Despite much research on how multilingual learners view the linguistic properties of language, how they perceive languages as cultural capital has been far less investigated. Drawing on the theories of social cognition, this study explores how multiple foreign language learners' impressions, as a lens to observe their multilingual awareness, are…

Whereas Standard Dutch only distinguishes between two adnominal grammatical genders, substandard varieties of Belgian Dutch distinguish between three such genders. German, too, distinguishes between three genders. Nevertheless, when assigning gender to German nouns with Dutch cognates, speakers of Belgian Dutch are strongly influenced by Standard…

"Functional Multilingual Learning" ("FML") aims to leverage pupils' full language repertoire in a strategic and transversal way across the curriculum in order to enhance access to conceptual understanding and improve skills in the language of schooling. This linguistic-ethnographic study explores the pedagogical decisions of…

Corpus analyses of learners' dictionaries of English idioms have revealed that 11% to 35% of English figurative idioms show either alliteration ("miss the mark") or assonance ("get this show on the road"), depending on the type considered. Because English multiword combinations, particularly idiomatic expressions, present a…

Research has shown that prompting learners to elaborate on the appropriateness of form-meaning links can be an efficient vocabulary learning exercise (Deconinck, Boers & Eyckmans, 2017). In this paper we wish to shed more light on the mental processes that occur during this specific elaborative task by investigating the influence of individual…

Previous research has shown that content and language integrated learning (CLIL), an educational approach that offers content courses through more than one educational language, increases metalinguistic awareness. This improved insight into language structures is supposed to extend beyond the linguistic domain. In the present study, the question…

Behaviour-tracking technology has been used for decades in SLA research on focused practice with an eye toward elucidating the nature of L2 automatization (e.g. DeKeyser, 1997; Robinson, 1997). This involves longitudinally capturing learners' judgments or linguistic production along with their response times in order to investigate how specific…

The socio-cultural conditions of late modernity induce a "reflexive imperative" amongst young people, which also results in metapragmatic and metalinguistic behaviour, as has been demonstrated by linguistic ethnographers (LE). However, recent LE studies on reflexivity in Western European settings have mainly focused on how groups of…

Background: The metalinguistic ability to cope with homonyms, that is, words having multiple unrelated meanings, emerges rather late in the course child language development. It is associated with specific neural activity and related to academic achievement and second language learning. This study is about homonyms that are at the same time…

Ways that mother tongue and foreign languages are taught in Belgian, especially Flemish, secondary schools are discussed. Some "out-of-school" activities are reported that seem to have a significant effect on students' awareness of languages. The extent to which topics and subthemes of language awareness are present in official curricula…

Discusses the tendency in second-language (L2) pedagogy to make fallacious comparisons between multicompetent L2 learners and monoglot speakers of the target language. The article describes the principal elements of multicompetence and presents a number of their implications for the construction of syllabi and examinations and the development of…