Larissa Aronin

• my personal site http://larissa-aronin.com
• Professor (Associate) at Oranim Academic College of Education

The turbulent beginning of the 20th century and the global transformations taking place in its last decades, and which continued into the next century, made millions of people leave their birthplace and find abode in other countries. The causes and trajectories of relocation vary; it can be voluntary, as in the case of immigration or moving for wor...

This volume offers a unique insight into multilingualism and sociolinguistic diversity employing the dominant language constellation (DLC) approach. How can novel research inform teaching practices? How do current theories account for multilingual reality in settings as diverse as countries of Western and Eastern Europe and Tunisia and Maghreb? The...

This chapter summarizes the theoretical novelty and practical implications offered in the volume. Theoretical findings refer to expanding the concepts of language awareness and identity, and their scrutiny from multiple perspectives in their tight connections with each other within the framework of DLC. In particular, the chapter categorizes the te...

Dominant Language Constellation approach, as a new research field, calls for new conceptual tools, for reviewing established theoretical stances, and for methodological innovations. In this introductory chapter, we relate Dominant Language Constellations to the concepts of Language(s) Awareness and (multilingual) Identity, and we explain how it con...

Linguistic landscape (LL) studies have developed extensively to describe more places and more items. The tendency of expanding the LL purview towards including the items that, in fact, belong to the material culture deserves thorough analysis. This is especially critical for the classroom research and practices, where tangible, concrete, three-dime...

elivering facts and findings from a variety of multilingual settings, this textbook systematically covers the diverse dimensions of multilingualism. As well as explaining key concepts, it examines the foremost issues of individual and societal multilingualism. It discusses topics from indigenous and minority languages to World Englishes and transla...

Globalisation affects all sectors of the society including higher education. Teaching staff and students are getting increasingly mobile, which results in the linguistic diversity in institutions. This, in its turn, invokes the necessity of accommodating populations with diverse and heterogeneous language skills. The issue of multilingualism in edu...

Article slideshow

Demonstration of the 3 visualization of DLCs.

In a globalized world, teaching English to speakers of other languages is indivisible from multilingualism. Due to the transformation of language practices, the linguistic “unit of circulation” is neither a single language, nor the entire linguistic repertoire. Instead, sets of languages perform the essential functions of communication, cognition a...

The concept of Dominant Language Constellations (DLC) is complementary to the notion of language repertoire. It denotes the set of a person’s most expedient languages, functioning as an entire unit and enabling an individual to meet all their needs in a multilingual environment. While a language repertoire refers to the totality of linguistic skill...

In today’s globalised world, a single named language such as English, Norwegian or Spanish, no matter how ‘big’ it is, rarely satisfies all the needs of communication, cooperation, education or any other area of human life. Neither is the entire language repertoire plausible for everyday use, simply because it is impossible to use too many language...

This article presents research on teaching English in Israel, a vibrant multilingual country, in the period between 2014 and 2020. After a brief introduction to the current approach to English language teaching around the world, it outlines the studies investigating: (a) learners of English, (b) English teachers, and (c) methods that are used in th...

This volume is an important instalment in the rapidly expanding literature on multilingualism in education and language teaching. Within multilingual studies the volume is highly innovative in its application of the concept, theory and perspectives of the Dominant Language Constellations (DLC). The volume reports original research on language educa...

The volume is devoted to examination of contemporary sociolinguistic practices from the perspective of Dominant Language Constellations (DLC). It is the first collection of studies guided by the DLC approach featuring contributors with expertise in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, language policy and education. The authors of the volume intro...

The Dominant Language Constellation (DLC) is a group of one’s most important, vehicle languages, functioning as a whole, and enabling an individual to meet all needs in a multilingual environment. Unlike linguistic repertoire, which embraces all the skills and registers of all the acquired languages, the Dominant Language Constellation includes onl...

This volume is devoted to examination of contemporary sociolinguistic practices from the perspective of Dominant Language Constellations (DLC). It is the first collection of studies guided by the DLC approach featuring contributors with expertise in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, language policy and education. The authors of the volume intr...

This volume is dedicated to the concept and several applications of Dominant Language Constellations (DLC), by which it advances understanding of current multilingualism through addition of a novel perspective from which to view contemporary language use and acquisition. The term Dominant Language Constellation denotes the set of a person’s or grou...

This contribution to the special volume is written in tune with Prof Marianna Visser's seeing linguistic diversity in Africa as an asset rather than a complicating factor (2012, 2013). Multilingualism is without a doubt an advantage. With that said, multilingual education is a truly challenging enterprise. In particular, the realisation of appropri...

The contribution will explore the grounds for employing Dominant Language Constellation (DLC) as an additional approach to the time-honored methods of research in multilingualism. Dominant Language Constellation is a group of one’s most important languages, functioning as an entire unit, and enabling an individual to meet all needs in a multilingua...

There is so far no simple, short and ‘one size fits all’ answer to the question ‘What is multilingualism?’. This lecture will show why we should not expect one. Instead, it will acquaint the reader with the forms, appearances and key features of multilingualism. It will discuss the basic terminology and concepts of multilingualism, introduce the fu...

The introduction describes the field of material culture of multilingualism as a synthesis of two important provinces of human interest – ‘multilingualism’ and ‘material culture’. It starts with laying out some philosophical views on material culture from earlier times to the recent forays into the perception of materialities. The main thrust of th...

The material culture of multilingualism is an emerging domain of research in multilingualism studies. The aims of this chapter are to present the material culture of multilingualism as a field in its own right, and consolidate the theoretical underpinnings of the material culture of multilingualism singled out so far. In particular, the author trac...

Multilingualism in post-postmodernity has proved to be the prevailing human condition. Various approaches have been applied to fully embrace the advantages of multilingualism and to come to terms with its challenges—among them, first of all, the widely spread competence concept. In addition to the competence approach, there are several others, such...

Multilingual speakers, bilingual and more often multilingual, are diverse in many ways. They undergo different kinds of experiences in a variety of social spaces, in particular when undergoing changes in their linguistic environments. This article suggests a conceptual tool to examine the various contexts in which multilingual speakers emerge and r...

The article presents a philosophical conceptualization of multilingualism. Philosophy’s general task is to subject human experience to reflective scrutiny and the experience of present day society has changed drastically. Multilingualism, as the vehicle of a new linguistic dispensation, plays a central role in it. We apply the metaphor ‘edge’ to ex...

Introduction The perspective of multi-competence became extremely useful when the societal awareness of bilingualism generated a demand for understanding what it means to be a bilingual. This was a welcome response to the challenges encountered by non-native speakers, mostly of English, by language teachers, scholars and all those associated with s...

The material culture of multilingualism is an emerging domain of research in multilingualism studies. The aims of this chapter are to present the material culture of multilingualism as a field in its own right, and consolidate the theoretical underpinnings of the material culture of multilingualism singled out so far.

Abstract Understanding multilingualism has always been a challenge. The reasons are several. Firstly, manifestations of multilingualism at first sight are similar to those of bilingualism, so that often the impression is that it is “just learning an additional language.” Secondly, researchers admit it is much too complicated to study compared to bi...

Research methodology is determined by theoretical approaches. This article discusses methods of multilingualism research in connection with theoretical developments in linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and education. Taking a brief glance at the past, the article starts with a discussion of an issue underlying the choice of research...

This chapter continues the line of research on the concept of affordances in applied linguistics and sociology of language, which David Singleton has investigated in recent years (Singleton and Aronin 2007; Aronin and Singleton 2010, 2012a, 2012b; Singleton et al. 2013). The concept of affordances in reference to applied linguistics and multilingua...

This book brings together papers dealing with essential issues in applied linguistics and multilingualism that have been contributed by leading figures in these two fields and present state-of-the-art developments in theory and research. The first part includes articles touching on various aspects of multiple-language acquisition, with a particular...

Linguistic minority populations in Europe, both immigrant communities and minority language users within the host community, are typically multilinguals, combining the official languages of the country they live in with daily or occasional use of their home languages. This they do within social and physical time and within their own perceived time....

Joshua Aaron Fishman (July 18, 1926– ) is one of the most influential figures in American and world sociolinguistics of the second half of the 20th and of the 21st century. He is the founder of the sociology of language as a separate field of research. As one of the founding figures of sociolinguistics, he has made a substantial contribution as a t...

The concept of affordances originating in Gibson's work (Gibson, 1977) is gaining ground in multilingualism studies (cf. Aronin and Singleton, 2010; Singleton and Aronin, 2007; Dewaele, 2010). Nevertheless, studies investigating affordances in respect of teaching, learning or using languages are still somewhat rare and tend to treat isolated aspect...

Affectivity is an important dimension in humans' social and individual lives. It is either a stimulating or hindering aspect of language learning. This article aims to draw attention to material culture as a powerful, but mostly neglected source of data on the use and acquisition of languages, and demonstrates the close and intricate links between...

This book is an authoritative account of multilingualism in the present era, a phenomenon affecting a vast number of communities, thousands of languages and millions of language users. The book’s focus is specifically on the knowledge and use of multiple languages, but its treatment of the topic is very wide-ranging. It deals with both bilingualism...

Not all the constituents of societal or individual multilingualism (speaker, language, context and environment) have been researched equally to date. Multilingualism studies up to this juncture have theorised environment mostly as milieu, conceptualised usually in terms of people, i.e. community, family, school populations. Heretofore, the material...

Due to the all-embracing nature of multilingualism, it is customary that research on multilingualism deals not only with purely linguistic matters, but extends to the domains of psychology and sociology as a result, creating new, specific knowledge on multilingualism. Our understanding of multilingualism has increased with research expanding into v...

With the advent of globalization and the consequent and concomitant establishment of a new linguistic dispensation, the diversity of multilingualism has increased exponentially. Unsurprisingly, such diversity has attracted the closest attention of researchers, as well as those involved in managing the practical ramifications of multilingualism, par...

The goal of this article is to make research on English language teaching and learning published locally in Israel more widely available. Given that so many Israeli researchers are internationally trained and maintain wide connections, it necessarily omits much important work that appears in European and US journals. It focuses on shorter studies,...

This paper analyses the opinions, awareness and perceptions of trilingual or multilingual students, regarding their language teacher. Findings of a comparative study carried out in two different cultural contexts, Ireland and Israel, are discussed, where participants (435 in total) included Russian-speaking students in Israel studying English or He...

This paper examines the relationships between L1, L2 and L3 in immersion programmes for Russian-speaking students in Israel. The context of the immersion programmes in multilingual setting is discussed. Two parallel and similar immersion programmes, which were carried out for the same population, but with different target languages (L2 Hebrew and L...

Multilingualism in European bilingual contexts: Language use and attitudes. David Lasagabaster and Ángel Huguet (eds) (2007)Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. pp. 251. ISBN 1–85359–930–1/ EAN 978–1-85359–930–9 (hbk) ISBN 1–85359–929–8/ EAN 978–1-85359–929–3 (pbk)

This paper aims to show that the development of multilingualism in the world has reached a point where, in terms of scale and significance, it is comparable with and assimilable to politico-economic aspects of globalisation, global mobility and ‘postmodern’ modes of thinking. The paper situates multilingualism in its relationship with the most dram...

In this paper we propose a perspective on multiple language acquisition based on Gibson's theory of affordances. We suggest that the experiential profile of multilingual learners provides them with especially favourable conditions to develop awareness of the social and cognitive possibilities which their particular situation affords them. We review...

This study was conducted with young Russian-speaking immigrant adults in Israel who are in the process of becoming trilingual in Russian, Hebrew, and English. The focus of the study is on these trilinguals' emotional experiences and attitudes with regard to a) themselves as speakers and learners; b) the process of language learning, and c) each of...

The aim of this paper is to discuss different aspects of trilingualism and multilingualism as related to sociolinguistics. The paper highlights the importance of multilingualism in modern society and the inter disciplinarity of its study as related to sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and psycholinguistics. The paper, which adopts a sociolingu...

The study endeavored to put forward a holistic perspective on multilinguality, by extending the remit of the disciplines and fields of study pertaining to multilingual acquisition and by drawing on the construct of identity. Looking at the study and use of new languages from the perspective of identity allows for a more complicated view of the spea...