In Urmia city, many children learn and speak their first language (either Azari or Kurdish) at home and study all of their courses in Farsi throughout their education. This bilingual quality of education needs to be researched to attain high quality educational practices. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of bilingualism on…

In this paper, I will present the main findings of qualitative research conducted in Turin, Italy, regarding the school integration of migrant students. The goals of the research were two-fold: (1) to outline the current educational situation of migrant students; and (2) to identify best practices relating to key issues emerging in national (and…

This article analyzes how minority-language students responded to what they felt to be disrespectful behavior of a mainstream teacher towards their language from a case at an Aotearoa/New Zealand school in 1997-1998. Even when minority language is recognized officially and institutionally, as in Aotearoa/New Zealand, some minority-language…

The data in this article comes from a larger 3-year ethnographic study that examines the transnational immigrant lives of second-generation Latina youth whose families reside in northern California and maintain close ties to small rural communities in western Mexico. In the course of the study, three bilingual youth and I developed a participatory…

The current study investigates how beginner readers learn to read Setswana and English, and whether there is cross-language transference of skills between these two languages. Letter knowledge, phoneme awareness and reading of words and pseudowords in both Setswana and English were assessed in 36 Grade 2 children. A complex pattern emerged.…

This article describes a case study conducted at an International Baccalaureate World School in mainland China in which the majority of faculty and over 98 per cent of students are Chinese. The purpose of the study was to investigate and compare the teacher-student relationships of Chinese and non-Chinese teachers, with a specific focus on the…

This paper explores some aspects of the dialogue between bilingual pupils and their teacher in a Swedish-speaking school in Finland, in a strongly Finnish-dominated environment. Using a socio-cultural perspective I look behind the immediate interaction in the classroom to show how pupils express and position themselves through the classroom…

Throughout the English-speaking world, children from bilingual backgrounds are being educated in mainstream classrooms where they have little or no opportunity to use their mother tongue. Second and third generation children, in particular, are assumed to be learning sufficiently through English only. This study investigated how British…

In a context of steadily increasing global migration, ethnic and linguistic diversity in Irish schools is becoming both more prevalent and more visible. In Ireland, schools have been availing of Department of Education and Science (DES) funding since 1999 in order to provide English-language support for bilingual students. The support provided in…

Teachers are often unaware that bilingual students often switch between their languages when doing mathematics. Little research has been undertaken into this phenomenon. Results are reported here from a study of language switching by sixteen Year 4/5 Iranian bilingual students as they solved mathematical problems in an interview situation. Reasons…

The present study was carried out in French immersion classrooms in an urban Quebec school board that is increasingly characterised by the heterogeneity of its French-dominant, English-dominant, and French/English bilingual student population. The study explored the extent to which a bilingual read-aloud project would (1) raise teachers' awareness…

This paper examines language development of Samoan students in bilingual contexts in Aotearoa, New Zealand. In the absence of valid and standardized assessments tools in Samoan, one was designed to test reading comprehension and oral language development for Samoan students using common narratives as a base. For reading comprehension, the tool…

In general, the vitality and social functions of a language are assessed in connection with such indices as the language's intergenerational transmission, the absolute number of speakers and proportion of speakers in the population, its present domains of use, its development within diverse domains of use, and the availability of its educational…

It is much debated whether translation is semantically mediated or based on word-word associations at the lexical level. In 2 experiments with Dutch (L1)-French (L2) bilinguals, the authors showed that there is a semantic number magnitude effect in both forward and backward translation of number words: It takes longer to translate number words…

The research reported here investigated primary school pupils' use of reading strategies. The study differed from most of the previous studies on reading strategies in that (1) the participants were young bilinguals in multicultural Singapore; (2) the data were examined within the Student Approaches to Learning (SAL) framework developed by John…