Language teachers cannot help their students develop high levels of metalinguistic knowledge and language aptitude if they themselves are found lacking in these abilities. This article reports on a study that utilised a descriptive correlational mixed-methods research design to gather data from 89 multilingual teachers of English, Chinese, French,…

Equity-focused calls for elementary education reform recognize the importance of student and teacher translanguaging, yet nuances of how this process unfolds in early childhood science is an underexplored area. This study examines young plurilingual children's participation in science investigations, with a view toward understanding how open-ended…

A compulsory foreign language in Finland starts now in Grade 1 instead of Grade 3. The change has forced teachers to adopt new teaching methods. As young learners are not yet literate, teaching should focus on oral skills and awareness of diversity. Video data from 19 early foreign language lessons of five English, German, or French teachers in…

Digital tools can guide and support teachers in professional development programmes. The aim of this study was four-fold: (1) to explore changes introduced in classroom methodology by secondary school teachers during their participation in a professional development programme, using the digital tool EVALOE-DSS, based on conversational methodology;…

German university degrees, at least in some countries, offer students only German literature courses in addition to language courses. Linguistics is often not a core component of German degree programmes. As a result, students who are not familiar with basic linguistic terminology do not know how languages work, including their mother tongue, or…

This study investigates the effects of Processing Instruction (PI) on the acquisition of grammatical gender and gender-marked pronouns in German. PI was compared to Traditional Instruction, i.e. a traditional, vocabulary-oriented approach using color cues (TI) and a Categorization and Memorization task (CM). The results of an immediate posttest…

The scope of the paper is to analyse Namibian mainstream primary teachers' practices in the multilingual context they work in. As teachers have a central role in implementing language policies, their practices either support or impede learning as well as learners' multilingual identities. Multilingual practices entailing rich scaffolding and…

Multilingualism does not enhance further language learning in learners if they are not supported by the school environment. Learning L3, L4 or Ln is attained best when language users take advantage and are aware of the existence of their overall linguistic knowledge. It is the teacher whose understanding and beliefs about multilingual pedagogies…

This qualitative study uses a semi-structured interview to investigate why Saudi learners stop learning a third language and whether these reasons are permanent or temporary. The participants were six female master's degree students who had experience learning a third language outside of formal education or informal settings. This study identifies…

International students' attitudes towards teachers' codeswitching to the first language (L1) have not been adequately investigated in cross-cultural English-medium instruction (EMI) settings, where teachers and international students do not share the same L1 while they interact in English as a lingua franca (ELF). To fill that void, this study…

Given that societies across the globe are increasingly multicultural and multilingual, the notion of communicative competence grounded in constricting definitions of national cultures and languages reflects neither our instructional realities nor the sociolinguistic reality of the languages and cultures we teach. To foster students' development of…

The article proposes a remodeling of Tertiary Language Didactics (TLD) against the backdrop of empirical findings from German-speaking areas and the notions of translanguaging and "compétence plurilingue." TLD as a multilingual didactics approach for the initial stages of L3 learning developed in the 1990s in the field of "German as…

The study addresses the research gap of how being a speaker of a Slavic language influences the ability to convey tempo-aspectual meanings in Romance languages by examining personal and impersonal narratives delivered in written and spoken mode by learners of L3 Spanish and L3 Italian with L1 Slovak and L2 English. Narratives are analysed…

This study explores whether middle-school students can exploit explicitly addressed crosslinguistic lexical similarities between German and English to learn vocabulary more efficiently. Across six weeks, 260 Swiss German learners of English as a foreign language (17 classes) completed three vocabulary learning tests (T1, T2 and T3). Additionally,…

This study presents a reanalysis of existing data to investigate whether a relationship between perception and production abilities regarding a challenging second-language (L2) phonological contrast is observable (a) when both modalities must rely on accessing stored lexical representations and (b) when there is an asymmetry in task focus between…