Bilingual Language Proficiency

A collection of papers that explore bilingual children coping with two language systems.

This book pioneers the study of bilingualism across the lifespan and in all its diverse forms. In framing the newest research within a lifespan perspective, the editors highlight the importance of considering an individual's age in researching how bilingualism affects language acquisition and cognitive development. A key theme is the variability among bilinguals, which may be due to a host of individual and sociocultural factors, including the degree to which bilingualism is valued within a particular context.Thus, this book is a call for language researchers, psychologists, and educators to pursue a better understanding of bilingualism in our increasingly global society.

With contributions from an international team of leading experts, this volume offers new ways to explore and measure language dominance.

A study of first and second language development in an indigenous community with implications for broader linguistic and cognitive issues. When two or more languages are part of a child's world, we are presented with a rich opportunity to learn something about language in general and about how the mind works. In this book, Norbert Francis examines the development of bilingual proficiency and the different kinds of competence that come together in making up its component parts. In particular, he explores problems of language ability when children use two languages for tasks related to schooling, especially in learning how to read and write. He considers both broader research issues and findings from an ongoing investigation of child bilingualism in an indigenous language–speaking community in Mexico. This special sociolinguistic context allows for a unique perspective on some of the central themes of bilingualism research today, including the distinction between competence and proficiency, modularity, and the Poverty of Stimulus problem. Francis proposes that competence (knowledge) should be considered as an integral component of proficiency (ability) rather than something separate and apart, arguing that this approach allows for a more inclusive assessment of research findings from diverse fields of study. The bilingual indigenous language project illustrates how the concepts of modularity and the competence-proficiency distinction in particular might be applied to problems of language learning and literacy. Few investigations of indigenous language and culture approach bilingual research problems from a cognitive science perspective. By suggesting connections to broader cognitive and linguistic issues, Francis points the way to further research along these lines.

This volume brings together concrete ideas on identifying and measuring second language (L2) proficiency from different branches of SLA. The chapters introduce a range of tools for the evaluation of learners' language level with respect to both productive and receptive skills and provide a variety of answers to the question of how to assess L2 proficiency in a valid, reliable and practical manner.

This book investigates the role native language plays in the process of acquiring a second language within a bilingual educational model. The research presented is based on a 2 year longitudinal study of students in a bilingual school. Particular attention is paid to the development of academic language proficiency. Performance in both languages was compared between two groups of peers learning in submersion classes in Germany and in Portugal. This comparison allows the assessment of effects of a given bilingual education programme. There is a considerable advantage found for the students who learned in the bilingual environment, both in written and in oral samples. These students developed a more proficient bilingual academic discourse ability; socioeconomic status and cognitive abilities were controlled for. When comparing the results with an external measure for school achievement, the advantage was confirmed. The results also hint at didactic factors which seem to contribute to this performance.

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2013 im Fachbereich Anglistik - Linguistik, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: As our world becomes more and more globalised, the number of people who speak more than two languages increases, thus making research into trilingualism an attractive enterprise in order to see what the effects of three languages in one mind might be. In recent years, there has been an increase in studies investigating, amongst other aspects, cross-linguistic influences on third language acquisition or word recognition in trilinguals. However, in general, such research is still relatively scant. Trilingualism is often seen as merely a special case of bilingualism and most of the findings for bilingualism have been regarded as extendable to trilingualism, often not even making a distinction between bilingualism, trilingualism, and multilingualism in general. Some studies have tried to determine whether trilinguals have special competences that bilinguals have not, yet without conclusive results. Yet, it would be very interesting to know whether or not trilingualism is really just ‘bilingualism plus one’, i.e., the findings regarding lexical access for bilinguals extend to trilinguals. This paper will investigate whether the findings for switching costs for bilinguals’ two languages extend to trilingualism, and to what extent these costs are influenced by language proficiency. In a first step, some general concepts and methods relevant for the papers discussed here will be reviewed. In chapter 2, two studies dealing with the issue of switching costs in bilinguals and trilinguals, respectively, will be presented and compared. In the final chapter, I will try to answer my research questions, but also to touch on alternative accounts for the findings presented here.