The topic of the internationalisation of academia has recently attracted attention from sociolinguists and language-policy scholars. In this paper, we compare two different universities from two contrasting contexts in Europe in order to find out more about their projected stance [Jaffe, A. (2009). Stance in a Corsican School: Institutional and…

This study examines how Chinese ESL learners recognize English words while responding to a multiple-choice reading test as compared to Romance-language-speaking ESL learners. Four adult Chinese ESL learners and three adult Romance-language-speaking ESL learners participated in a think-aloud study with the Michigan English Language Assessment…

In striving for internationalisation, government and university policies in Catalonia promote the use of English in classrooms in two ways that often overlap: (1) as a lingua franca aiding the participation of international students and (2) through immersion approaches targeting local students. However, as the findings presented in this article…

The current study analyzes the oral production of advanced learners of English who have Catalan and Spanish as their first languages. Subjects participated in study abroad (SA) programmes in English-speaking countries as part of their undergraduate studies. A role-play task was used to elicit speech from learners prior to SA and upon arrival from…

Since the end of the last century, more than 10% of students in Catalonia's schools are immigrants, mostly concentrated in areas of Catalonia where the population speaks Castilian in everyday life. Although these newcomers are educated in Catalan, the majority use diverse varieties of Spanish as their language of everyday communication. In the…

This study examines the effects of foreign language learning context (three-month study-abroad; versus "at-home" instruction) and age (10-11-year-old children versus university students) on the development of effective foreign language communication strategies (CS) in monologue production. Participants (N = 95) were all Spanish/Catalan…

Assessing pragmatic knowledge in the instructed setting is seen as a complex but necessary task, which requires the design of appropriate research methodologies to examine pragmatic performance. This study discusses the use of two different research methodologies, namely those of Discourse Completion Tests/Tasks (DCTs) and verbal reports. Research…

This study starts from the premise that academic mobility contributes to the development of students' plurilingual identities and that study abroad contexts aiming at becoming global spaces are particularly interesting sites to explore the individuals' discursive work to (re-)construct their plurilingual identities by reconciling their language…

This study examined the effect of short-term high-variability phonetic training on the perception of English /b/, /v/, /d/, /ð/, /ae/, /? /, /i/, and /i/ by Catalan/Spanish bilinguals learning English as a foreign language. Sixteen English-major undergraduates were tested before and after undergoing a four-session perceptual training program…

Research on writing development in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) settings is still inconclusive. This study intends to make a contribution in this respect by presenting longitudinal findings on the development of written complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) in secondary education CLIL and non-CLIL learners. Participants in the…

Heritage language speakers struggle in European classrooms with insufficient material provided for second language (SL) learning and assessment. Considering the amount of instruments and pertinent studies in English SL, immigrant students are better prepared than their peers in Romance language settings. This study investigates how factors such as…

This interpretive case study is framed within recent sociocultural conceptualisations of learning. It draws on research on teacher-led classroom discussions, and investigates the conversational intricacies through which "dialogicity" is accomplished in adaptive ways in one content and language integrated learning (CLIL) science…

The present study explores young learners' awareness of foreign language learning and of their learning conditions. The participants were 76 Catalan-Spanish children who were learning English at primary school. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal data were collected by means of two different interviews that contained questions related to pupils'…

This article examines how learning an additional language can positively affect children's opinions and feelings about languages and how this process can be enriched when different languages--namely, the additional language and the children's L1s--are present and used in the classroom in an informed way. It is hypothesised that this will benefit…

Adult learners have persistent difficulty processing second language (L2) inflectional morphology. We investigate associative learning explanations that involve the blocking of later experienced cues by earlier learned ones in the first language (L1; i.e., transfer) and the L2 (i.e., proficiency). Sagarra (2008) and Ellis and Sagarra (2010b) found…