Purpose: This study focuses on 7- to 9-year-old children attending primary school in Swedish areas of low socioeconomic status, where most children's school language is their second language. The aim was to better understand what factors influence these children's narrative listening comprehension both in an ideal listening condition (in quiet)…

Language abilities in preschool years, including those measured with letter knowledge, are predictors of reading development in later school years. The aim of this study was to investigate variation in children's language abilities before they started school in relation to gender and neighborhood level socioeconomic status (SES). Schools from…

We examined factors determining parental success in transmitting heritage language (HL) and literacy in Russian-speaking migrant families of comparable socioeconomic status (SES) in Cyprus, Ireland, Israel and Sweden. A total of 345 Russian speakers completed a questionnaire about their language use and home language practices. Of those, we chose…

The Scandinavian countries currently face their largest ever wave of immigration. The immigration wave increases the need for immigrants to learn the host language to be able to participate in work life and become a citizen of the host country. Yet, the language training programmes -- 'Swedish for Immigrants' in Sweden have come under great…

The overall aim was to identify predictors of adult immigrant students' job expectations after they have finished the language training program. We studied both socio-demographic predictors (sex,family status, socio-economic status, and level of education) and experience predictors (age at arrival, teacher, and language exposure). To get a more…

The project Early Language Learning in Europe (ELLiE) has studied the longitudinal effects of an early foreign language (FL) start in seven European contexts. This article presents a sub-study of ELLiE that investigates the impact of out-of-school factors on learners' listening and reading skills in year four of formal FL instruction. More…

Drawing on personality psychology research, Dornyei and his colleagues have recently developed an approach to understanding L2 motivation that positions the learner's self-recognition as a potential communicator in another language at its core, thus marking a break from the established social psychology paradigm. In this article it is argued that,…