The aim of the research and investigation methodology was based on an expert survey, using questionnaires translated into German, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese languages. The experts, interviewed in this study as part of the international community, represent institutions or organizations, that are involved in educational policy or in…

Intercultural competence is a crucial element of foreign language education, yet the multifaceted nature of this construct makes it inherently difficult to assess. Although several tools for evaluating intercultural competence currently exist, research on their use in secondary school settings is scarce. This study reports on the development and…

Cinema is in part a reflection of our society and, in these times of cultural mix, it is more and more common to find different language communities appearing on-screen together. Thus, it is not unusual to have to process (voluntarily or not) more than one language throughout the day. From a cognitive point of view, language switching is widely…

In the past decade, techniques traditionally used in the audiovisual translation (AVT) industry have been applied to foreign language teaching (FL) with promising results. Both teachers and researchers have provided useful data on various AVT typologies (i.e., subtitling, dubbing, audio description) to improve specific learning areas: vocabulary…

Second Life is one of the many three-dimensional virtual environments accessible through a computer and a fast broadband connection. Thousands of participants connect to this platform to interact virtually with the world, join international communities of practice and, for some, role play groups. Unlike online role play games however, Second Life…

This paper begins by reviewing European language education policies in higher education and relating these to the bottom-up language provision practices currently applied in higher education institutions. The paper then focuses on a case study at the University of Aveiro (Portugal) that sets out to identify students' social representations…

This paper investigates the use of "Facebook" for out-of-class, informal language learning. 190 New Zealand university language students (Chinese, German, French, Japanese and Spanish) completed an anonymous online questionnaire on (1) their perceptions of "Facebook" as a multilingual environment, (2) their online writing…

The aim of this study is to examine the strategies majority language-speaking parents use to support the development of the minority language in families who follow the pattern of exposure known as one-parent-one-language (OPOL). In this particular pattern of raising a child bilingually, each parent speaks only their own native language to their…

The purpose of this study was to use an app-embedded survey to profile language learner demographics. A total of 3,759 EFL language learners from primarily eight L1 backgrounds (French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish and Thai) responded to the survey embedded within a popular English grammar app. This app has over 500,000…

One of the main barriers to the reuse of Open Educational Resources (OER) is language (OLnet, 2009). OER may be available but in a language that users cannot access, so a preliminary step to reuse is their translation or localization. One of the obvious solutions to the vast effort required to translate OER is to crowd-source the translation, as…

This article addresses the need to develop new pedagogic approaches which promote learner independence in contexts where learning takes place through the medium of more than one language. The challenges of responding to a rapidly changing educational landscape to ensure that our learners become pluriliterate global citizens are presented through…

This study aims to examine language dominance and language switching effects in a series of monolingual and multilingual lexical decisions in which participants have to decide if the presented letter string is a word or not, regardless of language. Thirty participants (12 French-English bilinguals and 18 French-English-Spanish trilinguals) were…

Within foreign language classrooms, one intervention gaining recognition is LinguaFolio, a portfolio-based formative assessment designed to increase self-regulated learning. The question emerges whether such an intervention impacts student motivation, learning, and achievement. Researchers conducted a classroom-based, quasi-experimental,…

For many language learners, studying a foreign language is a compulsory, high-stakes activity. It is perhaps for this reason that positive feelings about language learning are rarely mentioned in the literature on language learning. The focus is predominantly on negative feelings: the anxiety caused by being asked to speak in the foreign language…

This study is part of longitudinal research undertaken in 11 secondary schools across two countries, based in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms with 12-15 year olds. The aim was to listen to learners, provide them with a "voice" to analyse their perceptions of "successful learning" and to undertake participatory research…