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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1232

Part of Session 188: Relating the Productions of Multilingual Children and Adolescents in their Languages (Other abstracts in this session)

Multilingual discourse competence: Exploring the factors of variation

Authors: Riehl, Claudia Maria
Submitted by: Riehl, Claudia Maria (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany)

In a growing number of European cities the number of bilingual students outranges the number of monolinguals.  Due to mutual traffic from one language to the other variation is not only found in the spoken, but also in the written discourse of bilingual speakers. As a consequence, in multilingual urban settings we meet a greater variety of written text types as in more homogenous monolingual environments. To date, however, it has not been explored in detail what kind of linguistic features are transferred from one language to the other in text production. Furthermore, it has not been sufficiently analyzed either, what role educational issues (coordinated and non-coordinated instruction in both languages, duration of instruction in L1) and other extra-linguistic factors play on text production in L1 and L2.

To investigate the mutual impact of these factors we conducted a study with nine- and ten-graders of different school types in two big cities of Germany, analyzing the multi-competence of speakers who had grown up with Turkish, Italian and Polish as a first and German as a second language. In a variety of different writing tasks in both languages we tested the influence of L1 on L2 and vice versa on various levels of the text. Additionally, we employed interviews and questionnaires in order to detect the social factors that might influence the discourse competence in both languages (e.g. educational background of the parents, language attitude, and reading activities in the respective languages). We also correlated the different educational types (mother tongue instruction and monolingual instruction in the dominant language only) with the outcome of the tests.

In this paper we will demonstrate the impact of writing abilities in L1 on L2 and vice versa by explicating different types of cross-linguistic influence: It will be argued that the variation found in written texts of bilingual individuals may not only be influenced by the transfer of linguistic features (syntactic, semantic etc.) from one language to the other but also by the transfer of discourse strategies. We will illustrate how differences in discourse patterns may be expressed in diverse macro-structures, in the creative use of particular language patterns or in a different communication mode (conceptual oral vs. conceptual written). It will be demonstrated how in modern urban environments the mutual use of two different languages by bilingual individuals leads to a diversity of patterns, to language variation and a creative use of the language, and how this can be correlated with educational and sociolinguistic factors.

References:

Bialystok, Ellen (2007): Acquisition of literacy in bilingual children: A framework for research. Language Learning, 57 (Suppl. 1), 45-77.

Normann Jørgensen, J. & Quist, P. (2007) Bilingual children in monolingual schools. In: Auer, P. and Wei, L. (eds.) Handbook of multilingualism and multilingual communication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 155-173.