We investigated the role of socioeconomic status (SES) in the unfolding of vocabulary and text-comprehension skills in language minority bilingual children, who are educated exclusively in their L2. For comparison, a monolingual control group was also tested, consisting of children of the same age and schooling. We administered a synonyms task to…

The aim of the Regional Dossier series is to provide concise descriptions of minority languages in education, mainly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. In the Slovene Littoral, Slovene and Italian are official languages and thus they share equal status in public and private life. Learners in this region attend schools either with…

Linguistic minority spaces tend to have a long history of language-ideological struggles that are often fought on the terrain of education, which is further complexified in the light of more recent migration. The northernmost Italian province of South Tyrol is such a space, in which German-language preschools are increasingly attended by children…

In this study, we validated the "ReadFree tool", a computerised battery of 12 visual and auditory tasks developed to identify poor readers also in minority-language children (MLC). We tested the task-specific discriminant power on 142 Italian-monolingual participants (8-13 years old) divided into monolingual poor readers (N = 37) and…

The choice of language for publishing is a topic of particular significance for scholars of languages other than English (LOTE) due to the importance of publishing in the professional language for maintaining expertise in the written academic register of the respective language. While the multilingual ability of such scholars means they can…

Italy is characterized by a considerable amount of language variation. Only a few spoken vernaculars enjoy institutional support and are officially recognized as minority languages. Among these, Friulian is one of the largest in terms of number of speakers. In the past decade, the assessment of Friulian language vitality has yielded discordant…

Since educators play a decisive role in the formation of language attitudes, this study analyses perceived competence, habits of language use and attitudes towards three languages in contact harboured by prospective teachers. Our research replicates a 20-year-old study and is comparative, as it parallels two European regions: the Basque Autonomous…

The aim of the Regional Dossier series is to provide concise descriptions of regional or minority languages in education, mainly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. Friulian is a Romance language, traditionally recognised as part of the Rhaeto-Romance sub-family. It is spoken in Friûl (in Friulian)/Friuli (in Italian), a territory…

Toddlers from low-income and language-minority immigrant families are at risk for language difficulties due to early disparities in the quality of their home language environment. The present longitudinal study extends previous research by investigating nursery teachers' communicative modalities and functions, and their relations with the…

In the current revival of Gumperz' notion of the "verbal repertoire," which today is rather termed as communicative or semiotic repertoire, some scholars tend to locate repertoires with individual speakers whereas others see them primarily as emerging from particular spatial arrangements. What is often underestimated in both approaches…

Do assimilationist restrictions on a minority language lead to greater national unity or a more rebellious minority population? Under what conditions might short-term backlash to language assimilation evolve into greater national unity in the long term? While much of the literature on ethnic politics implicitly treats language simply as an…

Balancing teaching national, regional, and foreign languages presents a challenge for higher education, illustrated by the use of hypertext for multilingual communication. This study investigates the correlation between proficiency in multilingualism and cultural awareness among higher education students. Embedded mixed methods design explores the…