We analyze the 2007 European financial crisis' impact on the demand for new language skills. The crisis affected German-speaking regions less. Learning German became relatively more attractive for migration and trade. We construct a sub-national database for German as a foreign language exam (TestDaF) participation rates between 2001-2013 and…

Studies from various disciplines have reported that spatial location of options in relation to processing order impacts the ultimate choice of the option. A large number of studies have found a primacy effect, that is, the tendency to prefer the first option. In this paper we report on evidence that position of the key in four-option…

This chapter examines the responses of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to assessment-related challenges introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The sudden move to online teaching and assessments required institutions to re-think their approaches to current practices and provide alternative solutions almost overnight. Our survey aimed to gather…

Whereas major research universities may accommodate programs of study in Arabic, Chinese, or Persian, regional universities and liberal arts colleges have struggled to adapt to a wider and more complex array of world languages and literatures in the 21st century. Many have been forced to choose between radically restructuring or closing programs…

This paper explores the approaches and strategies used by secondary school learners of different languages in England completing Asset Languages reading tasks at levels A1 and A2 of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). Assessments across languages at the same level of proficiency were designed to a common specification and at…

By means of a large-scale web-based investigation, we established the degree of mutual intelligibility of 16 closely related spoken languages within the Germanic, Slavic and Romance language families in Europe. We first present the results of a selection of 1833 listeners representing the mutual intelligibility between young, educated Europeans…

The Center for Applied Linguistics, in Cooperation with Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, undertook to cover experimentally, for a period of 18 months, foreign language Journal material on applied linguistics published in Central and Eastern Europe and to select for abstracting, and in some cases, translation, articles of particular…