We presented 28 Spanish monolingual and 28 Catalan-Spanish close-language bilingual 5-year-old children with a video of a talker speaking in the children's native language and a nonnative language and examined the temporal dynamics of their selective attention to the talker's eyes and mouth. When the talker spoke in the children's native language,…

Research on the effects of bilingualism on third language (L3) development set in bilingual communities is scarce, outdated, and has provided mixed results. This study investigated the effects of exposure and age of onset of acquisition (AOA) of L3-English, as well as first and second language (L1/L2) skills and use, in the development of…

This study qualitatively explores how studying abroad in an English as a lingua franca context promotes student-sojourners' intercultural awareness (ICA) taking a longitudinal perspective. A group of Catalan/Spanish bilinguals and Turkish-L1 speakers were interviewed regarding their past ERASMUS experiences in terms of ICA following a stimulated…

Learner corpora of written texts from academic writing assignments provide a practical resource for students, particularly in fostering academic writing skills. One such corpus is the newly available ROGER (Corpus of Romanian Academic Genres), a bilingual comparable corpus containing learner discipline-specific academic writing data in Romanian…

The goal of this brief article is to highlight a specific methodological consideration pertaining to the examination of linguistic transfer in sequential language acquisition: When and how can transfer be meaningfully disentangled from issues pertaining to developmental trajectories of the target language? While this methodological issue is…

The premise of the present paper is that an intercultural approach to multilingualism in schools generates inclusion and a construction of cultural and linguistic identity that respects the diversity of society and classrooms. Students, teachers, and families participated in an action research project conducted in four schools with the presence of…

In the past few decades, literature has consistently suggested that bilingual children are at risk for academic failure due to their limited language skills. However, many of these studies included underprivileged bilingual children, and few of them attempted to disentangle the effects of bilingualism from the effects of socio-economic status.…

This book reports on a longitudinal study of the acquisition of pragmatic markers in written discourse in a third language (English) by secondary students living in the bilingual (Spanish and Catalan) Valencian Community in Spain. It examines pragmatic transfer, specifically positive transfer, in multilingual students from a holistic perspective,…

This study explores the effects of extensive audio-visual input with three captioning modes -- unenhanced captions, textually enhanced captions, and no captions -- on learning a variety of L2 grammatical constructions and examines the effects of three learnability factors: construction type, frequency, and recency. A total of 112 participants…

This study compares the language proficiency gains of two groups of students taking a business English course module in a bilingual university in Catalonia (Spain). Whereas one of these groups followed a 'translanguaging' or 'plurilingual' pedagogy, the other followed a strictly monolingual approach. Participants were 54 mostly Catalan/Spanish…

When bilinguals read in either their first language (L1) or their second language (L2), words from both languages are unconsciously and automatically activated in their mind (e.g., Kroll et al. 2006; Van Heuven and Dijkstra 2002). Many bilinguals, particularly in Florida, choose to learn Portuguese in college as a third language (L3), thus…

This article addresses the benefits of audio-visual input for learning second language (L2) vocabulary and grammatical constructions. Specifically, it explores the role of frequency, the effects of subtitles and captions, and the mediating role of learner proficiency on language gains in two longitudinal studies. Study 1 targets vocabulary…

Attitudes and motivation seem decisive in successful language learning (Dörnyei, Csizér, and Németh 2006. "Motivation, Language Attitudes and Globalisation: A Hungarian Perspective." Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.). Research in Spanish multilingual contexts analysing the influence of the L1 on attitudes and motivation to learn foreign…

Under the conditions of the globalized new economy, European universities have become profit-making institutions. They envision students as mobile workers-to-be whose employability chances depend on self-enterprising and on self-responsibilization for foreign-language command, and they now compete in the educational marketplace by targeting them…

This paper presents the first phase of a study conducted to analyze Knowledge Building forums for evidence of second language acquisition. This study is an analysis of the posts within an existing forum in search of evidence of foreign language learning. The analysis found that the collaborative writing project shows evidence that the students…