Most research reporting that bilingual children exhibit enhanced cognitive skills and social awareness relative to their monolingual peers focusses on children raised and educated bilingually, making it difficult to pinpoint the degree of second language exposure necessary for such advantages to materialise. The current study measures the social…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…

This paper presents an investigation into stakeholder perspectives on the methodology, materials and resources and assessment procedures employed in a bilingual (CLIL) programme in a monolingual context. A total of 873 respondents (544 students, 92 teachers and 237 parents) in Andalusia, Spain (more specifically, in the provinces of Málaga and…

Recently it has been proposed that sensitivity to nonarbitrary relationships between speech sounds and objects potentially bootstraps lexical acquisition. However, it is currently unclear whether preverbal infants (e.g., before 6 months of age) with different linguistic profiles are sensitive to such nonarbitrary relationships. Here, the authors…

The adoption of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in Spain has affected educational spending and introduced modifications in learning and assessment procedures for students. While positive effects are noticeable in terms of language learning, evidence concerning the impact on non-linguistic subject areas has been less forthcoming.…

The current article presents the outcomes of a preliminary quantitative study into stakeholder perspectives of the effects of CLIL on linguistic and intercultural competence development in the Canary Islands, Spain. The investigation has employed data triangulation (students, parents, and teachers, and, within the latter, non-linguistic area and…

This paper presents the outcomes of a Spanish study on aspects of the background, skills and perceptions of three groups of teachers -- content teachers, language teachers and language assistants -- working to implement CLIL in the monolingual area of Andalusia, Spain. The research was based on a questionnaire completed by 130 informants and…

This study explores language use in Japanese-Catalan/Spanish families in Catalonia with a special attention to Japanese. In a community such as Catalonia wherein two languages of different status are in conflict within its own territory, the ability of families to maintain a socially "weaker" language and transmit yet another language…

This article aims to shed light on the question of elitism in CLIL by exploring empirical evidence taken from a large-scale longitudinal investigation based in Spain. To this end, it reports on a quantitative study into the effects of CLIL programmes on the English language attainment of primary and secondary education students in monolingual…

Very little research has been conducted on the effects of CLIL on L1 competence development. This article compares CLIL and non-CLIL learners' levels of attainment in Spanish Language and Literature in seven public schools in the South of Spain. Learners' verbal intelligence and motivation were previously matched in order to homogenise the sample.…

The present research aims to identify the factors involved in the successful completion of the "Young Chinese Test" 2-A1 (YCT 2-A1) at Spanish Confucius Institute (Canary Islands). Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) entails several learning difficulties compared with other European languages. This study was conducted on 61 monolingual…

As stated by Valero-Garcés (2006, p. 38), the new scenario including public service providers and users who are not fluent in the language used by the former has opened up new ways of linguistic and cultural mediation in current multicultural and multilingual societies. As a consequence, there is an ever increasing need for translators and…

The author of this chapter argues that the failure of Spanish language education policies in the United States to educate both Latinos and non-Latinos has to do with the clash between three positions--(a) the English language, characterized by U.S. educational authorities as the unique and powerful lingua franca; (b) the Spanish language, as…

In this article, I explore language identities and processes of negotiation concerning parts of these identities as seen by a group of students from a bilingual mathematics classroom. A collection of 10 students' individual writings on the questions "What language do you use during group work in your mathematics class and why?" is…

Within this study, we examine the nexus of immigrant parents' language attitudes and motivations towards a lesser-spoken, endangered language and the revitalization efforts in the Basque Country, Spain. Attitudes and motivations are conceptualized as multileveled, relational, and dynamically constructed within their immediate and broader…