Contents: Cecilia Varcasia: Introduction ¿ Renate Kärchner-Ober: Effects of National Language Policies and Linguistic Reorganization - Long-term Issues in a Society, Cultures and Languages ¿ Sandro Caruana/David Lasagabaster: Using a Holistic Approach to Explore Language Attitudes in Two Multilingual Contexts: the Basque Country and Malta ¿ Amanda Hilmarsson-Dunn/Rosamond Mitchell: Multilingual Migrants in England: Factors Affecting their Language Use ¿ Enrica Cortinovis: Eliciting Multilingualism: Investigating Linguistic Diversity in Schools ¿ Andreas Braun: The Role of Education in the Language Practices of Trilingual Families ¿ Silvia Melo-Pfeifer: Researchers¿ Multilingual Awareness in an International Research Team ¿ Kerstin Kazzazi: Three Languages, Two People, One Conversation ¿ Callie Mady/Wendy Carr: Immigrant Perspectives on French Language Learning in English-Dominant Canadian Communities.
Research into the complex phenomenon of multilingualism is rapidly increasing. This book looks at multilingualism through its interfaces with language policies, language attitudes and issues of language awareness and identity. The aim is to examine the dynamic processes that lead or hinder the development of such phenomena. One of the scopes of the volume is to represent the complexity of the multilingual speaker by shedding light on different multilingual settings in the world. The chapters of this volume tackle the topic from a sociolinguistic perspective by showing how multilingualism is dynamically constructed. They provide empirical research on language learning in different multilingual environments in the world as well as practical suggestions for the investigation of multilingualism and the improvement of its education.
Cecilia Varcasia holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics. She is a Research Fellow at the Language Study Unit of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. Her research focuses on multilingual communication, discourse and conversation analysis, cross-cultural pragmatics and corpus linguistics. She has co-edited Corpora, Discorso e Stile. Corpora, Discourse & Style.