Laura Portolés

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.

Teacher training programmes have often ignored the new multilingual paradigm and, consequently, educators may hold some misconceptions about how additional languages are learnt and should be taught in multilingual contexts. A number of recent studies have investigated language teachers’ beliefs regarding multilingual education (Arocena-Egaña, Cenoz & Gorter, 2015; De Angelis, 2011; Griva & Chostelidou, 2012; Haukås, 2016; Mitits, 2018; Otwinowska, 2014). Unlike this extant literature, the current paper focuses not on language teachers, but on a sample of 121 subject teachers-to-be.

In line with van Kampen et al.’s (2018) research about specialist and practitioner perceptions on the goals for CLIL in the Netherlands, the present study addresses Hüttner, Dalton-Puffer and Smit’s (2013) call for investigating teachers’ beliefs about CLIL in European countries like Spain where this teaching approach is highly institutionalized. Unlike the aforementioned studies, though, ours focuses on novice subject teachers in Primary education.

This book deals with early multilingual acquisition from a holistic, dynamic, and multilingual perspective. It focuses on the analysis of pragmatic awareness and language attitudes of consecutive multilingual children in relation to other variables, such as the linguistic model or the age factor. This volume makes an important contribution to the field, providing evidence for the Dynamic Model of Multilingualism proposed by Herdina and Jessner.

This volume brings together the latest findings from research on multilingual language learning and use in multilingual communities. Suzanne Flynn, Håkan Ringbom and Larissa Aronin are some of the prestigious scholars who have contributed to this book. As argued by this last author in her chapter, although multilingualism has always existed, the important changes that research on this phenomenon has recently undergone, like that of adopting a multilingual perspective in its studies, should always be borne in mind.

The study examines early multilingual formulaic speech with a focus on the English classroom. We have followed a discourse-pragmatic approach in the analysis of our data, which comprises transcripts from eight 45-minute sessions. Transcripts from these sessions involved 184 participants from two different age ranges. In this analysis, we have considered formulas produced in three languages: Catalan, Spanish, and English.

Tradicionalment la didàctica de llengües estrangeres, com ara l’anglès, s’ha basat en una perspectiva monolingüe en què l’ensenyament de la llengua es realitzava sense tenir en compte el bagatge lingüístic dels aprenents, ja que les llengües de cada parlant s’analitzaven com a sistemes lingüístics independents, la interferència dels quals calia evitar. No obstant això, aquesta no és la política lingüística fomentada des del Consell d’Europa que en documents com el Marc Comú Europeu de Referència per a les Llengües advoca per adoptar una perspectiva plurilingüe en l’ensenyament de llengües.

Traditionally, language teaching has been grounded on a monolingual bias and the strict separation of languages has been conceived as a requirement to ensure foreign language learning success. However, the flexible use of one’s linguistic repertoire, known as translanguaging, has also proven beneficial in EFL settings (vid. Jones & Lewis, 2014). The present study aims at examining translanguaging practices in early language learning taking into account the functions proposed by García et al. (2011).