In a neuroimaging study focusing on young bilinguals, we explored the brains of bilingual and monolingual babies across two age groups (younger 4-6 months, older 10-12 months), using fNIRS in a new event-related design, as babies processed linguistic phonetic (Native English, Non-Native Hindi) and nonlinguistic Tone stimuli. We found that phonetic…

This article reports on the South African results of a study to identify and explain relationships between some major factors associated with successful reading at Grade 5. With 11 official languages, educational policy in South Africa advocates an additive bilingualism model, and students in Grades 1 to 3 are taught in their mother tongue.…

This essay attempts to show the importance of linguistic issues in education for democracy and the close relationship between democracy and multilingualism. Increasingly nation-states are having to adapt to linguistic diversity within their borders and to recognize that democracy requires the participation of all citizens, including those…

How do young children learn to read, write, speak, and listen in two languages? How do emergent readers and writers make meaning within multilingual communities? This book examines the emergent biliteracy development of two kindergarteners growing up in a New Mexican neighborhood. Using ethnographic accounts, the book portrays the familial,…

Teachers in multilingual classrooms have been working for some years to improve their repertoire of ways to address the needs of very young children who enter school not speaking the language of instruction. The work of 22 seasoned teachers and administrators in international schools all over the world, this book contains a wealth of information…

Concerns about bilingual and multilingual programs have been an issue all over the world. Efforts to improve the educational achievement of students from different language backgrounds have created educational settings where teachers are now teaching in a language that is not their own. In the 20th century, many groups have expressed their rights…

This qualitative ethnographic Linguistic Landscape (LL) study collected and analyzed ten individual "walking tour" interviews with residents of Memphis, Tennessee, exploring the personal thoughts and feelings about linguistic changes in the communities triggered by the LL. The researcher focused the participants' attention on…

South Africa, as a multilingual country, offers the opportunity for examining the interaction between aphasic symptomatology and the parameters of language. Effective intervention techniques depend on an understanding of clinical linguistics. This article describes an intervention study with two Sesotho-speaking individuals with anomia. Sesotho as…

Multilingualism in education is a conceptual as well as a pedagogical challenge of the 21st century. Luxembourg, with its three statutory official languages (Luxembourgish, French and German), is an especially complex setting. The gap between traditional principles of language education on the one hand and the challenging impacts of today's…

In this article, the author describes the opportunities she had for putting her cultural and language skills to use. She shares her experiences at the Asian Voices of Organized Youth for Community Empowerment (A-VOYCE) program and at the Participatory Chinatown project. The author never thought that learning about her identity and using what she…

The present linguistic situation in Russia, however much it may have been affected by political and economic considerations, is overwhelmingly the consequence of what people have made of their geographical conditions, their history and their long-standing language and ethnic contacts over many centuries. The present linguistic complexity of Russia…

This study investigates the relationship between working memory and language in young children growing up in a multilingual environment. The aim is to explore whether mechanisms of short-term storage and cognitive control hold similar relations to emerging language skills and to investigate if potential links are mediated by related cognitive…

This study examined the perceptions of three Muslim families on multilingual development in their children with autism. Findings indicate that the families' goal of maintaining normalcy in their children's life could not be attained without immersion in multiple languages. They believe that immersion in multilingual contexts helped their children…

This article offers a comment on the ways multilingual language users perceive their L2 and L3 learning experiences at the level of appraisals, that is, variables that "assign value to current stimuli based on past experience". In the theoretical part of the article the concept of appraisals is introduced and briefly outlined from the different…

The biggest challenge the teaching profession faces is the question of how to overcome a system that is geared to an early 20th century view of the world community. If the 21st century communities include both the local physical neighborhood and the expanded notion of networked virtual communities, then what does that mean for learning…