Choosing language options at secondary school in England : insights from parents and students

In a world of global English, study abroad today is a multilingual experience,with English frequently adopted as a medium of instruction in globalising higher education and also functioning as the most common lingua francaamong international student groups. This chapter explores the resulting challenges for English-speaking students majoring in other languages, who undertake study abroad with the desire to achieve advanced proficiency inlanguages such as Spanish, French or German. Such students have high expectations that SA will provide a naturalistic “immersion” experience in L2,to complement their classroom studies at home. However, in practice they find they must negotiate a multilingual environment, including many interlocutors keen to speak English, in order to maximise opportunities for L2 use and learning.This chapter provides longitudinal case studies of two British languagesspecialists undertaking study abroad in France and Spain respectively. These two participants were “high gainers”, that is, they made exceptional progresswhen abroad towards advanced proficiency, compared with a larger cohort ofstudents. The chapter describes the multilingual practices of these two students when abroad, and documents the agency they displayed and the varied strategies they adopted to enter contexts of target language use and to build long-term relationships with target language speakers, so as to achieve their main goal of increased oral fluency in L2, alongside regular use ofEnglish with home social networks and local networks of international friends

Deprivation Indices, Population Health and Geography: An Evaluation of the Spatial Effectiveness of Indices at Multiple Scales

Area-based deprivation indices (ABDIs) have become a common tool with which to investigate the patterns and magnitude of socioeconomic inequalities in health. ABDIs are also used as a proxy for individual socioeconomic status. Despite their widespread use, comparably less attention has been focused on their geographic variability and practical concerns surrounding the Modifiable Area Unit Problem (MAUP) than on the individual attributes that make up the indices. Although scale is increasingly recognized as an important factor in interpreting mapped results among population health researchers, less attention has been paid specifically to ABDI and scale. In this paper, we highlight the effect of scale on indices by mapping ABDIs at multiple census scales in an urban area. In addition, we compare self-rated health data from the Canadian Community Health Survey with ABDIs at two census scales. The results of our analysis confirm the influence of spatial extent and scale on mapping population health—with potential implications for health policy implementation and resource distribution