This article examines content‐based instruction as a possible strategy for easing students' transition from beginning to advanced foreign language courses, as well as for developing students' interest in pursuing language study beyond those courses sponsored and protected by an institutional foreign language requirement. Four principal sections organize this article. First, the theoretical underpinnings of content‐based instruction are reviewed. In the second section, four common content‐based instruction models are outlined and compared. The third section examines recent research findings in content‐based instruction and offers advice on how to implement a content‐based instruction program in a university context. The final section highlights future research needs.

In recent years, literacy has emerged as a key critical term in foreign language (FL) teaching and learning. This essay reflects on the history of literacy and on current developments, in particular those related to the development of multiliteracies paradigms. The article concludes with a discussion of emergent topics related to literacy and language teaching and suggests ways in which research in these domains is posing new questions for the field of FL education.

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Recent scholarship has proposed a pedagogy of multiliteracies to frame FL curricula and instruction, and encourage critical reflection about language use through a variety of discourses and textual genres. One pedagogical framework conducive to fostering learners' intersemiotic awareness is Global Simulation (GS). GS consists in the creation of a culturally grounded, fictitious scenario, wherein students adopt specific character roles through which they enact discourse styles associated with their characters' identities and the simulation's attendant social demands. The adoption of characters reinforces the notion of literacies based on participation in a variety of discourses from the standpoint of particular social roles. This article reports on the development and implementation of a multiliteracies-based GS in fourth semester French applying a genre-based framework. First, we provide background on GS and its compatibility with multiliteracies and genre-based approaches. Next, we outline the framework and various texts and modules used in the course under study. Finally, we demonstrate through our findings the potential for this approach to foster learners' awareness of language and other communication modes as social signifying practice, and their abilities to draw upon multiple Available Designs in making meaning.