Hosted by Birkbeck College, University of London, and co-organised by the International Association of Multilingualism, the AILA Research network ‘Multilingualism: Acquisition and Use’ and the Centre for Multilingual & Multicultural Research, Birkbeck; 24–25 June 2010.

The annual international Bloomsbury Round Table invites researchers to present their latest work in the broad fields of language, communication and cognition. This year's theme was the multiple faces of multilingualism. The programme included seven plenary papers, fourteen presentations, a poster session and the launch of the Applied Linguistics Review, published by De Gruyter Mouton.

Over the last three decades, multilingualism research has gradually emerged as a discipline in its own right, going beyond its roots in second language acquisition (SLA) and bilingualism research, specifically looking at the acquisition and use of three or more languages (L≥3) at individual and societal level, and increasingly requiring different methodologies (Aronin & Hufeisen Reference Aronin and Hufeisen2009; Todeva & Cenoz Reference Todeva and Cenoz2009). This was evidenced in the plenary sessions and presentations following the welcome by Jean-Marc Dewaele (Birkbeck, University of London), a specialist on multilingualism and emotions (Dewaele Reference Dewaele2010).

In the first plenary session, Li Wei (Birkbeck, University of London) addressed the multicompetence, creativity and criticality of multilingual children. His classroom-based analysis of the codeswitching behaviour of British Chinese children in complementary schools showed that the multilingual practices of such minority ethnic children involve a rich, creative multicompetence rather than the low linguistic communicative competence frequently assumed from a restrictive one language only (OLON) or one language at a time (OLAT) perspective. Ulrike Jessner (University of Innsbruck) then discussed the advantages and pitfalls of using a multilingual approach for written evaluation of multilingual pupils, reporting on a study with Gessica De Angelis (University of Bolzano) which investigated writing across languages in South Tyrol (Italy), involving 8th grade Italian (L1) students with German (L2) and English (L3). Anne Pauwels (SOAS) examined gender and language practices in multilingual settings. Elaborating on the notions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’, she provided a novel perspective on the language practices of second generation men and women in Australian migrant settings, and those of young men and women learning languages in a school setting.

In the second plenary session, Raphaele Berthele (University of Fribourg) provided empirical evidence for multilinguals’ more efficient development of receptive competences in new, previously unlearnt languages, arguing that such efficiency is due to interlingual inferences based on abduction rather than induction or deduction. The paper by Larissa Aronin (University of Haifa) and Muiris Ó Laoire (Institute of Technology, Tralee) examined language nominations – ‘mother tongue’, ‘foreign language’, ‘L1’, ‘L2’, for example – as markers of the linguistic and societal diversity of multilingualism. Changeable over time, such nominations may prove useful for monitoring the dynamics of multilingualism in particular communities across time and space. John O'Regan (Institute of Education, University of London) reflected on the discourse of intercultural communication and its underlying theoretical premises, referring to questions of judgement and truth in the intercultural public sphere. Sian Preece (Institute of Education, University of London) then showed how the increase in multilingual and bidialectical students entering English-medium universities, inside and outside Anglophone settings, creates multilingual spaces whose linguistic and cultural diversity should be welcomed rather than seen as a problem to be remedied.

The presentations also illustrated the diverse nature of multilingualism in different language contact settings, such as the emergence of Eastern European English (Elena Salakhian, University of Tübingen); variation in interrogative inversion in English contact varieties (Michaela Hilbert, Otto-Friedrich-Universität); perceptual learning in Hindi-English bilinguals (Katharina Schuhmann, SUNY Stony Brook); language, identity and cultural conflict in Gabon (Rebecca Mitchell, University of Cambridge); power relations and negotiations of space and identities in researching multilingual teenagers in Stockholm (Marie Werndin, Stockholm University); language practices within intercultural couples in central Switzerland (Kellie Goncalves, University of Bern); and spontaneous translation from Bulgarian/French (L1) into English (L2) (Karim Siebeneicher Brito, Universidade Federal do Paranco).

Although one paper investigated the foreign language learning motivation of adult English mother tongue speakers beyond the classroom (Martin Pickett, University of Portsmouth) and another described pre-school pragmatic development in a Catalan-Spanish bilingual child learning English (Maria Pilar Safont Jorda, Universitat Jaume I), most presentations were framed within an educational setting: modelling grammar teaching in a multilingual context (Mandira Halder, University of Nantes); language dependency in Japanese-English students' bilingual autobiographic writing (Kyoko Motobayashi, OISE, University of Toronto); e-books and reading skill development in Chinese ESL learners in Hong Kong (Gopa Nayak, University of Oxford); and the use of Hebrew as mother tongue in English foreign language acquisition in Israel (Tsafi Timor, Kibbutzim College of Education). Finally, Maria Kambanaros (European University Cyprus) reported on specific language impairment (SLI) in simultaneous bilingual children.

The poster session sampled Ph.D. research at Birkbeck on language learner strategies in highly multilingual (L ≥ 7) language learners (Ron Peek); the effect of Chinese L2 English learners' motivation/attitudes on L2 suprasegmental development (Jiang Yu); and codeswitching and terms of address in multiple identity formation (Fatma Said).

The final round table discussion saw general agreement on the following: (1) multilingualism is a complex, rich phenomenon; (2) multilingualism research is both related to and quite different from bilingualism and SLA research; (3) multilingualism should be seen and nurtured as a valuable asset, particularly within education, to be reflected in suitable initiatives at school curriculum, teacher training, institutional and policy levels.