About 5.3 million English Language Learners (ELLs)--students whose primary language is not English and whose English language skills are not sufficient to keep up with classes conducted only in English--are enrolled in PK-12 public schools across the United States. The number of these students increased dramatically in ten years, from 3.5 million…

In a multiracial and multilingual society where bilingualism is adopted as the cornerstone of education policy, mother tongue maintenance is a significant issue. An innovative initiative termed as "modular curriculum" was introduced in Singapore primary schools to cater to Chinese students, the major ethnic group, with varying Chinese…

This article provides an overview of the role that interdisciplinarity plays in the Spanish education system. With this aim, we first describe the main conception of the term "interdisciplinarity" in texts written in Spanish, including other terms that have similar meaning. Then we review the role of interdisciplinarity in the Spanish…

This article presents the case for using a critical literacy approach to enhance the freshman composition experience for second language writers. As our classrooms become more multilingual and multicultural with each passing semester, we need to move away from thinking of our ESL students as "outliers" and consider them as key…

The need for proficient speakers of multiple languages has emerged as a result of political and economic forces in the last decade driving the challenge to find effective and efficient way to teach and learn languages. The past decade has brought numerous innovations and advances in the area of technology, which have changed the role from one of…

Although Belgium is officially trilingual (Dutch, French, and German), its legislation does not allow for bilingual education (BE). Recently, concerns about the position of Dutch in the face of French and immigrant languages have politicized the issue in the bilingual capital of Brussels and the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders. Considering…

The voices of the main stakeholders in literacy and schooling--pupils and parents--have seldom been given adequate space in studies of school and classroom discourse in sub-Saharan Africa. The present paper attempts to redress this imbalance by presenting the voices of pupils from a multilingual urban primary school in Ghana and of parents from a…

This article reports on the small-scale evaluation of a school-based action research project, focusing on the creation of teaching materials aimed at developing tools for multilingualism for pupils aged 7-14. This three-year project was launched in September 2004 in 12 state primary schools and two secondary schools in two local authorities in the…

In 1996, the Ministry of Education in Malawi directed that in future Standards 1 to 4 would be taught through mother tongues. It took eight years before the pilot phase of the language policy could begin. The paper critically analyses this situation using Bamgbose's framework which says that, in Africa, language policies tend to follow one or more…

International campuses provide social forums to enhance students' intercultural competence, skills and confidence. Yet, despite multiple opportunities for social contact, the most typical pattern is one of minimal interaction between students from different cultural backgrounds. This study examined students' attitudes towards culturally mixed…

This article is about a small-scale research project which aimed to investigate in one local authority (LA) in England some of the outcomes of the nationwide PNS/EMA (Primary National Strategy/Ethnic Minority Achievement) pilot project, begun in 65 LAs in England in January 2004. The research project itself was conducted in the summer term of 2006…

This paper explores the social and cultural dimensions of individual multilingualism by focusing on a semi-autobiographical essay written in 1917 by an author who is usually read as a monolingual German writer but who was, in fact, multilingual and multicultural: Franz Kafka. The story is about an ape who, in order to survive his capture by the…

The present paper investigates the language learning strategy use and learning style preferences of Greek university students in order to find out the possible relations that hold between degrees of plurilingualism, strategy use and learning styles. The subjects were 1555 Greek undergraduates from a number of disciplines, learning foreign…

The present study investigates the link between multilingualism/multiculturalism, acculturation and the personality profile (as measured by the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire) of 79 young London teenagers, half of whom were born abroad and had settled down in London during their childhood "Third Culture Kids" (TCKs; Pollock…

This paper draws on the recently theorised notions of space and scale in sociolinguistics to investigate the complexity and micro-variation of the Chinese language in the context of mass internal migration, and the way in which sociolinguistic processes shed light on the construction of migrant identities. In spite of the enormously rich diversity…