This article reports on a study focusing on the use of multilingual cultural resources in child-headed households (CHHs) in Uganda's Rakai District. Using funds of knowledge and sociocultural perspectives on children's learning, we documented through ethnographic observations and interviews how children in four CHHs used multilingual cultural…

Research methodology is determined by theoretical approaches. This article discusses methods of multilingualism research in connection with theoretical developments in linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and education. Taking a brief glance at the past, the article starts with a discussion of an issue underlying the choice of…

The study aims to highlight the representations that university students have about plurilingualism, in order to research how they can develop plurilingual competences in an essentially monolingual French academic setting. It is based on a survey of 684 students enrolled in two foreign language programmes across two year levels (first and fourth…

Following Spolsky's definition of language policy, this introductory paper offers a brief reflection on the three main lines of research that are represented in this special issue regarding the relationship between internationalisation and language policies in higher education: management and planning, practices, and beliefs. In the first part, we…

This article explores the impact of superdiversity on linguistic practices in Southampton, UK. Our focus seeks to identify what these practices are in an environment that we describe as superdiverse, and what is influencing, determining, shaping and contributing to these practices. Southampton is characterised by twenty-first century social…

In this paper, I explore the impact of linguistic super-diversity on the teaching of languages at tertiary level. Through a small-scale study of university-based language teachers in Australia and the United Kingdom, I examine to what extent these teachers have become aware of the changed language profiles that their students are bringing to the…

Although the importance of using students' home languages in education has been recognised for many years, home languages that are not official languages often struggle to find space in school curricula. This paper examines the ways that language-in-education policies influence the space available for non-official languages in the curriculum. It…

The academic and public debates about language maintenance and language shift in the post-1994 South Africa distract attention from the more productive and important endeavour of explaining the nature of the multilingualism observed among users of African languages in urban contexts. An explanation for this phenomenon is offered here, based on…

Research on multilingual classrooms usually focuses on contexts where both teachers and pupils share the same linguistic repertoire; what can be called "symmetrical" multilingual classrooms. This paper sets out to investigate whether (and how) pupils' multilingual resources can be used in classrooms where the teacher does not share…

The changing demographics of neighborhoods and schools require that all educators consider how to support children who are developing bilingualism and biliteracy. Research documents the importance of engaging young children in learning by drawing on community heritages and cultural and linguistic resources, and of connecting more effectively with…

This article describes the inaugural year of a cross-cultural after-school program that used a problem-solving, project-based pedagogy to promote meaningful interactions between immigrant middle school students and their urban, low-income peers. The program relied on the students' local knowledge as they worked together to create social maps of…

This paper investigates the use of "Facebook" for out-of-class, informal language learning. 190 New Zealand university language students (Chinese, German, French, Japanese and Spanish) completed an anonymous online questionnaire on (1) their perceptions of "Facebook" as a multilingual environment, (2) their online writing…

This chapter addresses the issue of pedagogy and bilingual/multilingual education: how best to match teaching-and-learning approaches to the literacy development needs of students in multilingual educational settings. More specifically, it makes the case for what is known as the "Sydney school" genre-based literacy development approach.…

Through a comparison of France and Germany, this article investigates why the overall conception of multilingualism promoted by the education systems of the two countries favours the teaching of "useful" European standard languages over that of minority and migrant languages that are conceived in merely cultural terms. Adopting a…

Focusing on the topic of the development of the plurilingual and intercultural competence through the integration of electronic communicative practices both in foreign language classrooms and non-formal contexts, this work aims at defining and characterizing, in view of a co-actional perspective, a "pedagogical blog", by considering it…