Studies have found that bilinguals respond differently to personality measures in their two languages, indicating that bilinguals change their personality as they switch between their two languages and/or cultures. Across two experiments, we attempted to investigate the effect of language and culture separately on how bilingual speakers rate…

The requirement for Chinese students to adopt an English name for the English language classroom remains a relic of a previous era, which is not only accepted but also desirable by some. This study reports on 357 Chinese English language students' relationship with their English names in terms of the concepts of identity, agency and investment,…

This paper engages with the negotiation of insider and outsider researcher identities in the context of Welsh-English bilingualism in Wales. It aims to develop a reflexive approach to researching bilingualism, foregrounding the actions and experiences of doing bilingual research in a minority language context. Taking data from education and…

While translanguaging has been adequately researched in various educational sectors, there is scant research at the primary-level English-L2 classroom in the Chinese educational context. Within a monolingual English-only immersion policy favoured by the state in China for many decades now, translanguaging has been a debated issue recently. Within…

In recent years, a large amount of Chinese international students, from middle or upper-middle class families, began their international education in Canadian secondary schools, where critical thinking is the main educational goal and often determines students' achievements. Guided by reflexivity in multilingual and intercultural education, this…

Swearing uses language forms that are taboo and potentially offensive. These are often used for emotional expression. Multilingual research shows that because the first language retains most emotional force (Dewaele [2004]. "The Emotional Force of Swearwords and Taboo Words in the Speech of Multilinguals." "Journal of Multilingual…

The aim of the paper is to understand how German speakers living in Norway with their families navigate partially shared repertoires. Using the notion of "legitimate peripheral participation," I aim to analyse how family members work towards shared repertoires in the family or account for only partially shared linguistic and cultural…

This study examined responses from a questionnaire administered to 98 second- and third-generation Rohingya refugees living in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Questions concerned participants' self-reported language proficiency levels in the Rohingya heritage language and Arabic and patterns of language use in various domains. Findings demonstrate that the…

The current study had two objectives: (a) to quantitatively investigate whether Japanese language learners of English have inclusive second language (L2) self-related motivations, and how inclusive L2 self-related motivations contribute to English learning effort and self-rated English ability, and (b) to qualitatively examine how Japanese…

Adopting mixed methods of data collection and analysis, the current study models the "perceived value of compulsory English language education" in a sample of 138 undergraduate non-language majors of Japanese nationality at a national university in Japan. During the orientation period of a compulsory 15-week English language programme,…

Learning outcomes are always the product of the interaction between individual learner agency and social structures. Recently concern has been expressed about unequal access to English, recognised as an important resource for social advancement, for rural populations in developing countries. This paper explores this issue by focusing on one…

When linguistic minority parents wish to develop and maintain their children's literacy in heritage languages (HLs), what can they do to help? How and to what extent do the individual contexts of language use and background affect the development and maintenance of HL literacy, compared with the sociocultural context of community? What are the…

This paper reports a study of how context influences a content-based language teaching (CBLT) project in China, an approach which is fairly new in the country, in its implementation in three middle schools. It identifies three aspects of the context which have a crucial effect on classroom practice. These are the perceptions of the project and its…

This article focuses on multilingual primary-aged children and their families in a post-industrial city in England. Such pupils, sometimes identified in education policy as "underachieving," often have rich experiences of learning that are hidden from their mainstream teachers and unrecognised in national assessment regimes. The article…

Informed by linguistic ecological theory and the notion of identity, this study investigates language uses and identity construction in interactions among students with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds in a multilingual university. Individual and focus-group interviews were conducted with two groups of students: Hong Kong (HK) and…