This article examines how learning an additional language can positively affect children's opinions and feelings about languages and how this process can be enriched when different languages--namely, the additional language and the children's L1s--are present and used in the classroom in an informed way. It is hypothesised that this will benefit…

The 2002 Language Policy for Higher Education (LPHE) identifies the currently dominant language of instruction--English--as being a possible barrier to many African students in accessing and successfully completing studies at higher education level. The LPHE thus requires that black African languages be developed at Higher Education Institutions…

Although multilingualism is the norm in Africa the degree of linguistic complexity varies from one specific national context to another. While some countries are highly multilingual, others have fairly few languages. Similarly, whereas in some countries a good number of languages enjoy majority status; in others, we have a myriad of primarily…

Language policy is generally seen as a national-level decision regarding which languages the state will support, and in which public domains. However, the reality is that language policy plays out at regional and local levels as well. In fact, it could be argued that the most important instantiations of language policy are those which directly…

Trilingual families need language support if they wish to maintain three languages. Most studies on trilingualism have paid little attention to the influence of grandparents as an affective factor. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the impact of the extended family, particularly grandparents, on trilingual families' language maintenance.…

In five experiments, we examined cross-language activation during speech production in various groups of bilinguals and trilinguals who differed in nonnative language proficiency, language learning background, and age. In Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 5, German 5- to 8-year-old second language learners of English, German-English bilinguals,…

This paper tries to give answers for successful receptive multilingualism (RM) but also for its failure. It is mainly based on the results of two projects, one on inter-dialectal communication in the Baltic area during the era of the Hanseatic League and the other analyses inter-Scandinavian communication today. The main purpose of this survey is…

This paper presents profiles of eight multilinguals and examines the circumstances that determine their continued use, in addition to English, of at least two of their "home" languages. I attempt to identify in which domains this occurs, whether there are established patterns of domain-specific language use and whether these patterns are…

This article investigates how two young newcomers navigate an institutional policy of "English only" in a Finnish primary school and how this policy impacts opportunities for voice. From a discourse analytic and sociolinguistic perspective, the analysis takes an ethnographic path to a focal event of language conflict in the classroom.…

This paper analyzes the ideologies and practices of local languages as the medium-of-instruction (MOI) policy in a multilingual school in Nepal. Grounded on the notion of language policy as a locally situated social practice, this critical ethnographic study investigates challenges--both ideological and implementational--that local languages MOI…

In this article, we will examine some contrasted discourses on multilingualism that circulate nowadays in the field of education. Focusing on the cases of French-speaking Belgium and of the Franco-Ontarian community in Canada, we will show the existence of two discourses on multilingualism: one that insists on the positive value of multilingualism…

This article examines major unresolved challenges in the assessment of pre-K-grade 12 multilingual students in US public schools. The ethnic educator approach advocates for a change of paradigms in assessment, one that abandons the medical model to incorporate socio-constructivist theoretical perspectives and pluralistic and progressive social…

Meeting the educational needs of a linguistically diverse population is a challenge for many countries. This is a particular challenge for New Zealand (NZ) which, until the 1980s, had a White Immigration Policy. The last 30 years have seen NZ become a full member of the Asia Pacific Region and move from being a mostly homogenous society to one of…

In a neuroimaging study focusing on young bilinguals, we explored the brains of bilingual and monolingual babies across two age groups (younger 4-6 months, older 10-12 months), using fNIRS in a new event-related design, as babies processed linguistic phonetic (Native English, Non-Native Hindi) and nonlinguistic Tone stimuli. We found that phonetic…

This article reports on the South African results of a study to identify and explain relationships between some major factors associated with successful reading at Grade 5. With 11 official languages, educational policy in South Africa advocates an additive bilingualism model, and students in Grades 1 to 3 are taught in their mother tongue.…