Globalisation, increased mobility and transnational networking transform the linguistic ecologies of contemporary societies. In this COST Action, the aim is to bring multilinguals into the focus of these processes by investigating the challenges and opportunities involved in acquiring, using and being understood as a “new speaker” of a language in the context of a multilingual Europe.

In the past 30 years, research on the linguistic expression of spatial relations has shed light on systematic structural and lexical differences between languages. One such difference concerns how some Romance and Germanic languages (e.g. French and German) describe how figures move in space. Whilst languages like French tend to express the path of movement by means of finite verbs, in German, uninflected elements such as verbal prefixes, adverbs or prepositions perform this function....

This project was dedicated to measuring students' compentences in French in the skills listening, reading, speaking and writing by the end of primary school as well as by the end of the 8th class. In order to compare results, the 8th-class students' skills in reading and writing in Englisch were also tested. Analyses focused on whether aspects such as number of teaching hours and different variables related to students and teachers influence the students' competences in foreign languages....

This project commissioned by the State Secretariat for Migration dealt with developing a framework curriculum to promote the language skills of migrants in Switzerland. Development goals for future projects were also defined. To order the document in German. To order the document in French.