Israel's population includes over a million Russian-speaking immigrants and more than 300,000 native English speakers. These groups differ in social integration and in the status of their heritage languages in Israel. We compared children's and parents' perceptions of children's identities, language abilities, and language preferences among…

Language teachers cannot help their students develop high levels of metalinguistic knowledge and language aptitude if they themselves are found lacking in these abilities. This article reports on a study that utilised a descriptive correlational mixed-methods research design to gather data from 89 multilingual teachers of English, Chinese, French,…

We evaluated external and internal sources of variation in second language (L2) and native language (L1) proficiency among college students. One hundred and twelve native-English L2 learners completed measures of L1 and L2 speaking proficiency, working memory, and cognitive control and provided self-ratings of language exposure and use. When…

Heritage languages (HLs) are acquired in contexts of unbalanced input, or situations in which children receive primary exposure to the family/HL and experience an abrupt shift after the child begins formal schooling. As a consequence, HL speakers normally become more dominant in the environmental language, while the development of the HL is…

Background: The educational context in South Africa does not always support the development of bilingualism to enable the cognitive and social advantages of dual language proficiency. The emphasis on English as the language of instruction overlooks bilingual competence. This study attempts to show that by considering conceptual vocabulary,…

The UK is linguistically rich but faces a reducing uptake of language learning in schools, as pupils feel more withdrawn and disinterested in learning an additional language to English. A key component in many linguistic minority communities to preserve their language is complementary schooling (CS), which has wide-ranging educational and societal…

Lombard is one of the 12-15 non-recognized regional languages spoken in Italy. This article focuses on the new speakers of Lombard, i. e. people who have learned or are learning Lombard as a second language. Through an open questionnaire the author has probed into various aspects concerning these new speakers' competence and learning trajectories,…

Though the two languages most frequently used in the homes of Chinese Singaporeans are English and Mandarin Chinese, there is not much information on how the home language can influence language use and attitudes toward these two languages. This study investigates the family language ecology in bilingual homes and aims to compare attitudes toward…

The Irish language is a minority language undergoing the attenuation and accelerated change commonly seen as threatened languages come under increasing pressure from the dominant language. The decline of the numbers of traditional speakers and growing numbers of L2 speakers of Irish has given rise to some contested spaces regarding authenticity,…

Most linguistic processes--acquisition, change, deterioration--take place in and are determined by a complex and multifactorial web of language internal and language external influences. This implies that the impact of each individual factor can only be determined on the basis of a careful consideration of its interplay with all other factors. The…

This study was conducted to explore the effects of a two-way immersion bilingual program on maintenance/acquisition of Spanish-language proficiency and on reading and mathematics achievement in English over a period of 4 academic years. The researchers used Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) techniques to compare the effects of two different…

Compares two different types of bilingual education programs--the Canadian immersion programs, designed primarily for foreign language enrichment, and the European School bilingual education program, designed primarily for language maintenance. Achievement scores for both approaches were comparable, pointing to the importance of environment and…

This report examines the value for research and policy purposes of data generated by the "Pound 10 Grant Scheme" operated by Roinn na Gaeltachta in Ireland, which seeks to preserve the Irish language. The scheme was introduced in the early 30's by An Roinn Oideachais (an organization which had responsibility for the promotion of the…