Laura Portolés

This study aims to contribute to the research literature on politeness in language teachers’ requestive behaviour. More specifically, it adopts a multilingual approach to explore teachers’ politeness strategies in the English for Young Learners (EYL) classroom, an underresearched instructional setting where regulative discourse tends to predominate. Participants are two pre-school teachers and two intact groups of 4/5-year-old children.

Empirical research on L3 teachers' beliefs has gained momentum in the last decade since teacher cognition is paramount for understanding teaching practices in multilingual settings. Yet, many of these works deal with experienced language practitioners (e.g. [Otwinowska, A. (2017). English teachers' language awareness: Away with the monolingual bias? Language Awareness, 26 (4), 304–324]) and focus on the impact of instruction about multilingual pedagogies (e.g. [Gorter, D., & Arocena, E. (2020). Teachers' beliefs about multilingualism in a course on translanguaging.

The study of teachers’ attitudes towards languages has received some attention, as multilingualism has become one of the main educational targets for European school systems (Cenoz 2019; Liyanage & Tao 2020). Several authors (Lasagabaster 2017; Safont 2007) have claimed that language attitudes may play a crucial role in multilingual education.

Cross-linguistic influence and the fluent alternation of several languages have been the focus of interest of recent research (García, 2009; Muñoz, 2007; Safont, 2001). The present study analyzes cross-linguistic influence and language switches in the oral production of English by 25 Catalan-Spanish bilingual children in a Spanish primary school. With that aim, we first identify the most common types of code-switch and their function in an EFL classroom by using Williams and Hammarberg’s (1998) categorization of code-switches.

Aquest article tracta sobre les tendències educatives actuals i els nous reptes que l’educació multilingüe planteja. Es presenta la situació lingüística actual a la gran majoria de centres educatius on diverses llengües coexisteixen dins i fora de l’aula. S’expliquen les diferents tendències educatives lligades al foment del multilingüisme, com ara la importància del manteniment de les llengües pròpies de l’alumnat,la incorporació de l’anglés a una edat primerenca i els nous enfocaments metodològics en l’ensenyament de llengües, com són els programes CLIL i EMI.

This pilot observational study deals with teacher directives in the English as an Additional Language classroom for very young language learners. Our data comprise transcripts from two 45-minute sessions, which have been processed from a discourse-pragmatic perspective. The aim of the analysis carried out is twofold. First, to examine the linguistic choices in the realization of regulative directives according to level of directness, addition of peripheral modifiers, use of person deixis and co-occurring speech acts in teachers’ feedback, such as praise or criticism.

While child requestive behavior has received some attention in SLA research, very few studies have considered requests production and comprehension in young learners from a multilingual perspective (Safont and Portolés, 2015, Safont and Portolés, 2016; Portolés, 2015; Safont, 2017). However, data in previous studies were obtained either from completion tests or from natural classroom discourse. To the best of our knowledge, no studies have explored young learners’ requests in three languages by combining both authentic and elicited data.