The aim of the Regional Dossier series is to provide concise descriptions of regional or minority languages in education, mainly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. Friulian is a Romance language, traditionally recognised as part of the Rhaeto-Romance sub-family. It is spoken in Friûl (in Friulian)/Friuli (in Italian), a territory…

The present study examines grammatical gender knowledge in offline production (gender marking on indefinite articles) and online gender processing (visual world paradigm) in adult second language (L2) learners of Norwegian with three different first languages (L1s): Greek, Russian, and Turkish. In particular, it investigates the role of the…

In Arabic literacy education in Europe, whether within mainstream education or in supplementary schools, instruction is a translocal endeavour at its core. The socio-historical conditions and ways of knowing embedded in traditional ways of teaching Arabic literacy are still deeply intertwined with the teaching of Arabic literacy in the diaspora.…

How does early educational quality affect longer-term academic outcomes? We shed light on this question via a natural experiment in the Philippines--the implementation of a mother tongue education policy in public schools in kindergarten to Grade 3. This policy led to an unexpected decline in educational quality, but differentially in a subset of…

L1 grammar teaching worldwide often takes the form of traditional grammar teaching with decontextualized parsing exercises and rules of thumb. Some researchers have proposed enriching such forms of grammar teaching by relating traditional grammatical concepts to underlying metaconcepts from linguistic theory. The merits of such an approach have…

The most recent "Open Doors" report by the Institute of International Education (IIE, 2020) indicates that the number of non-white U.S. study abroad students has been steadily growing over the past 10 years, and now it accounts for 31% of all students pursuing part of their education abroad. This study focuses on four Spanish heritage…

Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has benefited quite a lot from Construction Grammar. Most of the previous SLA researches adopting a constructionist approach have been primarily engaged in issues pertinent to the relevance of construction in SLA, the process of second language (L2) construction learning, and factors affecting L2 construction…

Rapid automatized naming (RAN) has been shown to be a strong correlate of reading abilities. RAN also predicts future reading across different ages, ability levels, and languages, and is often used in literacy screening. Thus, understanding the specific relations between early RAN and later reading difficulties is important, particularly for…

The aim of this study is to identify factors associated with Vietnamese-Australian parents' language use and attitudes towards home language maintenance. Vietnamese-Australian parents (n = 151) with children aged under 18 completed a survey regarding demographic factors and factors conceptualised by Spolsky's language policy theory: language…

Mountain Jewish immigrants to Israel from the Eastern Caucasus used two heritage languages, Juhuri (Judeo-Tat) and Russian. Juhuri was their home and Russian the societal languages prior to migration. In Israel, Juhuri and Russian are Heritage Languages and Hebrew is the societal language. The present study reports on frequency of use and…

This study analyzes the programs and policies for Spanish heritage language (SHL) students in Iowa high schools. Previous research suggests that SHL students do not enjoy equitable educational experiences in Spanish language classrooms, which are often taught by and designed for traditional second language learners. In US states like Iowa, there…

Previous studies have suggested that deafness could lead to deficits in motor skills and other body-related abilities. However, the literature regarding motor skills in deaf adults is scarce and existing studies often included participants with heterogeneous language backgrounds and deafness etiologies, thus making it difficult to delineate the…

Current research on language policy underscores how top-down policymakers tend to endorse the interests of dominant social groups, marginalize minority languages, and attempt to perpetuate systems of socio-lingual inequity. In the Castilian-Spanish-dominated sociolinguistic terrains of Galicia and Navarre, this article examines the rise of…

Perceptual narrowing of speech perception supposes that young infants can discriminate most speech sounds early in life. During the second half of the first year, infants' phonetic sensitivity is attuned to their native phonology. However, supporting evidence for this pattern comes primarily from learners from a limited number of regions and…

This article focuses on a school-family partnership programme that has been implemented in French schools to prevent learning difficulties among migrant children, taking their specific needs into account. It consists of a series of three to four sessions, gathering migrant parents, their children and members of the teaching staff, one interpreter…