Eritrea does not have one official language and there is experience in using multiple languages in official government communications, education, media and the legal system. Since Eritrean independence in May 1991, Eritrean laws have been promulgated in a mix of Arabic, English and Tigrinya: some are issued in these three languages; some are…

This paper focuses on the integration of translanguaging practices in a public preschool situated in a small village in North-West of Italy. Mobility processes and local Italian families' school choices have led to the raise of the number of students with an immigrant background enrolled at the studied preschool up to 85%. After a brief overview…

Prediction in language comprehension has become a key mechanism in recent psycholinguistic theory, with evidence from lexical prediction as a primary source. Less work has focused on whether comprehenders also make structural predictions above the lexical level. Previous research shows that processing is facilitated for syntactic structures which…

Insults are prototypical means to express impoliteness in social interactions. In film they are prime ways of staging conflict or jocular abuse, reflecting everyday communicative practices while contributing to the emotionality of dialogue, characterisation and plot advancement. Both original and dubbed films offer a privileged perspective to…

This paper reports findings from an exploratory study on multilingual speakers conducted in Germany. Data were collected using a questionnaire instrument launched in 2021. To our knowledge, this is the first enquiry into multilinguals' own perception of their spoken languages in Germany. The core research questions addressed in this paper are (1)…

Since educators play a decisive role in the formation of language attitudes, this study analyses perceived competence, habits of language use and attitudes towards three languages in contact harboured by prospective teachers. Our research replicates a 20-year-old study and is comparative, as it parallels two European regions: the Basque Autonomous…

Processing of emotional meaning is crucial in many areas of psychology, including language and music processing. This issue takes on particular significance in bilinguals because it has been suggested that bilinguals process affective words differently in their first (L1) and second, later acquired languages (L2). We undertook a series of five…

Using a corpora approach involves using a series of texts in the language under study as a type of corpus on which to base acquisition. Languages in all forms (written, spoken, performed, formal, informal, etc.) are captured all the time through online and digital platforms, apps, etc. making them highly accessible. Applying corpora in teaching…

Since the early 2000s, neurocognitive research on second language (L2) acquisition has been controversial as to how plastic the human brain is after puberty. Recent studies have extended this debate to first language loss (L1 attrition). This article gives an overview of the first event-related brain potential (ERP) studies on L1 attrition and L2…

The translation of bilingual literary texts may challenge a translator when s/he needs to transfer some embedded, foreign codes from a language other than the dominant language of the source text (ST) into the target text (TT). This study analyses the way in which code-switching (CS) is transferred into a TT, looking at the translation strategies…

In the present study, we sought to advance the field of learner corpus research by tracking the development of phrasal vocabulary in essays produced at two different points in time. To this aim, we employed a large pool of second language (L2) learners (N = 175) from three proficiency levels--beginner, elementary, and intermediate--and focused on…

The aim of the paper is to present the results of a research project called 'Tell Me', conducted from October 2018 to March 2020. The project focused on Bengali children living in Venice, Italy, and aimed to describe (1) children's languages in the home environment and at school; (2) the quality and quantity of input they receive in every language…

Based on a database composed of 1500 pictures, belonging to 401 analytical units from the Linguistic Landscape (hereafter: LL), and representing mainly the signs on the shop of migrant traders in two multi-ethnic neighbourhoods in Milan, this paper will describe the positioning strategies of Latin American (hereafter: LA) communities in a…

The present contribution aims at describing the main phases of implementation of a Transformative Action-Research project named 'L'AltRoparlante'. This project began in school year 2016/2017 and is still being implemented in five Italian multilingual schools. Its main purpose is to acknowledge students' individual and collective multilingual…

According to a language-integrated view of spelling development, learning to spell involves the same language-learning skills across alphabetic systems. A prediction based on this view is that the same spelling training should be equally effective for learning to spell in a shallow (Italian, native language) or an opaque (English, additional…