departments in internationalizing the curriculum, I observed that claiming such a role was rather akin to asserting the obvious. This column, too, with its focus on Revisiting the Role of Culture in the FL Curriculum, seems at first sight to fall into the same category: affirming the tried and truenamely, that culture has an established place in FL curricular discussions. However, the title already and quite deliberately signals a certain distancing from any self-satisfied stance toward the topic, inasmuch as it probes the implied reconsideration of culture in FL curricula with at least two kinds of "why"s: a retrospective and causative query and a more prospective and purposive "why" that would illuminate the path forward with regard to the role of culture in FL programs.As is to be expected, the two go hand in hand. What might be less expected is how much innovative thinking has of late gone into a seemingly "checked-off" construct like culture in FL curricula and pedagogy. Indeed, might the proposed "revisiting" approximate a "revising," a typographical slip that I encountered in the very writing of this introduction? There is good reason to at least consider that possibility, precisely because the context of culture and the context of situation within which FL specialists in their particular professional culture now discuss the nature and the role of culture in their educational work has shifted dramatically in the last decade or so.We know that these two prominent terms were originally used by the anthropologist Malinowski (1935) as a way of capturing the fact that any understanding of words depends on and is em-bedded in the "active experience of those aspects of reality to which the words belong" (p. 58). Malinowski came to extend that notion of the significance of context to an entire culture, thereby yielding the two pivotal notions of context of situation and context of culture in a linguistically oriented anthropology. Considering the implications of such a position over 40 years later, Halliday (1999) interpreted Malinowski's as follows:language considered as a system-its lexical items and grammatical categories-is to be related to its context of culture; while instances of language in use-specific texts and their component parts-are to be related to their context of situation. (p. 4, original emphasis)

This Scottish sample had similar MC-HOME and EA-HOME scores as previously reported in American samples and the HOME scores related strongly to family adversity, supplying a proximal link between social conditions and the environment of children. These results suggest that the HOME Inventory is reliable and has concurrent validity with measures of social adversity in a British sample.

In response to calls for more practice‐based teacher education, this study investigated the way in which two high‐performing novice world language teachers, one in Spanish and one in Latin, implemented a high‐leverage teaching practice, leading an open‐ended group discussion. Observational data revealed a number of constituent micro‐practices. The article offers examples illustrating the way in which the practice was achieved and also captures the impact of such practices on classroom discourse. Findings provide an initial basis upon which continued research on high‐leverage teaching practices in the world language education context can be pursued.

The MLA Report (2007) accords considerable weight to the role of culture in a transformed approach to language education in the U.S. and outlines "one possible model" for developing transcultural understanding that involves the interpretation of the "cultural narratives" inherent in all forms of cultural representation (p. 238). How exactly students might be engaged in interpreting cultural narratives in the foreign language classroom, though, remains to be further specified, imagined, practiced, and studied. Moreover, expanding this model of culture-in-language education to include active production and negotiation of meaning around cultural narratives, in addition to interpretation of these, has important pedagogical and learning implications. This paper highlights how engagement with historical narratives is a natural site for the kinds of interpretive and meaning-making practices that foster the deep cultural learning discussed in the MLA's report. Reporting data from an ethnographic, discourse-analytic study of a university-level French classroom, this paper illustrates that through the instructional environment created by the teacher and through the students' engagement in class activities, many rich opportunities for perspective-taking from multiple points of view were made available to students, ultimately weaving a dense web of meanings around French experiences of World War II. Close analysis of excerpts from classroom interaction show how a constellation of instructional features and patterns of student engagement allowed the class to access the repertoire of more or less plausible storylines attached to this historical period and to practice with interpreting perspectives embedded in cultural texts. Interview data further highlight both the challenges and great potential of inviting multiple perspectives and voices into culture pedagogy in the foreign language classroom. 59credence to the MLA's proposed model while also providing evidence for the need to expand that model.Of central concern are also the practical, pedagogical issues arising from such a shift toward engaging foreign language learners (FLLs) with cultural narratives, not least of which is the need to clarify what exactly constitutes a cultural narrative. Building on the MLA report's assertion that cultural narratives "appear in every kind of expressive form" (p. 238), spanning genres and ranging from the linguistic to the visual to any other semiotic mode, I take cultural narratives to be the multiple (sometimes competing), conventionalized storylines that cultural groups produce and use to make sense of and attribute meaning to their shared experiences. These stories employ linguistic and other symbols to signal perspectives and meanings, and whether or not individual members of cultural groups accept particular narratives as reasonable or "true" accounts, they are available to group members for purposes of meaning-making through the semiotic tools they share, especially language.While traditionally in the field of FLE the word "narra...

What does development of language awareness among very young world language learners look like, especially when they have relatively infrequent exposure to the language they are learning? Adopting an 'engagement with language' (EWL) perspective and attending closely to classroom discourse, our research analyses interactional data drawn from several Head Start preschool classrooms (children aged 3-5 years) in order to both establish what sorts of explicit language awareness such young learners display in episodes of EWL and point out what other opportunities for cultivating language awareness are latent, but ultimately unexploited, in the classroom discourse excerpts presented. Our analysis is the basis for the claim that world language education more broadly, especially in the case of young learners, can be enhanced if curriculum and instruction intentionally focus on developing language awareness and deepening EWL.