This article offers a review of some of the major issues of bilingualism in education in Malta. It starts by contextualising the current situation in a historical perspective. From the macro-perspective it then moves to a micro-perspective to illustrate how, in practice, Maltese and English are used as a bilingual medium of instruction across…

In Malta, mathematics is often taught through code-switching between Maltese and English, mainly due to the use of textbooks published in the UK. The mixing of the languages has been a source of discussion for several years, with some educators accepting the mixed pattern, and others arguing in favour of using English alone. Furthermore, the…

Linguistic evidence shows that the dialects of Maltese present on the islands of Malta and Gozo are distinct from Standard Maltese (SM) on all linguistic levels. This article describes the dialectal reality in Gozo and inside Gozitan classrooms on the basis of data collected through classroom observation and interviews. The emphasis on the use of…

This article addresses the issue of teacher codeswitching in the teaching of Italian in Malta. The analysis of teacher codeswitching shows that the learners' first language (L1), Maltese, is used as a pedagogical tool to enhance language learning. Teachers frequently resort to Maltese to provide more learner-friendly explanations of grammatical…

Immigrant students may use and develop language and literacy skills differently depending on the dominance of the first and second language (L1 and L2) in the neighborhoods where they live. In this study, neighborhood effects on students' reported language use at home and with peers, and on measured language and literacy proficiency, were…

This article reports on an investigation of family language policies among 37 Albanian immigrant families in Northern Greece within the framework of Spolsky's language policy model. Data collection was based on semi-directed interviews with parents which were analysed using both content and discourse analysis. According to our findings, three…

In a Danish context, the acquisition of literacy by the "bilingual student" is embedded in an education policy discourse in which literacy is seen as a cognitive competence that can be quantified by measuring a number of specific skills in a defined language and in a defined written language. On the basis of empirical data from the…

The curricular attainment of pupils in Gaelic-medium primary education in Scotland is investigated using surveys of Gaelic-medium and English-medium pupils in the fifth and seventh years of primary school (approximately 9 and 11 years of age) in 2007. The Gaelic-medium survey was essentially a census of pupils. The English-medium survey was a…

This study examines the relationship between caregivers' conversational styles in One-Person-One-Language (OPOL) settings and early bilingual development. In particular, it attempts to demonstrate that interrogative styles may have an impact on bilingual children's responsiveness in two language contexts. It is based on longitudinal data of a…

Code switching (CS) (or language mixing) generally takes place in bilingual children's utterances, even if their parents adhere to the "one parent-one language" principle. The present case study of a Japanese-Chinese bilingual infant provides both quantitative and qualitative analyses on the impact of input on output, as manifested in CS. The…

In the seven decades since Leopold's groundbreaking 1939 study, there has been no longitudinal study covering more than two years of a Japanese bilingual subject's development. Despite the lack of longitudinal research, however, we have been broadly informed by the veritable outpouring of research on a short-term basis since the late twentieth…

This article investigates English-Japanese children's code-switching (CS) from the structural point of view. Muysken categorises it into three types, that is, insertion, alternation and congruent lexicalisation. Regarding insertion, using Myers-Scotton's matrix language frame (MLF) model, for example, the matrix language (ML) of a bilingual clause…

Despite intentions to raise children in two home languages, non-Japanese bilingual homes may be encouraging the development of the societal language in children born in Japan. This article investigates: (1) the language use of two trilingual mothers with their developing trilingual children, and (2) how the mothers respond to their children's use…

Anglophone children in Grades 2 and 5 who attended an intensive French immersion program were examined for linguistic and metalinguistic ability in English and French. Measures of linguistic proficiency (vocabulary and grammatical knowledge) were consistently higher in English and remained so even after 5 years of immersion education in French.…

The present study investigates the link between personality traits (OCEAN Personality test), emotional intelligence (EI) (Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire) and the notion of "feeling different" while using a foreign language among 102 Polish-English bilinguals and Polish L2 users of English who were immersed in a foreign language and…