This book brings together linguistic, psycholinguistic and educational perspectives on the phenomenon of cognate vocabulary across languages. It discusses extensive qualitative and quantitative data on Polish-English cognates and their use by learners/users of English to show the importance of cognates in language acquisition and learning.

Agnieszka Otwinowska is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland. Her research interests include crosslinguistic influences, bilingual and multilingual language acquisition in children and adults, language teaching, bilingual education and CLIL. She is the co-editor of Teaching and Learning in Multilingual Contexts (with Gessica De Angelis, Multilingual Matters, 2014).

Agnieszka Otwinowska is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland. Her research interests include crosslinguistic influences, bilingual and multilingual language acquisition in children and adults, language teaching, bilingual education and CLIL. She is the co-editor of Teaching and Learning in Multilingual Contexts (with Gessica De Angelis, Multilingual Matters, 2014).

This book offers one of the most extensive treatments of crosslinguistic lexical similarity. Otwinowska defines cognates broadly as words with similar forms and meanings across languages and discusses the origins of such words, how they become associated in the mind, what types of crosslinguistic influences arise from these associations, and how language learners and teachers can make the best use of them…a great resource for both researchers and teachers.

Aneta Pavlenko, Temple University, USA:

Thoroughly researched and elegantly written, this book offers a much-needed introduction to the role of cognates in SLA, a comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis of research on crosslinguistic similarities, and a richly-documented case study of cognate awareness used as a motivational strategy in a foreign language classroom. This text will be a valuable resource for scholars of multilingualism and for foreign language teachers looking for better ways to motivate their students and to make them more fluent and eloquent.

Gessica De Angelis, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland:

This is a welcome addition to the literature on cognate vocabulary across languages. While its emphasis is on Polish-English cognates, the volume will equally appeal to teachers and researchers interested in the topic. The chapters offer an up-to-date review of the literature on crosslinguistic influence and an unambiguous distinction between bilingual and multilingual behaviour. This is an excellent volume that will be read widely.