Most research reporting that bilingual children exhibit enhanced cognitive skills and social awareness relative to their monolingual peers focusses on children raised and educated bilingually, making it difficult to pinpoint the degree of second language exposure necessary for such advantages to materialise. The current study measures the social…

Knowledge building occurs when students work together and participate in idea-centred discussions where they share information and create knowledge collectively. This research explores whether knowledge building in knowledge forums using English as the "lingua franca" can facilitate in foreign language learning. An analysis was done on…

Background: Previous literature highlights the importance of causal attributions in achievement and motivation. However, the studies about causal attributions in second language acquisition (SLA) are limited and scarce. Aims: This study was designed to determine the frequency of successful and unsuccessful activities per English level and to…

In an era of globalization, multilingualism is no longer the exception but the rule. To fully promote the communicative and functional development of multilingual learners, different educational programs at school have been implemented in the past few years. The study presented here is a contribution in this direction, by investigating the…

This article examines factors that promote active multilingualism. For this purpose, the "Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test" was used with 48 children. Their results were linked to a parental questionnaire designed to evaluate the children's linguistic input in their immediate environment. The study shows that, besides a minimum amount of…

Proficient bilinguals use two languages actively, but the contexts in which they do so may differ dramatically. The present study asked what consequences the contexts of language use hold for the way in which cognitive resources modulate language abilities. Three groups of speakers were compared, all of whom were highly proficient Spanish-English…

Acquisitionists generally assume a relation between code-mixing in young bilingual and trilingual children and language dominance. In our cross-sectional study we investigated the possible relation between code-mixing and language dominance in 122 children raised in Spain or Germany. They were bilingual, trilingual or multilingual, the latter…

Very little research has been conducted on the effects of CLIL on L1 competence development. This article compares CLIL and non-CLIL learners' levels of attainment in Spanish Language and Literature in seven public schools in the South of Spain. Learners' verbal intelligence and motivation were previously matched in order to homogenise the sample.…

The continuing incorporation of immigrant populations into the Spanish educational system poses an important challenge in that all participants must cooperate toward creating the best possible adaptation process at the academic level as well as on the personal and social levels. A number of different factors appear to influence children's…

While research suggests that study abroad (SA) benefits second language (L2) oral fluency, its benefits for other domains are less clear, especially for shorterterm programs, which are becoming more common. Additionally, studies investigating the relationship between cognitive capacity and benefits of SA report inconsistent patterns. In light of…

A study with 118 male and 87 female junior high school students in Spain using a scale developed to assess anxiety among Spanish students associated with learning a second language found a relationship between low anxiety and superior performance in the second language (English). The scale obtained predictive validity. (SLD)