Gender-fair language makes women and people of other genders, their interests, and achievements more visible. However, critics argue that gender-fair language impairs the comprehensibility and aesthetic appeal of texts. This study tests these assumptions specifically concerning the gender asterisk, a form of gender-fair language that makes people…

Research shows that sojourning L2 learners are often eager to speak with their native-speaker peers, but they may not realize how these interactions differ from their experiences in the L2 classroom. Using the Communication Accommodation Theory (Giles & Ogay, 2007) as a guiding principle, this mixed-method study aims to, at two different time…

In the initial phase of participating in short-term semester abroad programs, newly arrived international students may face a lot of difficulties and challenging experiences living in Thai society. This phenomenological study reports on the issues of socio-cultural adaptation experienced by German exchange students while participating in semester…

Germany is a non-English speaking country with a large and growing number of incoming international degree-seeking students. However, their estimated dropout rates are high. This study aims to investigate whether specific challenges faced by international students (e.g., social and academic integration, language learning, financial situation,…

Gender-fair language makes women and other genders, their interests, and their achievements more visible and is particularly relevant to grammatical gender languages such as German, in which most nouns and personal pronouns are assigned to a specific gender. The present study tested the often repeated critical claims that gender-fair language…

Migrant students tend to underperform in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects and are less likely to pursue higher education in STEM when compared with their nonmigrant peers. Given the substantial increase in migration, this disparity has been a central concern in science education in many European countries. The…

The public debate on the use of the German nonbinary gender asterisk ("Lehrer*in" 'teacher') is emotionally charged. While it has been adopted by political and educational institutions, opponents argue that it is inappropriate for making persons identifying themselves beyond the male-female-dichotomy more visible. We investigated this…

The ability to categorize concepts is an essential capability for human thinking and action. On the one hand, the investigation of such abilities is the purview of psychology; on the other hand, subject-specific educational research is also of interest, as a number of research works in the field of science education show. For computer science…

This paper investigates the relationship between multilingualism, code-switching, target language contact and pragmatic and grammatical awareness in learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Participants (N = 144) were university students enrolled in English language courses at a German university. The study employed a cross-sectional…

A recent surge of findings on bilingual cognitive advantage has attracted attention from both researchers and the media. An advantage has been demonstrated with regard to, inter alia, inhibiting, switching, monitoring and updating. However, Paap et al. argue that the advantage does not exist or is only limited to executive functioning. Both sides…

The goal of this article is to examine intercultural experiences and the cultural identity reconstruction of Chinese international students in Germany by focusing on their cultural learning, and use of multiple languages including English as a lingua franca (ELF), German and Chinese. Three rounds of individual interviews over 1 year were conducted…

The technical institutions Institut Mines Télécom in Albi, France (IMT) and Trier University for Applied Sciences at the Environmental Campus of Birkenfeld, Germany (UCB) have been running Virtual Exchange (VE) projects since 2013. These projects allow the French and German students to use the vocabulary learned in class in a real context and to…

Globalization and the digitalization of our lives have made it impossible to avoid (inter)cultural encounters. In the traditional classroom environment, students are expected to juggle a myriad of choices almost simultaneously. Factors like grammar, pronunciation, word choice, etc. are all important assessment factors to consider when looking at…

We live in a time of unmatched global mobility and correspondingly, the number of U.S.-American students studying abroad continues to increase. For years now, applied linguists have displayed an increased interest in study abroad students' perspectives and desires about second language (L2) learning and use while abroad. Yet few studies have…

Most of the projects aimed at making migrants more successful in the context of higher education in Germany focus on programmes that introduce the rules and expectations of the university to students and try to change their habitus. This article discusses a multilingualism project conducted in a German university that strives to go beyond this…