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…

This paper explores the interactions of a groupwork team composed of both local and exchange students, with heterogeneous competence in English, in an English-medium CLIL context at a technical university in Catalonia. Plurilingual and multimodal conversation analysis is used to trace how the students jointly complete an academic task. The…

The introduction of English and other foreign languages as media of instruction, which is generally referred to as content and language integrated learning (CLIL), has transformed the teaching experiences of a large number of educators. Yet their daily struggles and personally ambivalent stances have hardly been examined. This paper addresses this…

By means of a large-scale web-based investigation, we established the degree of mutual intelligibility of 16 closely related spoken languages within the Germanic, Slavic and Romance language families in Europe. We first present the results of a selection of 1833 listeners representing the mutual intelligibility between young, educated Europeans…

In this article, we focus on the role English plays in multilingual chat rooms in Romance Languages. We intend to demonstrate how English, even as forbidden language in this particular setting, is a mediation and a remediation tool. Our conclusions point out that: (1) English is an constructive resource in multilingual communication; (2) it has a…

Schools throughout the world teach in several languages, but few reach the level of linguistic proficiency of Hamelin-Laie International School in Mongat, Barcelona, Spain. This school begins instruction in English, Catalan, and Spanish and at grade one, adds a fourth language as a World Language. Factors that impact the success of this school…

This article explores dilemmatic aspects of language policies in a preschool group in which three languages (Swedish, Romani and Arabic) are spoken on an everyday basis. The article highlights the interplay between policy decisions on the societal level, the teachers' interpretations of these policies, as well as language practices on the micro…

Language attitudes have become more relevant than ever as a result of the considerable number of immigrant students enrolled in the Catalan educational system and the challenges this entails in terms of promoting social integration and language learning. Therefore, the objective of the study is to increase our understanding of language attitudes…

Dominant notions of what constitutes a "language" and what a "dialect" within a continuum are entirely based on sociopolitical factors (i.e. the "languages by 'Ausbau'" of Kloss), totally disregarding structural and communicative aspects. This paper argues that such stance is no longer tenable in view of the modern…

The arrival of large numbers of Slovak Roma to Sheffield over a relatively short period has inserted two new languages (Slovak and Romani) into an already diverse, multilingual school environment. Schools face challenges in welcoming the new migrant children, inducting and integrating them and facilitating access to the English school curriculum.…

Higher Education is caught between internationalization on the one hand and the quest for local support by fostering local practices on the other. The clash between uniformity-standardization and localization-specialization manifests itself in every university trying to adopt internationalization strategies. How can universities manage this…

This paper reports on the results of an exploratory study that employed the concurrent think-aloud method to investigate narrative text-creating strategies of multilingual Transylvanian-Hungarians in English, their third language. The study explored the participants' reliance on their different languages as they composed a story in English based…

This paper investigates the attitudes towards Englishisation displayed by 30 students enrolled in a Combined Languages degree, including English and another language, in a top-ranked bilingual university in Catalonia, where Spanish and Catalan coexist complexly, and where foreign language medium instruction is relatively new. Through a two-year…

In this article, we establish direct links between language policy on the one hand and assessment in multilingual contexts on the other hand. We illustrate the bi-directional relationship with the examples of the USA, Canada, and the Basque Country. That comparison is placed in the context of the changing views about the use of languages in…

The present study adopts a multilingual approach to analysing the standardized test results of primary school immigrant children living in the bi-/multilingual context of South Tyrol, Italy. The standardized test results are from the Invalsi test administered across Italy in 2009/2010. In South Tyrol, several languages are spoken on a daily basis…