The way networks grow and change over time is called network evolution. Numerous off-the-shelf algorithms have been developed to study network evolution. These can give us insight into the way systems grow and change over time. However, what off-the-shelf algorithms often lack are knowledge of the behavioral details surrounding a specific problem. Here we will develop a simple case that we will revisit over the next few chapters: How do children learn words from exposure to a sea of language? One possibility is that the words children learn first influence the words they learn next. Another possibility is that the structure of language itself facilitates the learning of some words over others. Indeed, we know that adults speak differently to children in ways that facilitate language learning, with semantically informative words tending to appear more often around words that children learn earliest. This invites the question: To what extent does the semantic structure of language predict word learning? This chapter will provide a general framework for building and competing models against one another with a specific application to the network evolution of child vocabularies.

Geneviève Calbris’ semiotic study of French gestures began in the 1970s and shows how gestural signs interface between the concrete and the abstract. Created by analogical links originating in physical experience of the world via processes of mimesis and metonymy, they are activated by contexts of use and constitute diverse semantic constructions: Gesture is able to evoke several notions alternatively (polysemy) or simultaneously (polysign). As expressions of perceptual schemas extracted from physical experience, they prefigure concepts. A Saussurean perspective brings to light relations between physical features of gestures (signifiers) and the notions (signifieds) they are apt to evoke; it reveals signifiers that are common to different gestures (paradigmatic axis of substitution) and how signifiers interweave in gestural sequencing (syntagmatic axis of combination). Gesture expresses, animates, explains, synthesizes information, and anticipates speech. We highlight its utterance functions, its simultaneous multireferentiality, the gestural anticipation of verbal information, and the interplay of tension-relaxation between conversation partners that this can create.

This chapter presents an overview of the field of second/foreign language acquisition (SLA) and gesture, which examines gestures as a window onto language acquisition, and gestures as a medium of acquisition. The chapter surveys what is known about effects of specific languages in contact (crosslinguistic influence), general learner behaviors, teachers’ and learners’ gesture practices in and outside of language classrooms, and effects of seeing and producing gestures on language learning. The chapter closes with a research agenda for SLA and gesture studies, outlining some open questions, challenges, and future research topics.

This chapter samples signs from educational institutions at various levels and a few school and government offices.

In this chapter, we discuss historical, methodological, and social issues pertaining to the relationship between context and language learning and assessment in first, second, and heritage languages (henceforth, L1, L2, and HL, respectively). We begin with an overview of the contextual factors that shape L1 development and discuss issues of language policy in formal L1 educational contexts. In the second and third sections, we briefly review the development of the fields of L2 learning and assessment, with attention to contextual happenings and trends that have affected them, and discuss psychological, social, cultural, and literacy-based approaches to language learning. In the fourth section, we examine the case of HL learners as an example of how context affects the development and maintenance of the HL in both informal (e.g., how young children acquire the HL) and formal settings (e.g., how current L2 teaching methods are not adequate to teach HL learners). The chapter concludes with a discussion of what we see as possible future trends and directions in the fields.

This chapter considers the relationship between colonial knowledge, imperial education, and class mobility. British working-class children were not educated for the empire, and British soldiers received almost no country-specific training. Once in India, enlisted men were actively discouraged from developing more than the most basic of language skills. But in spite of gaining no material benefits from learning about India, some non-elite Brits did devote themselves to learning native languages, local religious practices, and further understanding the social world of British India. To do so, they at times crossed boundaries of class and race, developing relationships with native Indians and elite British in the process. The remnants of these educational endeavors include poetry, exam results, scrapbooks, and hand-illustrated glossaries through which non-elites constructed their own forms of colonial knowledge. But autodidacts failed to translate this learning or these new relationships into material gain because the governing institutions of the Raj could not conceive of the utility of colonial knowledge for this class.

Being bilingual is a common experience for many people. In this chapter we define what is bilingualism according to the most recent research evidence in linguistics and neurolinguistics. A general overview of the different stages of bilingualism across the lifespan and the terminology are presented together with preliminary insight on the properties and capacities of the bilingual brain. Findings reported in the chapter include the role of minority languages, such as local and regional languages spoken by small communities, and their crucial role for sustaining bilingualism globally.

Frederic Taveau makes a strong argument for reconceptualising modern languages – in this case French – as a subject discipline, with knowledge domains and pathways that explore alternative ways of learning and using language with beginner or near-beginner students. By foregrounding textual fluency, he challenges more traditional approaches to language learning that emphasise linguistic systems. Instead, he focuses on the use of multimodal literary texts to promote meaning-making and language learning through deepening learners’ critical and cultural awareness of relevant, motivating real-world phenomena. Taveau outlines the processes involved in enabling novice learners of French to become more self-confident and self-directed creative literary writers using language in unprecedented ways. Through a series of scaffolded text-centred learning episodes, learners are guided through pluriliteracies-based steps, increasingly using cognitive discourse functions creatively and confidently (explaining, describing, classifying, arguing and evaluating) to construct their own descriptive literary texts on a Gothic theme. These texts are ‘owned’ by students, demonstrating language learning as a creative, motivating means to understanding their world and that of others.

Research on mediation in intercultural pragmatics is an emerging area of research and to date there is little work that currently focuses on this. Intercultural mediation is important for understanding how language users engage with intercultural pragmatics, where meaning-making and interpretation are central. The issues confronting research on mediation and intercultural pragmatics result largely from the fact that this area of work has emerged from studies of language learning rather than studies of intercultural pragmatics specifically. This chapter overviews three main research themes in the field of mediation in intercultural pragmatics: (1) the importance of metapragmatic awareness in mediation and how metapragmatic awareness is understood in intercultural contexts, (2) mediation as an activity that can be directed to others or to the self rather than always being an activity of intermediaries, and (3) the particular nature of mediation as a language teaching activity in which teachers construct learning as an interpretive process of making sense of meanings encountered in and across languages.

Over the last two decades, second-language pragmatics brought to the fore commonalities and conventions shared by speakers and hearers, those which create a common ground for communication, as well as culture varieties in language use, and those which cause communication breakdowns in real-life contexts. But, of course, meaning which is to be understood entirely under the influence of social interaction and cognitive change cannot capture the modalities or channels speakers use to convey a certain content of an utterance. Typically, natural behaviors, in the form of emotive effects, are integrated somehow into the interpretation of utterances in everyday life situations, a point generally missed in the literature on how utterances are understood in a second language. In the light of the above observations, an original feature of this chapter is its discussion of cases where "natural," i.e. affective, and linguistic communication interact in the interpretation of utterances. The task of describing and explaining what is conveyed by nonpropositional types of meaning, those "affective aspects of learning," such as feelings, attitudes, or preferences, falls squarely within the domain of L2 pragmatics, and the central aim of this chapter is to redress the balance.

Language skills are fundamental to children’s achievement as they are both a predictor of future academic success and school engagement and the conduit by which learning takes place. Language difficulties have well-documented consequences on virtually all areas of children’s development. This chapter addresses how early language system weaknesses impact on the academic outcomes and quality of life of children and their capacity to participate in activities with their peers. Understanding the impact of language weakness on the emergence of literacy skills and academic abilities can inform universal and targeted interventions within education settings, in early childhood and the early years of school. These educational interventions are described and the evidence for their short-term, mid-term and long-term impact is reviewed. The chapter concludes with a discussion about what is required to harness the potential of educational settings to provide rich language learning experiences in classrooms which can reduce inequities, enable positive engagement in school and foster social-emotional well-being. If classrooms are to be harnessed in this way, schools and early childhood settings need to focus on the fundamentals of high-quality teaching practices to improve all children’s language and literacy outcomes.

How multilingualism and related concepts are seen, is likely to influence who identifies as multilingual. This chapter examines views of multilingualism in education in Norway. Based on an overview of prevailing definitions of multilingualism and the presentation of Norway as a multilingual country, I discuss the extent to which multilingualism is seen as a resource in the curricula for selected language subjects, white papers on education, the work of scholars researching multilingualism, and Norwegians in general. These understandings are compared to pupils’ own definitions of multilingualism and to what extent they identify as multilingual. The analysis shows that positive attitudes towards multilingualism are widespread in society and in policy papers on education. However, not all types of multilingualism are equally embraced, since migrants’ multilingualism is often discussed in problem-oriented terms. Furthermore, scholars in Norway refer mainly to migrants in multilingualism discourse, thus excluding most people living in Norway from identifying as multilingual. However, secondary school pupils’ own definitions and self-perceptions take a broader and more inclusive approach.

In this chapter, the author presents some of her creative courses or workshops at Aix-Marseille University and in a local medical centre, as well as a new action research project in creative pedagogy. As a lecturer, she has developed an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and research, infusing her academic teaching with creative, plurilingual practices. She became aware of the pleasures of thinking and writing between languages when studying English poetry for her PhD in French, as well as of the negotiation of the cultural and conceptual mismatches between the discourses of English poetry criticism and French academia, and between interior and exterior languages, but with a crossover effect: a language of intimacy from which one was estranged by distance, a language of exteriority in the immediate environment. The creative energy of language learning, and the pleasure learners take in the phonetics and physicality of foreign words, led the author to develop a pedagogical approach designed to include what Yoann Loisel calls the ‘maternal side of language’. She references Julia Kristeva’s chora to convey the way creative translation and plurilingual creative writing workshops offer the possibility of playing with new ‘ways of [writing]’, new ‘manners of being’.

Language contact is at its most intense within one and the same individual. This chapter discusses the dynamic and multifaceted phenomenon of individual bilingualism, which emerges when individuals learn to understand multiple language varieties. Individual bilingual language use may contribute to societal processes of language change, language maintenance, and language loss. It is as yet not fully clear how bilingual individuals affect such larger processes, but cross-linguistic influence in comprehension and production, patterns of language choice, and variable levels of proficiency across the lifespan all play a role. These in turn depend on individuals' contexts for learning and using languages throughout the lifespan. The chapter exemplifies some of these on the basis of bilinguals' language biographies (including Frederick the Great's). Language learning histories and opportunities for using each language help explain the large variability in language skills and use among bilinguals. New languages can be learned until well into adulthood. Their number is constrained only by learning opportunities and motivation. Previously learned languages, including languages learned very early in life, can be lost through lack of use and practice. Language attitudes play a large role in all of this.

Gilles Forlot, also denounces French monolingualism and a homogenizing view of the Republic. He  advocates fighting off these “zombies” as he describes them by dealing with ‘the attention to exceptions in language systems, the illegitimacy of all forms of language contact, [and] a supposedly necessary balanced set of skills when one learns/speaks a language.”

As for Maureen Kendrick, her Ukrainian family experiences in Canada inspired her to develop reciprocal teaching with migrant students. Through her work, she mobilizes not only languages but also multimodal semiotic resources to create access to new knowledge and opportunities for students.