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Multiculturalism is not a new phenomenon in European history. Neither are its literary and artistic manifestations. This thesis compares and contrasts two distant but similar multicultural contexts: Golden Age Spain and postmodern Britain. Picaresque and romance are chosen to illustrate how authors question religious oppression, cultural intolerance and thought control within multicultural contexts. Cervantes and Rushdie give voice to marginalised minorities and deconstruct the grand-narratives of religion; Aleman, Kureishi, Dhondy and the author of Estebanillo Gonzalez all depict life at the margins. The establishment of a counter-canonical critique of literary tradition in Golden Age Spain, and the emergence and development of genres such as the picaresque, would not have been possible without Spain's multicultural heritage and the presence of Spanish marginal and dissident voices. Gradually these voices from the periphery vanished as Spanish minorities were absorbed by the centre. Likewise, the power to confront of a marginal genre, such as the picaresque, disappeared. From the Spanish case we can draw a parallel in contemporary Britain, where representations of the margins are becoming absorbed into the mainstream. Postmodern Britain recalls the Spanish case not only in terms of the emergence of minority voices which are being absorbed by the centre, but also in terms of the choice of genres to express hybridity, difference and cross cultural and religious encounters. However, there is a difference between sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain and postmodern Britain; ethnicity has become desirable.

The relationship in a bilingual conversation between language choice and identity has been the subject of research in different disciplines such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and second language acquisition among others. The purpose of this research was to understand why and how language alternation occurs in bilingual interviews and its potential connection with identity. The data analyzed was from interviews from Proyecto Latino@, a previous research on Latin@ high school students’ experiences in schools and their academic engagement and/or disengagement. Participants’ narratives of their experiences indicated that code-switching is a result and a process of cultural adaptation. Code-switching in this research presented ways in which participants re-created their own concept of identity. Bilinguals of the Proyecto Latin@ portrayed a multiple identities construction –Spanish- English – when code-switching.

The relationship in a bilingual conversation between language choice and identity has been the subject of research in different disciplines such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and second language acquisition among others. The purpose of this research was to understand why and how language alternation occurs in bilingual interviews and its potential connection with identity. The data analyzed was from interviews from Proyecto Latino@, a previous research on Latin@ high school students’ experiences in schools and their academic engagement and/or disengagement. Participants’ narratives of their experiences indicated that code-switching is a result and a process of cultural adaptation. Code-switching in this research presented ways in which participants re-created their own concept of identity. Bilinguals of the Proyecto Latin@ portrayed a multiple identities construction –Spanish- English – when code-switching.

This thesis investigates the acquisition of the spatial and figurative meanings of five Spanish spatial particles, namely sobre, encima, debajo, bajo and en, by a group of Chinese university students of Spanish as a foreign language at intermediate and upper-intermediate language levels. More specifically, this study aims to answer two questions. The first question considers the order of acquisition of prepositional meanings, that is, whether this is similar to a native language, with literal and more primary meanings acquired first and figurative ones later or, conversely, whether the pattern of acquisition is different to that found in a first language (Kemmerer, 2005; Lam, 2010). The second question of this research is to determine whether there are observable differences between the degree of acquisition and use of these prepositions in English compared to Spanish, and if so, what the characteristics of these differences are. To try to answer these questions, the performance of this group of participants in four behavioural tests is compared. The tests were a lexical identification task, a picture fill-in-the- blank task, a sentence generation task and a truth value judgment task. These tests were conducted both in Spanish, which the participants had begun to study at undergraduate level and English, which they had first been exposed to in school in a pre-puberty period. The results of this study indicate, first, that the acquisition of the literal and figurative meanings of the spatial particles in this study does not follow a pattern similar to that found in a native language. That is, meaning acquisition in a foreign language occurs in a parallel or simultaneous pattern. Furthermore, in a non-immersion context such as that of this study, the age at which students begin the study of a foreign language is not a decisive factor in determining the degree of mastery that students can obtain. The quantity and quality of the input students are exposed to; together with an appropriate methodology appear to be the most important factors in predicting the level of proficiency that can be reached.

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