This study describes the evolution of English language teaching in Finland and looks into the connections of the societal and educational changes in the country as explanatory factors in the process. The results of the study show that the language teaching methodology and the status of foreign languages in Finland are clearly connected to the…

This paper presents an extension of the Multiple Grammars Theory (Roeper, 1999) to provide a formal mechanism that can serve as a generative-based alternative to current descriptive models of interlanguage. The theory extends historical work by Kroch and Taylor (1997), and has been taken into a computational direction by Yang (2003). The proposal…

This study investigated how students learning English and students learning Spanish activated multilingual repertoires as they participated in one high school program that aimed to promote reciprocal learning and teaching of multilingual literacy practices. Grounded in sociocultural theory, we examined how students drew upon Spanish, English, and…

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…