Understanding the value of monocultural acculturation orientation to the host culture (assimilation) and bicultural acculturation orientation (integration) for language learning is critical in guiding educational policy and practices for immigrant students. This study aimed to enhance our understanding on the relationship between acculturation…

This study responds to the Italian Ministry of Education mandate that, starting the 2013-2014 academic year, CLIL be implemented in the "final" year of high school, during content time, by content teachers with C1-level competence in English. This decision raises numerous concerns, at least in Calabria: most content teachers have, at best,…

During the early catalanization of schooling in the Barcelona area in the 1980s, Castilian-speaking teenagers of working-class immigrant descent often struggled against Catalan language and identity. This longitudinal study followed a group of high-school classmates and found that as young adults, some but not all of the resistant working-class…

This study investigates the effects of weekly heritage language (HL) classes on first language (L1) proficiency in speakers who arrived in the second language (L2)-dominant setting before the onset of puberty. Two groups of L1 Spanish--L2 Swedish bilingual high school students living in Sweden participated in the study. One group currently…

This paper examines two sociolinguistic lexical variables, "work" and "to dwell," in the spoken French of former immersion students in their first or fourth year at a bilingual university in Ontario, Canada. Their patterns of use are compared to those of non-immersion graduates in the same institution, to Ontario high school immersion students, to…

This paper is an exploratory study of the childhood academic language environments (CALEs) of bilingual Japanese expatriate students. Student (n=28) and parent (n=67) surveys were adapted from the Life History Calendar (Caspi et al. 1996) to gather retrospective CALE data at a Japanese-English bilingual high school. Principal Components Analysis…

This study examines a lesser-known population of students, called "long-term English language learners" (LTELLs) in the USA, who now comprise one-third of all English language learners in New York City secondary schools. A major finding from our research, which explores the characteristics and educational needs of this student population, is that…

What makes people, in shifting power positions of a post-independence period, plan on disusing an already known L2 or learn a new L2? What are the reasons for such shifts and what outcomes can, therefore, be predicted for the future of societal bilingualism surviving alongside ongoing efforts at monolingual unification in a newly independent…

The principal objective of this study was to investigate the long-term (35-36 years) effects of a K-3 bilingual-multicultural programme by studying the former Mexican-American participants and controls as adults in their 30s and 40s. The controls were enrolled in an English immersion programme and were matched to the experimental programme…

The Italian-Slovenian border represents a dynamic vantage point from which to observe how cultural and linguistic contact takes place and how minority groups have created educational strategies to preserve their cultural and linguistic diversity while striving for respectful coexistence with the dominant society. Slovene-medium schools have been…

The present study focuses on 79 young teenagers enrolled in foreign language (FL) classes in a London school. Having to decide whether to pursue the study of FLs, three groups emerged: those wishing to pursue FL classes, those having decided to abandon FL classes, and those still undecided about further FL study. A comparison of the three groups…

Differences between early and late Irish-immersion secondary school students are examined, not only in terms of academic outcome and target language ability, but also in terms of attitudes to learning the target language. Participants included a gender-balanced group of 97 students in Irish-immersion in fourth year of secondary school (mean age…

With the rapid increase in immigration from Latin America to the USA, many US high schools are struggling with the thorny question of how best to educate newcomer immigrant youth with low levels of English proficiency. This paper examines what some might consider an anachronistic educational model--a segregated bilingual high school for Latino…