Corsican is a Romance language that belongs to the Italo-Romance group. Corsican has been recognised since 1974 as a regional language in France by the Ministry of National Education. The language is officially recognised by the French Constitution as belonging to the heritage of France. Over the past 25 years, several laws, decrees, regulations,…

Breton (Brittany, France) and Lower Sorbian (Brandenburg, Germany) are two of the many endangered minority languages currently undergoing revitalization. In their cases, given that intergenerational transmission in a family setting has mostly ceased, language revitalization takes the form of educational initiatives, such as the immersion program…

In this dossier, the situation of Iparralde is discussed, which occupies approximately two fifths of the French "département" (county) Pyrénées-Atlantiques. According to quantitative and socio-political criteria, the Basque language in France is a minority language. The aim of the Regional Dossier series is to provide concise…

This article concerns Northern Catalonia, the part of the Catalan-speaking area that today is in France. A Catalan-speaking region until the first half of the twentieth century, the effects of Frenchification -- the acceptance of the French political and economic project in the contemporary era -- and the multiple demographic changes of the…

Language researchers and teachers have long been interested in the timing of learning, and the distributed practice effect, whereby greater inter-session intervals result in longer retention, is well-known (Kim & Webb, 2022). Many L2 studies have focused on the intentional learning of lexis (Edmonds, Gerbier, Palasis, & Whyte, 2021),…

The UFR Lansad (Language centre teaching languages to specialists of other disciplines) was created in 2014 at the University of Lorraine. The process leading to its creation was led by a small number of teachers and researchers, from the pre-existing teams of the previous Lorraine universities (Molle et al. 2019). It is the result of didactic…

Verbal interaction has been the subject of a growing interest among language professionals in Europe since the CEFR was published in 2001; in linguistics, verbal interaction has long been studied. In the Bakhtinian approach, it is even considered "the fundamental reality of language". All types of interaction share the fact that they are…

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is "syntactic bootstrapping." A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the "semantic seed…

According to the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF), since 2016 many French universities have set up French language teaching programmes for refugees and people with subsidiary protection to respond to their need of linguistic support in French before starting or resuming their higher education studies. Welcoming such students however…

While current debates oppose the cochlear implant's privileging of speech acquisition to teaching sign language, nineteenth-century debates, in contrast, opposed those who saw sign language as a tool for learning to read and write, and those who saw in it an autonomous language for organizing thought itself. Should the order of gestural signs…

The aim of the dossier is to provide a concise description of European minority languages 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, teachers, pupils, and…

Most university degrees in France include languages as part of the curriculum. LANguages for Students of Other Disciplines (LANSOD) courses refer to language courses destined to students whose major is not languages, but another discipline such as musicology or chemistry. It is estimated about 90% of students enrolled in French higher education…

In this chapter, I present an interactional and multimodal analysis of video-recorded mental health consultations with asylum seekers in France. My main focus is on sequences in which the patients talk with the therapist about their learning of French, in some cases through the mediation of a professional interpreter. The particular context of…

In teacher training curricula, books are presented as an ideal material for building and enriching young children's language. Yet, the routine of reading at home with children is hardly ever mentioned. In this chapter, the author proposes analyses of story-reading activities from a usage-based and first language acquisition perspective. The goal…

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…