This book investigates how bilingualism affects children's language, cognitive and narrative abilities. The data sample derives from 209 8-12 years old bilingual children, in three different targeted languages (Greek-English, Greek-German, Greek-Albanian) along with 100 monolingual Greek children. The children completed baseline and experimental tasks measuring their vocabulary, grammar, cognitive skills, and narrative production abilities. The outcome of this work reveals that learning to read and write in two languages is beneficial for the development of language and cognitive skills. A strong case can be made to the growing bilingual communities in Germany and beyond to provide literacy training in both languages within mainstream schools, afternoon classes outside of the curriculum or in community schools.

This edited volume brings together 10 cutting-edge empirical studies on the realities of English language learning, teaching and testing in a wide range of global contexts where English is an additional language. It covers three themes: learners' development of interactional competence, the organization of teaching and testing practices, and sociocultural and ideological forces that may impact classroom interaction. With a decided focus on English-as-a-Foreign-Language contexts, the studies involve varied learner populations, from children to young adults to adults, in different learning environments around the world. The insights gained will be of interest to EFL professionals, as well as teacher trainers, policymakers and researchers.

In French Immersion Ideologies in Canada, Sylvie Roy gives voice to people who have experiences with French immersion programs in Alberta, Canada. Using a sociolinguistics for change approach, she interprets questions related to language ideologies, as well as reasons people learn French as an additional language and why some students are asked to learn English first. She also reflects on what it means to become or to be bilingual or multilingual in a globalized world. Roy discusses teachers' and learners' linguistic and cultural practices and examines transculturality for the future. By questioning concepts that recur in participants' narratives, this book explores how power is reproduced, who is marginalized in the process, and what can be done to deconstruct ideologies about learning and teaching French in Canada and in the world. Roy demonstrates complex issues related to the French language and their consequences for learners, parents, teachers, and administrators.

Focusing on English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in the Arab Gulf states, the authors consider both sociolinguistic and pedagogical perspectives, and explore practical implications. This edited volume features chapters covering how teachers are negotiating the linguistic challenges posed by EMI; issues of ownership, choice and agency; the scaffolding of academic literacies; how to support the development of content teachers' pedagogical content knowledge in EMI settings as well as the benefits of a bilingual education. Chapter authors all have extensive local experience that they draw upon reflectively in their writing. Policy-makers, teachers and teacher educators wondering how they can best balance the need to develop competence in English in students of all ages on the Arabian Peninsula in a globalizing world, together with the concern to nurture Arabic language, culture and identity, will gain rich insights from this book. Postgraduates and researchers exploring issues surrounding EMI, both locally and internationally, will benefit from the arguments presented in this volume.

Affirming the Rights of Emergent Bilingual and Multilingual Children and Families explores how the philosophy, principles, and practices of the internationally acclaimed Municipal Preschools and Infant Toddler Centers of Reggio Emilia, Italy, advance the social justice and linguistic human rights of emergent bilingual and multilingual children and their families, particularly immigrants and refugees. The book is driven by the authors' research-based discourse including an interview with Reggio Emilia educators and direct observations in the Preschools and Infant-toddler Centers in Italy. Chapters include survey and follow-up interviews, and classroom examples from U.S. early childhood educators inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach some of whom are in multilingual settings. Recommendations are included for practitioners who are intentional about advocating for the rights of emergent bi- and multilingual young children. Also included are the researchers' interpretations and reflexive narratives on contextuality, intersectionality, and intertextuality, which interweave theories and practice. The insightful examinations of scholarly work and the critical review of the distinctive features of the Reggio Emilia philosophy contribute to an early childhood education transformative lens that challenges the status quo of inequities and foregrounds the linguistic and cultural rights of learners who speak different languages. The authors review research and theory that inform the latest developments in culturally and linguistically responsive practices in innovative early education (infant through pre-k), family participation, and teacher preparation and development. Of general interest to educators and researchers around the world who work to ensure the rights of emergent language learners, this is an essential text for upper-level and graduate students, early childhood educators, educational and community leaders, administrators, and researchers.

Affirming the Rights of Emergent Bilingual and Multilingual Children and Families explores how the philosophy, principles, and practices of the internationally acclaimed Municipal Preschools and Infant Toddler Centers of Reggio Emilia, Italy, advance the social justice and linguistic human rights of emergent bilingual and multilingual children and their families, particularly immigrants and refugees. The book is driven by the authors' research-based discourse including an interview with Reggio Emilia educators and direct observations in the Preschools and Infant-toddler Centers in Italy. Chapters include survey and follow-up interviews, and classroom examples from U.S. early childhood educators inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach some of whom are in multilingual settings. Recommendations are included for practitioners who are intentional about advocating for the rights of emergent bi- and multilingual young children. Also included are the researchers' interpretations and reflexive narratives on contextuality, intersectionality, and intertextuality, which interweave theories and practice. The insightful examinations of scholarly work and the critical review of the distinctive features of the Reggio Emilia philosophy contribute to an early childhood education transformative lens that challenges the status quo of inequities and foregrounds the linguistic and cultural rights of learners who speak different languages. The authors review research and theory that inform the latest developments in culturally and linguistically responsive practices in innovative early education (infant through pre-k), family participation, and teacher preparation and development. Of general interest to educators and researchers around the world who work to ensure the rights of emergent language learners, this is an essential text for upper-level and graduate students, early childhood educators, educational and community leaders, administrators, and researchers.

This book offers essential insights into the challenges and complexities surrounding the medium of instruction (MOI), its impact on all languages and stakeholders in multilingual contexts, educational processes, developments and outcomes. MOI has been a prominent topic in recent debates on the role of languages in education in multilingual contexts, partly because prioritizing one language over others as the medium of instruction has a profound impact on all languages and stakeholders in multilingual contexts. These include, to name but a few, (language) teachers, teacher educators, students, and policymakers, as well as industries and enterprises built around the needs and expectations of these stakeholders. This book presents high-quality empirical research on education in multilingual societies. It highlights research findings that, in addition to providing descriptions of language learning, development and use in language contact and multilingual contexts, will help shape future language education policy and practices in multilingual societies.

This book is the beginning of a conversation across Social Semiotics, Translanguaging, Complexity Theory and Radical Sociolinguistics. In its explorations of meaning, multimodality, communication and emerging language practices, the book includes theoretical and empirical chapters that move toward an understanding of communication in its dynamic complexity, and its social semiotic and situated character. It relocates current debates in linguistics and in multimodality, as well as conceptions of centers/margins, by re-conceptualizing communicative practice through investigation of indigenous/oral communities, street art performances, migration contexts, recycling artefacts and signage repurposing. The book takes an innovative approach to both the form and content of its scholarly writing, and will be of interest to all those involved in interdisciplinary thinking, researching and writing.

This book examines one-way foreign language immersion education in the United States. It provides a clear and rich description of a Chinese (Mandarin) immersion program, its curriculum, instructional materials, assessment activities, parental involvement and student outcomes. The author analyses two studies that document the development of the students' reading skills in English and Chinese, and the progress of their vocabulary knowledge, lexical inference, and reading comprehension in Chinese. In addition, this book contextualizes the program in its eco-system, including its neighbourhood, school, and the school district, and discusses the importance of school leadership, parental involvement, neighbourhood support and language acquisition planning in making an innovative school program successful. Its concluding chapters offer recommendations for program- and classroom-level practices and suggest pathways for future research on biliteracy learning in Chinese one-way immersion programs. This book will appeal in particular to students and scholars of applied linguistics, second language acquisition and language education.

It's no secret that parents want their children to have the lifelong cultural and intellectual advantages that come from being bilingual. Parents spend millions of dollars every year on classes, computer programs, and toys, all of which promise to help children learn a second language. But many of their best efforts (and investments) end in disappointment.

In "The Bilingual Edge," professors and parents King and Mackey wade through the hype and provide clear insights into what actually works. No matter what your language background is--whether you never passed Spanish in high school or you speak Mandarin fluently--King and Mackey will help you:

select the language that will give your child the most benefits

find materials and programs that will assist your child in achieving fluency

identify and use your family's unique traits to maximize learning

Fancy private schools and expensive materials aren't needed. Instead, "The Bilingual Edge" translates the latest research into interactive strategies and quick tips that even the busiest parents can use.

Academic Discourse Socialization: Case Study on Multilingual Learners examines academic literacy development. Yutaka Fujieda draws on literacy autobiographies, reflective journals, final narratives, blog posts on Moodle, and individual and focus group interviews with multilingual students in a mandatory research seminar course to unpack their processes, experiences, and practices of academic literacy and academic identity construction. Fujieda argues that multilingual students' academic identities are co-constructed via various roles and a sense of belonging to the discourse community.

This edited volume provides innovative insights into how critical language pedagogy and taboo topics can inform and transform the teaching and learning of foreign languages. The book investigates the potential as well as the challenges involved in dealing with taboo topics in the foreign language classroom. These are traditionally often subsumed under the acronym PARSNIP (politics, alcohol, religion, narcotics, isms, and pork) to critically examine how challenging topics such as disability, racism, conspiracy theories and taboo language can be integrated into conceptual teaching frameworks and teaching practice. It draws on examples from literacy texts and pop culture such as young adult novels, music videos, or rap songs and investigates their potential for developing critical literacies. The book considers foreign language teaching outside of English teaching contexts and sets the groundwork for addressing the integration of taboo topics in foreign language education theory, research and practice. Filling an important gap in educational research, the book will be of great interest to researchers, academics and students of foreign language education, critical pedagogy and applied linguistics. It will also be useful reading for teacher trainers and educators of foreign language education.

With an estimated 1.6 million English as an Additional Language (EAL) learners in the UK, and over 5 million in the USA, EAL research is urgently needed to inform practice. This edited volume investigates the multifaceted elements that shape EAL pedagogy and research in a variety of settings and research areas including linguistic ability influences on subject-specific skills, integrating learners' home languages into classroom environments, and the importance of supporting EAL teachers in the classroom. In doing so, the contributors provide an international perspective on the emerging field of EAL research. The research-based chapters detail fundamental concerns related to EAL learner education. The text is composed of three parts: Part 1 explores the question of what is EAL and how a definition can shape policy construction; Part 2 examines the challenges EAL learners face in the classroom, including the use of first languages and the relative impact learner language proficiency has on subject-specific classes; and Part 3 investigates concerns relating to supporting EAL teachers in the classroom. The volume draws on researcher expertise from a variety of universities and institutions worldwide. It explores diverse language backgrounds in multilingual contexts. It covers empirical studies with pedagogical, policy and further research implications. The volume represents a single resource invaluable for EAL teachers, trainers and trainees, as well as researchers in the field of education, language learning and teaching, bilingualism and multilingualism, and second language acquisition.

- Provides a comprehensive exploration of the field of student recruitment agencies in higher education - Whilst looking at the history of the topic, it also considers the emerging trends I the areas - Addresses both the pros and cons of student recruitment agencies on a global scale.

The studies in this collection seek to examine the notions of 'linguistic diversity' and 'hybridity' through the lenses of new critical theories and theoretical frameworks embedded within the broader discussion of the sociolinguistics of globalization. The chapters include critical inquiries into online/offline languages in society, language users, language learners and language teachers who may operate 'between' languages and are faced with decisions to navigate, negotiate and invent or re-invent languages, local and global and virtual spaces. The research took place in contexts that include linguistic landscapes, schools, classrooms, neighborhoods and virtual spaces of Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Japan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, South Korea and the USA.

The studies in this collection seek to examine the notions of 'linguistic diversity' and 'hybridity' through the lenses of new critical theories and theoretical frameworks embedded within the broader discussion of the sociolinguistics of globalization. The chapters include critical inquiries into online/offline languages in society, language users, language learners and language teachers who may operate 'between' languages and are faced with decisions to navigate, negotiate and invent or re-invent languages, local and global and virtual spaces. The research took place in contexts that include linguistic landscapes, schools, classrooms, neighborhoods and virtual spaces of Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Japan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, South Korea and the USA.

This book examines how language is a central resource in transforming migrant women into transnational domestic workers. Focusing on the migration of women from the Philippines to Singapore, the book unpacks why and how language is embedded in the infrastructure of transnational labor migration that links migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries. It sheds light on the everyday lives of transnational domestic workers and how they draw on their linguistic repertoires, and in particular on English, as they cross geographical and social spaces. By showing how the transnational mobility of labor is dependent on the selection and performance of particular assemblages of linguistic resources that index migrants as labor and not as people, the book provides a powerful lens with which to examine how migration contributes to relationships of inequality and how such inequalities are produced and challenged on the terrain of language.

As the demand for English language education grows in Asia, there has been a parallel growth in the development and implementation of standardized tests at the local level. Offering much-needed context on locally produced tests in Asia, contributors examine emerging models for English language assessment and the impact these large-scale tests have on the teaching and learning of English. Chapters address the following well-known and developing high-stakes tests in different regions across Asia: the GEPT, the TEPS, the VSTEP, the CET, the EIKEN and TEAP, and the ELPA. Brought together by world-renowned testing assessment scholar Cyril Weir and the Language Training and Testing Center (LTTC), one of Asia's leading testing institutions based in Taiwan, this volume is a useful reference for evaluating, developing, and validating local tests of English and their societal impact. Comprehensive and research-based, chapters cover historic backgrounds, sociocultural contexts, test quality, international standing, and future considerations. Ideal for graduate students, researchers, and scholars in language assessment, TESOL/TEFL, and applied linguistics, this book will also be of interest to language teaching professionals, language test developers, and graduate students in Asian studies and international education, intercultural communication, and intercultural studies.

The body of research in this volume offers a detailed account of the success of young immersion learners of Irish in becoming competent speakers of the minority language. Taking account of in-class and out-of-class factors, it examines the variety of Irish spoken by the pupils, the extent to which the Irish spoken deviates from native-speaker norms, the degree to which pupils are aware of and attempt to acquire a native-like variety and the extent to which issues of identity and motivation are involved. The results highlight the limitations of an immersion system in generating active and accurate users of the language outside the immersion setting and will help immersion educators to gain a greater understanding of how young immersion learners learn and acquire the target language. The findings are placed in the context of other one-way immersion programmes internationally with a particular focus on minority language settings, and make an important contribution not only to our understanding of the Irish issues, but how the Irish situation can be placed in a broader scholarly and socio-political context.

This volume examines the unique characteristics of akshara orthography and how they may affect literacy development and problems along with the implications for assessment and instruction. Even though akshara orthography is used by more than a billion people, there is an urgent need for a systematic attempt to bring the features, research findings, and future directions of akshara together in a coherent volume. We hope that this volume will bridge that gap. Akshara is used in several Indic languages, each calling it by a slightly different name, for example 'aksharamu', in Telugu, 'akshara' in Kannada, and 'akshar' in Hindi. It is the Bhrami-derived orthography used across much of the Indian subcontinent. There is a growing body of research on the psycholinguistic underpinnings of learning to read akshara, and the emerging perspective is that akshara, even though classified as alphasyllabaries, abugida, and semi-syllabic writing systems, is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Rather, akshara orthography is unique and deserves to be a separate classification and needs further investigation relating to literacy acquisition in akshara. The chapters in this volume, written by leading authors in the field, will inform the reader of the current research on akshara in a coherent and systematic way.

This book focuses on Hong Kong as a multilingual society. It investigates how trilingual education is implemented in Hong Kong primary schools. Based on a large scale survey of 155 Hong Kong schools and in-depth case studies in 3 selected schools, the book gives an overview of trilingual education in Hong Kong primary schools, revealing the views on trilingual education of all stakeholders: school principals, panel chairs, subject teachers, students, and parents. The research findings presented in this book suggest that the implementation of trilingual education varies significantly from school to school, as does the effectiveness of the trilingual education models used. It shows how students' views towards the use of different media of instruction (MoIs) also vary, and how their mother-tongue backgrounds affect their perceptions. By documenting views, policies and implementation methods, the book provides insight into the practice of trilingual education in Hong Kong and offers suggestions on potentially effective implementation methods.

This edited collection provides research-informed guidance on how reflexivity may be practised in applied linguistics research. Specifically, we promote reflexivity as an essential hallmark of quality research and argue that doing reflexivity confers greater transparency, methodological rigour, depth, and trustworthiness to our scholarly inquiries. The collection features perspectives from different sub-fields of applied linguistics, including intercultural communication, language education, and multilingualism, and draws on data from a range of settings, including language cafes, classrooms, workplaces, and migration and displacement contexts. Each chapter follows a unified structure: theoretical background, context of the empirical study used as a backdrop for the chapter, an analysis of how reflexivity played out throughout the study, and conclusions which include takeaway points for other researchers. This approach allows readers to gain a sound understanding of the challenges and affordances of doing reflexivity in concrete examples of applied linguistics research whilst also gaining guidance on how to nurture and report on researcher reflexivity as this unfolds throughout the lifetime of a project. This book will appeal to students and scholars in applied linguistics, particularly those with an interest in research methods in the areas of language education, multilingualism, and intercultural communication.

• Offers advanced students, researchers, and university administrators with the state of the art in research and practical, evidence-based insights on heritage language program administration/direction and curriculum development, in order to understand and provide quality education to HL learners through effective HL program direction. • Meets a need for synthesis of the great increase in work on heritage language learners and university-based programs, heretofore covered in articles and individual chapters but not all in one place on the book level. Makes much-needed connections between the research literature and practice in developing programs and curricula. • The first book that discusses this subject, full stop. A few books focus on L2, ESL, or FL language program direction but they lack any attention to heritage language learners.

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is an increasingly popular educational approach given its dual focus on enabling learners to acquire subject-matter through an additional language, while learning this second language in tandem with content. This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of recent CLIL developments, illustrating how CLIL has been uniquely conceptualized and practiced across educational and geographical contexts. Divided into six sections, covering language and language teaching, core themes and issues, contexts and learners, CLIL in practice, CLIL around the world and a final section looking forward to future research directions, every chapter provides a balanced discussion of the benefits, challenges and implications of this approach. Representing the same diversity and intercultural understanding that CLIL features, the chapters are authored by established as well as early-career academics based around the world. The Routledge Handbook of Content and Language Integrated Learning is the essential guide to CLIL for advanced students and researchers of applied linguistics, education and TESOL.

This book examines the role played by the international circulation of literature in constructing cultural memories of the Second World War. War writing has rarely been read from the point of view of translation even though war is by definition a multilingual event, and knowledge of the Second World War and the Holocaust is mediated through translated texts. Here, the author opens up this field of research through analysis of several important works of French war fiction and their English translations. The book examines the wartime publishing structures which facilitated literary exchanges across national borders, the strategies adopted by translators of war fiction, the relationships between translated war fiction and dominant national memories of the war, and questions of multilingualism in war writing. In doing so, it sheds new light on the political and ethical questions that arise when the trauma of war is represented in fiction and through translation. This engaging work will appeal to students and scholars of translation, cultural memory, war fiction and Holocaust writing.