Not only does language practice in shop signs generate a sense of place with particular meanings to visitors, it also indicates the kind of economic activity performed in that place. By investigating and comparing the shop name signs in the two largest foreign migrant neighbourhoods in Guangzhou, specifically, Baohan Straight Street (African…

This article compares metalinguistic awareness among emerging bilingual and multilingual learners of English in Norwegian primary school. Participants were 120 students in grades 5-7 (aged 10-13) attending mainstream English classes in Norway and were divided into three groups based on a linguistic background questionnaire: an L1 Norwegian group,…

In simultaneous interpreting studies, the concept of interference -- namely, the marks of the source language in the target language -- is perceived as a negative phenomenon. However, interference is likely to happen at a lexical level when the target language does not have its own lexicon. This is the case in international sign (IS), which can be…

The present study investigates whether exposure to multilingual pedagogies enhances emergent bilingual children's narrative abilities. These abilities are among the most reliable indicators of children's literacy skills. We compare two groups of emergent bilingual children with migrant background attending the fourth and fifth grade of a public…

Multilingualism presents both a challenge and an opportunity for Natural Language Processing, with code-switching representing a particularly interesting problem for computational models trained on monolingual datasets. In this paper, we explore how code-switched data affects the task of Machine Translation, a task which only recently has started…

Pluriliterate academic practices offer students who are literate in both their L1 and English the possibility of relying on sources in multiple languages. Surprisingly, there is little research on the factors playing a role in students' choice of sources and whether this choice is related solely or partly to the language of the source. This study…

Our paper presents the methodological approach of group discussions and documentary method to investigate team beliefs in Early Childhood Education and Care facilities. The research addresses the question of how team beliefs on multilingualism and language education are shaped. To reconstruct team beliefs, we used group discussions and the…

Teachers' language attitudes play a key role in their decision-making, evaluation, and behaviour in the classroom. This is as true in a monolingual environment as it is in a bilingual or multilingual linguistic situation, but it is fair to assume that the two different linguistic environments are associated with the dominance of different…

This qualitative study investigates how skilled migrants from South Korea shuttle between linguistic and cultural resources for socialisation and career development. Drawing on the theoretical notions of cultural capital and scalar politics, this study found they strategically re-configured and transformed inter-scalar relations at the…

This paper shall describe the bridging strategies used by Grades 3 and 4 English teachers from schools in two regions in the Philippines to help their multilingual students transition from using the mother tongue as medium of instruction in the different subject areas to using English in the English classroom. Data were obtained through…

This study compares the language proficiency gains of two groups of students taking a business English course module in a bilingual university in Catalonia (Spain). Whereas one of these groups followed a 'translanguaging' or 'plurilingual' pedagogy, the other followed a strictly monolingual approach. Participants were 54 mostly Catalan/Spanish…

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…

Language policy and Linguistic Landscapes (LL) are a highly contested area in South Africa. Due to Apartheid, the education system constitutes the core of such contestation. In Post-Apartheid South Africa the new Constitution of 1996, the South African Schools Act (SASA) and recent political initiatives such as the Use of Official Languages Act of…

Research on linguistic variation suggests that usage patterns are deeply embedded in native and non-native speakers' knowledge of grammar. This study explores the transfer of these variable sociolinguistic patterns at the initial stages of third language acquisition. We elicited narratives in Portuguese from two mirror-image groups of sequential…

Educational research in Austria has demonstrated that early tracking into academic secondary schools and middle schools results in inequities for students with low socioeconomic status, from migration backgrounds and/or with German as an additional language. It has also found gaps in performance between students in the two school types, including…