Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital city of the bilingual Basque Autonomous Community of Spain, is a largely Spanish-speaking city: over 90% of the city's population claims Spanish as their native language and less than one-fifth of the city's adult population is bilingual in Basque and Spanish (compare with more than one-third of the population of San…

For many preschoolers in Turkish kindergartens, English instruction starts in the third year of their lives when they have barely begun to articulate their thoughts in their own mother tongue, Turkish. Parents have a dual role as models and decision makers in their children's foreign language education. As the fifteen participant parents of this…

Our study examines the extent to which French immersion students use lax /?/ in the same linguistic context as native speakers of Canadian French. Our results show that the lax variant is vanishingly rare in the speech of immersion students and is used by only a small minority of individuals. This is interpreted as a limitation of French immersion…

The overseas immersion environment has long been considered a superior context for language learning, supposedly providing unlimited exposure to target language (TL) input and countless opportunities for authentic interaction with expert users. This article focuses on immersion programmes (IPs) for in-service language teachers--a relatively…

A number of studies have shown that approximately one-quarter of children in potentially bilingual environments do not become bilingual. This article explores several key factors that influence the likelihood that a child who has access to interactions in two languages will learn them both. The five factors discussed are input, language status,…