New citizens are typically characterized as people who occupy an estuarial position between the global and the local: to simultaneously become authentic to their global provenience and rooted in their new local societies, they are expected to cautiously partake in processes of differentiation as they construct their identities. This article…

This study examines how language ideologies are negotiated and navigated in a linguistically diverse kindergarten group in Germany, focusing on the multilingual language practices of teachers and children. Drawing on data generated during 3months of focused linguistic ethnographic fieldwork, I analyse situations in which children and teachers…

In the two decades preceding Irish independence the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge, founded 1893), an organisation dedicated to the revival of the Irish language, campaigned to persuade both national and intermediate commissioners of education to reposition the language within the curriculum to reflect what the League believed was both its…

This paper provides an empirical study of word formation and lexical expansion in a set of Algonquian languages, considering 153 terms for each language. These terms range from words that predate European colonialism to more recent forms coined by English L1 speakers. We propose a classification of the methods of lexical innovation, which involves…

Safaliba is an Indigenous Ghanaian language spoken by 7-9,000 Ghanaians in a nation-state of 29 million people with 73 indigenous languages, none of which are spoken by a majority of Ghanaians. Government schools in Safaliba towns and villages are mandated to utilize Gonja and English instructional reading materials from the Ghana Education…

We present findings from a randomized controlled trial of "Descubriendo la Lectura" (DLL), an intervention designed to improve the literacy skills of Spanish-speaking first graders, who are struggling with reading. DLL offers one-on-one native language literacy instruction for 12 to 20 weeks to each school's lowest performing…

Researchers have studied academic self-concept and its relationship to academic achievement extensively, but not in the Spanish heritage language context. Using measures of reading, writing, and spelling performance, I investigate the relation between self-concept and performance and whether self-concept can predict performance scores. I obtained…

The language of behavior analysis is precise in the sense that it focuses attention on functional relations between behavior and the environment that are extended in time. However, to non-behavior analysts, behavior-analytic terms and explanations are difficult to understand and awkward sounding. Evidence suggests that this has had deleterious…

This study brings together two previously largely independent fields of multilingual language acquisition: heritage language and third language (L3) acquisition. We investigate the production of fortis and lenis stops in semi-naturalistic speech in the three languages of 20 heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian with German as a majority language and…

How could individual differences in processing non-speech acoustic signals influence their cue weighting strategies for L2 speech contrasts? The present study investigated this question by testing forty L1 Chinese-L2 English listeners with two tasks: one for testing the listeners' sensitivity to pitch and temporal information of non-speech…

Judicial discourse can grant or deprive liberty to litigants. It is, therefore, important to ensure fair hearing during trials and even more as courtrooms have become multilingual settings. In the Court of First Instance of Bafoussam, French (one of the official languages of Cameroon) often come into contact with more than 250 national languages.…

Languages vary according to which morphosyntactic forms of embedding are present in the grammar as well as to which of these forms allow recursive embedding. The present study examines how German-speaking children discover which forms of embedding are recursive. In German, possessive modifiers are expressed by several structural options (i.e.,…

A frequent observation in the school context is that opportunities to learn from errors are often missed. However, a positive error climate may support learning from errors. For the school subject of mathematics, some findings about characteristics of the error climate already exist. But, a comparison of the error climate between different school…

The purpose of this study is to investigate how triadic dialog promotes generalization of growing figural patterns during classroom talk in multilingual classrooms and crucial linguistic terms that the teacher and students draw on in their home language, as they engage in pattern generalization. Ten sessions in two classrooms in grade 7 were…

Most common words in English have multiple different meanings, but relatively little is known about why children grasp some meanings better than others. This study aimed to examine how variables at the child-level, wordform-level, and meaning-level impact knowledge of words with multiple meanings. In this study, 174 children aged 5- to 9-years-old…