Discourse and identity practices in heritage language contexts have received significant attention in applied linguistics in recent years. One line of research in this realm has sought to adopt scales, the spatiotemporal niches within which social identification and learning take place. This article problematizes modernity as a scale of its own…

In the context of German linguistic policies, Heritage Language (HL) education ranges from formal and informal to non-formal offers. Families with migratory backgrounds seeking acquisition and maintenance of the HL frequently resort to educational or maintenance opportunities that are not institutionalized. In the region of Bavaria (Germany), the…

Due to globalisation and migration, multilingualism has become both a reality and an aim of education systems across Europe, affecting how language education is shaped. To improve the ways in which schools cater for language education in diverse settings, research is required on the potentials of multilingualism in order to design curricula that…

This article reports on an investigation into the bilingual development of literacy skills in Portuguese heritage language speakers in Switzerland in which we sought to put Cummins' linguistic interdependence hypothesis to the test. Three predictions were derived from this hypothesis: (1) Literacy skill levels in one of the bilinguals' languages…

After a theoretical overview of the concept of heritage language (HL) from a plurilingual perspective, we will describe the project "Images on the (teaching of) Portuguese Language abroad". For this project, several drawings were collected, produced by lusodescendant children living in Germany and attending supplementary Portuguese…

This dissertation addresses the issue of Slovene/German bilingualism in the province of Carinthia in southeastern Austria. The study examines the relationship between learning Slovene in the home and the ability to speak good German later in life; it is based on research conducted in the bilingual community of Bad Eisenkappel (Eisenkappel) in…

COMPASS is an e-learning system that can visualize grammar errors during sentence production in German as a first or second language. Via drag-and-drop dialogues, it allows users to freely select word forms from a lexicon and to combine them into phrases and sentences. The system's core component is a natural-language generator that, for every new…

This article presents findings from the global literacy project, Critical Connections: Multilingual Digital Storytelling (MDST), which provides a means of nurturing and reflecting multiliteracies in practice. It recognises the power of storytelling and the space stories offer both for self-representation and for engaging with otherness. It draws…

From the perspective of German colonial supporters and authorities, appropriate white education in the settler colony of Southwest Africa (SWA) was essential for maintaining German hegemony in the territory. In order to reach this objective, the German colonial administration in SWA, with assistance from pedagogues and institutions in Germany,…

The aim of the present contribution is to evaluate and discuss the impacts of language learning interventions in pre-school children with German as a first or a second language. The sample consisted of 864 children in intervention groups and 294 children as a comparison group within two successive cohorts. The instruments used were the SSV (Grimm…

A sub-thesaurus of language teaching terms was compiled as a supplement to the EUDISED Multilingual Thesaurus. The sub-thesaurus includes three lists: (1) an alphabetized cross-referenced list of English descriptors to be added to the Multilingual Thesaurus; (2) an alphabetized English list of additional descriptors and the French and German…

This regional dossier aims to provide concise, descriptive information and basic educational statistics about minority language education in a specific region of the European Union--the northwestern part of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Details are provided about the features of the educational system, recent educational policies,…

Two linguistic and religious aspects of the Alsatian school are discussed. These two aspects of the problem converge in the area commonly called Alsace-Lorraine. The discussion of the school question is developed in two parts: (1) the historical evolution prior to the German occupation in 1940, and (2) developments since 1940. The interlocking of…

Since the mid-1960s, the use of objective testing in education, and multiple-choice tests in particular, has increased dramatically in the Netherlands. Since the founding of the Dutch National Institute for Educational Measurement in 1968, the construction of many achievement tests has been concentrated there. This general changeover from…

This collection of papers is divided into three parts. Part 1, "Changing Patterns: Curricular Implications," includes "Basic Assumptions Revisited: Today's French and Spanish Students at a Large Metropolitan University" (Gail Guntermann, Suzanne Hendrickson, and Carmen de Urioste) and "Le Francais et Mort, Vive le…