Catalan speakers have traditionally constructed the Catalan language as the main emblem of their identity even as migration filled the country with substantial numbers of speakers of Castilian. Although Catalan speakers have been bilingual in Catalan and Castilian for generations, sociolinguistic research has shown how speakers' bilingual…

The topic of the internationalisation of academia has recently attracted attention from sociolinguists and language-policy scholars. In this paper, we compare two different universities from two contrasting contexts in Europe in order to find out more about their projected stance [Jaffe, A. (2009). Stance in a Corsican School: Institutional and…

Objective: To summarize the advantages and limitations of general population, high-risk and "natural experiment" longitudinal studies for studying psychological change. The English and Romanian Adoptees study is used as an example of a "natural experiment," and detailed findings are provided. Method: What is new is a focus on the young people who…

Emotional words are better remembered than neutral words in the first language. Ferre, Garcia, Fraga, Sanchez-Casas and Molero (2010) found this emotional effect also for second language words by using an encoding task focused on emotionality. The aim of the present study was to test whether the same effect can also be observed with encoding tasks…

This study investigates the specificity of predictive coding in spoken word comprehension using event-related potentials (ERPs). We measured word-evoked ERPs in Catalan speakers listening to semantically constraining sentences produced in their native regional accent (Experiment 1) or in a non-native accent (Experiment 2). Semantically anomalous…

Why is it more difficult to comprehend a 2nd (L2) than a 1st language (L1)? In the present article we investigate whether difficulties during L2 sentence comprehension come from differences in the way L1 and L2 speakers anticipate upcoming words. We recorded the brain activity (event-related potentials) of Spanish monolinguals, French-Spanish late…

From a critical sociolinguistic perspective, this article investigates the written linguistic practices of 20 labor migrants from heterogeneous backgrounds who organized their life trajectories in an "ethnic" call shop in a marginal neighborhood near Barcelona. This was a late capitalist institution informally providing the undocumented…

This paper analyses the language-in-education policies implemented to integrate international immigrants into the Catalan language community in Vic, Catalonia. It focuses on the Catalan Government's "Languages and Social Cohesion Plan" (LIC) plan, Vic city council's local education plans, which were adopted as part of LIC plan, and the…

Despite the well-known educational possibilities afforded by "Rhythm And Poetry" (RAP) for the development of musical, lyrical and critical skills [Morrell, E., & Duncan-Andrade, J. M. R. (2002). Promoting Academic Literacy with Urban Youth through Engaging Hip-hop Culture. "The English Journal," 91(6), 88-92. Retrieved…

This study examines how Chinese ESL learners recognize English words while responding to a multiple-choice reading test as compared to Romance-language-speaking ESL learners. Four adult Chinese ESL learners and three adult Romance-language-speaking ESL learners participated in a think-aloud study with the Michigan English Language Assessment…

Several studies have shown that concepts spread activation to words of both of a bilingual's languages. Therefore, a central issue that needs to be clarified is how a bilingual manages to restrict his speech production to a single language. One influential proposal is that when speaking in one language, the other language is inhibited. An…

This article draws attention to the role one's language plays in socialization and explains the misunderstandings and conflicts over integration of the Roma in the Czech Republic. Recognizing the role of home language leads to successful socialization. By not demanding that schools account for home language in the process of teaching, the Roma…

The theoretical complexity of current understandings of second language (L2) identity has brought the study of language learning motivations from basic concepts of intrinsic, integrative and instrumental motives to a more dynamic construct that interacts with background factors, learning contexts and proficiency levels. This cross-sectional study…

A new approach for overcoming the language and culture barriers to participation in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is reported. It is hypothesised that the juxtaposition of English as the "language of instruction," used for interacting with course materials, and one's preferred language as the "language of participation,"…

We assessed the roles of first language (L1) and second language (L2) proficiency in the processing of preverbal clitics in L2 Spanish by considering the predictions of four processing theories--the Input Processing Theory, the Unified Competition Model, the Amalgamation Model, and the Associative-Cognitive CREED. We compared the performance of L1…