Bilingual Language Acquisition

Sentence repetition tasks are increasingly recognised as a useful clinical tool for diagnosing language impairment in children. They are quick to administer, can be carefully targeted to elicit specific sentence structures, and are particularly informative about children’s lexical and morphosyntactic knowledge. This chapter exlores the theoretical potential of sentence repetition for assessment of sequential bilingual children, and presents three studies comparing performance of sequential bilingual children with monolingual children’s performance on standardised sentence repetition tests in Hebrew (children with L1 Russian, age 5-7 years, and L1 English, age 4½-6½ years), German (children with L1 Russian, age 4-7 years) and English (children with L1 Turkish, age 6-9 years). Results differed across studies: distribution of children in the Hebrew studies was in line with monolingual norms, while the majority of children in the English-Turkish study scored in a range that would be dee...

The article discusses errors and inaccuracies in the speech of an educated Russian-speaking tourist guide (Russian L-2) to increase the communicative competence of guides, as well as improving the training programs of Russian as L-2. The error's typology (the table in the text of the article) is based on a speech errors and irregularities file, consisting of 1,200 words and on the error's scientific classification literature at all levels of the language (phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, stylistics).
      In general, a guide speaks as an educated person with an extensive vocabulary and rich literary Russian, however, error analysis indicates difficulties in word formation, in the prepositional and verb systems of the Russian language, as well as in discourse. The guide’s speech is characterized by a small percentage of morphological errors, but a large number of lexical and semantic inaccuracies in the use of nouns, especially adjectives, adverbs and verbs, as well as a frequent mixing of speech styles. Most speech errors were communicatively insignificant, but reduced the information's quality and affect the overall level of satisfaction from the tour. In turn, the Russian learning system should be paid special attention to these topics, since they present a particular difficulty for foreign students and students.     
      Key words: Russian, speech errors, touristic guide, classification.

В статье рассматриваются ошибки и неточности в речи образованного русскоговорящего туристического гида-инофона с целью повышения коммуникативной компетенции гидов, а также совершенствования программ обучения РКИ. На основе картотеки речевых ошибок и неправильностей, состоящей из 1,200 слов, произведена типология ошибок (таблица помещена в тексте статьи) с опорой на имеющейся на сегодняшний день в научной литературе классификации ошибок на всех уровнях языка (фонетика, лексика, грамматика, стилистика).
      В целом речь гида  это речь образованного человека, обладающего обширным запасом слов и выражений и говорящего на богатом литературном русском языке, тем не менее, анализ ошибок свидетельствует о трудностях в словообразовании, в предложно - падежной и глагольной системах русского языка, а также в дискурсе. Речь гида характеризуется небольшим процентом морфологических ошибок, большим количеством лексико-семантических неточностей в употреблении существительных, особенно, прилагательных, наречий и глаголов, а также частым смешением стилей речи.  Большинство речевых ошибок относятся к коммуникативно незначимым, но снижающим качество объяснений и влияющим на общий уровень удовлетворенности от экскурсии. В свою очередь, в системе обучения РКИ следует уделить особое внимание работе над указанными темами, поскольку они представляют особую трудность для иноязычных учащихся и студентов.
      Ключевые слова: РКИ, речевые ошибки, инофон, туристический гид, классификация.

This article draws on data from a yearlong case study of a Mexican American ESL teacher’s practice in a K–5 school in the southeastern United States. The study examines how the teacher established bilingual interactional space in her ESL pullout class consisting of six 9- to 11-year old students of Mexican descent. The analysis shows the ways in which she affirmed her students’ bilingual identity and made strong connections between in-school and out-of-school experiences. Findings illustrate how the teacher’s explicit attention to bilingualism and cross-linguistic transfer created potential for pride in Spanish and motivation to develop English. The author recommends building bilingual interactional space in ESL and dual language classrooms to promote positive bilingual identity and opportunities for expanding linguistic repertoires.
Keywords: bilingualism, ESL, identity, translation, cross-linguistic transfer, linguistic repertoires

Last in the three-part series Understanding Bilingual Education. With the information and charts from the first two papers, the role of languages in any school system can be analyzed in terms of types of bilingual education. This paper takes a pedagogical approach in providing lesson plans that have been used in Content-Based English as a Foreign Language university classes on Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. Ten realistic cases of school systems in Japan and the world are presented for analysis, and a checklist of ten items provides further criteria. Referring to the chart of ten aims in the first paper, and the ten types of bilingual education detailed in the second article, various school situations around the world can be analyzed in terms of established criteria in the field of bilingualism.

The study focuses on the acquisition of English prepositions among students of Iraqi secondary school in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Participants in the study were (20) students all of them at sixth level. The researchers studied the students’ responses to the given test to investigate the problematic prepositions of English language that Iraqi English as foreign language (EFL) learners have in their everyday and academic usage; and investigate the way that EFL Iraqi learners differentiate between using English and Arabic prepositions. The major finding in this study is that the main reason for all the errors is the dominance of the mother tongue (MT) on English language (EL), especially with Arabic language having a syntactic structure when imposed on EL that too with Arabic meaning on EL. The dominance and influence of one’s MT is a major challenge in using the EL in the right way by Iraqi EFL learners. In a subconscious manner, Iraqi EFL learners tend to use or impose their MT’s synt...

This article applies a developmental bilingual perspective to language teaching. It shows how bilingualism clarifies the effectiveness of language teaching approaches, bilingual development at different ages, the viewpoint of students, the societal context of language teaching, and language acquisition.

Abstract: The argument I will develop in this essay is that the foreign students are a latent human resource who can assist with overcoming English monolingualism in the Australian population. Foreign students, properly rewarded, can be a major source of skills transfer. Every one of those students is a walking compendium of language and cultural skills that Australians need to know.

During the classes were presented basic elements of speech therapy workshop, which can be used by glottodidactists in teaching correct pronunciation of bilingual children. The degree of mastery of the phonetic system of a new language has a significant impact on the success of the glottodidactic process. Speech defects significantly delay the acquisition of a second language and also reduce communication skills. During the workshop were indicated phonetic skills that should be achieved at particular age ranges, as well as exercises that allow to overcome the difficulties associated with incorrect pronunciation.

How infants learn new words is a fundamental puzzle in language acquisition. To guide their word learning, infants exploit systematic word-learning heuristics that allow them to link new words to likely referents. By 17 months, infants show a tendency to associate a novel noun with a novel object rather than a familiar one, a heuristic known as disambiguation. Yet, the developmental origins of this heuristic remain unknown. We compared disambiguation in 17- to 18-month-old infants from different language backgrounds to determine whether language experience influences its development, or whether disambiguation instead emerges as a result of maturation or social experience. Monolinguals showed strong use of disambiguation, bilinguals showed marginal use, and trilinguals showed no disambiguation. The number of languages being learned, but not vocabulary size, predicted performance. The results point to a key role for language experience in the development of disambiguation, and help to distinguish among theoretical accounts of its emergence.

This paper is about using different languages in the family, as this is the very first socializing environment for a child. Being bilingual is a common phenomenon in many parts of the world, but not in Hungary, where most of the inhabitants are monolingual. Generally, bilingual children have parents of two different first languages. As a result, for those kids being bilingual from birth is a natural process. In other cases, English is used as a lingua franca within the family. Some families move to a different country where the family members are forced to learn to speak the local language. Another case is when the parent is non-native and still speaks the target language to his/her child(ren). Publishers also have special books, CDs and exercise book for parents to teach English at home. Those parents who refuse the above-mentioned methods can employ a native au-pair or baby-sitter or decide to send their child(ren) at a very early age to a language school. This paper deals with the possibilities a Hungarian family can choose from in raising a bilingual child. It also talks about their strengths and weaknesses. key words: second language acquisition, bringing up bilingual children, non-native parents A többnyelvű családok nyelvhasználat lehetőségei Nyelvek a családban A család mint elsődleges szocializációs színtér kiemelt szerepet játszik a gyermekek életében, így nyelvi fejlődésében is. A történelmi korokra visszatekintve, a létrejövő birodalmak etnikai és kulturális összetételét figyelembe véve szükségszerű és logikus következtetés, hogy a kultúrák keveredtek, és ezáltal a kultúra egyik legfontosabb hordozója, a nyelv is olyan közkinccsé vált, amit nem csak az a nép birtokol, akinek a kultúrá-jához tartozik. A nyelv nem csupán a többiekkel való kommunikáció, az információcsere biztos módja volt, hanem a túlélés záloga is egyben. Azokban a közösségekben, ahol több nyelv élt egymás mellett, termé-szetes módon jött létre a két-vagy akár a többnyelvűség is. Bár a kétnyel-vűség mint jelenség a globalizálódó világ és a nyitottabb lehetőségek mi

This Forum challenges and problematizes the term incomplete acquisition, which has been widely used to describe the state of competence of heritage speaker (HS) bilinguals for well over a decade (see, e.g., Montrul, 2008). It is suggested and defended that HS competence, while often different from monolingual peers, is in fact not incomplete (given any reasonable definition by the word incomplete), but simply distinct for reasons related to the realities of their environment.

The focus of the paper is a phenomenon well documented in both monolingual and bilingual English acquisition: argument omission. Previous studies have shown that bilinguals acquiring a null and a non-null argument language simultaneously tend to exhibit unidirectional cross-language interaction effects — the null argument language remains unaffected but over-suppliance of overt elements in the null argument language is observed. Here subject and object omission in both ASL (null argument) and English (non-null argument) of young ASL-English bilinguals is examined. Results demonstrate that in spontaneous English production, ASL-English bilinguals omit subjects and objects to a higher rate, for longer, and in unexpected environments when compared with English monolinguals and bilinguals; no effect on ASL is observed. Findings also show that the children differentiate between their two languages — rates of argument omission in English are different during ASL vs. English target sessions differ. Implications for the general theory of bilingual effects are offered.

A gyermekek mesterséges úton is kétnyelvűvé válhatnak. Az ún. Saunders-modell különlegessége éppen az, hogy a szülők nyelve megegyezik a közösség anyanyelvével, de egy általuk ismert másik nyelven nevelik a gyermeküket. Magyarországon ennek a törekvésnek egyre több képviselője van, akik blogokat, kiadványokat és videókat adnak közre, amelyek a gyermeküket angolul nevelő szülőknek nyújtanak segítséget. A módszert nyelvátadásnak is nevezik (Bán 2013).
A választott kétnyelvűséggel kapcsolatban többféle elképzelés született az elmúlt években, ám kevés tudományos írás készült a kérdésről. A jelen dolgozatban nem merítjük ki a témát, de ízelítőt adunk a lehetséges módszerekből (helyhez, időhöz vagy személyhez között kétnyelvűség), bemutatva azok előnyeit és esetleges korlátait egyaránt. Az elméleti felvezetés után olyan családokat mutatunk be, ahol a szülők mesterséges kétnyelvű környezetben nevelik gyermeküket/gyermekeiket. 2014 és 2016 között öt családdal készültek el az interjúk, személyes kapcsolatok révén jutottunk el hozzájuk. Az esetek bemutatása során áttekintjük, miért választották a szülők a kétnyelvű nevelést, milyen tapasztalatokat szereztek az eltelt időszakban. Amikor a szülők a módszer mellett döntenek, életre szólóan elköteleződnek egy nevelési módszer mellett és a mesterséges kétnyelvű nevelés során számos kihívással is szembekerülnek (szókincs, kiejtés, nyelvi finomságok, kötődés, környezet reakciói).

Many children grow up in bilingual families and acquire two first languages. Emerging research is advancing the view that the capacity to acquire language can be applied equally to two languages as to one but that bilingual and monolingual acquisition nonetheless differ in some nontrivial ways. To probe the first steps toward acquisition, researchers recently have begun to use experimental methods to study preverbal bilingual infants. We review the literature in this growing field, focusing on how infants growing up bilingual use surface acoustic information to separate, categorize and begin to learn their two languages. These new data invite the expansion of standard linguistic theories to account for how a single architecture can support the acquisition of two languages simultaneously.

This chapter discusses the phenomenon of 'Heritage Language' as a whole with a focus on Persian as a heritage language. Studying heritage languages is an emerging field, which has flourished within the past several decades and as migration and globalization grows, heritage languages are becoming more important. The first part of this chapter provides an original contribution by unifying the existing research on Persian as a heritage language. This is a crucial task because various researchers have already explored this topic from different perspectives. However, many scholars are not aware of the existing research, which causes them to start the work from the ground up. The second part of this chapter examines various characteristics of heritage Persian speakers in terms of their linguistic and metalinguistic abilities, compares their profiles with that of a native speaker and a second land-language learner, and sheds light on the current challenges within this field.

Children acquiring languages with rich inflection produce verbal morphology earlier in development than those learning languages with more impoverished inflection. In this paper, I present data from bilingual children acquiring Basque and Spanish, two null-subject languages with rich morphology which show a lead-lag pattern in the acquisition of inflection. Verbal inflection appears earlier in Spanish than in Basque, and although children produce few root infinitives in either language, they produce fewer in Spanish than in Basque. This is surprising, given that Basque has even ''richer'' verbal inflection than Spanish insofar as Basque has more obligatory morphological distinctions than Spanish does. These results lead me to propose that a combination of factors facilitate the early emergence of inflection in languages such as Spanish, including nominative/accusative case marking as well as morphological complexity, rather than solely the richness of the verbal paradigm.

Πρόκειται για εισαγωγικό εγχειρίδιο που εξετάζει όψεις και πτυχές της γλωσσικής εξέλιξης του ανθρώπου, ως μέρους της γενικότερης ανάπτυξής του. Η περιγραφή της γλωσσικής εξέλιξης οργανώνεται για μεθοδολογικούς λόγους σε περιόδους: εξετάζεται η γλώσσα κατά τα πρώιμα στάδια (1-3 έτη), την προσχολική ηλικία (3-6 έτη) και τα σχολικά χρόνια (6-12 έτη).
Σε κάθε περίοδο αναδεικνύονται οι βασικοί σταθμοί και τα σημαντικότερα χαρακτηριστικά από κάθε γλωσσικό επίπεδο (φωνολογικό, μορφοσυντακτικό, σημασιολογικό-λεξιλογικό και πραγματολογικό). Επιπλέον, περιγράφεται με συντομία η παιδική δι/πολυγλωσσική ανάπτυξη και εκτίθεται ο διάλογος μεταξύ των βασικών θεωριών επιχειρώντας με αυτόν τον τρόπο να ερμηνευτούν οι ιδιαιτερότητές της. Το βιβλίο κλείνει με μία προσπάθεια εμβάπτισης του αναγνώστη στα είδη των δυσκολιών του προφορικού λόγου και της επικοινωνίας στην προσχολική ηλικία σε μια απόπειρα σύνδεσης της τυπικής με τη μη τυπική ανάπτυξη.
Στη νέα έκδοση οι αλλαγές είναι εκτεταμένες, και προκύπτουν από την ανάγκη προσαρμογής στα νέα δεδομένα ως συνέπεια της ανατροφοδότησης και της αξιολόγησης. Τα υπάρχοντα κεφάλαια εμπλουτίστηκαν με νέα υποκεφάλαια, πραγματοποιήθηκε αναδιάρθρωση και αναδιατύπωση, και επικαιροποιήθηκε η βιβλιογραφική τεκμηρίωση.

Dieser Beitrag beleuchtet die Auswirkungen von Zweisprachigkeit auf die kognitiven Fähigkeiten von Kindern, die im zweisprachigen Unterricht oder in der Familie eine weitere Sprache erwerben. Dazu wird zunächst erläutert, was unter verschiedenen kognitiven Fähigkeiten zu verstehen ist. Dann wird darauf eingegangen, wie diese in zweisprachigen Familien und in verschiedenen Formen von bilingualem Unterricht erworben werden. Zum Schluss wird die Bedeutung dieser Ergebnisse auf den Unterricht mit CLIL Modulen übertragen.

Bevezető A kényelvűség meghatározása nagyon nehéz, mert számos tényezőt kell figyelembe venni, így nincs egységesen elfogadott definíciója. Skuttnabb-Kangas szerint a kétnyelvűséget négy csoportba lehet osztani aszerint, hogy a két nyelv elsajátítása mikor történt (nyelvelsajátítás ideje); milyen sorrendben sajátította el a nyelveket; milyen a beszélő nyelvtudásának szintje és milyen a nyelvhasználat jellegzetessége; illetve a beszélő identitása szempontjából meghatározó-e. Bloomfield szerint kétnyelvű az az egyén, aki két különböző nyelvet anyanyelvi szinten, tökéletes nyelvtani helyességgel, akcentus nélkül beszél és használ-ezt nevezte valódi kétnyelvűségnek. Diebold azonban azt mondja, hogy az is kétnyelvű, aki nem beszéli ugyan a másik nyelvet, viszont megérti azt, ezt nevezte minimális kétnyelvűségnek. Diebold úgy véli, kétnyelvűnek tekinthetünk bármely olyan személyt, aki az adott idegen nyelven rendelkezik legalább eggyel az alábbi alapvető nyelvi készségek közül: beszédprodukció, beszédmegértés, írás és olvasás (I4). A két különböző meghatározás nagyon végletes, a megoldás valahol középen van. A továbbiakban két vagy többnyelvűnek tekintünk minden olyan személyt, aki képes

Haput is a Caucasian Language which is closely related to Kryts (kry), and part of the Shahdagh subgroup of Lezgian languages. However, the Haput consider themselves to be distinct from Kryts. The Haput Language Picture Dictionary is organized according to domains, and contains over 700 entries. The Picture Dictionary also contains a useful index with Azeri, English, and Russian equivalents.

Colorful PDF slideshow of a presentation at the Japan Association for Language Teaching Kobe Chapter. There is much to read in the slideshow on all aspects of bilingualism in Japan, and the presentation contrasts a developmental bilingual perspective with the usual native speaker-oriented and monolingual second language acquisition paradigm.

The discipline of bilingualism in applied linguistics is the study of different languages that come into contact at various levels in the same social space or person. Active bilingualism research groups in Japan show, on the one hand, a fascination with an idealized view of dual language proficiency that is virtually out of reach as a goal. On the other hand, bilingualism principles and worldwide research findings serve the imperative of international families to raise well-adjusted bilingual children. This article aims to clarify the various meanings of bilingualism, and to show how understanding bilingualism developmentally makes it a realistic and appropriate goal of language learning.

Il termine Bilinguismo indica la capacità di parlare e comprendere due lingue; il Bilinguismo viene distinto in Bilinguismo precoce e Bilinguismo tardivo, prendendo come punto di riferimento il momento in cui una o entrambe lingue sono state acquisite.

Nei bambini bilingui si osserva una prestazione ricettiva e un vocabolario inferiori rispetto a quello dei monolingui, e tempi di reazione di interpretazione e produzione più lunghi, soprattutto nella seconda lingua.
Queste caratteristiche della capacità linguistica dei bilingui appaiono simili a quelle osservate nei bambini con Disturbo Specifico del Linguaggio, per cui le due condizioni possono non essere facilmente distinte.
Ci sono strumenti diagnostici che possano farci distinguere identificare i bambini affetti realmente da Disturbo Specifico del Linguaggio? La scarsa quantità dei dati rende la missione molto più difficile.

This is a draft of the paper "Gemischter Input – einsprachiger Output? Familiensprache und Entwicklung der Sprachtrennung bei bilingualen Kleinkindern". The final version was published in: Weydt, Harald / Jungbluth, Konstanze / Janczak, Barbara (eds.): Mehrsprachigkeit aus deutscher Perspektive, Tübingen: Narr, 73-94
The final version is available at http://narr-starter.de/magento/index.php/mehrsprachigkeit-aus-deutscher-perspektive.html