This article discusses a community engagement pilot program for language students offered at Flinders University. For a number of years, the Language in Action program has provided placement opportunities for language students in a range of community settings such as aged-care agencies and cultural associations. From an educational perspective, Language in Action draws from the Deep Approach to World Language Education, which places students in charge of their learning experience and promotes meaningful interactions with communities. The program is also designed to encourage students’ prosocial behavior, contributing to developing a sense of meaning in life, relationship satisfaction, and wellbeing. Through Language in Action, students have opportunities not only to improve their language and intercultural skills in near immersion settings, but also to establish social connections with individuals from migrant groups. This article discusses the placement experiences of language students, focusing on students of Italian, in aged-care contexts. It presents the rationale of the Language in Action program in light of some core principles of Positive Psychology. It discusses the program’s implementation, preliminary data on students’ evaluations of their language development, and the sense of achievement they derive from their placements.

This paper reports on an online guided reading program designed and developed by the authors, and implemented in class conditions. The program allows students to read a short story from a computer screen and obtain immediate support, in the form of suggested problem-solving strategies designed to help them overcome the lexical and grammatical difficulties commonly encountered by intermediate language students, at local text level, during the reading process. Based on the analysis of case studies of readers, the chief objective of this study is to gauge the pedagogical relevance of the guided reading program and suggest that it facilitates intermediate language students’ first encounters with literary texts.

This paper reports on an online guided reading program designed and developed by the authors, and implemented in class conditions. The program allows students to read a short story from a computer screen and obtain immediate support, in the form of suggested problem-solving strategies designed to help them overcome the lexical and grammatical difficulties commonly encountered by intermediate language students, at local text level, during the reading process. Based on the analysis of case studies of readers, the chief objective of this study is to gauge the pedagogical relevance of the guided reading program and suggest that it facilitates intermediate language students’ first encounters with literary texts.

This study investigates how first-year post-secondary students conceptualise and judge their strategic behaviour in relation to reading foreign language literary texts. The questionnaire used to collect data is structured around four important metacognitive aspects of reading: what readers believe they are able to do (Confidence), how readers conceive efficient reading in a foreign language (Effectiveness) and what readers believe makes reading difficult (Difficulty), as well as how readers believe they are able to overcome reading difficulties (Repair). In addition to providing information on conceptualisations of key areas of reading, a contrastive investigation of self-assessed proficient readers and self-assessed less proficient readers is carried out in order to elicit possible differences between the two groups.The results obtained show that the large majority of the surveyed students are able to envision reading as a cohesive and constructive activity. Most of them report they are able to incorporate bottom-up and top-down strategic behaviour in their conceptions of foreign language reading. However, students appear to be mostly concerned with lexical difficulties which are naturally perceived by them as the major impediment to reading comprehension. As for possible conceptual differences between self-assessed proficient and less proficient students, results suggest that they are minimal. In fact, the only area where a significant discrepancy between the two groups appears isconfidence.

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