Undoubtedly, different learning contexts offer different opportunities for foreign language practice. This article focuses on context effects, and reports on the findings of the "Study Abroad and Language Acquisition" (SALA) project, which has examined in depth the impact of two learning contexts, SA within the European Community Action…

The present paper aims to briefly describe the manner in which intercultural education is perceived in the Romanian school system, as well as the solutions that are being proposed (mainly in the form of activities) for reconsidering and strengthening interculturality as a dimension of education. We report on the results of semi-structured…

Researchers (Ball, 2003; Ma, 1999; Schulman, 1986) have long investigated how a teacher's subject matter and pedagogical content knowledge impact on students' learning of mathematics. In an attempt to account for the relationship between teacher knowledge and student learning, this study examined four Romanian first grade teachers' knowledge about…

"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 present study investigated the development of linguistic awareness in children exposed to the early learning of a second language in Grades 3-5 of primary school, i.e. between the ages of 8 and 10. The aim was to determine whether this bilingual experience enhanced the development of phonological awareness in beginning readers in a bilingual…

Regional dossiers aim at providing a concise description and basic statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements, and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects, such as the…

This paper draws on Wenger's model of community of practice to present preliminary findings on how processes of negotiation of meaning and identity formation occur in knowledge construction, meaning-making and interaction in two secondary Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) science classrooms. It uses a multimodal conversation analysis…

Psychometric properties of Romanian translations of the "Behavior Problems Inventory-01" ("BPI-01"; Rojahn, Matson, Lott, Esbensen, & Smalls, 2001) and the "Nisonger Child Behavior Rating Form" ("NCBRF"; Aman, Tasse, Rojahn, & Hammer, 1996) were explored. Respondents completed the instruments for 115…

We examined inattention/overactivity (I/O) over time and in relation to caregiving in three matched groups: (1) Romanian Orphans (RO) with a minimum of eight months' deprivation prior to adoption, (2) Early Adopted (EA) children adopted from Romania prior to age four months, and (3) Canadian Born (CB) non-adopted children. Comparisons among groups…

The human brain has the fascinating ability to represent and to process several languages. Although the first and further languages activate partially different brain networks, the linguistic factors underlying these differences in language processing have to be further specified. We investigated the neural correlates of language proficiency in a…

This article discusses the problems related to the teaching of the state language, Rumanian, in the context of the Hungarian minority population in Szekler Land, Rumania, and the language ideologies connected to Rumanian on the basis of empirical research. On the one hand, it is argued that at present the methodology of state language teaching in…

This article aims at describing and explaining the effects of a period of Study Abroad spent in the target language country (SA) on foreign language development. Such effects are analysed in the short- and mid-term and in contrast with the impact of a period of formal instruction (FI) previously spent in the home country (AH). It is hypothesised…

This dissertation is a study of Castilian transcodic markers in the Catalan written on the Internet. Thirty Castilian transcodic markers representing five categories were run through the interface of the Corpus d'Us del Catala a la Web (CucWeb) to collect information in order to conduct both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The major…

This paper discusses current inclusive education policies and practices in Romania. There are few accounts of and no systematic study published on this topic. The Romanian special educational policies began to evolve towards integration and inclusion. Today, Romanian special education functions according to democratic principles and Romanian…

This case study is part of a larger project which aims to determine the usefulness and validity of a model of a pre-service content and language integrated learning (CLIL) teacher education programme inserted in a Master's degree, whose main pedagogical option is to achieve teacher empowerment through cycles of collaborative teaching and shared…