In the literature on international student mobility, foreign language skills are usually discussed as an outcome rather than a driver of study abroad programmes. In contrast, this article focuses on their role in study abroad aspirations and destination choices of credit mobility students. The study is based on an online survey, conducted at three…

As English is widely accepted as a lingua franca in today's world, the importance of the language has been acknowledged globally in the present case. To rank the countries in terms of their English language proficiency, the EF Proficiency Index is prepared each year. In this study, five countries having the highest scores according to the Index…

We investigated age-related decline in adult learning of Dutch as an additional language (Ln) in speaking, writing, listening, and reading proficiency test scores for 56,024 adult immigrants with 50 L1s who came to the Netherlands for study or work. Performance for all four language skills turned out to decline monotonically after an age of…

Although international truckers are essential to the European supply chain, we know little about how they deal with their frequent multilingual workplace interactions. This paper examines the effects of participants' Individual Multilingual Repertoires (Pitzl, Marie-Luise. 2016. World Englishes and creative idioms in English as a lingua franca.…

Although a bilingual advantage has been reported for various measures of cognitive control, most previous studies have looked at a limited range of cognitive control measures. Furthermore, they typically leave unaddressed whether positive effects of bilingualism hold for all bilinguals or whether these are modulated by differences in bilingual…

This article investigates 2 questions: (1) does the presence of background noise lead to a differential increase in the number of simultaneously activated candidate words in native and nonnative listening? And (2) do individual differences in listeners' cognitive and linguistic abilities explain the differential effect of background noise on…

Metalinguistic skills are highlighted in the literature as providing bilinguals with an advantage in additional language (L3) learning. The extent to which this may apply to bilingual education and content-and-language-integrated-learning settings, however, is as yet little understood. This article reports on a study exploring and comparing the…

This study investigates the impact of ethnic diversity on test scores, on top of the effect of the share of non-native pupils. We use a rich survey of Dutch primary school students and exploit variations between subsequent cohorts within the same school as our identification strategy. We find that ethnic diversity has a positive impact on the test…

In the Netherlands, Turkish-Dutch children constitute a substantial group of children who learn to speak Dutch at the age of four after they learned to speak Turkish. These children are generally academically less successful. Academic success appears to be affected by both language proficiency and working memory skill. The goal of this study was…

Rural children are a largely understudied population in language and literacy research, despite the fact that these children often enter school with delays in their language development. Since most rural areas suffered from so-called selective rural outmigration, many parents in rural areas are lower or middle educated. The home literacy climate,…

This article reports on a number of projects on early English teaching in the Netherlands. The focus of these projects has been on the impact of English on the development of the mother tongue and the development of skills in the foreign language. Overall the results show that there is no negative effect on the mother tongue and that the gains in…

Little is known about the language acquisition of refugees in Western countries. This study examines how pre- and post-migration characteristics of refugees are related to their second language proficiency. Data are from a survey of 3,500 refugees, who were born in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, former Yugoslavia and Somalia, and who resided in the…

This study reports on the impact of 11 West European first languages on the acquisition of Dutch. Using data from nearly 6,000 second-language learners, it was found that the mother tongue had a rather large impact on two language skills--namely, oral and written proficiency--as measured by the scores received by these learners on the State…

Focuses on the changes necessary in Dutch foreign language teaching policies. Cites the need for a greater differentiation of objectives in learning languages. The relevance of the European context to these policies suggests international communication as one essential goal, whether the approach involves multilingualism or a small number of…

Reports on a large-scale investigation among Turkish and Moroccan children in Dutch primary schools. The focus is on these children's proficiency, respectively in Turkish and Arabic and Dutch. and on the development of skills in both languages. (26 references) (VWL)