Volume 11, Issue 2

This paper focuses on six interpreter-mediated interactions between teachers, migrant parents, and their children in Italian primary schools, a topic that has not yet been widely examined in the literature on public service interpreting. The analysis draws on audio-recorded interpreter-mediated interactions collected in Italy during a European Horizon 2020 project. The paper shows the barriers that exist in engaging children in these interactions. The difficulties observed are varied and more challenging to overcome than those hindering parental involvement. While Childhood Studies shows that the important enhancement of children’s agency in social contexts needs particular non-hierarchical structures of interaction, in the analysed interpreter-mediated interactions the mutual positioning of teachers, parents and mediators does not allow this enhancement. Thus, the involved children stay silent, they provide minimal responses when addressed, they show feelings of distress, and their few initiatives are not supported by the other participants. The paper shows the reasons for the failure of both teachers’ actions and mediators’ coordination to involve children and support their exercise of agency.

The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated health systems, economies, and societies. Considered a high-risk group, the elderly have been amongst the most affected. Using word association tests, we access the perceptions held by a group of individuals aged 65 and over, pre-stratified by gender and level of education, regarding certain aspects of the situation we now face. We interpret the vocabulary provided during the tests as a network of connections. Thus, we can create the metastructure of the mental lexicon and consider it the reflection of the collective perceptions associated with five cognitive categories: pandemic, old age, society, future , and politics . For this, we use a model that allows us to construct cognitive prototypes based on the theory of fuzzy sets. Previous results warn of the emotional consequences that have affected the entire population. However, we are now also able to prove that the older generation is experiencing unprecedented feelings of loneliness and neglect due to the circumstances. This could exacerbate the worry, fear, and uncertainty imposed on this group by the new normal . Finally, we suggest concrete actions for both health workers in contact with groups of elderly individuals and the research community that generally uses attitudinal surveys.

Although past research has established that family language policies are composed of numerous complex, entangled, heterogenous elements, as of yet, most works grounded within this research paradigm do not attempt to fully embrace this complexity. This article argues that the complexity can be more fully engaged with by conceptualising a family language policy as a rhizomatic system which consists of a multiplicity of temporary assemblages. Drawing on video recordings, interviews, and stimulated recall protocols from a project on the dimensions of language in Swedish-English families, this article aims to consider how interactional episodes within these families can be viewed as an assemblage of material elements, experiences, agential forces, and conceptual discourses. It is argued that through the analysis of multiple assemblages, and through the consideration of the connectivity between such assemblages, that a holistic picture of the rhizomatic structure that is a family language policy begins to be built.

In the research, the effect of adverse teaching conditions on the Turkish listening comprehension, speaking, written expression, and reading comprehension skills of bilingual students was investigated. In the study, some indicators of the basic language skills of bilingual children were examined according to the multi-grade classroom and COVID-19 factors. The universe of the study is bilingual children studying in multi-grade classrooms of primary education in Muş province. The population is made up of sixty-nine third and fourth-year students from four different primary schools. Three questions were analyzed: (1) What is the level of students’ listening comprehension, speaking, written expression, and reading comprehension skills? (2) How is the effect of independent variables (gender, age of acquisition of Turkish, school level, parents’ education, and school) on students’ language skills? (3) How is the relationship between students’ listening comprehension, speaking, written expression, and reading comprehension skills? The study adopted a multiple-case study design. The data were collected using two rubrics and two achievement tests. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, multiple group comparisons, nonparametric tests, and correlation. The results revealed findings regarding participants’ listening comprehension, speaking, written expression, and reading comprehension skills. It was observed that the independent variables did not significantly affect the language skills of the participants. According to the findings, students’ language indicators of written expression are weak and relatively inadequate. Alike students’ language indicators of reading comprehension are partially inadequate. On the other hand, the indicators in speaking and listening comprehension skills were observed to be good but partially insufficient. The results show that the performance of bilingual students in multi-grade classrooms on Turkish language indicators observed during the COVID-19 outbreak is not at an adequate level completely.

This paper describes the results of a research project aiming to document the acquisition sequence of a set of L2 Polish morphosyntactic structures. In order to verify the hypothesis that acquisition sequences are largely independent of the learner’s L1, data were collected among two groups of learners, i. e. speakers of typologically and genetically distant languages relative to Polish, on the one hand, and speakers of East Slavic languages (Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian), on the other hand, all of which are lexically and grammatically very close to the target language. Data were obtained through a survey and an Elicited Imitation Task.While Slavic learners systematically achieved higher performance than their non-Slavic counterparts, the acquisition sequences of the two groups proved to a large extent comparable. These results suggest an interaction between a general processing advantage deriving from a close relation between the L2 and one’s L1, on the one hand, and universal acquisition constraints, on the other hand.

Research has shown how, in a narrative event, people give meanings to and conceptualise their experience in figurative language. The aim of this case study was to explore the figurative language which emerged in the flow of mobile students’ narrative accounts of interculturality. Pragmatic features of talk, including those specific to the lingua franca, were analysed in the participants’ use of figurative language. The data of the exploratory study derived from mobility project interviews conducted with South Korean student teachers at the beginning and end of their short-term stays in Finland. The results revealed, among other things, that metaphors of movement and force were used for ‘doing interculturality’, when the interviewees constructed themselves, others and events in figurative language in the context of the mobility project interview. Using oppositional metaphor (e.g., free-strict) as well as metonymy and hyperbole, the participants presented their views on school education, society and people in the two contexts. By exploring the narrators’ strategies for telling and their discursive construction of roles and positions, it was possible to analyse in more detail the interplay of figurative language and the narrative construction of interculturality.

The increase in the number of newcomer students in countries across the world has underscored the importance of effective transition strategies in education. Many students encounter difficulties in acquiring academic knowledge due to initial limited language skills in the school language. Implementing appropriate strategies to facilitate this transition has shown positive outcomes. However, some obstacles remain to be addressed for newcomer students. In the Netherlands, standardized tests are utilised to monitor the academic progress of all students and determine the appropriate educational pathway. Our study, based on longitudinal assessment data from 51 newcomer elementary school students and 74 of their classmates, sheds light on how this system interacts with the transitions of newcomers. While newcomer students made greater progress compared to their peers, we found that their results were influenced by the application of test norms designed for younger age groups. The insights from this study provide valuable perspectives on educational pathways for newcomer students and prompt us to reconsider the implications of norm accommodation for these students. It highlights the needs to implement practices that enable newcomer students to effectively pursue their academic aspirations.

This paper focuses on how Gabriella, an upper-secondary student in Sweden, re-negotiated social belonging and linguistic participation in book-group discussions involving students in the school subjects Swedish and Swedish as a second language. Gabriella immigrated to Sweden due to forced migration. As a Swedish language learner, she worried that her language proficiency was regarded as insufficient by her peers. Within the frame of linguistic ethnography, and with the aim of identifying Gabriella’s trajectory of participation in book-group discussions over time, audio-recorded group discussions about the novel How I live now, interview data, and observational fieldnotes were analyzed by means of an epistemic stance analysis. Building on learning as participation, it was possible to unfold how Gabriella went from a passing participant to a driving force. Her trajectory of participation was spurred by the content of the novel and a sense of epistemic responsibility to share her first-hand experience of war, while her classmates responded with silence. From an educational perspective, this paper emphasizes the importance of classrooms as contact zones where students are not only provided with rich opportunities to gather around literature that stirs up questions of what it means to be human, but more importantly, it accentuates the need for literary education to include responsive practices to help students accommodate each other as co-learners.