Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions all over the world were forced to make the executive decision of quickly and effectively transferring face-to-face classes into an online format. Issues such as technical difficulties, varying degrees of digital literacy within a given team of teachers or the question of how to preserve the essence of face-to-face classes in an online environment are among the many challenges that have affected and hindered the practice of instructors all over the world. With a focus on the teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language (Español como Lengua Extranjera, ELE) and video-conferencing platforms such as the software known as Zoom, in this paper we discuss the importance of continuing the practice of teaching speaking in an online environment. Subsequently, we present a number of strategies that we have put into practice in our online ELE classrooms in order to try and maintain the same or very similar level of interaction between our students when compared to face-to-face classrooms.

The present study examines the relative order of noun-adjective sequences within a code-switched DP among Basque/Spanish bilinguals. Several hypotheses have been considered: is this a property defined by the determiner (Bartlett, 2013), the adjective (Cantone & MacSwan, 2009) or the noun (Arnaus et al., 2012)? We propose a new look at the problem by using code-switching of Basque/Spanish, two languages whose typological properties partially overlap. The Basque adjective is rigidly post nominal, while Spanish adjectives range from obligatory pre-nominal to obligatory post-nominal. We found that neither the N nor the D seem to play a role. Furthermore, the study showed that the adjective is responsible for word order in these contexts. Thus, our results confirm Cantone and MacSwan (2009).

Recent work argues that a bilingual linguistic system is fully integrated in one competence system and does not consist of two separate, autonomous systems as is commonly assumed (see Goldrick et al 2016, Grimstad et al 2014, López 2020, Riksam 2017). Here, we explore the organization of the lexicon within the integration hypothesis using data based on idioms and code-switching. The working hypothesis is that if the lexicons of a bilingual person are integrated in the sort of grammatical architecture presented in López (2020), one should be able to code-switch within the idiom and retain the idiomatic meaning. After a pilot study with a community of Papiamentu-Dutch bilinguals, we tested this hypothesis with two communities of bilingual code-switchers: Basque-Spanish, English-Spanish. The task consisted of choosing a meaning out of three choices for a range of sentences, some of which included code-switched idioms. Our results, by-and-large, confirm the hypothesis that code-switching does not destroy the integrity of the idiom.

The present study examines the relative order of noun-adjective sequences within code-switched Determiner Phrases. Several hypotheses have been considered: (i) Order is a property defined by the noun; (ii) it is a property defined by the adjective; (iii) it is a property governed by the carrier phrase. The studies that have investigated the issue all assume that the class of adjectives is homogeneous, but in fact, there exist several sub-classes of adjectives which in many languages, including Spanish, exhibit distinct ordering properties. We propose to add the variable ‘adjective type’ to our study and use code-switching of English/Spanish, two languages that differ in the position of adjectives, as our database. A total of thirty English/Spanish heritage speakers took part in an experiment. Our results show that both the language of the adjective and the carrier phrase are significant factors of word order in the noun phrase; on the other hand, the noun itself does not seem to play a role.