Underachievement among national minority group students in places of their compact residence in Ukraine makes them vulnerable to educational failure. This problem is noticeable in Chernivtsi Region of Ukraine where the multicultural character causes peculiar behaviour in politics, migration, economic and cultural activities as well as in…

This study aims at exploring the potential of extensive TV viewing for L2 vocabulary learning, and the effects associated with the language of the on-screen text (L1 or L2), type of instruction (pre-teaching target items or not) and learners' proficiency. A total of 106 secondary school students (Grade 8) divided into 4 classes participated in a…

In Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), the design of a language policy at school level is not only bound up with the number of languages used for learning and the number of hours devoted to teaching those languages, but also with the fact that language becomes specialised in relation to the subject, which impacts on the methodology…

In recent years there has been a focus in language policy research on understanding how national policies are interpreted and negotiated by social actors on the ground. This paper looks at the interplay between government and grassroots initiatives to create Galician-speaking spaces in predominantly Spanish-speaking urban settings. While official…

Bilinguals have been shown to perform worse than monolinguals in a variety of verbal tasks. This study investigated this bilingual verbal cost in a large-scale picture-naming study conducted in Spanish. We explored how individual characteristics of the participants and the linguistic properties of the words being spoken influence this performance…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise description of the European minority language, Aragonese, in education. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects such as the number of schools, teachers,…

Macro-level policy makers, perceived as stakeholders of language management, employ a range of language policy strategies to legitimise hegemonic control over meso- (i.e. family) and micro- (i.e. individual) level language ideologies (Cassels-Johnson 2013). However, language policies of an individual are often difficult to detect because they are…

Translanguaging claims to advance social justice as a transformative pedagogy. This paper analyses a tension which developed over the life span of a European research project which aimed to improve the educational experience for Eastern European Roma pupils through teachers' employment of a translanguaging pedagogy. Roma are ethnically and…

In this article the way bilinguals handle differing semantic categories in their two languages will be investigated. Drawing on bilingual data from multilingual speakers of Romansh as well as from speakers of (Swiss) German, the tensions that emerge from "conflicting habits" in the two languages are analyzed in the semantic domain of…

There is considerable debate about whether early vocalizations mimic the target language and whether prosody signals emergent intentional communication. A longitudinal corpus of four Catalan-babbling infants was analyzed to investigate whether children use different prosodic patterns to distinguish communicative from investigative vocalizations…

Recent studies in the field of intonational phonology have shown that information-seeking questions can be distinguished from confirmation-seeking questions by prosodic means in a variety of languages (Armstrong, 2010, for Puerto Rican Spanish; Grice & Savino, 1997, for Bari Italian; Kugler, 2003, for Leipzig German; Mata & Santos, 2010, for…

Acquisitionists generally assume a relation between code-mixing in young bilingual and trilingual children and language dominance. In our cross-sectional study we investigated the possible relation between code-mixing and language dominance in 122 children raised in Spain or Germany. They were bilingual, trilingual or multilingual, the latter…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the production of pragmatic markers (PMs) by multilingual students in a CLIL context. Previous studies have analyzed pragmatic competence in multilingual settings (e.g., Cenoz, 2003; Martín-Laguna & Alcón-Soler, 2015; Portolés, 2015; Safont & Portolés, 2016). However, to the best of our…

The ability to read is the gateway to success in modern knowledge-driven societies. Thus, it is vital to make sure that no child is left behind in his or her endeavor to acquire the cognitive processes needed to understand age-appropriate texts. One significant milestone on the way to reach proficiency in this respect is memorization of certain…

This paper presents the results of a study based on the change in language attitudes experienced by some allochthonous individuals through contact with the sociolinguistic situation in Catalonia. Previous studies have suggested that in some cases, contact with Catalan--a minority language with a valued identity--acts as a stimulus for some…