This paper reports on a small-scale research study into the beliefs of teenagers in Switzerland on Swiss national languages and their status relative to English. High school students (n = 232) in the French-speaking city of Lausanne completed a questionnaire about the economic, social, cultural and symbolic value of German, Italian and English.…

This paper focuses on vocabulary development in oral language productions of three elementary school-age sibling pairs growing up in a trilingual setting. This longitudinal study describes the development of the children's narrative competence over three years. The corpus analysed consists of retellings of animated films. The contribution deals…

Despite the uptick in awareness of racial and other sociocultural diversity owing to recent social movements particularly in the United States but also in many countries in Europe, deep understanding of identity and bias is lacking and remedies for policy and practice inequities in the education sector remain. Steadily increasing racial and…

Reinforcement of differences in educational systems and school curricula may be expected in Europe due to societal crises and transformations. Thus, it is likely that cultural "variants of a capitalist spirit" and different concepts of economic education will become evident in a corresponding curriculum analysis. In this study, we…

This article explores cross-linguistic lexical influence (CLI), i.e. idiosyncratic borrowings and creations based on other languages, in texts written by pupils learning French and English as foreign languages, and whose language of instruction is German. The study, carried out in German-speaking Switzerland, was based on a plurilingual conception…

This work reports the results of a survey study conducted with French-, German-, and Italian-speaking speech and language therapists (SLTs) in Switzerland. In this survey we asked respondents about their language background, training in multilingual matters, and practices with multilingual patients, as well as their opinions on the current SLT…

Purpose: This article examines the use of English medium instruction (EMI) for teaching Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) by non-native speakers with a focus on multilingual classrooms. It also explores teachers' positive and negative beliefs about using EMI in classroom settings for JFL instruction. Methods and procedure: 274 non-native…

This study investigates the interplay among identity, language, and culture of six heritage language (HL) teachers at a Greek school in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. It applies the concept of "participative multilingual identity construction" and argues that in order for teachers to provide agency and opportunities to their…

This paper presents insights from two interview studies with the aim of shedding light on the learning potential of studying abroad in an area where English is used as a lingua franca. The majority of previous research on study abroad focuses on students' experiences of studying abroad in target-language regions, for example learners of English…

Although Switzerland is a plurilingual country, most early education and care (ECEC) institutions are monolingual. Yet, new institutions have recently established English as a second language of instruction, addressing economically advantaged families. Despite the growing body of international research on language policy and practice in…

In the way of commentary, I offer a brief, summative reflection on the complex, multifarious nature of people's semiotic engagements in and with space. Against the backdrop of three snapshot case studies, I suggest there are actually few neat boundaries to be drawn between the linguistic and non-linguistic, between the semiotic and the spatial,…

Motivational interactions during multiple language learning have been largely neglected in language motivation research. To fill this gap, we investigate longitudinal relations between Swiss German students' value beliefs in English, French, and German in upper secondary schools and whether there are differences in motivational development between…

Academic self-concept (ASC) is a student's self-perceived level of ability in an academic domain and a major factor involved in academic performance. We examined the importance of internal/external sources of evaluation for the structure of L2 and L3 ASCs in two groups of 5th/6th graders learning English and French in Switzerland (mean age: 12.1).…

Switzerland is like a language and culture pot with its four official languages and habitants from all over the world. The purpose of this study was to inspect this country's special language education model. The study was designed as a case study and data were gathered with document analysis. Curriculums and other publications were analyzed with…

This book provides an overview and evaluation of the quality of bilingual education found in internationalised higher education institutions. Its authors focus on the multifaceted roles that language(s) play in these growing multilingual spaces and analyse and identify the many factors that account for quality multilingual degree programmes. The…