One of the most influential factors in the future access to the labour market of a young descendant of migrants is their occupational aspirations. Sociodemographic, socio-cultural, and socio-professional family elements or knowledge of languages are key in their formation. But in bilingual societies like Catalonia, the symbolism associated with…

This study tested the effects of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French words on the pronunciation of these words by 7- to 8-year-old Catalan children. In a short training experiment with a pre- and posttest design, 28 children either repeated cognate words in French (e.g. French "aspirateur," Catalan "aspirador"…

Games are fully accepted by students, as they stimulate memory, activate reasoning capacities in brain, improve the knowledge and keep out the stress. Our innovation teaching group is interested in using games for teaching Biochemistry of the Chemistry degree. Most of the individual games found in Internet are classified in numerical games…

This article provides qualitative information chronicling the study-abroad experiences of eight Erasmus+ students. Data were obtained from the analysis of focus-group discussions, e-journal narratives, plus background and language contact questionnaires. Combined, such data illustrate the participants' discursive positions on their socialisation…

This article offers a brief overview of historical linguistics and explores the value of historical "sign" linguistics. The specific focus of the article is on the question of the extent to which the concept of "sign language families" is a legitimate and useful one. It is suggested that although lateral transmission and…

Previous research indicates that developmental contexts influence language development. These developmental contexts include bilingualism, which is the focus of the current paper. This study analyses the influence that the acquisition of a language, Catalan, has when the simultaneous acquisition of another similar language, Spanish, occurs. This…

Located in the province of Lleida (Catalonia, Spain), this study aims to identify and analyze the predictors of linguistic acculturation preferences of autochthonous high-school students toward their peers of Latin American descent. Autochthonous high-school students (N = 349) filled a questionnaire measuring linguistic acculturation and a series…

The present dissertation intends to investigate the syntactic nature and L2-acquisition of passive sentence structure in two Romance varieties, Italian and Spanish. First, I will present an analytic proposal couched within the Generative Approach (Chomsky, 1957, and subsequent work); from there, and following Perlmutter and Postal's (1977)…

Successful language learning in bilinguals requires the differentiation of two language systems. The capacity to discriminate rhythmically close languages has been reported in 4-month-olds using auditory-only stimuli. This research offers a novel perspective on early language discrimination using audiovisual material. Monolingual and bilingual…

Intercultural studies have underexplored the issue of children's theatre as a tool for symbolic representations of (new, hybrid) identities. In this paper, I analyze two theatrical productions addressing both Spanish society and Romanian diaspora (first/second generation) to answer these questions: how are diasporic identities re-constructed in…

Despite a surge of research interest on languages other than English (LOTE) education over the past years, there is a lack of attention to LOTE teachers' professional practice and development in higher education. To address such a gap, this narrative inquiry examines how a Romanian language teacher navigates identity tensions and seeks his…

This paper is about identifying a nuance of social meaning which, I demonstrate, was conveyed in the Early and Late Modern period by the suffix "-oon." The history of non-native suffix "-oon" is presented by means of assembling non-native suffix "-oon" vocabulary in date order and sorting according to etymology. It…

Numerous approaches have been introduced to automate the process of text summarization, but only few can be easily adapted to multiple languages. This paper introduces a multilingual text processing pipeline integrated in the open-source "ReaderBench" framework, which can be retrofit to cover more than 50 languages. While considering the…

The present study focuses on email communication in the multilingual university setting. Previous studies dealing with similar settings point to the lack of politeness markers in students' email messages [Bjorge, A. (2007). Power distance in English lingua franca email communication. "International Journal of Applied Linguistics", 17(1),…

Thanks to a wealth of research on college student retention, we have today a good understanding of the factors that facilitate student success. However, actions taken to promote student success are far from always effective. The teaching-learning environments differ between institutions and provide, to a greater or lesser extent, the conditions…