LAUSR

The volume under review brings together a diverse range of theoretical and empirical perspectives on bilingualism and bilingual education, a burgeoning field of study with growing scholarly as well as public interest in the issue which involves an expanding number of the world’s population. This collection can be seen as the latest in a line of efforts to dispel prevailing myths about bilingualism. Meanwhile, it works to establish bilingualism as an exciting field of research where theories and practice in different linguistic, cultural, and ideological contexts can interact and cross-fertilize. The contributions in the volume are organized in three thematic parts, addressing the linguistic, pedagogical, and policy-related aspects of bilingualism. The opening piece in Part I Language Acquisition and Linguistic Aspects of Bilingualism is contributed by Piotr Romanowski, who examines the debated phenomenon of Non-Native Bilingualism (NNB) in Poland. The author first approaches the concept of NNB in the Polish monolingual context where parental recognition of the value of immersion learning has led to a host of creative measures to create a learner-friendly NNB environment. The potential of this approach is confirmed and elaborated in the empirical data gathered from 22 NNB families, with a conclusive observation that parents’ commitment counts and that the right communication strategies underpin success. The next chapter is contributed by Zofia Chłopek, who reflects on the relationship between language competences and metalinguistic awareness, a highly contentious issue in the bilingualism literature. The author revisits the notion of metalinguistic awareness (MLA) concerning the characteristics of a bi/multilingual individual and challenges the postulated parallel development of MLA and language competences. This raised doubt is explained in an empirical study with 122 bi/multilingual university students in Poland. The correlation results between the students’ self-assessed language competence ratings and their scores in a written translation task indicate that the number of appropriated languages and the attainment level thereof may have some bearing on MLA. Dealing also with grammar acquisition in bilingual learners, the subsequent chapter by Dorota Gaskins presents a focused case study on the processing strategies for picking up nominal inflections in the bilingual input. Putting the syntactic theory of Radical Construction Grammar to the test with her bilingual toddler, the researcher illustrates how the child’s unbalanced exposure to Polish and English – two very different languages with distinctive rules for noun usage – can lead to different patterns of acquisition. Apart from the evidence of language-specific features of acquisition, as predicted by the theory, Gaskins also notes a complex role frequency of exposure plays in influencing the trajectory of language development. Anne-Marie Bezzina and Joanne Gauci, in a corpus analysis of lesson recordings from Maltese secondary schools, evaluate the role of Maltese L1 and English L2 in the learning of French L3. Their results add support to the positive effect of L1 use in a foreign language classroom. The authors attribute the scaffolding role of L1 to the sociolinguistic values of codeswitching. The last chapter in Part I coauthored by Anna Verschik and Elīna Bone depicts the linguistic features of Estonian-Latvian bilingual speech based on a case study. The study finding tends to reverse the