Increasing numbers of Chinese students are pursuing graduate degrees in Catalonia. Although highly proficient in both Castilian and English when they arrive, they find themselves in a bilingual society where Catalan, not Castilian, predominates both at universities and in the broader social context. Acquiring Catalan is hence important for both…

Games are fully accepted by students, as they stimulate memory, activate reasoning capacities in brain, improve the knowledge and keep out the stress. Our innovation teaching group is interested in using games for teaching Biochemistry of the Chemistry degree. Most of the individual games found in Internet are classified in numerical games…

This article provides qualitative information chronicling the study-abroad experiences of eight Erasmus+ students. Data were obtained from the analysis of focus-group discussions, e-journal narratives, plus background and language contact questionnaires. Combined, such data illustrate the participants' discursive positions on their socialisation…

The present study focuses on email communication in the multilingual university setting. Previous studies dealing with similar settings point to the lack of politeness markers in students' email messages [Bjorge, A. (2007). Power distance in English lingua franca email communication. "International Journal of Applied Linguistics", 17(1),…

This paper examines two forms of listening in relation to racism and the minority language context in Catalonia. The research is based on a collaboration between two academics and RC (Racialised Catalans) which started with initial interviews on their educational experiences and trajectories in Catalonia. From there, a collaboration between the…

While research on motivation has attracted a great deal of attention in relationship with L2 success, studies dealing with motivation on Languages Other than English and, particularly, on regional languages is scarce [Dörnyei, Z., & Al-Hoorie, A. H. (2017). The motivational foundation of learning languages other than global English:…

This study explores the effects of embodied prosodic training on the production of non-native French front rounded vowels (i.e. /y, ø, oe/) and the overall pronunciation proficiency. Fifty-seven Catalan learners of French practiced pronunciation in one of two conditions: one group observed hand gestures embodying prosodic features of the sentences…

This paper explores how three Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) lecturers working in English-medium instruction (EMI) grapple with the prospect of self-positioning as English-language-teachers (ELTs), drawing on interviews in which they explicitly deny acting in this way. It begins with essential background, first discussing…

Research on pragmatic awareness of language learners has mainly focused on the target language. As argued by some scholars, a multilingual perspective should also be adopted in the analysis of pragmatic awareness. In fact, existing findings point to the peculiar characteristics of multilingual pragmatic comprehension and awareness. Bearing these…

Purpose: Research on EMI (English-Medium Instruction) has addressed the extent to which content lecturers speaking in their L1 perform as well as when they lecture in English. In this study a lecturer who gave the same lecture in his L1 (Catalan) and English was observed to examine if and how transitioning from one language to another impacts his…

This study set out to test the theoretical premise of the SSARC model of pedagogic task sequencing, which postulates that tasks should be sequenced for learners from cognitively simple to complex. This experiment compared the performance of three tasks differing in cognitive complexity in a simple-complex sequence versus in the absence of any…

Social networks have been investigated as an important factor to understand social and language innovations for decades. Most researchers focus on one-language-dominated societies when studying social networks' influence on language practice while studies on bilingual societies remain scarce. In this study, we examine how Chinese graduate students…

The internationalisation of higher education has increased the visibility of linguistic diversity in universities worldwide. However, classroom practices do not necessarily reflect this diversity. This study explores how teachers and students manage plurilingual resources while learning Catalan during study abroad. The analysis applies [Moore, E.,…

This study explores the effects of extensive audio-visual input with three captioning modes -- unenhanced captions, textually enhanced captions, and no captions -- on learning a variety of L2 grammatical constructions and examines the effects of three learnability factors: construction type, frequency, and recency. A total of 112 participants…

Empirical research on L3 teachers' beliefs has gained momentum in the last decade since teacher cognition is paramount for understanding teaching practices in multilingual settings. Yet, many of these works deal with experienced language practitioners (e.g. [Otwinowska, A. (2017). English teachers' language awareness: Away with the monolingual…