This dissertation presents a linguistic study of the sound patterns of Camuno framed within Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins, 2004, 2006, to appear). Camuno is a variety of Eastern Lombard, a Romance language of northern Italy, spoken in Valcamonica. Camuno is not a local variety of Italian, but a sister of Italian, a local divergent development of…

This study investigates how previous exposure to a foreign language and culture influences student performance in online knowledge-building tasks. As knowledge-building tasks allow students to share and distribute their knowledge; this study examines whether foreign language and culture knowledge is also distributed amongst the group. The study…

Schools throughout the world teach in several languages, but few reach the level of linguistic proficiency of Hamelin-Laie International School in Mongat, Barcelona, Spain. This school begins instruction in English, Catalan, and Spanish and at grade one, adds a fourth language as a World Language. Factors that impact the success of this school…

Taking a psycholinguistic orientation within task-based language teaching scholarship, this study investigated the effects of mode (oral vs. written) and task complexity on second language (L2) performance. The participants were 78 Catalan/Spanish learners of English as a foreign language. Half of the participants performed the simple and complex…

This article explores dilemmatic aspects of language policies in a preschool group in which three languages (Swedish, Romani and Arabic) are spoken on an everyday basis. The article highlights the interplay between policy decisions on the societal level, the teachers' interpretations of these policies, as well as language practices on the micro…

Language attitudes have become more relevant than ever as a result of the considerable number of immigrant students enrolled in the Catalan educational system and the challenges this entails in terms of promoting social integration and language learning. Therefore, the objective of the study is to increase our understanding of language attitudes…

Introduction: The development of immigrant students' language proficiency is one of the main challenges facing education professionals today. Our study was a longitudinal analysis of Catalan and Spanish language acquisition. Method: Participants were 72 immigrant students (27 Spanish speakers and 45 non-Spanish speakers) enrolled in compulsory…

In this article I intend to analyse two of the research projects I carried out among the Roma from a critical intercultural perspective. I shall discuss some of the processes referring to the educational policy of teaching Romani mother tongue in school, considering not only the direct beneficiaries of this policy, the students, but also the…

Dominant notions of what constitutes a "language" and what a "dialect" within a continuum are entirely based on sociopolitical factors (i.e. the "languages by 'Ausbau'" of Kloss), totally disregarding structural and communicative aspects. This paper argues that such stance is no longer tenable in view of the modern…

This study explores the foreign language learning emotions of four EFL adolescent students in Romania and the ways in which their emotions emerge in their sociocultural context. Multiple qualitative methods were employed over a school semester, including a written task, semi-structured interviews with the learners and their teachers, lesson…

This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the…

The popularity of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) continues to spread in education systems around the world. However, and despite the large number of studies recently published, we know little about how CLIL teachers and management teams feel regarding CLIL. In this paper, we analyse two contentious matters that require further…

The arrival of large numbers of Slovak Roma to Sheffield over a relatively short period has inserted two new languages (Slovak and Romani) into an already diverse, multilingual school environment. Schools face challenges in welcoming the new migrant children, inducting and integrating them and facilitating access to the English school curriculum.…

Adjectives, like nouns and verbs, are one of the three major classes of lexical words. But, unlike nouns and verbs, they emerge late in acquisition. In Catalan, as in many other languages, their use is closely linked to the literate lexicon learned at school-age. Thus, the use of adjectives can be a good indicator of later language development.…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise, description and basic statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe. 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…