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...

The Inventar des zweisprachigen Unterrichts (inventory of bilingual education) provides an overview of bilingual education in Switzerland, specifically of all bilingual education programmes currently in progress (2021/2022 school year) at compulsory schools and upper secondary schools.

When commencing the compulsory education curriculum, pupils are five years old and are assumed to have mastered the oral foundations of the language of instruction. In some districts however, up to 80% of pupils entering 1H speak a different language at home, and between 60 and 70% do not speak or understand French at all. The processes whereby so-called “allophone” students, even if many of them were born in Switzerland, acquire phonological representations of French (i.e.

Two-thirds of all Rhaeto-Romanic speakers live outside the Rhaeto-Romanic homeland, yet the specific linguistic conditions for Romansh speakers outside the traditional language region have not yet been studied in detail.

Comparatively little research has been conducted on how adult migrants – both those with low literacy skills (non-literates) and those who have competence in a non-Latin alphabet (non-roman alphabet literates) – acquire reading and writing skills, and scholarly findings on the subject are correspondingly sparse. This condition is all the more surprising as specialist discourse on the topic of “literacy levels in adults” has long revealed that traditional differentiations between so-called...

SWIKO is a multilingual learner corpus describing learner language according to principles of corpus-linguistics. The corpus is an umbrella project developed during the 2016–2019 research period and being further developed in the 2021–2024 period. It incorporates data from other projects at the Research Centre on Multilingualism. SWIKO can currently be accessed via a request to the Institute of Multilingualism.

In line with the strong presence of usage-based approaches to language description and research in language acquisition, research in corpus linguistics has intensified and diversified in recent years. This applies equally to corpus-based and corpus-oriented research into language acquisition as well as to applied pedagogical research. Nevertheless, research gaps and desiderata remain. For instance, in regards to learner corpora, certain bias towards English as the target language, intermediate...

The learner's native language(s) have an impact on second language acquisition. All speakers ‘ languages share the processes that enable their functioning and also their knowledge repertoires, such as the phonological repertoire (Flege, Bohn & Jang, 1997; Kartushina & Frauenfelder, 2014). The functioning of languages and their common repertoires can generate cross-linguistic interferences and transfers, which either hinder or facilitate second language acquisition.

The main goal of this project is to compile an inventory of existing corpora containing productions of learners of German and French as a foreign language; a further objective is defining gaps and needs in this area.