Biscriptuality

In the context of constantly increasing linguistic diversity in many parts of the world, opportunities and challenges arise for the acquisition of literacy skills. The successful development of literacy skills becomes a crucial prerequisite for educational attainment determining future career prospects of migrant students. Multilingual settings reveal the diversification of languages and scripts prompted in the context of migration. This monograph explores the phenomenon of biscriptuality and aims to provide an approach for investigating the development of biliteracy in the context of divergent scripts. This interdisciplinary mixed-methods study bridges intercultural education science, education research and applied linguistics for gaining a complex view on the role of biscriptuality in students’ biliteracy. It considers the extent of students’ biscriptual skills, specifies language dimensions in which the influence on biliteracy may occur, and differentiates between the effects of biscriptuality on the development of writing skills in two different genres, narrative and expository.

The Idea of Writing is an exploration of the versatility of writing systems. This volume, the second in a series, is specifically concerned with the problems and possibilities of adapting a writing system to another language. Writing is studied as it is used across linguistic and cultural borders from ancient Egyptian, Cuneiform and Korean writing to Japanese, Kharosthi and Near Eastern scripts. This collection of articles aims to highlight the complexity of writing systems rather than to provide a first introduction. The different academic traditions in which these writing systems have been studied use linguistic, socio-historical and philological approaches that give complementary insights of the complex phenomena.

English as a global lingua franca interacts with other languages across a wide range of multilingual contexts. Combining insights from linguistics, education studies, and psychology, this book addresses the role of English within the current linguistic dynamics of globalization. It takes Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai as case studies to illustrate the use of English in different multilingual urban areas, arguing that these are places where competing historical assessments, and ideological conceptions of monolingualism and multilingualism, are being acted out most forcefully. It critically appraises the controversial concept of multilingual advantages, and studies multilingual cross-linguistic influence in relation to learning English in bilingual heritage contexts. It also scrutinises multilingual language policies in their impact on attitudes, identities, and investment into languages. Engaging and accessible, it is essential reading for academic researchers and advanced students of bi- and multilingualism, globalization, linguistic diversity, World Englishes, sociolinguistics, and second/third language acquisition.

This book explores crosslinguistic influence in third language acquisition, drawing insights from a study of young bilingual secondary school students in Germany to unpack the importance of different variables in the acquisition and use of English as an additional language. Lorenz draws on data from a learner corpus of written and spoken picture descriptions toward analyzing sources of crosslinguistic influence in L3 acquisition in bilingual heritage speakers with unbalanced proficiency in heritage versus majority languages as compared with their monolingual German peers. This unique approach allows for a clearer understanding of the extent of influence of access to heritage languages, the impact of being a "balanced" vs "unbalanced" bilingual speaker, and the importance of extra-linguistic variables, such as age, gender, socio-economic status, and type of school. The final two chapters highlight practical considerations for the English language classroom and the implications of the study for future directions for research on third language acquisition. With its detailed overview of L2 and L3 acquisition and contribution toward ongoing debates on the advantages of being bilingual and multilingual, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in applied linguistics, foreign language acquisition, foreign language teaching, and learner corpus research.

This volume emphasizes the energetic nature of linguistic diversity and its consequences of how we think about language, how it affects the individual, education in school, and urban spaces across the globe. Hence, linguistic diversity reflects the constant state of rapid change prevalent in modern societies bearing opportunities as well as challenges. It is the prime objective of this selection of contributions to give a differentiated picture of the chances of linguistic diversity. Dynamics of Linguistic Diversity pays tribute to more recent developments in the study of language, applied linguistics, and education sciences. Contributions in this volume discuss how the concept of language is contextualized in a world of polylanguaging, investigate latent factors of influence, multilingual individuals, multilingual proficiency, multilingual practices and development, multilingual communication as well as teaching practices and whether they foster or hamper multilingual development.

The notion of the “Silk Road” that the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen invented in the 19th century has lost attraction to scholars in light of large amounts of new evidence and new approaches. The handbook suggests new conceptual and methodological tools for researching ancient economic exchange in a global perspective with a strong focus on recent debates on the nature of pre-modern empires. The interdisciplinary team of Chinese, Indian and Graeco-Roman historians, archaeologists and anthropologists that has written this handbook compares different forms of economic development in agrarian and steppe regions in a period of accelerated empire formation during 300 BCE and 300 CE. It investigates inter-imperial zones and networks of exchange which were crucial for ancient Eurasian connections. Volume I provides a comparative history of the most important empires forming in Northern Africa, Europe and Asia between 300 BCE and 300 CE. It surveys a wide range of evidence that can be brought to bear on economic development in the these empires, and takes stock of the ways academic traditions have shaped different understandings of economic and imperial development as well as Silk-Road exchange in Russia, China, India and Western Graeco-Roman history.

This exploration of the versatility of writing systems highlights their complexity when they are used to represent loanwords, solve problems of polysemy or when they are adapted to be used for another language. The approaches from different academic traditions provide a varied but expert account.

Reporting the findings of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth, this book concisely summarises what is known from empirical research about the development of literacy in language-minority children and youth, including development, environment, instruction, and assessment.