Across the globe signage which conveys directives regarding appropriate behavior in public, such as 'Do Not Enter' signs, is made multilingual in ways that other signage is not. This paper examines two examples of multilingualism in directive signs within Seoul, South Korea in order to theorize what gives rise to multilingualism in directive…

Chinatowns, as neighborhoods for overseas ethnic Chinese, have garnered considerable scholarly attention from linguistic landscape (LL) researchers in recent years. These investigations tend to treat old immigrants who have been tied to the neighborhoods for generations as the key text producers of LL, with far too little attention paid to the LL…

This study explores how Japanese EFL students engaged in translingual practices during a telecollaborative project that connected two college classrooms in the US and Japan. The project aimed at encouraging the students' creative uses of languages, promoting an appreciation for their multiple linguistic resources, and nurturing their sense of…

Implementing challenging mathematics tasks with multilingual students who are not yet fluent in the instructional language is difficult for monolingual teachers because of the linguistic and cultural differences between the teacher and students. In this study, we examined how monolingual preservice teachers set up cognitively demanding mathematics…

This study explores language use in Japanese-Catalan/Spanish families in Catalonia with a special attention to Japanese. In a community such as Catalonia wherein two languages of different status are in conflict within its own territory, the ability of families to maintain a socially "weaker" language and transmit yet another language…

The current study examined how two groups of native speakers--monolingual Canadians and multilingual Singaporeans--differentially perceive foreign accentedness in spontaneous second language (L2) speech. The Singaporean raters, who had exposure to various models of English and also spoke multiple L2s on a daily basis, demonstrated more lenient…

This article discusses the implications of "multicompetence" (Cook, 1991), defined as an individual's knowledge of more than one language, for language assessment. The growing psycholinguistic evidence highlighting variability in native speaker performance as a result of multicompetence is reviewed, evidence that further questions the validity of…

"Voices of Pedagogical Development" is a collection of articles written by teacher-researchers at the University of Jyväskylä Language Centre. It shares the fruits of their ideas and development work in the areas of academic literacies, new forms of teaching and learning, and internationalisation. Part one aims at establishing and…

Whereas most research in SLA assumes the relationship between the first language (L1) and the second language (L2) to be unidirectional, this study investigates the possibility of a bidirectional relationship. We examine the domain of manner of motion, in which monolingual Japanese and English speakers differ both in speech and gesture. Parallel…

"Talk-in-interaction: Multilingual perspectives" offers original studies of interaction in a range of languages and language varieties, including Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, and Vietnamese; monolingual and bilingual interactions; and activities designed for second or foreign language learning. Conducted…

The gendered speech in a foreign language has been found to pose barriers for learners due to different gender norms associated with their mother tongue and the foreign language. The problem is especially serious with the masculine and feminine forms of speech in the Japanese language, as these are strongly linked with social inequality between…

This study investigated the effect of multilingual linguistic experience on the perception of Japanese durational contrast by learners of Japanese as a foreign language at the basic level. Five monolingual and five multilingual learners listened to recorded sentences containing the utterances /iken/ or /ikken/ and were asked to identify which of…

Language contact is traditionally associated with language communities having a long and close association with a second language--through an existing official language, or extensive use of the language spoken by past colonial rulers, or both. Japan neither falls directly into these categories, nor is it considered a country with a strong…