In the present scientific era which prefers evidence-based educational research and methodological gold standards, 'rigour', 'discipline' and the 'systematic' serve as standardising and homogenising concepts and as powerful identifiers of 'normal science' in the context of historical and cultural contingencies. These concepts serve to construct…

Recent developments in machine translation (MT) might have led some people to believe that soon professional translation will not be needed, but most translator trainers are aware of the high demand for the quality that MT systems cannot deliver without human intervention. It is thus important that professional translators, trainers and their…

Swiss Vocational Education and Training (VET) is based on national legislation which was introduced in the 1930s and renewed in the 1960s (as well as in the 1970s and in 2002). At first, the goal of the national VET legislation was to further Vocational Education and Training in order to support small and medium enterprises; however, later, it…

In the current revival of Gumperz' notion of the "verbal repertoire," which today is rather termed as communicative or semiotic repertoire, some scholars tend to locate repertoires with individual speakers whereas others see them primarily as emerging from particular spatial arrangements. What is often underestimated in both approaches…

This paper summarises the contributions to EuroCALL's CorpusCALL SIG Symposium for the year 2020. In line with this year's EuroCALL conference theme, 'CALL for widening participation', the Symposium centred around the theme of "Data-driven learning for languages other than English." This paper gives a brief overview of developments and…

Throughout her career, Nancy Huston has both accepted and transgressed the limits of bilingualism. "Limbes"/"Limbo" (1998), "L'empreinte de l'ange" (1998), "The Mark of the Angel" (2000), "Danse noire" (2013), and "Black Dance" (2014) are five texts that demonstrate Huston's diverse use…

This paper analyzes the Spanish appropriation of one of the great French eighteenth-century best-sellers, the "Spectacle de la Nature" (1732-1750) by the "abbe" Antoine Noel Pluche. In eight volumes, the "abbe" discussed current issues in natural philosophy, such as Newtonianism, the origin of fossils, artisan…

The unit-decade compatibility effect is interpreted to reflect processes of place value integration in two-digit number magnitude comparisons. The current study aimed at elucidating the influence of language properties on the compatibility effect of Arabic two-digit numbers in Austrian, Italian, and Czech first graders. The number word systems of…

In the present study, the natural and simultaneous first language acquisition of a German-Italian bilingual boy and an Italian monolingual girl from 1;8 to 2;1 are analyzed and compared. The investigation focuses on the rate of acquisition and the size and composition of the productive lexicons. At the end of the observation period, the bilingual…

This study explores the possibility of cross-language activation when bilinguals process number words in their first language (Italian) and their second language (German). Italian monolinguals (Experiment 1), German monolinguals (Experiment 2), and Italian/German bilinguals (Experiment 3) were required to decide the larger of two number words…

This paper describes an informal component that we added to an online formal language learning environment in order to help the learners reach relevant Internet pages they can freely use to complement their learning activity. Thanks to this facility, each lesson is enriched, at run time, with a number of links automatically retrieved from social…

"Promoting public understanding" is what the programming mandate asks the Swiss public broadcasting company SRG SSR to do. From a sociolinguistic perspective, this means linking speech communities with other speech communities, both between and within the German-, French-, Italian-, and Romansh-speaking parts of Switzerland. In the…

The Assessment of Language Competence (ALC) certificates is an annual, international testing program developed by the Australian Council for Educational Research to test the listening and reading comprehension skills of lower to middle year levels of secondary school. The tests are developed for three levels in French, German, Italian and…

This article explores the impact of language policy issues on program development and management at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich Language Center. Based on the analysis of the language policy approach of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, the article reflects both current practices and policy elements with the help of the…

This article seeks to explore how various language policies may have impacted Year 12 language candidature in Victoria. Australian Federal and Victorian State Government language policies are but one of the influences yet, it may be argued, the most significant influence. These stand alongside waves of immigration, global events and conflicts, and…