English medium education at university level is widely used in different contexts and it poses a challenge for students who are not used to studying through the medium of English. This study was carried out in a university in the Basque Country in Spain and it focuses on a course where students who are mostly Basque-Spanish bilinguals are taught…

In recent years there has been a focus in language policy research on understanding how national policies are interpreted and negotiated by social actors on the ground. This paper looks at the interplay between government and grassroots initiatives to create Galician-speaking spaces in predominantly Spanish-speaking urban settings. While official…

There is strong controversy over the application and effects of the Linguistic Immersion Policy in Catalonia, a policy that established that the Catalan language should constitute the only vehicular language during the different levels of compulsory schooling. While some of the effects of this policy have been determined, the evidence on other…

This study examined student teachers' beliefs about teaching multilingual classrooms across three European contexts; Slovenia, Spain (Catalonia), and Finland. Research shows that teachers' confidence in handling linguistically diverse classrooms is lacking. Linguistically sensitive teaching (LST) was used as a lens to explore different expressions…

In the early twenty-first century Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) emerged as a distinctively European pedagogy for raising additional language competence. Although CLIL scholarship has been abundant and has taken many different directions, there is a dearth of ethnographic research to shed light on the situated ambivalences of CLIL…

The aim of this paper is to describe the process of designing and implementing a teaching unit that links a curricular subject -- in this case, Spanish language -- with the identity of students as a strategy aimed at improving engagement and learning. The teaching unit was implemented in a Shared Education Unit in Catalonia (Spain) for at-risk…

Following the arrival of a large number of immigrants in Catalonia (Spain), a series of language and educational policies focused on language uses, competences, and attitudes have been implemented with the aim to promote newcomers' social integration and to protect and maintain the regional language, Catalan. This study examines these key factors…

The management of bilingualism in the Spanish autonomous community of Navarre is a source of tension. The implementation of English medium of instruction in the public educational system has clashed with attempts to break with the linguistic territoriality regime by promoting Basque schooling. This paper brings together ideologies on English and…

This article focuses on the 'native speaker effects' (Doerr, N. M., ed. 2009. "The Native Speaker Concept: Ethnographic Investigations of Native Speaker Effects." Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter) pertaining to the construction of eliteness in Spanish-English CLIL-type bilingual programmes in the autonomous community of Castilla-La Mancha…

This study sought to explore the ideological and implementational spaces for mainstreaming multilingual pedagogies (MPs) in initial teacher education (ITE) policies and curricula across the European Union. The concept of linguistically sensitive teaching (LST) was used as a lens to examine inclusive, equity-centred MPs in ITE. A multi-sited…

In Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), the design of a language policy at school level is not only bound up with the number of languages used for learning and the number of hours devoted to teaching those languages, but also with the fact that language becomes specialised in relation to the subject, which impacts on the methodology…

This article focuses on minority languages in education in Europe in contexts where they are in contact with national state languages and English. Teaching minority language implies bilingual education because it is not about replacing the majority language, but to come 'alongside' or at 'equal footing'. The cases of Basque and Frisian, comparing…

In this article, we establish direct links between language policy on the one hand and assessment in multilingual contexts on the other hand. We illustrate the bi-directional relationship with the examples of the USA, Canada, and the Basque Country. That comparison is placed in the context of the changing views about the use of languages in…

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…

While the idea of plurilingual competence is widely established theoretically and promoted in European language policies, it is not implemented in educational practice, where separate plurilingualism is still dominant. The idea of languages as autonomous entities is e.g. reflected in the "Common European Framework of Reference for…