This monograph provides an overview of the language situation in Hong Kong from a historical perspective. Hong Kong has evolved in the past 167 years from a small fishing port to an international financial centre which forms part of a financial network hailed by "Time Magazine" as Ny.Lon.Kong (i.e. New York-London-Hong Kong). Hong Kong…

The human brain has the fascinating ability to represent and to process several languages. Although the first and further languages activate partially different brain networks, the linguistic factors underlying these differences in language processing have to be further specified. We investigated the neural correlates of language proficiency in a…

The purpose of this paper is to draw on recent studies of bilingualism and emotions to argue for three types of modifications to the current models of the bilingual lexicon. The first modification involves word categories: I will show that emotion words need to be considered as a separate class of words in the mental lexicon, represented and…

This author, a lecturer in the Education Program at the University of Washington (Bothell), relates an experience that dated back to an invitation to give a talk at the Gwangju International Center (GIC) in Korea in the Summer of 2011. Min spoke about culturally-embedded writing practices across nations and presented some practical strategies that…

The author works as a biliteracy teacher in a bilingual school that serves students from K-5th grade. She and her coteacher provide instruction in both English and Spanish to 4th and 5th graders. They have two language arts blocks so that students receive literacy instruction in both their native and second languages, and they teach math, social…

This hands-on guide shows elementary school teachers how to create multilingual classroom communities that support every learner's success in reading, writing, and general literacy development. The author provides a practical overview of key ideas and techniques and describes specific literacy activities that lead to vocabulary and oral English…

Inside the globalisation era in which society is immersed, one of the current challenges for any educational system is to provide quality education. While some countries are linguistically homogeneous, many countries and regions display a wealth of linguistic diversity and it is essential to adapt the educational system to those realities. In…

This study presents the main findings from a study which investigated Malaysian multilingual students' practical use of three languages with respect to reading, speaking and writing in Bahasa Malaysia (BM), English and German. In addition, two further aspects have been examined: students' motivation to learn a language, and the respondents'…

Research on bilingual word recognition suggests that lexical access is nonselective with respect to language, i.e., that word representations of both languages become active during recognition. One piece of evidence supporting nonselective access is that bilinguals recognize cognates (words that are identical or similar in form and meaning in two…

Research in monolingual populations indicate that vocabulary knowledge is essential to reading achievement, but how vocabulary develops in bilingual children has been understudied. The current study investigated the role of home and school factors in predicting English vocabulary among 284 bilingual kindergartners (168 Chinese, 65 Malay, 51…

This article explores the impact of language policy issues on program development and management at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich Language Center. Based on the analysis of the language policy approach of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, the article reflects both current practices and policy elements with the help of the…

This study explores transformations in the cultural identities of a group of pre-service teachers from mainland China during their educational experiences in Hong Kong, and how these transformations subsequently impact their professional identity. Individual and focus group interviews were conducted with 16 cross-border pre-service teachers from a…

This case study is part of a larger project which aims to determine the usefulness and validity of a model of a pre-service content and language integrated learning (CLIL) teacher education programme inserted in a Master's degree, whose main pedagogical option is to achieve teacher empowerment through cycles of collaborative teaching and shared…

The project "The educational value of various aspects of multilingualism in the classroom of the Basque Country and of Friesland" concerns a comparative study of the languages in the schools in the Basque Autonomous Community and in the Province of Friesland. It is part of the agreement between the general administration of the Basque…

Multilingualism is an international fact of life and increasing in the United States. Multilingual families are exceedingly diverse, and policies relevant to them should take this into account. The quantity and quality of a child's exposure to responsive conversation spoken by fluent adults predicts both monolingual and multilingual language and…