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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 188

Thematic Session (Papers belonging to this Thematic Session)

Relating the Productions of Multilingual Children and Adolescents in their Languages

Authors: Pfaff, Carol Wollman; Schroeder, Christoph
Submitted by: Pfaff, Carol Wollman (Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany)

This proposed Thematic Session will focus on empirical results from studies of multilingual children in two (or more) of the language they use in their everyday lives, in speaking (and writing).

The target groups of multilinguals (or plurilingual individuals) at the center of this proposed session are those found in cities, which, as a result of long-term or (initially imagined short-term) immigration brought about through a variety of social causes: work, asylum, international institutions and diplomatic institutions. In addition to the language used at home and in school, the number of languages which have come to be characteristic of plurilingual individuals is increased by foreign language education and by dual language instructional models of various types.

Increasingly researchers have focused on aspects of such multilingual from a number of perspectives, particularly arising from the necessity to come to terms with the range of linguistic variation in the registers of informal and more formal speech and writing used by the multilinguals, which, as pointed out by Grosjean 1989, do not -- and should not be expected to -- conform to the (supposed) norms of monolingual usage.

Such variation, in its own right provides an important window on linguistic universals, as discussed in the papers in Siemund (ed.) 2011. It has been celebrated in range of publications on informal urban sociolects, but is often regarded with dismay by educators who see the necessity to facilitate the acquisition of standard varieties. Nonetheless, the actual state of the art in the description and analysis of the range of variation has not been sufficiently explicated, and the area of the parallels and divergences of the varieties of the several languages used by the same individual has not yet been explored in detail for most of the cases investigated to date. It is our desire to contribute to closing this gap with the contributions of this thematic session.

The papers in the session will be drawn from empirical studies of bilingual/monolinguals oral and/or written production in two or more of the languages in their verbal repertoire.

After an introductory segment giving an overview of the specifics and the cases to be presented, the topics open for presentation and discussion will include the following:

methodological considerations for data collection and analysis phonology/orthography morphosyntax lexicon discourse structure literacy educational issues (e.g., mother tongue instruction, separate or coordinated with instruction in the dominant language)

Among other issues, we are particularly interested in the nature and extent to which there appears to be cross-language influence and those areas which seem to demonstrate variation determined by universal factors or those related to processing constraints.

References

Gogolin, I. 2010 “Stichwort Mehrsprachigkeit” Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft 13.529-47

Grosjean, F., (1989) Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person. Brain and Language 36 (1), 3–15.

Siemund, Peter (ed.) (2011) Linguistic Universals and Language Variation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.