Australia lags behind other linguistic and culturally diverse countries in policy direction and approaches to early multilingual education, despite well-established research documenting the intellectual, linguistic, sociocultural, familial and economic benefits of multilingualism in the early years. This is evidenced by the absence of a national…

In most countries, it is not compulsory to be trained to work as an interpreter in community settings. A comparison across jurisdictions reveals that different requirements exist, from a simple self-evaluation of language competence, to passing a certification or accreditation test. Even in countries where certification or accreditation systems…

This article discusses the usage of the Spanish language by Hispanic mothers with their children, their views on language maintenance and culture within their bilingual families and their opinions on the benefits of bilingualism in a globalised world. Drawing upon detailed case studies of 16 native Spanish-speaking mothers married to…

Research into second language anxiety (SLA) has largely focused on second language learners rather than immigrants. However, living in an environment where the target language (TL) is the language of everyday communication may constitute a significant source of anxiety that generalises beyond the language classroom [Pappamihiel, N. E. 2001.…

This article is a critical reflection on a study of the views of Spanish teachers in South Australian schools about their professional development (PD) needs and experiences. Officials responsible for designing Spanish specific PD were interviewed. Sixteen teachers were randomly selected from private, public, country and metropolitan middle…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 11th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2014), October 25-27, 2014, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) and endorsed by the Japanese Society for Information and Systems in…

Describes a project that aimed to provide target language experiences for second and third year Spanish as a foreign language learners in Australia. The project involved exposing students to native Spanish speakers. Findings show that students made a noticeable improvement in communicative competence, and they became more knowledgeable about…

Explains how education is essentially about expanding students' literacies by developing sets of social practices that help them understand and participate in different social worlds, describing how to expand literacies through a Hispanic influence across the curriculum and how to increase the Hispanic influence through structural variations in…

This study examined the language and cultural attitudes of 45 bilingual Spanish/English adolescents of Spanish, Peruvian, and Chilean background enrolled in Saturday Spanish programs in Sydney, Australia. Each student had at least one parent whose first language was Spanish. A 60-item questionnaire designed to elicit information on factors…

Examined validity of Career Decision-Making System (CDM) by administering CDM to English- and Spanish-speaking subjects in the United States, English- and French-speaking subjects in Canada, and English-speaking subjects in Australia. Results suggest that translation from English to another language or use with persons of another nationality does…

Argues that mastery of modal particles is important for interpersonal aspects of language development. The article outlines the difficulty of learning and teaching German modal particles with regard to the theoretical explication. The study shows how a teaching program improved initially poor comprehension and production skills in the area of…

A study investigated the attitudes of bilinguals toward each language and toward language mixing (codeswitching), expressions of identity, and how this relates to linguistic behavior. Subjects were 15 undergraduate students of Spanish-English interpreting and translation at an Australian university whose age (19-53), language proficiency, and…

This paper reports on a study of the efficiency of interactive tasks at eliciting targeted morpho-syntactic structures from child speakers of English as a Second Language (ESL). Two groups of subjects between 7 and 10 years of age were examined, one group with various first language backgrounds, and a second which used Spanish as their first…

This book focuses on a common set of circumstances in Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand in which increasing numbers of young children from minority language backgrounds are taught in mainstream English-medium classrooms. It provides a longitudinal ethnography of a group of children learning English in a Canadian…

This bibliographic guide to the literature on equal education throughout the world contains over 40,000 references. It is arranged in 22 subject categories: the education of minorities in the United States (in general and by minority group); schooling issues (staffing and organization and multicultural education); economic, social, political and…