The goal of this research project is to examine language ideological debates throughout the period 1970-1990 in two international organisations, the Council of Europe and the European Union, from a critical sociolinguistic perspective. Their discourses on multilingualism and their recommendations for language teaching have shaped language policy in education in many European contexts since.

The goal of the project is to study the influence of teaching materials found in a compulsory school textbook on the learning of two grammatical phenomena. Following an analysis of the way in which these two phenomena are presented in the textbook, an improved variant will be constructed using criteria associated with input quality.

How do I find out if a train is wheelchair-friendly? Should I talk about my "disability" at job interviews? What types of educational support are available for disabled children, and who should I contact to apply for it? Are the toilets in this restaurant accessible? To find answers to these kinds of questions, people with disabilities develop a range of social and linguistic practices that are often unknown to the general public, as do their friends and family.

Vocabulary learning in a second or foreign language can take place in many different ways. In our project, we want to better understand how learners learn words incidentally or intentionally through the use of digital tools. Our project covers several language combinations and is being conducted in two countries in parallel, Poland and Switzerland. In Poland, we study learners who are Polish monolinguals and learn English as a second language (L2).

For more than three decades, the Canton of Valais “Bureau des Echanges Linguistiques” (office for language exchanges) has been responsible for coordinating language exchange programmes in the canton’s two language regions as well as outside the cantonal borders. In addition, exchange activities in the canton are also organised independently by families, school classes or schools.

The canton of Grisons in Switzerland promotes the goal of Romansh-German bilingualism with unique school models in traditional Romansh-speaking areas. In those areas, the minority language Romansh is the school language in primary schools. At secondary school levels, however, school language is switched to the majority language German. Differences in contact with German outside of school settings lead to extremely heterogeneous class constellations during German lessons from the third...

This thesis traces a discursive genealogy of the language debates at the Council of Europe. Through a sociolinguistic and discursive approach to international institutions, different institutional texts produced between 1949 and 2008 are examined in their socio-historically situated conditions of production.