This article presents the outcomes of a 2-year pilot study of a teaching innovation project in an English-medium instruction course on sociolinguistics, in a languages degree at a Catalan university. Following the tenets of Critical Linguistics Education, our proposal aimed at promoting the students' development of metalinguistic awareness of…

Attitudes and motivation seem decisive in successful language learning (Dörnyei, Csizér, and Németh 2006. "Motivation, Language Attitudes and Globalisation: A Hungarian Perspective." Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.). Research in Spanish multilingual contexts analysing the influence of the L1 on attitudes and motivation to learn foreign…

In the shift to English-medium instruction (EMI) in European higher education, policy often runs ahead of research and curricular decisions are taken independent of evidence regarding their suitability for achieving broader educational goals, which may range from internationalisation as a general strategy to English language learning as a more…

Under the conditions of the globalized new economy, European universities have become profit-making institutions. They envision students as mobile workers-to-be whose employability chances depend on self-enterprising and on self-responsibilization for foreign-language command, and they now compete in the educational marketplace by targeting them…

Spain has followed the lead of other Western countries by establishing new citizenship requirements for immigrants. In 2015, the "Real Decreto" 1004/2015 was passed, making both knowledge of culture and history of Spain and knowledge of Spanish language a requisite for immigrants wishing to become citizens. In order to fulfill this legal…

This study explores the source of transfer in third language (L3) English by two distinct groups of Catalan-Spanish bilinguals, simultaneous bilinguals and late bilinguals. Our study addresses two research questions: (1) Does transfer come from the first language (L1), the second language (L2), or both? and (2) Does age of acquisition of the L2…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise description of the European minority language, Hungarian in Romania, in education. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects such as the number of schools,…

Occitan, or the Oc language, is a Romance language. The focus in this dossier is on the four regions in France where Occitan is spoken: Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Occitanie, and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal…

Since 2002, which marks the end of the Civil War in Angola, a large multilingual and multicultural workforce from various corners of the world has entered the Angolan education system. This paper investigates language barriers experienced in the classroom of Spanish speaking lecturers by Portuguese speaking students. The study focuses on a group…

Bilingualism is associated with lifelong cognitive benefits that correlate with facilitated achievements in subsequent language learning. Second language (L2) instruction as well can promote the development of cognitive abilities involved in language learning, and among these, L2 input processing. Crucial to L2 acquisition, input processing is the…

In this contribution, the self-reported linguistic practices of researchers engaged in an international research project are analysed and discussed. These researchers constitute a community of practice of intercomprehension, using mostly romance languages to communicate and, at the same time, also researching the phenomena. The data was collected…

On college campuses throughout the United States, classes for decades have been offered to help Spanish speakers learn Portuguese, augmented recently by similar courses in Italian, French, and Catalan. Though there exist numerous commonalities between these innovative course offerings, the pivotal role of Spanish stands out. This essay therefore…

Predicting the outcome of language contact situations is complicated by the fact that the primary agents of linguistic change--individual speakers--are unpredictable (van Coetsem, 2000; Thomason, 2001). My dissertation examines the variety of Spanish spoken in Galicia, Spain, where individual language choices are often motivated not by utility but…

Although CLIL (content and language integrated learning) programmes are now globally expanding, the number of studies that have examined their impact on both multiple language learning (students' L1, L2 and English as a foreign language) and content learning are scarce. This study investigates the effects of a CLIL programme implemented in a rural…

Fan practices involving translation open up opportunities to explore language learning practices within the fandom (Sauro, 2017). We examine how three fans capitalize on fan translation and language learning. We consider the cases of Selo (an English-Spanish translator of games), Nino (a Japanese-Catalan fansubber of anime, and Alro (an…