Immigrant mothers in "new immigrant families" (one spouse is a marriage immigrant) in Taiwan are popularly viewed as culturally deficient and as not having knowledge to teach children literacy. Multiple-case study methods were adopted. Thirteen Vietnamese mothers participated in this study. The lens of "funds of knowledge" was…

The paper provides detailed assessment of a multilingual dementia patients using Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE) adapted into Hindi by the author. After providing a brief review of literature on Dementia as understood in the west, the responses of the patient under different components of the BDAE are presented. The latter part of…

Support for the use of local languages for learning and communication is currently in fashion among national policy-makers in Africa. This position has been promoted by UNESCO and other local-language advocates for years; more recently it is being seen favourably by a range of influential international institutions. However, even positive language…

The self-report questionnaire has served as the primary tool for investigating language maintenance in hundreds of communities over the past 40 years. More recently, it has been employed to investigate language shift amongst first-generation communities where one of the most useful indicators of generational change is the reported pattern of…

This article is based on results from a baseline study for an intended intervention project in bilingual-intercultural education in the Municipality of San Miguel Ixtahuacan, in the Department of San Marcos, Guatemala. To a great extent the article deals with issues of bilingual education from the perspective of social justice. It analyses the…

Diversity and intercultural awareness initiatives are increasingly common at institutions of higher education in the USA. Although students recognize and appreciate the diversity of their surroundings, studies show that intercultural interactions at the social level are lacking. This study focuses on how English language learners, multilingual…

What emerges repeatedly in research regarding language choice in South Africa is that people negotiate culture, face and identity through more than one language, and balance the need for modernity and the value of tradition, together with awareness that multiculturalism is normative in South Africa. South African scholarship focusing on…

This article presents the concept of Jewish Lithuanian as a range of post-Yiddish varieties spoken by some Jews in Lithuania and seeks to synthesise findings in contemporary ethnolect studies and in the field of Jewish language research. The legitimacy of the term "ethnolect" is questioned by some researchers; however, it is argued that…

In this contribution, I investigate the effect of the knowledge of other languages on self-perceived communicative competence and communicative anxiety in the French of 953 users. I tested the hypothesis that knowledge of more languages, specifically other Romance languages, create stronger or clearer affordances (Singleton & Aronin, Innovation in…

Nepali, the official language of administration of Nepal, has been privileged through systematic political manoeuvres throughout its history. English also enjoys special status and privileges, and despite the fact that it is officially only a "foreign" language, in practice it is one of the most dominant languages in educational and…

This paper reports on the use of ethnolinguistic vitality as the framework for a sociolinguistic survey measuring attitudes to multilingualism and reporting on the experiences of a community of Northeast Thailand (Isan) that forms part of Thailand's largest minority. The aim of the study was to examine the experiences of participants in a…

Although multilingualism and multilingual education have existed for centuries, our 21st-century entrance into the new millennium has brought renewed interest and contestation around this educational alternative. Ethnolinguistic diversity and inequality, intercultural communication and contact, and global political and economic interdependence are…

What is the influence of a language learning experience (LLE) in a school context on the metacognitive development of children? To answer that question, we presented 54 multilingual preschoolers with two movie clips and examined their reactions to an exolingual situation of communication. These preschoolers were aged four and a half to six and a…

The paper critically discusses key theoretical concepts and definitions attached to the notion of a "plurilingual social actor", and assesses their impact and implications for European language policies and for the development of plurilingualism and citizenship in schools. (Contains 11 notes.)

The bi/plurilingual person is a unique speaker-hearer who should be studied as such and not always in comparison with the monolingual. As such, unilingual linguistic models and perspectives based on the idea that bilingualism is a duplication of competences in two languages (or more) are unsuitable to describe plural practices in multilingual…