Many educators in immersion contexts support a policy of strict separation of languages in the classroom as the ideal model for second language acquisition and are reluctant to make connections between the dominant language, the target language and pupils' home languages. This can result in missed opportunities for drawing on pupils' entire…

The pedagogies that are currently being put forward within a broad multilingual paradigm in languages education endorse the general principle that learning is a collaborative and dialogic process engaging learners and teachers as partners that bring diverse linguistic, cultural and other knowledge into the classroom. The plurilingual approach to…

In this contribution, we argue that consideration should be given to the implications of a holistic approach to language acquisition as a fundamental part of plurilingual and pluricultural education serving several aims of a knowledge-based and innovative learning through metalinguistic knowledge, well beyond developing communicative competence in…

In socio- and applied linguistic research, age tends to be accounted for as fixed, biographical information, and individuals in later life have rarely been considered more than marginally. In this paper, I attempt to address this oversight by presenting data from multilingual subjects over the age of 65 as they take part in a language and literacy…

In France, most teachers still receive scant training in how to support plurilingual children in their learning of and through the language of instruction. In the absence of relevant, in-depth knowledge about language, we believe that many teachers are practising language policies based on beliefs rooted in ideologies unsupported by research…

Previous research has shown that individual differences in working memory (WM) are highly predictive of a wide range of cognitive behaviours. Until recently, research has focused on monolingual, or undifferentiated, populations. The present research compares metacognitive awareness, as measured by self-ratings of reading, writing, speaking and…

This contribution documents the strategies bi/plurilingual children spontaneously develop when confronted with a task that demands comprehension of texts in a third language. To illustrate these strategies in context, the paper draws from classroom interaction excerpts: small groups of children (ages 8-10) discover meaning in a text in a language…

The paper presents the language policies being implemented in French primary schools under the present educational reform and considers how they tackle the question of sociocultural and linguistic pluralism. It questions the choice of teaching one foreign language from a very early age at kindergarten rather than opting for a model of language…