Previous studies have demonstrated how primary-school-aged children learning a minority language at school revert to the use of their dominant L1 in peer-peer situations, both within and outside the classroom. Identifying the cause of this pattern is central to language policy strategies and initiatives across many minority language regions, and…

Citizenship is not a neutral word; it evokes numerous interpretations and connotations in various policies, discourse, and practices. Its significance is motivated by current narratives of rights and responsibilities of a citizenry, (illegal) immigration, and English-only ideologies. The basis for this investigation is the perception that the U.S.…

The present study examines two factors in relation to English L3 proficiency development and school performance in a third language: (a) parental education and (b) second language exposure within the living community. Participants (n?=?50) are Italian L1 students with German L2 and English L3. All students (eighth grade, 14 years of age) were…

In this study, I investigated language ideologies in a state-funded International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme school in the United States. I conducted ethnographic observations, focus groups, and interviews in a fourth grade classroom in one of the largest refugee resettlement areas in the country. Findings indicate that although the…

The study investigated the role of word-level and verbal skills in writing quality of learners who spoke English as a first (L1) and second (L2) language. One hundred and sixty-eight L1 and L2 learners (M = 115.38 months, SD = 3.57 months) participated in the study. All testing was conducted in English. There was a statistically significant L1…

The data reported in this article come from a large project whose goal was to explore how Latin American students in Catalonia, Spain use their two languages--Spanish and Catalan--to support their learning of mathematics in small groups with other students who are Spanish- or Catalan-dominant. For 5 years, lessons from bilingual mathematics…

Purpose: The current study measured, objectively and subjectively, how changes in speech rate affect recognition of English passages in bilingual listeners. Method: Ten native monolingual, 20 English-dominant bilingual, and 20 non-English-dominant bilingual listeners repeated target words in English passages at five speech rates (unprocessed, two…

Competition Model studies of second language learners have demonstrated that there is a gradual replacement of first language cues for thematic role assignment by second language cues. The current study introduced two methodological innovations in the investigation of this process. The first was the use of mouse-tracking methodology (Spivey, 2007)…

While Hulk and Muller (2000) predict that the direction of cross-linguistic syntactic influence is unidirectional when the construction involves syntax-pragmatics interface and surface overlap between two languages, they explicitly rule out language dominance as a factor involved. This study questions their latter claim and argues that the syntax…

Taking a different perspective to traditional case studies on one bilingual child, this book discusses the whole family and the realities of life with two or more children and languages. What do we know about the language patterns of children in a growing and evolving bilingual family? Which languages do the siblings prefer to speak to each other?…

Ideology can be understood as a guide to action, and therefore, language ideology can be viewed as a link between language ability on the one hand, and language use on the other. In this respect, language ideology plays a central role in the success of language revitalization movements. In an effort to understand how new language ideologies are…

Levy, Mc Veigh, Marful and Andreson (2007) found that naming pictures in L2 impaired subsequent recall of the L1 translation words. This was interpreted as evidence for a domain-general inhibitory mechanism (RIF) underlying first language attrition. Because this result is at odds with some previous findings and theoretical assumptions, we wanted…

The aim of this study was to determine whether the type of bilingualism affects neural organisation. We performed identification experiments and mismatch negativity (MMN) registrations in Finnish and Swedish language settings to see, whether behavioural identification and neurophysiological discrimination of vowels depend on the linguistic…

This study investigates how five non-heritage language learners manage themselves in a heritage learner dominant classroom. It looks at mainly the interactions among the students from a sociocultural perspective in terms of their attitude, socialization, and using strategies. The results indicate that most of subject students struggle but…

The present study examines and compares the extent to which advanced L2 learners of Spanish and Spanish heritage speakers acquire the syntactic and semantic properties that regulate the grammatical representation of double complementizer questions in Spanish, a CP-related structure not present in English. Results from an aural sentence completion…