ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors shall be concerned with research in modern languages which has a direct bearing on diversification, examining first the studies which have focused on the organisational issues arising when languages other than French are on offer as FLls, such as questions of staffing and timetabling, and then considering work which has investigated the key factors influencing pupils’ experience of learning various languages and schools’ views on the educational benefits of diversifying language provision. A body of analytical work exists on the linguistic factors in different languages which make them ‘easy’ or ‘difficult’ to learn, but very little of the writing on the subject or of the views on the difficulty of various languages is based on research with foreign language learners. Research on a larger scale, examining the area of attitude across a number of languages, has been carried out by the Assessment of Performance Unit.
