This paper presents insights from two interview studies with the aim of shedding light on the learning potential of studying abroad in an area where English is used as a lingua franca. The majority of previous research on study abroad focuses on students' experiences of studying abroad in target-language regions, for example learners of English…

This paper explores the notion of speaker authenticity in the context of obsolescent 'Francoprovençal': a highly fragmented grouping of Romance varieties spoken in parts of France, Italy, and Switzerland by less than 1% of the total regional population. While Francoprovençal has long been losing ground to the dominant language(s) with which it is…

The literature exploring study abroad students' social networks and intercultural communication traditionally considers three categories of social ties: the co-national network, the multi-national network and the host national network. However, the data collected from a yearlong digital ethnography and the narratives on the social media posts of…

This contribution examines the linguistic perceptions and ideologies of an individual of Latin American origin, Jorge, based in the German-speaking region of Switzerland, through narratives to analyse how pre-existing normative linguistic discourses influence (linguistic) identities. Connecting the micro-level of Jorge's narrative to the macro…

The present paper reports on a study investigating whether the presence of a foreign accent negatively affects credibility judgments. Previous research suggests that trivia statements recorded by speakers with a foreign accent are judged as less credible than when recorded by native speakers due to increased cognitive demands (Lev-Ari and Keysar…

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of this exploratory case study was to understand how teachers, working with English Language Learners (ELLs), expanded their knowledge and instructional practices as they implemented a one-to-one iPad® program. Background: English Language Learners experience linguistic, cultural, and cognitive shifts that can be…

Ageing and the threat of shortages among vocational education and training (VET) teachers are current issues in Europe. Yet, there is little research conducted so far that has investigated scientifically the motivation and perceptions of these teachers. We examine the factors influencing the choice of a second career as a VET teacher in…

Sociolinguistic competence is not often examined in nonnative English acquisition. This is particularly true for features where the variants are neither stylistically nor socially constrained, but rather are acceptable in all circumstances. Learning to use a language fully, however, implies being able to deal with this type of…

The authors investigated normative beliefs about personality development. Young, middle-aged, and older adults indicated the age-relevance of 835 French adjectives by specifying person characteristics as typical for any age decade from 0 to 99 years. With this paradigm, the authors determined age-relevance (How typical is a characteristic for a…

One of the early forms of intercultural education was the upbringing of children by foreign governesses, who appeared on the European labour market during the seventeenth century. In Germany families of the gentry and the wealthy middle-classes began, since the eighteenth century, to copy the upbringing of princely children. They too wanted their…

The theories of Pulgram (1970) suggest that if the vowel of a French syllable is open then it will induce syllable segmentation responses that result in the syllable being closed, and vice versa. After the empirical verification that our target French-speaking population was capable of distinguishing between mid-vowel aperture, we examined the…