Functional neuroimaging of bilinguals and monolinguals used in conjunction with experimental cognitive tasks has been successful in establishing functional specialization as a principle of brain organization in humans. Consistent results show that attained proficiency and possibly language exposure are more important than age of acquisition as a…

Introduces a special issue on the complex relationship between multilingualism and education in the Mediterranean region. Articles examine Maltese bilingual education; teaching English in Algeria; shifts in environmental literacy in Lebanon; multilingual education in Lebanon; cognitive-academic language proficiency and language acquisition in…

Algeria's educational system and language usage are politically controlled. As French loses its ground, English is being heralded as a solution to the country's problems. Popular vernaculars are banned. Language policy is the result of political takeovers. The introduction of English in elementary school appears to be an attempt to end the…

Investigates the design differences between Chinese and English language versions of Web sites based on evidence gathered from Chinese academic Web sites. Through surveying and interviewing university Webmasters from Mainland China and Taiwan, this study seeks to gain real-life insights into the design environment of multilingual Web development.…

Introduces this special issue of the journal. Examines why there is a focus on Sweden, perspectives on the role of first languages in Sweden, historical perspective on historical and territorial minority language policy in Sweden, and the debate on the role of English. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the consequences of the dominance of English for a small language like Swedish and a small country like Sweden. Presents a survey of contrastive studies, which reveal that texts and writing in the mother tongue differ between cultures. Discusses studies of the current situation in Sweden, which reveal a serious threat towards certain…

This article draws from an ethnographic research project looking at the communicative practices of children and parents in a multilingual area of London. One focus in the study was on participants' use of narrative to convey cultural identities. Narratives in the families were evoked through shared discussions of artifacts and objects displayed…

The story of School X started in South Africa in 1875. At that time, the school was built for white children only. More than hundred years later, the 1994 elections demarcated the end of the apartheid era and the school enrolled black Xhosa-speaking children for the first time. As a result, in 2004, 90% of the students were black Xhosa-speaking.…

There is now widely recognized support for classroom-based formative teacher assessment of student performance as a pedagogically desirable approach to assessment which is capable of promoting learning. However, the highly localized and socially co-constructed nature of this type of assessment has raised conceptual and research issues that…

We assessed six multilingual subjects by functional MRI using a Noun Verb Generation task in four different languages. We hypothesised that the degree of proficiency in each language would be related to the extent of functional activity measured in a region of interest analysis. Proficiency in each language was quantified using two…

According to the aspect hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1996; Bardovi-Harlig, 2000), perfective morphology emerges before imperfective morphology, it is first used in telic predicates (achievements and accomplishments) and it later extends to atelic predicates (activities and states). The opposite development is hypothesized for imperfective…

Encouraging pupils to develop a sense of European identity is one of the implicit aims of the "European Schools". This paper reports on a small case study that was carried out in 2004 that investigated how the European School at Culham attempts to develop in its pupils a sense of European identity. In particular, the study looked at the…

In this article, the authors draw attention to the need for ethnolinguistic democracy at a time when linguistic and cultural issues are significantly impacting how schools, educators, students, and curriculum are perceived. The authors delineate the manifold acts of imperialism associated with the colonizing of young minds and bodies as culture…

For the purposes of this article, the authors define "multilingualism" as a state of general communicative proficiency in more than two languages; that is, a person is multilingual when he or she can fulfill his or her communicative goals in at least three languages. Bilingualism and trilingualism are thus seen as specific subtypes of a…

Apache Indian's spectacular performance of the identity of "Jamaican" dancehall DJ exemplifies the problematic politics of acculturation in "postcolonial" Britain. Born in the Handsworth district of Birmingham, a major centre of Caribbean and South Asian migration, this multilingual, border-crossing, urban youth appropriates…