This article reports on the perspectives of mothers and educators in relation to the engagement of mothers in their children's learning as children living in complex circumstances made the transition to school. For the purposes of this study, family engagement related to engaging with children's learning, which may not necessarily equate to…

The introduction of English and other foreign languages as media of instruction, which is generally referred to as content and language integrated learning (CLIL), has transformed the teaching experiences of a large number of educators. Yet their daily struggles and personally ambivalent stances have hardly been examined. This paper addresses this…

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 present study examines the effects that a 3-week study-abroad (SA) experience and a set of individual differences have on the foreign language (FL) development of a group of 64 Catalan/Spanish speakers, learners of English as an FL. Moreover, the present study attempts to account for the outcome differences between successful and less…

In this paper, we explore the connections between a linguistic landscape and language ideologies in an elementary school in a village within the Hungarian region of Szeklerland in Romania. This "schoolscape" is analysed as a display or materialization of the "hidden curriculum" regarding the construction of linguistic and…

The Council of Europe's "Autobiography of Intercultural Encounter" (AIE) is a tool to develop intercultural competence (IC) in education by encouraging users to reflect upon and learn from momentous intercultural encounters they have experienced face to face. Its parallel resource, the "Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters…

In this article, we focus on the role English plays in multilingual chat rooms in Romance Languages. We intend to demonstrate how English, even as forbidden language in this particular setting, is a mediation and a remediation tool. Our conclusions point out that: (1) English is an constructive resource in multilingual communication; (2) it has a…

This study investigates how previous exposure to a foreign language and culture influences student performance in online knowledge-building tasks. As knowledge-building tasks allow students to share and distribute their knowledge; this study examines whether foreign language and culture knowledge is also distributed amongst the group. The study…

Schools throughout the world teach in several languages, but few reach the level of linguistic proficiency of Hamelin-Laie International School in Mongat, Barcelona, Spain. This school begins instruction in English, Catalan, and Spanish and at grade one, adds a fourth language as a World Language. Factors that impact the success of this school…

Taking a psycholinguistic orientation within task-based language teaching scholarship, this study investigated the effects of mode (oral vs. written) and task complexity on second language (L2) performance. The participants were 78 Catalan/Spanish learners of English as a foreign language. Half of the participants performed the simple and complex…

This article explores dilemmatic aspects of language policies in a preschool group in which three languages (Swedish, Romani and Arabic) are spoken on an everyday basis. The article highlights the interplay between policy decisions on the societal level, the teachers' interpretations of these policies, as well as language practices on the micro…

Language attitudes have become more relevant than ever as a result of the considerable number of immigrant students enrolled in the Catalan educational system and the challenges this entails in terms of promoting social integration and language learning. Therefore, the objective of the study is to increase our understanding of language attitudes…

Introduction: The development of immigrant students' language proficiency is one of the main challenges facing education professionals today. Our study was a longitudinal analysis of Catalan and Spanish language acquisition. Method: Participants were 72 immigrant students (27 Spanish speakers and 45 non-Spanish speakers) enrolled in compulsory…

In this article I intend to analyse two of the research projects I carried out among the Roma from a critical intercultural perspective. I shall discuss some of the processes referring to the educational policy of teaching Romani mother tongue in school, considering not only the direct beneficiaries of this policy, the students, but also the…

Dominant notions of what constitutes a "language" and what a "dialect" within a continuum are entirely based on sociopolitical factors (i.e. the "languages by 'Ausbau'" of Kloss), totally disregarding structural and communicative aspects. This paper argues that such stance is no longer tenable in view of the modern…