The Zhuang language test ("Vahcuengh Sawcuengh Suijbingz Gaujsi", VSSG) is the first minority language test in the People's Republic of China. It was designed with multiple goals including improving Zhuang language teaching, recruiting students for relevant majors of tertiary study, identifying proficiency for work-related applications,…

The population of young language minority (LM) students is rapidly growing worldwide due to global migration and immigration trends. The increasing representation of young LM students in school settings creates high demand for the language assessment of LM students in order to meet the needs of stakeholders, such as governments and language…

Since educators play a decisive role in the formation of language attitudes, this study analyses perceived competence, habits of language use and attitudes towards three languages in contact harboured by prospective teachers. Our research replicates a 20-year-old study and is comparative, as it parallels two European regions: the Basque Autonomous…

Given their significance in daily life and frequent inclusion in clinical and educational assessments, children's narrative abilities merit investigation. The present study examines the narratives of children acquiring an additional language, adding to the more abundant studies of monolingual children. Sixty kindergartners (mean age 68 months)…

The L1 subject is a central meeting place for all students regardless of their linguistic backgrounds. Thus explorations of multilingualism in the L1 subject provide the potential for enhancing all students' multilinguality. In Norway, several policy papers have emphasised the important role of the L1 Norwegian subject in promoting students'…

As part of its ambitious Belt and Road initiative, the Chinese government, cognizant of the fact that establishing strong people-to-people bonds locally, regionally, and internationally will be key to the initiative's success and that languages will play a pivotal role in facilitating this, has called for the diversification of language programmes…

As plurilingual/multilingual research advances, factors that contribute to or hinder individual's flexible language use are still underexplored. Questions such as "Why do some people identify as plurilingual and pluricultural while others do not?" and "What factors contribute to high levels of plurilingual and pluricultural…

This commentary highlights major validation challenges raised, explicitly or implicitly, from the four articles in the special issue on "Validity Considerations for Assessing Language Proficiency in Young Language Minority Students." They are concerned with: (1) the construct definition in consideration of young language-minority (LM)…

In two artificial language learning experiments with four groups of highly proficient Basque-Spanish bilinguals and two groups of Spanish monolinguals, we examine the cues that allow adult listeners to parse new input into phrases. In addition, we investigate which factors lead bilinguals to switch between the segmentation strategies…

In 1981, Sweden was the first country in the world to entitle deaf pupils to a bimodal-bilingual education. However, drawing from interviews with key past Stockholm teacher trainers and on our own efforts to update teacher training, we note that sign-bilingual teacher training in Sweden has been ad hoc to this day. The interviewees' accounts…

Minority language studies have received increasing attention over the last decade in Iran. Drawing on Spolsky's (Spolsky, Bernard. 2004. "Language policy." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) language policy theoretical framework, this inquiry reports on the language ideologies, practices, and management efforts of an under-explored…

Over the last decades, many efforts have been made to establish the Basque minority language as a normalized language in the Basque Country. Research has shown that language use, language proficiency and attitudes towards language are closely associated. Likewise, the benefit of interactive learning environments for improving language proficiency…

Dutch-medium schools in Brussels traditionally cater to a Dutch-speaking minority, but they have recently seen a massive influx of pupils with a limited competence in Dutch. In order to face the resulting pedagogical and ideological challenges, many of these schools have intensified their efforts to remain Dutch enclaves in a predominantly…

Young Indigenous students with a language background of emergent, unrecognised, and/or non-prestigious contact languages are commonly by-passed as English language learners (ELLs). Consequently, they are taught and assessed via undifferentiated mainstream pedagogy and testing, generally characterised by reported underachievement. Long-term social…

This paper explores the role of collaborative teacher agency in facilitating translingual adjustments in a linguistically diverse primary school in Sweden. We focus on three multicompetent language teachers, who taught minoritized languages in the marginalized Mother Tongue (MT) subject, Modern Languages, and offered Multilingual Study Mentoring.…