Purpose: This article examines the use of English medium instruction (EMI) for teaching Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) by non-native speakers with a focus on multilingual classrooms. It also explores teachers' positive and negative beliefs about using EMI in classroom settings for JFL instruction. Methods and procedure: 274 non-native…

Purpose: The paper reports how lesson study helped to make the learning of students with limited English competencies visible in "Content and Language Integrated Learning" (CLIL). Design/methodology/approach: The two lesson study cycles took place in a Swiss primary school with a focus on three case pupils each with heterogeneous…

This paper is grounded in the evolution of our reflection on the relationship between plurilingualism, plurilingual speech and language learning. That is, it refers to research on the construction of plurilingual repertoires, over a period of more than thirty years, as documented in Lüdi and Py (1986 [2009]. "To Be or Not to Be … a…

Language policy in German-speaking Swiss kindergartens recently has been subject to change. While dialect traditionally was spoken to kindergartners, the use of High German has been established to promote the integration of migrant children and equality of opportunity. In this contribution, we look at how kindergarten teachers translate the new…

This article aims at a better understanding of the role played by multilingualism and language in general in the process of scientific knowledge construction. By analysing various cases of multilingual communication in different universities and subjects (marketing, physics, law), we propose to focus on two parameters: the language regime and the…

Within the study of language in society, new sociolinguistic notions are increasingly gaining ground, e.g. the notion of polylanguaging. Polylanguaging is defined as "the phenomenon that speakers employ linguistic resources at their disposal which are associated with different 'languages,' including the cases in which the speakers know only…

Higher Education is caught between internationalization on the one hand and the quest for local support by fostering local practices on the other. The clash between uniformity-standardization and localization-specialization manifests itself in every university trying to adopt internationalization strategies. How can universities manage this…

This article considers a case of local language socialization and accommodation in a multilingual community of practice: the use of English as an additional academic language for specific purposes at a bilingual Swiss university and its implications for teaching. The acronym ELF(A) is used throughout as short for English as a Lingua Franca (in…

The growing mobility of populations in important parts of the world has led, and is continuing to lead, to a lasting change from monolingual to multilingual teams of people working together, and the need for techniques for communication between people of different languages. A frequent stereotype envisages the most convenient solution as the…

The situation once described by Hoffmann (1985), in which children grow up exposed to three languages from an early age, is a reality for an increasing number of families. In Europe--as elsewhere--greater mobility is leading to greater numbers of mixed-language couples (Piller 2002), and, by extension, multilingual families. For such families,…