Accelerating globalization has created an interest in studying the use of different languages in intercultural communication. This paper is based upon a small-scale study of expatriates' use of English as a lingua franca in Denmark and Germany. It discusses expatriates' use of English as a lingua franca and its influence on their willingness to…

The volume offers a collection of the most recent research coming from scholars and practitioners in the field of multilingualism research in various contexts of natural/immersion environments, school/formal instruction, grounded in multilingual societies and individual multilinguality of semi-monolingual countries. The studies included in the…

The present volume constitutes a singular contribution to its field on several counts. First and foremost, it is an outcome of a joint research effort by members of various European higher education institutions who have cooperated within the framework of the European Campus of City Universities Project (EC2U). It is an initiative that brings…

With the rapid implementation of early foreign language programmes in the state of North-Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, first for Grade 3 (ages 8-9 years) in 2003 and then from Grade 1 (ages 6-7 years) in 2008, primary school teachers had to adapt to teaching a foreign language in Grade 1 quickly. Teachers had little experience with language teaching…

For decades now, researchers and academics have lamented the mismatch between the representation of English in the classroom and the way the language is used in real-world contexts. Much of teaching is bound by curricula that determine not only the contents of their teaching but also the materials and assessment methods they use, they are crucial…

Second language (L2) grammar learning is difficult. Two frameworks--the psycholinguistic lexical bottleneck hypothesis and the neurocognitive declarative/procedural model--predict that faster L2 lexical processing should facilitate L2 incidental grammar learning. We tested these predictions in a pretest-posttest syntactic adaptation study of…

This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker's belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and…

Given that meaningful interaction is, in many respects, the backbone of L2 acquisition, language programs have often promoted language exchanges, which connect L2 learners outside the classroom. The present paper discusses two such programs, the "Sprachmentoren" Program (SMP) and "Tandemprojekt" (TP), which were introduced to…

The acquisition of voice in Greek remains understudied, especially in heritage populations. Voice in Greek poses a challenging acquisition task for children due to its syncretism, marking various verb classes as well as passives. The present study explores the acquisition of anticausatives, reflexives, and passives in 6-to-8-year-old monolingual…

This book brings together research on second language pragmatics in the underexplored context of EFL primary classrooms. Presenting studies from Croatia, Cyprus, Germany, Norway, Spain and the Netherlands, the book offers a rich exploration of different topics, such as learners' pragmatic performance, awareness and development, learners' and…

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…

When teaching Mandarin Chinese classifiers, teachers usually ask students to memorize 'classifier + noun', phrases as collocations. Given that Mandarin Chinese has a vast and complicated system of classifiers, the rote memorization of 'classifier + noun' collocations is challenging and monotonous. Therefore, the present study aims to improve that…

We explore the relationship between newcomer refugee families' linguistic competencies in the language of the host country and their collaboration in and with the school. Following a case study design and through the qualitative analysis of interviews with refugee family members and school staff from a German primary school, we analyse these…

International students' attitudes towards teachers' codeswitching to the first language (L1) have not been adequately investigated in cross-cultural English-medium instruction (EMI) settings, where teachers and international students do not share the same L1 while they interact in English as a lingua franca (ELF). To fill that void, this study…

Performing a stay in a country where the L2 is the official language can provide the perfect immersion for L2 development (traditional study abroad). In the case of English learners, internationalization and the role of English as a lingua franca make it unnecessary to perform the stay in an English-speaking country. Hence, an increasing number of…