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This study examined student teachers' beliefs about teaching multilingual classrooms across three European contexts; Slovenia, Spain (Catalonia), and Finland. Research shows that teachers' confidence in handling linguistically diverse classrooms is lacking. Linguistically sensitive teaching (LST) was used as a lens to explore different expressions of 'fears' in student teachers vis-à-vis handling plurilingual pedagogies. We collected reflections of 128 student teachers and carried out an inductive, thematic content analysis in multiple cycles. The findings showed that student teachers' fears were related to the following five categories: 1) languages in society; 2) building relationships; 3) teaching skills and methods; 4) external evaluation and teacher's autonomy, and 5) legislation and policies. Student teachers in all three contexts shared concerns over how to protect minority languages and how to obtain enough opportunities to train for LST. A major difference between the contexts emerged in the categories of building relationships and external evaluation. By examining student teachers' expressions of fear in the Slovene, Catalan and Finnish contexts, the study gives clues to better design initial teacher education courses that support the inclusion of LST in teacher practices.

Community colleges across the United States are increasingly linguistically diverse, with populations that often include immigrant students who have grown up with a language other than English but have spent a significant part of their childhood in the U.S. and as such received a substantial part of their -K-12 education there. In this paper, we analyze perceived second language (L2) effects in essays written by multilingual "resident," i.e., immigrant, students enrolled in pre-credit bearing developmental and ESL writing courses. Focusing on a predominant set of grammatical patterns identified in previous research, this study compares the writings of L2 resident students to those of monolingual and international L2 students. Findings reveal that the age of arrival to the U.S. impacts grammatical patterns, with L2 resident students arriving after age 12 displaying residual grammatical L2 acquisition effects, as contrasted with earlier arrivals, whose writings resemble monolingual students' more closely. As familiarity with "standard" English patterns is unfortunately often viewed by community college instructors as indicative of "academic" writing ability, we argue that these findings indicate a need for community colleges to consider students' linguistic histories and their effects in order to interpret resident L2 students' writing skills correctly and to provide appropriate linguistic support for resident L2 students across the curriculum. Professional development that emphasizes critical language awareness is needed so that instructors can better understand and support linguistic diversity in their classrooms.

Teacher self-efficacy (TSE) changes according to context. Limited research has been conducted to understand how TSE can vary in relation to student characteristics or the student-teacher relationship (STR) in preschool. The aims of the current study were to 1) examine student-specific TSE variability among monolingual English-speaking and Spanish-speaking dual language learners (DLLs) and 2) examine the extent to which STR quality moderates the relationship between student language and student-specific TSE. Results demonstrated that when controlling for closeness in the STR, teachers felt higher levels of student-specific TSE in the domains of instructional support and student engagement for English-speaking students versus DLLs. However, teachers reported equal levels of student-specific TSE in the domains of behavior management and emotional support irrespective of student language. Secondly, STR quality did not significantly moderate relationships between language and student-specific TSE. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.

This study explored whether the directionality of the relation between majority language and various facets of socioemotional development (three to 5 years old) differs between children with different language backgrounds. 12,951 children (49% girls; 85% White, 6% Pakistani and Bangladeshi, 3% Black, 3% Mix, 2% Indian) from the British Millennium Cohort Study (2001-2006) were included in two-time-point cross-lagged analyses. Models controlling for important covariates found a bidirectional association for monolinguals ([beta]s = 0.05, -0.07, -0.04), a unidirectional effect of majority language on socioemotional difficulties for dual language learners (DLLs) speaking English and minority language(s) at home ([beta] = 0.14), and a unidirectional effect of socioemotional strength on majority language for DLLs speaking only minority language(s) at home ([beta] = -0.17).

This article puts forth a multilingual perspective on reading to counter the prevailing monolingualism that dominates reading instruction. First, it brings theories together to develop a cohesive understanding of teaching reading with emergent bilinguals at the center. Second, it illuminates ways educators can design reading instruction, which is responsive to and normalizes emergent bilinguals' resources. In taking up a multilingual perspective of reading, educators have a challenge and opportunity to engage in intellectual and practical work to ensure emergent bilinguals' strengths are at the center of reading instruction.

Responding to a recent call for interdisciplinary research into 'night studies', the present study attempts to put the nighttime at the centre of the sociolinguistic enquiry, seeking to explore how the nocturnal linguistic landscape (LL) differs from the diurnal LL by drawing on Singapore's Chinatown as the research site. A total of 1091 LL items constitute the database. Altogether 808 LL items were collected during the daytime and 283 of these LL items were found to be illuminated during nighttime site visits. The quantitative analysis reveals that the nocturnal LL differs from the diurnal LL in several ways: at the top-down level, the nocturnal LL shows a strong monolingual English tendency, while the diurnal LL has a tendency towards multilingualism; at the bottom-up level, fewer languages are used in the nocturnal signs than in the diurnal signs and Chinese is used as the prominent language in nocturnal signs, whereas English has a leading position in the diurnal signs. Our findings complicate previous scholarly understanding of bilingual and multilingual configurations in Singapore, suggesting that the LL has its own unique representation at night. The potential for integrating nighttime as a new dimension to examine LL is discussed .

The cognitive advantage (CA) hypothesis claims that multilingualism promotes the development of several basic cognitive capacities. A large number of empirical findings support this hypothesis, but recently there have also been numerous contradictory findings and methodological objections. The present paper extends the investigation of possible cognitive advantages from basic cognitive (executive) functions to broader cognitive competencies such as cognitive flexibility. A promising candidate for this is 'flexibility of goal adjustment' (FGA), a capacity of developmental regulation that solves problems through flexible adaptation processes. In a study with N = 119 monolingual and multilingual adults we found the predicted positive correlation between multilingualism and FGA. However, the mediator function of executive capacities entailed in the CA hypothesis operationalised as Stroop and flanker tasks could not be demonstrated.

This article uses reflective drawing to explore representations of multilingualism by Anglophone migrants in Luxembourg. Analysing twelve interviews in which participants drew and described their language experiences, we examine the language ideologies Anglophone migrants adopt in response to the ideologies of English they encounter. Participants adopt various ideologies, sometimes aligning with the ideology of global English, sometimes with counter-ideologies of resistance to it, and sometimes a mix of the two. Visual features indexing affective states include colour, gesture, facial expression, and composition. Monolingual cringe -- expressed as shame, embarrassment and being 'bad at languages' -- performs several functions for the participants. Sometimes it serves as an affective disclaimer, allowing them to lean on their privilege in a more socially acceptable way. Sometimes it appears to express genuine distress, in the form of searing linguistic insecurity. Sometimes it performs a distancing function, enabling them to oppose themselves to the stereotype of the monolingual English speaker. The affective intensity of the drawings suggests the ideology of global English does have costs for Anglophone migrants. Fundamentally, though, monolingual cringe reinforces privilege, allowing participants to apologise for their monolingualism even as they continue to benefit from it.

Over the past two decades, heightened migration has increased linguistic diversity in schools. For schools to cope with this multilingualism, many governments impose a monolingual policy where only the language of instruction is allowed. Although many schools adopt such a policy, the classroom practices may differ since multilingual students often revert to translanguaging-as-practice. Drawing on three key conceptual language policy (LP) models (Bonacina-Pugh, 2012. Researching 'practiced language policies': Insights from conversation analysis. "Language Policy," 11(3), 213-234; Johnson & Johnson, 2015. Power and agency in language policy appropriation. "Language Policy," 14(3), 221-243; Ricento & Hornberger, 1996. Unpeeling the onion: Language planning and policy and the ELT professional. "TESOL Quarterly," 30(3), 401-427), this study explores LP formation across macro (government), meso (school), and micro (classroom) educational levels in Flanders, Belgium. Macro-level analysis involves scrutinizing policy documents from the Educational Department of Flanders. Meso-level investigation includes policy documents from three secondary schools, compared with insights from interviews with the schools' principals and language coaches. Semi-structured interviews with teachers (n = 18) and classroom observations (n = 138 hours) provide nuanced perspectives at the micro-level. Triangulating data reveals declared, perceived, and practiced language policies at various levels. The study underscores LP's intricate nature within a multilingual educational context. Results highlight the contrast between macro-level policy straightforwardness and the complexity faced at meso- and micro-levels, where context-specific challenges arise. As schools navigate linguistic diversity, the role of language coaches becomes pivotal in creating inclusive and effective educational settings.

Positioning theory [van Langenhove and Harré (1999). Introducing positioning theory. In R. Harre, & L. van Langenhove (Eds.), "Positioning theory: Moral contexts of intentional action" (pp. 14-31). Blackwell Publishers] provides a useful analytical lens to examine how teachers' positioning in moment-to-moment interactions can expand or restrict opportunities for multilingual learners to participate in mathematical discussions and develop robust mathematical identities. In this study, I examined the discursive practices of one white, third-grade monolingual teacher, Keri, and the ways she interactively positioned Alexia, a Latina multilingual learner, in the first full month of the academic year during whole class interactions. Findings demonstrate Keri used a range of positioning acts to recursively position Alexia as a communicator of mathematics and mathematical thinker that simultaneously situated Alexia within the broader classroom storyline that successful mathematics students communicate their ideas to others. The findings confirm that monolingual teachers in elementary classroom settings appear to use similar positioning acts as bilingual teachers/teacher-researchers with individual multilingual students.

Although some critics consider it time-consuming and demanding, proponents of the monolingual approach for field research (i.e., learning to speak a target field language as part of the research process) argue that it can provide a unique insight into its structures. However, this claim remains largely unsubstantiated in the available literature on field methods. The present paper sets out to achieve a twofold objective: First, it reviews prior observations about the monolingual method in documentary-linguistics publications, highlighting important gaps in research. Secondly, based on qualitative data from the author's fieldwork context in rural, indigenous China, it contributes to addressing one such gap by demonstrating how, when, and why basic to intermediate communicative competence can enhance the documentation, description, and analysis of a field language, in ways that complement and sometimes outperform other approaches such as bilingual and stimuli-based elicitation.

The study sought to understand the general trajectory of children's executive function, as well as whether there was heterogeneity among monolingual English-speaking and dual language learning children in their growth of executive function. In addition, the study examined whether monolingual English-speaking and dual language learning children demonstrated different developmental trajectories in their executive function development. Two executive function measures, the Peg Tapping and the Dimensional Change Card Sort Task, were used in the study. Findings of 122 children (Mean age = 3.68 years; 57% monolingual English speaking, 43% dual language learning) showed there was linear growth on children's executive function. Both monolingual English-speaking and dual language learning children varied significantly in their initial level of executive function and in their growth rate of executive function over time. In addition, monolingual English-speaking children demonstrated higher initial levels of executive function than dual language learners, while dual language learning children showed a faster rate of growth in executive function measured by the Peg Tapping test.

With English hegemony sustained in 'multicultural' Anglophone universities, non-English speaking research students often develop diverse strategies to improve their English. While such strategies demonstrate a form of resilience, the symbolic power of English remains intact. To grapple with this paradox, we draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to probe Chinese international research students' academic language practice in response to English monolingualism in Australian universities. Findings from semi-structured interviews with 18 Chinese international research students in Australian universities indicate that participants' academic language practice is influenced by both the "doxic" English monolingualism and the evolving exercise of academic multilingualism. Drawing insights from Bourdieu-informed sociology of resilience and post-monolingual theorising, we problematise English monolingualism and provide recommendations for (Chinese) international research students, supervisors, and universities to capitalise on linguistic repertories for the sake of enriching academic experience.

To learn new words, particularly verbs, child learners have been shown to benefit from the linguistic contexts in which the words appear. However, cross-linguistic differences affect how this process unfolds. One previous study found that children's abilities to learn a new verb differed across Korean and English as a function of the sentence in which the verb occurred. The authors hypothesized that the properties of word order and argument drop, which vary systematically in these two languages, were driving the differences. In the current study, we pursued this finding to ask if the difference persists later in development, or if children acquiring different languages come to appear more similar as their linguistic knowledge and learning capacities increase. Preschool-aged monolingual English learners (N = 80) and monolingual Korean learners (N = 64) were presented with novel verbs in contexts that varied in word order and argument drop and accompanying visual stimuli. We assessed their learning by measuring accuracy in a forced-choice pointing task, and we measured eye gaze during the learning phase as an indicator of the processes by which they mapped the novel verbs to meaning. Unlike previous studies which identified differences between English and Korean learning 2-year-olds in a similar task, our results revealed similarities between the two language groups with these older preschoolers. We interpret our results as evidence that over the course of early childhood, children become adept at learning from a large variety of contexts, such that differences between learners of different languages are attenuated.

There is a long-standing debate in the literature about the benefits that acoustic components of Infant Directed Speech (IDS) might have for infants' language acquisition. One of the highly contested features is vowel space expansion, which refers to the enlargement of the acoustic space between the corner vowels /i, u, a/ in IDS compared to Adult Directed Speech (ADS). Some evidence indicates that vowel space expansion in IDS facilitates infants' speech perception, thus promoting language development, whereas other studies have questioned these benefits and have proposed that any processing benefits of IDS are due to its other prosodic features such as exaggerated and variable pitch. This study aimed to tease apart the effects of vowel space expansion and prosodic exaggeration in IDS on 18-month-old infants' speech processing. Using a looking-while-listening paradigm, two between-subjects conditions were compared: Exaggerated Pitch (with exaggerated pitch height and range, but without vowel space expansion) and Expanded Vowel Space (with vowel space expansion, but no exaggeration in pitch height and range). Our results showed that infants recognized the meanings of the words more accurately in the Expanded Vowel Space compared to the Exaggerated Pitch condition. This suggests that vowel space expansion in IDS facilitates infants' lexical processing even when it does not cooccur with the prosodic exaggeration typical of IDS.

This article examines the institutional and market treatment of the profession of interpreting in the English-monolingual context of Australia. Based on qualitative interview methods with 67 healthcare interpreters in Australia, the study aims to explore the impact of the linguistic hierarchies in favour of English on the financial and professional valuing of bilingualism and bilingual workers, most of whom are migrants speaking English as their additional language. With Bourdieu's linguistic market as a key theoretical framework, the findings reveal how deeply English monolingualism is entrenched in the local interpreting industry and healthcare institutions and how the pervasive monolingual ideologies work to devalue bilingualism as a non-skill. The study highlights strong ties between monolingualism, power, class and race, with a particular focus on the migrant-concentrated aspect of the interpreting profession. It illuminates the role of language in justifying and sustaining power and structural inequalities, which, in turn, disproportionately impacts vulnerable populations.

Vocabulary size is a crucial early indicator of language development, for both monolingual and bilingual children. Assessing vocabulary in bilingual children is complex because they learn words in two languages, and there remains significant controversy about how to best measure their vocabulary size, especially in relation to monolinguals. This study compared monolingual vocabulary with different metrics of bilingual vocabulary, including combining vocabulary across languages to count either the number of words or the number of concepts lexicalized and assessing vocabulary in a single language. Data were collected from parents of 743 infants and toddlers aged 8-33 months learning French and/or English, using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. The results showed that the nature and magnitude of monolingual-bilingual differences depended on how bilinguals' vocabulary was measured. Compared with monolinguals, bilinguals had larger expressive and receptive word vocabularies, similarly sized receptive concept vocabularies and smaller expressive concept vocabularies. Bilinguals' single-language vocabularies were smaller than monolinguals' vocabularies. The study highlights the need to better understand the role of translation equivalents in bilingual vocabulary development and the potential developmental differences in receptive and expressive vocabularies.

This study focuses on parental use of parentese: the acoustically exaggerated, clear, and higher-pitched speech produced by adults across cultures when they address infants. While previous research shows that parentese enhances language learning and processing, it is still unclear what drives the variability in the amount of parental parentese use. We report on the development of a survey related to parental beliefs, knowledge, and self-awareness of parentese, and the cross-validation of this survey with daylong recordings in which parental parentese was measured through observation. Forty mother-father (18 monolingual English and 22 bilingual Spanish/English) U.S. families with infants between 3 and 24 months of age participated. Scores on the parentese questionnaire showed wide variability, suggesting that many parents were unsure about the effects of parentese on infant language development, and had limited self-awareness of their own parentese use. Almost half of the parents claimed that they talked to their child 'like an adult', and a similar number disagreed with the claim that parentese can support language learning. Our observational assessment of parentese demonstrated that all mothers and all fathers used parentese when talking to their infants; mothers in an average of 81% and fathers in an average of 69% of child-directed segments. Importantly, maternal parentese knowledge/beliefs scores, as well as their self-reported parentese use, were significantly positively correlated with observed parentese use; these relations were not significant for fathers. These results demonstrate that maternal and paternal links between beliefs, self-awareness, and behavior may be distinct, emphasizing the importance of studying all caregivers and using observational methodologies. More broadly, a thorough understanding of the factors that shape infants' language environments contributes to theories of language acquisition and can aid in intervention design.

This paper explores linguistic life-histories from five participants in a larger interview study with U.S.-based adults. These five interviewees were middle-class White women from monolingual English-speaking families who pursued multilingual learning trajectories in young adulthood. Having previously attained proficiency in one language through academic study, all five recounted similar pivotal decisions to deprioritize that language, and instead invest in another language that they now saw as more socially relevant. Through discursive analysis of the emotionality and (lack of) agency in their narratives of linguistic decision-making, the paper demonstrates how all five women, in dialogue with the interviewer, co-constructed ideologies of linguistic solidarity across lines of social difference. Drawing on Bakhtinian theory to analyze identity development as ideological becoming, the research explores elite contestation of dominant language ideologies within interview dialogues.

The purpose of this sociolinguistic study is to examine language beliefs, emotions, and practices of twenty bi/multilingual fourth-grade children of immigrants in monolingual U.S. schools in relation to societal language ideologies. This qualitative multiple case study included individual semi-structured interviews with bi/multilingual children focusing on their language beliefs, emotions, practices, and agencies. We utilised qualitative thematic analysis to examine links to societal language ideologies and issues of power. Children generally identified positively with their heritage language(s) and considered bilingualism beneficial, but they also displayed negative emotions towards their heritage language(s), English, and bi/multilingualism depending on the context and the audience. Additionally, children's evolving language proficiencies and practices at home and school favoured English. We connect the children's emotions, beliefs, and practices to hegemonic language ideologies in U.S. society and schools and propose a solution towards change.

Language-specific (i.e. the ideal L2 self) and plurilingual selves are now at the forefront of scholarly inquiry in L2 motivation research. Yet, there is a lack of empirical studies examining how language learners reframe their sense of self as speakers of an L2. This study draws on a questionnaire (N = 162) and on semi-structured interviews (N = 10) and explores the ways in which university students of Italian and German describe their proficiency-related motivations. In particular, it examines their bilingual and plurilingual aspirations in relation to broader discourses on the value of L2 learning in their socio-context of learning, where the ability to speak a second language is not the norm. The findings show that learners' motivation display both language-specific and non-language-specific features. While many students viewed the acquisition of fluency in the L2 as their end goal, others connected L2 learning to the attainment of non-language-specific bilingual and plurilingual identities, regardless of the L2 being learnt. L2 proficiency enabled the respondents in this study to position themselves in their local English-dominant socio-context as educated, open-minded, cultivated and more globally connected individuals.

This article discusses family language policy and the tensions between mothers' and children's language beliefs in two Vietnamese immigrant families in Melbourne. These tensions have frequently been discussed from the parental perspective, but it is less common to include the children's voice. We draw on a larger in-depth qualitative study of family language policy in Vietnamese families living in Australia to explore the language beliefs of both children and adults. Employing Fitzsimmons-Doolan's [2018. "Language Ideology Change Over Time: Lessons for Language Policy in the U.S. State of Arizona and Beyond." "TESOL Quarterly" 52 (1): 34-61. doi:10.1002/tesq.371] notions of pro-multilingual and pro-monolingual ideologies and Bourdieu's [1986. "The Forms of Capital." In "Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education", edited by J. G. Richardson, 241-258. Greenwood Press] concept of capital, we explore family language policy from the perspectives of both children and their mothers, and show how these perspectives are associated with each other. Findings reveal the pro-monolingual stance of the children in opposition to the pro-multilingual stance of their mothers where the children and their mothers appeared to attach different degrees of value to English and Vietnamese. The findings reinforce the complexities in realising family language policy across languages.

This study aims to extend statistical learning (SL) research to multilinguals and provide an insight into what could facilitate word segmentation. We studied how the number of cues available in the input as well as the number of languages spoken influence SL and word segmentation. We used two SL tasks: one involving the tracking of transitional probabilities (TPs) between syllables of words, and another involving the tracking of two congruent cues-syllables and tones -- in an artificial tone language. Data was collected from monolinguals, bilinguals, trilinguals, and quadrilinguals. Our results indicate that all language groups demonstrated similar SL capacity when segmenting words using TPs of syllables. However, when an additional cue was added, bilinguals, trilinguals, and quadrilinguals outperformed monolinguals. Interestingly, quadrilinguals also outperformed bilinguals. Performance was best for all groups when the input afforded two cues. This study suggests that while experience with multiple languages does not affect core SL ability, it enhances the tracking of multiple cues. The study further indicates that SL is affected by the number of cues available in the input as we found that performance was facilitated by the presence of two congruent cues.

Acquisition of oral English verb morphology presents difficulties for bilinguals, learners of EFL and English-speaking monolingual children with specific language impairment. This study aimed to identify challenging English verb inflections among sixth grade speakers of Arabic (N = 85) and Hebrew (N = 86) using an elicited oral narrative task, and EFL L1, L2, L3 skills that support oral production of English morphosyntactic structures and verb inflections. To understand potential universal versus language specific patterns, we compared performance of our sample with that of monolingual children with specific language impairment. Oral narratives were transcribed and analysed for obligatory use of four target tenses to assess the use of verb inflectional morphology. Results indicated that "3rd person singular" presented most difficulties for both groups. "Present progressive" was more difficult for Hebrew speakers, as Arabic utilises this aspectual form in oral modality, while "copula" was more problematic for Arabic speakers. This error pattern aligns with use of verb inflections by English monolingual SLIs. Notable differences were seen in EFL/ L1/L2/L3 skills supporting EFL verb inflections: Hebrew speakers relied mostly on English reading comprehension, while Arabic speakers drew support from EFL, L1, and Hebrew morphological awareness. We attribute these differences to the multilingual status of Arabic speakers.

Multilingualism presents both a challenge and an opportunity for Natural Language Processing, with code-switching representing a particularly interesting problem for computational models trained on monolingual datasets. In this paper, we explore how code-switched data affects the task of Machine Translation, a task which only recently has started to tackle the challenge of multilingual data. We test three Machine Translation systems on data from the Canberra Vietnamese-English Codeswitching Natural Speech Corpus (CanVEC) and evaluate translation output using both automatic and human metrics. We find that, perhaps counter-intuitively, Machine Translation performs better on code-switching input than monolingual input. In particular, comparison of human and automatic evaluation suggests that codeswitching input may boost the semantic faithfulness of the translation output, an effect we term lexico-semantic enrichment. We also report two cases where this effect is most and least clear in Vietnamese-English, namely gender-neutral 3SG pronouns and interrogative constructions respectively. Overall, we suggest that Machine Translation, and Natural Language Processing more generally, ought to view multilingualism as an opportunity rather than an obstacle.

We presented 28 Spanish monolingual and 28 Catalan-Spanish close-language bilingual 5-year-old children with a video of a talker speaking in the children's native language and a nonnative language and examined the temporal dynamics of their selective attention to the talker's eyes and mouth. When the talker spoke in the children's native language, monolinguals attended equally to the eyes and mouth throughout the trial, whereas close-language bilinguals first attended more to the mouth and then distributed attention equally between the eyes and mouth. In contrast, when the talker spoke in a nonnative language (English), both monolinguals and bilinguals initially attended more to the mouth and then gradually shifted to a pattern of equal attention to the eyes and mouth. These results indicate that specific early linguistic experience has differential effects on young children's deployment of selective attention to areas of a talker's face during the initial part of an audiovisual utterance.

Bilingualism is associated with a number of false beliefs, myths and misconceptions, which carry implications for bilingual education and policymaking. While the language used, often in the media, to express such misconceptions may have become more subtle, a negative bias remains and is arguably more difficult to detect and defend against. The current study examined the endorsement of common misconceptions by bilingual and monolingual participants as a function of the phrasing used to construct the misconception statements. Participants (N = 103; 47% bilingual) completed an online survey comprising common misconceptions about bilingualism as well as filler items, rating their agreement with the statements using a 7-point Likert-type scale. The phrasing of the misconceptions was varied such that participants read either a strongly worded or weakly worded version of the statements. The results showed that participants gave higher ratings of the statements in the weakly worded condition. While overall the average endorsement of the misconceptions was low, 82% of participants agreed with at least one misconception and 29% agreed with half the statements or more. There was no significant difference between monolinguals' and bilinguals' ratings. The findings suggest that misconceptions about bilingualism remain prevalent and are readily detectable when worded ambiguously.

Upholding a critical, ethical, multilingual stance presents numerous challenges amidst a myriad of institutional, infrastructural, and societal pressures. Despite significant breakthroughs, such as translanguaging theories and pedagogies and the evolution of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) principles, the journey towards a more inclusive and equitable English language education remains fraught with difficulties. Monolingual English continues to dominate assessments and academic publishing, and critical scholarship often appears powerless. I discuss the need for critical research to be grounded in praxis and discuss the struggle of EMI researchers against entrenched and renewed coloniality within increasingly neoliberalized academic institutions. I explore these contradictions in an imaginary dialogue between multiple voices. I then propose a research initiative ('PAA-STELE') aimed at overcoming the dominance of monolingual English assessment. I conclude that through collective action and a steadfast commitment to critical-ethical principles, we may effect change, albeit slowly and incrementally, within the English language education field.

It is increasingly recognized that agency plays an essential role in shaping language-in-education policy (LEP) and influencing the learning process. Research on agency has not yet adequately engaged with the field of heritage education and maintenance in diasporas. Drawing on Shohamy's and Bonacina-Pugh's conceptualization of declared, perceived, and practiced language policies, we examine the individual agency of three groups of actors--people with power (principals), people with expertise (teachers), and people with interest (students)--in a variety of policy or planning activities within two Chinese heritage language (CHL) schools in Brussels. On the basis of collected ethnographically informed data in conjunction with the conversation analysis of audio-recorded classroom interactions, our findings illustrate how three types of agentive roles are effective in forming language policies and constructing discursive spaces within the CHL schools, with a clear orientation shift from monolingualism to multilingualism. This study contributes to research on heritage language maintenance in a highly multilingual, diasporic, and educational context by providing a portrait of how educational practitioners and learners assert their agency to explore locally appropriate language policies that maximize actors' potential to teach and learn heritage languages.

The present study investigates whether exposure to multilingual pedagogies enhances emergent bilingual children's narrative abilities. These abilities are among the most reliable indicators of children's literacy skills. We compare two groups of emergent bilingual children with migrant background attending the fourth and fifth grade of a public primary school in Italy: 30 children were exposed to multilingual pedagogies, whereas 33 attended a 'traditional' monoglossic program. The results show that children exposed to multilingual pedagogies use more mental state terms in their narratives in both their home language and Italian than children exposed to monoglossic education. Furthermore children exposed to multilingual pedagogies exhibit similar patterns of use of mental state terms across the two languages. By contrast, the production of mental state terms differs across the two languages among the children exposed to monoglossic education. The qualitative analysis of the narratives shows that the home and the school language dynamically interact with each other regarding the construction of the narrative among the children exposed to multilingual pedagogies. The children attending monoglossic programs rely mostly on literal translations. The study shows that multilingual pedagogies boost emergent bilinguals' literacy skills and enable them to access these skills from all languages in their repertoire.

We investigated the role of socioeconomic status (SES) in the unfolding of vocabulary and text-comprehension skills in language minority bilingual children, who are educated exclusively in their L2. For comparison, a monolingual control group was also tested, consisting of children of the same age and schooling. We administered a synonyms task to measure vocabulary and an inference test to measure reading comprehension. Socioeconomic status scores were obtained through the Hollingshead Four Factor Index questionnaire. Our results showed that being bilingual did not influence vocabulary and text-comprehension skills in the age group being tested (9-11 years). Whereas, SES played a significant role in relation to age and schooling. Interestingly, two different mediation analyses demonstrated that vocabulary knowledge accounted for a significant portion of the causal relationship between SES and reading comprehension, and that reading comprehension itself can explain part of the relationship between SES and vocabulary. The social and educational implications of the findings are discussed.

Verbal Fluency (VF) task total scores are widely used in language attrition studies, but they do not provide insight into the processes underlying optimal performance. We analyse the efficacy of clustering (subcategories within a category) and switching (shifting between these subcategories) strategies in phonemic (PVF) and semantic (SVF) tasks. First, we focus on L1 Finnish and L2 English performance among attriters (N = 38). Our analyses suggest similar processes underlying performance in both languages. These processes seem to remain unaffected by immersion time in the L2 environment (LoR) and frequency of L1 use, highlighting the importance of including L2 data alongside comparisons to L1 monolingual populations to account for a broad bilingual effect in language attrition studies. Second, we compare attriters' and monolinguals' (N = 50) performance in L1. Our findings suggest that attriters rely on clustering in PVF more systematically than monolinguals, and they struggle to initiate a search for a new subcategory or return to a previous category (switching) after depleting a cluster in PVF and SVF tasks. Thus, our analysis demonstrates a difference in processing strategies between the groups that could potentially contribute to similar total scores in PVF and lower total scores in the attriter group in SVF.

This study investigates the use of overt and null subjects in Bulgarian in child heritage speakers with L2 German. The alternation of overt and null pronominal subjects in null-subject languages like Bulgarian depends on grammatical and discourse conditions and contrasts with German. Oral narratives were elicited in Bulgarian, comparing the performance of the heritage children to that of monolingual children and adults. Overall 68 Bulgarian narratives of 39 speakers were analysed as to the use of overt and null pronominal subjects in topic-continuity and topic-shift contexts. The results reveal similar subject realisation for all speakers, supporting early acquisition of null-subject grammars. Analyses of topic-continuity and -shift contexts showed similar overall patterns in children's and adults' subject use, with children producing somewhat more overt subjects in topic-continuity and ambiguous overt pronouns in topic-shift contexts than adults. However, the bilinguals used significantly more ambiguous null subjects than monolinguals. These results suggest that fine-grained discourse constraints of null-subject grammars are more difficult for bilinguals to acquire and maintain. The near adult-like performance of the bilinguals in some contexts can be attributed to the fact that most of them were Bulgarian-dominant and received non-attrited parental input. Differences are also attributable to cross-linguistic influence.

Despite the extensive research on bilingual development, our understanding of how lexical competition unfolds in the bilingual mind remains limited. Previous studies have predominantly focused on crosslinguistic competition, neglecting the examination of the competition process within each language and the influence of diverse bilingual experiences, such as first language attriters, heritage speakers, or sequential bilinguals. Consequently, there is a critical gap in our knowledge regarding how bilinguals navigate and resolve competition dynamics during spoken word recognition in the context of language attrition. We compare the within-L1 and within-L2 competition mechanisms of Spanish-English attriters (N = 65) with two monolingual control groups (Spanish and English speakers). Participants completed two visual world tasks with manipulation of onset/rhyme overlap. Results indicate a contrast between the competition mechanisms exhibited by the L1 monolingual group and the Spanish attriters during L1 spoken word recognition. Our findings highlight the role of bilingual experiences in modulating L1 competition dynamics, shedding light on the complex relationship between bilingualism and lexical competition.

This paper presents the use of translanguaging in the assessment of content subjects in the context of Nepal's higher education. Since its proposition in the 1990s, translanguaging has been receiving much scholarly attention in multilingual educational contexts. In such contexts, individuals' language practices show a shift from the understanding of languages as separate autonomous systems to the recognition of integrated and heteroglossic practices. Drawing on the analysis of relevant policy documents and examinees' answer sheets of formative assessment, and interviews with eight purposively selected teacher educators teaching at the master's level at a university in Nepal, this paper reports that examinees' translanguaging practices in responding to assessment questions exhibit their translanguaging instinct resisting unplanned English-prioritised monolingual policies. It also reveals fluidity and simultaneity in examinees' use of diverse linguistic resources defying demarcated language boundaries as aspired by the institution's English-prioritised policies. The study further reports layered translanguaging exercised by examinees which educators acknowledged as an attempt to enhance efficacy in content communication. Examinees' translanguaging practices and educators' acknowledgment of translanguaged writing indicate collective resistance from the bottom-up countering monoglossic ideologies in assessment systems. This implies consideration of examinees' and educators' roles in promoting translanguaging for future language policy changes to facilitate effective assessment.

Purpose: Typically developing (TD) bilingual children usually produce narratives with preserved macrostructure (i.e., narrative scheme) but with impaired microstructure (i.e., language complexity). As for monolingual and bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD), they usually produce narratives with both impaired macro- and microstructure. It is therefore difficult to differentiate TD from DLD, on the basis of narrative production, especially in bilingual children. In this study, we examine whether a dynamic assessment (DA) task of narratives, using a pretest-teaching-posttest design, can differentiate TD from DLD, without disadvantaging bilinguals over monolinguals. Method: We recruited 118 French-speaking children (M[subscript age] = 8;5 [years;months]), with one experimental condition in which children benefited from a teaching phase (30 TD, 18 monolinguals and 12 bilinguals; 30 DLD, 15 monolinguals and 15 bilinguals) and one control condition (58 TD, 31 monolinguals and 27 bilinguals), in which children participated in another activity. In the pre- and posttest, children were asked to tell a story based on a series of pictures. During the teaching phase, an examiner asked children 12 specific questions about the story, targeting macro- and microstructural elements. Scores were attributed to the number of macro- and microstructural elements correctly produced and to the number of specific trained elements (TE) that were produced as a result of training. Results: Scores improved on macrostructure and on the number of TE following teaching for all groups of the experimental condition (TD and DLD), whereas there was no progress in children of the control condition. TD participants and participants with DLD differed on all measures in both pre- and posttest, with no differences between monolinguals and bilinguals. Conclusions: Our dynamic task led to both improved narrative skills and TD/DLD differentiation, with bilinguals not being disadvantaged. Our study thus supports the existing literature indicating that DA can be used to diagnose narrative deficits in children with DLD.

In the present study, we aimed to disentangle the impact of bilingualism and socioeconomic status (SES) on literacy in language-minority bilingual children (LMBC) and monolinguals exposed to French. We also wanted to explore the role of these two factors on cognitive and language skills, i.e., verbal knowledge (VK), morphosyntactic comprehension (MC), and phonological short-term memory (PSTM), well known to be important predictors of literacy acquisition. We compared LMBC with low and medium-high SES, and monolinguals with low and medium-high SES. All the children attended Grades 3, 4, and 5. We found that LMBC underperformed monolinguals on VK and MC. Low SES children showed lower scores compared to medium-high SES children on VK, MC, and PSTM. With regard to literacy, LMBC underperformed monolinguals on text and irregular word reading. Low SES children underperformed medium-high SES children only in regular word reading and pseudoword spelling. As a whole, bilingualism had an effect on measures involving lexical components, while SES had a more widespread effect on cognitive and language skills. The results are discussed considering implications for research, clinical, and educational settings.

This study examined the production of L3 French words by Spanish--English bilinguals who had no prior knowledge of the L3. Using a shadowing task, 39 Spanish L1/English L2 and 18 Spanish monolingual speakers produced 26 tokens of word-initial voiceless plosive consonants in French, Spanish and English (15 Spanish and French tokens for the monolingual group). Importantly, Spanish and French plosives are typically produced with short-lag VOT, whereas English plosives are produced with a long-lag VOT and aspiration. The results of generalised mixed-effects models revealed that L3 French productions by the bilingual group fell between L1 and L2 values, and provided evidence that the bilingual group experienced influence from both their L1, Spanish and their L2, English, while the monolingual group produced the French as a Spanish-like short-lag. Additionally, a post-hoc analysis of individual differences revealed that a subset of participants experienced heavy L1 influence on their L3 productions, whereas the remaining participants showed a lower, but considerable, degree of L2 influence on L3 productions. These findings provide support for the Linguistic Proximity Model (Westergaard et al., 2017) and suggest that the first exposure to a third language is not universal.

As global migration and transnational mobility have increased steadily in the recent few decades, interests in equity-based theories and pedagogies have intensified to respond to racially and linguistically diverse student needs in today's classrooms. Raciolinguistic ideology is a theoretical framework challenging monoglossic language ideologies and the 'White gaze' that privileges White speaking and listening subjects (Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. "Harvard Educational Review," 85(2), 149-171. https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149). While raciolinguistic ideologies aim to critically examine the idealized monolingualism, the framework is typically adopted to analyze racial realities in Western or European educational contexts. In this study, we intend to (re)imagine raciolinguistic ideologies situated in non-Western educational contexts by examining language-in-education policies in Turkey and South Korea. Using raciolinguistic ideologies and Kaplan and Baldauf's (Kaplan, R. B., & Baldauf, R. B., Jr. (2005). Language-in-education policy and planning. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), "Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning" (pp. 1013-1034). Lawrence Erlbaum) language-in-education planning framework as our analytical lenses, we interrogate raciolinguistic ideologies manifested through language-in-education policy and planning in Turkey and South Korea, where transnational mobility and diversity are drastically increasing to shape language education. The analyses suggest broadening the definition and viewpoint of race to understand space-specific and localized interpretations of raciolinguistic ideologies while dismantling new contemporary racism in non-Western educational contexts. Recommendations and implications for future critical examinations of racial regimes and educational policies are discussed.

A good deal of research purports that bilingualism has a positive effect on some aspects of cognitive functioning. However, this effect is not consistent, and little research examines trajectories of cognitive skill development in bilingual children. Moreover, it remains unclear whether different types of bilingualism impact how cognitive abilities unfold. The reported study investigates children's data from three linguistic groups (179 sequential bilingual, 96 simultaneous bilingual and 57 monolingual German-speaking children) and examines differences (1) regarding cognitive outcome measures pertaining to selective attention, visuospatial thinking and abstract thinking and (2) searches for substantial developmental trajectory differences regarding said measures. Children were tested at 3 points in time; at age 4;10, 6;2 and 7;4. Results indicate no significant linguistic group differences in selective attention, visuospatial thinking and abstract thinking when controlling for gender, language comprehension of the child, and families' socioeconomic status. Moreover, the three linguistic groups did not differ in developmental trajectories. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

In this longitudinal study, we examined what kind of profiles of reading fluency and spelling skills could be identified among pupils (N = 467) and how stable these profiles were during the first three years of school. We also investigated how monolingual (Swedish) and simultaneously bilingual (Finnish-Swedish) pupils and gender were distributed within the profiles. Three profiles of reading fluency and spelling skills were found among the pupils through latent profile analysis: low, average, and high performing. Latent transition analysis confirmed stable and identical profiles throughout the first school years. The distributions of monolingual and bilingual pupils and gender were equal in all profiles throughout the grades. These findings have implications on a pragmatic level in school, confirming the importance of early identification and support for low performing pupils.

In this article, we--three Asian MotherScholars in the field of language and literacy education--conducted a collaborative self-study to examine how our individual and shared experiences as transnational mothers of emergent bilinguals have shaped our ways of promoting bilingualism and biliteracy. Our study drew on transnational feminist perspectives and used multimodal data and narratives shared in an online inquiry group. We highlighted ways we leverage our strengths and make conscious efforts to navigate burdens rooted in monolingual ideologies and linguistic hegemony as we raise our bilingual children. We also found how inquiring collectively into our experiences has helped us cultivate critical consciousness and build transnational solidarity. Through our stories, we emphasized the urgency of challenging inequities and pervasive monolingual ideologies within U.S. schools, as well as the necessity of creating a space for immigrant mothers to inquire into their experiences and to support each other.

Globalisation is increasingly affecting universities worldwide. In African contexts, language policies exhibit an inheritance situation in which countries continue to implement policies which favour colonial languages in education. This paper investigates the Malawian higher education context and the ways in which staff engage with multilingualism. It examines the implementation of language policies by staff in their classrooms and explores the attitudes of staff members towards the current monolingual language policy and practices in higher education in the country. The paper draws on a 4-month ethnography carried out in eight Malawian universities. Findings indicate that the language 'rules' imposed by staff are highly variable and that diverse language 'policies' are implemented and enforced by staff, some of whom operate strictly monolingual approaches while others adopt multilingual approaches. Staff display a range of attitudes towards multilingualism, influenced by competing pressures of ensuring students comprehend the subject matter while also seeking to improve their English skills against the broader backdrop of language practices and expectations in the country.

We test children's distributive and collective sentence interpretations and the variables that predict them. In our first experiment, we establish that adult English collective sentences with "the" or "some" in the subject are categorically collective in their interpretations. We further demonstrate that children's collective and distributive interpretations are predicted by an independent measure of lexical growth, consistent with the lexical refraction hypothesis, and that their collective interpretations are predicted by their distributive interpretations, consistent with the pragmatic scale hypothesis. Furthermore, the distributive interpretations produce complete mediation between lexicon and collective interpretations in a mediation analysis. In our second experiment, we take independent measures of Spanish-speaking children's knowledge of the Approximate Number System, inhibition, lexicon and phrasal syntax. We then fit a Piecewise Structural Equation Model with these variables, with high statistical power and showing high goodness-of-fit. We consider the contrast between this model of collective interpretations, which are putatively conversational implicatures, and quantity implicature models from previous studies.