This regional dossier aims to provide concise, descriptive information and basic educational statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe--"Arberishtja" of Italy. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements, and support…

The aim of the research was to study the experiences of Portuguese heritage pupils in British schools. The main findings from empirical data suggest Portuguese children are underachieving at the end of primary education but the case study confirms that in good schools Portuguese pupils do well and have made huge improvements over the periods. The…

Research holds that, for bilingual children, a strong establishment in one language not only develops skills in that language, but also facilitates the development of a second language. The participants for this research were six nine-year-old children who were being educated in their first language, Macedonian, and also in English. This research…

Heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian in the United States form a very complex and diverse group of learners. Research in heritage linguistics has examined key parameters of the HSs' oral production. Important work has been done in heritage language (HL) pragmatics, morphology, and lexicon. However, very few studies have been conducted to…

Critical approaches to Spanish heritage language (SHL) pedagogy have called for more meaningful engagement with heritage language communities (Leeman, 2005). In a recent survey, furthermore, SHL students expressed a desire for more community-based activities in SHL curricula (Beaudrie, Ducar, & Relano-Pastor, 2009). This paper reports on the…

This study brings together previous research on writing processes and Spanish heritage language (SHL) learners to obtain a clearer picture of these learners' writing behaviors in English and Spanish. Following a cognitive-oriented framework, the study explores planning time, execution time, monitoring time, accuracy, and fluency. Twelve SHL…

There have been moves in a number of countries in recent years to develop appropriate pedagogies for the teaching of community/heritage languages, distinct from foreign language and mother tongue models. At the same time there has been a growing interest in ways of developing learners' creative abilities and there are grounds for believing that an…

The COLT (Community and Lesser Taught Languages) project is a consortium of five UK universities, working with various other regional organisations to set up replicable projects and structures to promote languages in North West England. It received funding under the UK's national "Routes into Languages" initiative. One objective was to…

The project "The educational value of various aspects of multilingualism in the classroom of the Basque Country and of Friesland" concerns a comparative study of the languages in the schools in the Basque Autonomous Community and in the Province of Friesland. It is part of the agreement between the general administration of the Basque…

Texts are stated to have an important role in Turkish language education relevant to the goals stated in the Primary Schools Turkish Lesson Teaching Program and Guide (2006), and in the formation and improvement of the individual's reading culture. The aim of the study is to determine the comprehensibility levels of the texts in the Turkish…

This study aims to determine the effect/contribution of the use of the jigsaw technique in the teaching of punctuation marks in mother tongue education on/to the academic improvement of students. The functionality of reading, speaking and writing skills falling within the understanding and expression domains of learning is dependent upon the…

Cross-language transfer of awareness of the structure of compound words was investigated among native speakers of Chinese who were learning English as a second language. Chinese fifth graders received instruction in the morphology of four types of compound words in either Chinese or English. They then completed both the Chinese and English…

This study examines a lesser-known population of students, called "long-term English language learners" (LTELLs) in the USA, who now comprise one-third of all English language learners in New York City secondary schools. A major finding from our research, which explores the characteristics and educational needs of this student…

Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's Carnival theory, this article focuses on specific outcomes of a research project the author undertook in Hong Kong, where drama pedagogy has been recently introduced into the official curriculum. It investigates the ways in which laughter, noise, jokes, frolic and popular literacies commonly appear in classrooms where…

User perceptions and experiences of complementary education are neglected in the research literature, yet they are important in providing understanding concerning complementary schools and their impact on educational and social identities. This paper explores the constructions of parents of pupils attending these schools, and of teachers at these…