Prior research indicates that humans adapt their language depending on context. This linguistic sensitivity has been suggested to indicate a natural pedagogy shared by all humans. This sensitivity has, however, only been demonstrated with English-speaking samples thus far. In two studies, we followed the experimental procedure of the original…

This study explores whether middle-school students can exploit explicitly addressed crosslinguistic lexical similarities between German and English to learn vocabulary more efficiently. Across six weeks, 260 Swiss German learners of English as a foreign language (17 classes) completed three vocabulary learning tests (T1, T2 and T3). Additionally,…

The aim of this article is to stress the importance of a dynamic systems or complexity theory approach as a necessary prerequisite to understanding the development of multi-competence in multilingual learners. Selected results from a study on emergent multilingual awareness in children, carried out in South Tyrol, are outlined and discussed. The…

The seminar, organised by Joan Cutting and Brona Murphy, aimed: (1) to bring together researchers involved in both emergent and established academic corpora (written and spoken) as well as linguists, lecturers and teachers researching in education, be it language teaching, language-teacher training or continuing professional development in…