In 2011, the Taiwanese Government began a campaign to encourage new immigrants to teach their native languages (heritage languages) to their children. However, these heritage languages are seldom used in cross-national families and the effectiveness of formal heritage language courses in Taiwan has yet to be explored. The present study examines…

Existing research on language in South African schooling frequently draws attention to the problematic hegemony of English and the lack of access to quality education in the home language of the majority of learners, often drawing on the metaphor of a gap or a disjuncture between post-apartheid language in education policy (LiEP) and its…

Negotiating their double identity as Mauritians and Muslims in multilingual and in multiethnic Mauritius, Mauritian Muslims have been socialised into reading and writing in Kreol in madrassahs, while they have never been exposed to Kreol literacy in mainstream education. At the point where Kreol is being introduced as an optional school subject,…

This article focuses on multilingual primary-aged children and their families in a post-industrial city in England. Such pupils, sometimes identified in education policy as "underachieving," often have rich experiences of learning that are hidden from their mainstream teachers and unrecognised in national assessment regimes. The article draws on…

First-generation Bangladeshi grandparents in the UK have consciously taken on the role of maintaining the linguistic and cultural identity of their grandchildren. Through their life experiences, they have built up "funds of knowledge" and skills that they are able to use to promote learning using strategies that are personalised and effective in…

Research has demonstrated that second language immersion is an effective means of facilitating primary school students' second language acquisition without undermining their competence in their first language. Despite the rapid growth of Chinese-English bilingual programmes in China, limited empirical research has been conducted thus far by which…

Scholars who work with Latino/as in the USA have long been calling for a more nuanced understanding of the heterogeneity of the US-based Latino population. Two-way Immersion (TWI) bilingual education programmes are an interesting context in which to examine the Latino parent communities in the USA. Overall, the language enrichment nature of TWI…

For many decades now, applied linguistics studies have investigated the impact of second language acquisition on various aspects of the development of school children. Few studies, however, have focused on the simultaneous acquisition of two additional/second languages in the classroom. The present paper explores the impact of a spoken Arabic…

Hong Kong children's comprehension of Chinese and English text is of concern to parents and teachers since school leavers need to be proficient readers both of Chinese and English. Although Chinese has been officially designated the medium of instruction in most secondary schools, many parents want their children to be taught in English-medium…

Language is not only a method of communication, but also a mechanism of power. The ethnographic research reported in this article documents how a group of Korean students, who are participating in a bilingual Korean school in Northeast China, construct their language attitude and practice. Research findings indicate that the Korean students value…

This paper is about the language attitudes that bilingual youth in Singapore have towards their Mother Tongue and English, and towards codeswitching between the two. The language attitudes of 443 primary school students were investigated using a variation of the matched-guise technique. Status and solidarity dimensions of attitudes, with ethnicity…

In this paper we report the results of a questionnaire survey conducted with 1777 Hungarian primary school children aged between 13 and 14 studying English and German. In our research we investigated the differences in the motivational and intercultural contact measures as well as determinants of motivated behaviour between learners of English and…

In the Singlish-"Good" English debate, the use of Singlish (SCE) is viewed as an obstacle to the development of students' literacy skills in standard English (SSE) and so the practice of classroom codeswitching between the two varieties is strongly discouraged. Yet the presence of the vernacular in the classroom continues to be robust. This paper…

This study examines how the language used at home, Putonghua or Cantonese, has influenced the Chinese reading attainment of 4335 primary school students in Hong Kong. Also examined was the influence of the birthplace and home background socioeconomic status (SES) of the reader. Although the indigenous Hong Kong population uses Cantonese, a dialect…

This paper reports a longitudinal quasiexperimental study that investigated the effectiveness of a theme-based syllabus versus an essentially grammatical syllabus with functional elements for young Turkish learners of English (aged 10-11) in a primary school setting. The theme-based syllabus rested on two different theoretical premises, one being…