This paper describes the language policies at 38 institutions of higher education on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. As a commonwealth of the US, Spanish and English hold co-official status on Puerto Rico despite the fact that majority of islanders use Spanish as their first language. Given the colonial status of the island, English has held…

This study examines how elementary teachers (grades three through five) in dual-language, bilingual programs (Spanish/English) view informal reading inventories (IRIs) to support their students' reading growth. The research, conducted in an urban district in the Northeastern United States, draws on interviews with 20 teachers in these programs.…

Parents, teachers and institutions often attempt to implement monolingual policies in bilingual settings, believing that they thereby facilitate children's bilingual development. Children, however, often have their own communicative agendas. In this study, we investigate how the twofold language policy of an English-medium preschool in Sweden is…

Previous research has shown that content and language integrated learning (CLIL), an educational approach that offers content courses through more than one educational language, increases metalinguistic awareness. This improved insight into language structures is supposed to extend beyond the linguistic domain. In the present study, the question…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise, description and basic statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements, and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects, such as the…

Challenges exist in implementing science programs in indigenous schools where cross-cultural boundaries between students and teachers are small but teachers do not have formal science education and how to teach science in an indigenous language. This paper presents a model for teaching science within a 'wharekura' (indigenous secondary school) to…

In examining how English as a second language (ESL) learners process English formulaic expressions in a nonnative English context, this study aims to investigate the strategies that learners use and how first language (L1) culture and conceptual knowledge could influence the use of the strategies. This study is guided by the research question of…

Despite its increasing popularity and adoption across Europe, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is not without its critics. It has been argued that CLIL programmes are highly selective, that is, the students possess more favourable learning prerequisites than their monolingually taught peers. The present study contributes to this…

The recent student unrest in South African public higher education institutions highlighted the call for the decolonisation of education across post-colonial countries. This research explored the construct of the "decolonisation of education" through the lens of students of different nationalities across Africa, their perspectives on…

This study investigates pupils' anxiety and enjoyment in the classroom when learning a second or foreign language. The particularity of this study lies in the comparison of two target languages (English and Dutch) in two educational contexts (CLIL and non-CLIL) at different instruction levels (primary and secondary education). While most research…

This study examined the effectiveness of a bilingual education program in social science majors in Chinese education at tertiary level. Participants were 53 undergraduate students enrolled in their third year of an Early Childhood Education program at a university in northwestern China. Students' English proficiency and their attitudes toward the…

There is a recognised need for multilingual pedagogies as these capitalise on children's resources. Language policies calling for monolingual or multilingual policies are, however, not easily translated into pedagogical practices. Teachers play a crucial role in the process of policy implementation because they negotiate policies and adapt them in…

In France, dominant monolingual discourses and teachers' lack of knowledge about bilingualism and second language acquisition often result in 'French only' policies in classrooms including in pre-school classrooms where some emergent bilingual children speak a language other than the language of schooling and very little or no French. These…

Although immersion programs are very popular in Canada, they are complex to implement and not as successful as we would hope them to be when it comes to the development of students' language skills. This article reports on the findings of a case study conducted within the context of an ongoing five-year grant funded project in Western Canada whose…

With the aim of bridging the gap between the understanding of individual agency and that of structural constraint, this article deals with the ways in which autobiographical research can provide insight into how individuals negotiate the social contexts in which they are located. Despite the strong utilitarian discourse about the centrality of…