The present research focuses on parents' decision to raise children with more than one language. Bilingualism in this article is considered to be not a result of environmental pressure or linguistic situation but the conscious choice made by the child's parents. The article concentrates on three main steps in planning the child's linguistic development: the choice of the language of pre-school (kindergarten) institution, the choice of the language of schooling, and parents' choice to include non-formal language learning activities into the child's daily routine. The research states that parents' attitude towards teaching their children a non-native language depends on the linguistic group they belong to and their educational background. The results of the research confirm that lack of methodological knowledge prevents parents from or limits their ability to teach the child. The survey also proves that children whose parents do teach them non-native languages are more motivated and more successful at school than their peers. Therefore, careful planning of the child's linguistic development is of primary importance and needs professional support from educational institutions.

The article focuses on the issues of reading of foreign language students at contemporary universities. The age of information, rapid development of IT have affected reading preferences and reading skills of our students. In this ubiquitous multimodal digital environment our students' reading preferences have been shifting: digital rather than printed text reading has become an everyday reality. Therefore, a new kind of literacy is required-the ability to read multimodal texts, the latter having an impact on reading. This raises a very important question for educators: What particular reading skills do our students have to acquire in order to fully comprehend multimodal texts? Moreover, in order to understand the meaning of specific professional texts read in English or any other foreign language, the reader requires linguistic as well as specific professional knowledge and particular (cognitive, metacognitive) reading skills, or in other words, disciplinary literacy is required. Consequently, this raises new requirements for university teachers-to teach New Generation foreign language (FL) students the reading skills necessary for understanding the meaning, critical assessment and evaluation of professional texts in a foreign language. Thus, the aim of the article is to establish what particular reading skills students need and have to acquire in order to understand the meaning of specific professional texts read in the English or any other foreign language. The aim is specified by the following research questions: what kind of texts (digital or printed) are preferred by New Generation FL students and what reading strategies are employed by students learning English as a second language? The research was carried out at Vilnius University in 2016. The analysis of students' reading strategies made it possible to conclude that their reading skills need to be developed more in the process of teaching/ learning foreign languages.

The European Language Portfolio (ELP) has been one of the biggest language education projects of the last decade in Europe. Lithuania has invested considerable finances and effort to exploit the benefits of the ELP. There have been a number of Portfolios designed for the Lithuanian system of education followed by piloting projects and seminars for language teachers run on a large scale at all levels of education. However, the implementation of the ELP in Lithuania seems to be very slow. The article looks into the reasons for the reluctance of language teachers to employ the ELP in the classroom practice and the possible ways of promoting the ELP implementation. The role of school authorities is emphasized and some possible solutions for stimulating stake holders' interest in the ELP suggested.