Young Children Learning Languages in a Multilingual Context

Kirsch, Claudine

doi:10.2167/ijm035.0

Cited by 13 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…While the parents emphasized the educational potential of the homescape, children in this study represented the homescape (including the soundscape) as part of their language repertoire and daily life. This finding shares some similarities with Kirsch's (2006) conclusion that children do not always distinguish between language learning and language use, but that they consider language learning more as a social process.…”

Section: Children's Perspective and Child Agencysupporting

confidence: 81%

FLP and homescapes: Employing walking tour methodology in researching children’s and parents’ perspectives

2022

Journal of Home Language Research

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Children's view of family language practices and their agency therein is regarded as important in the study of family language policy (FLP). This work extends the notion of the linguistic landscape to the private family domain and uses the innovative methodological approach of "homescape walking tour" to engage young children (6 to 7-years-old) in the data generation process. During the walking tours, children in Chinese-German families guided the researcher through their homes, taking pictures of objects containing "languages" and sharing their lived experiences with these resources. In a further step, parents were invited to share their opinions about their FLP and the objects photographed by their children.

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Section: Children's Perspective and Child Agencysupporting

confidence: 81%

FLP and homescapes: Employing walking tour methodology in researching children’s and parents’ perspectives

2022

Journal of Home Language Research

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“…Together with Luxembourgish, German is used as media of instruction, and children learn to read and write in German, not in Luxembourgish. Oral French is introduced as subject of study in the second terms of Year 2 (age 7-8) and French literacy starts in Year 3 (see Kirsch, 2006, for a detailed description of the use of languages in the Luxembourgish educational context). In the present study, children were assessed at the end of Year 2 on a range of tasks tapping into L1-executive and L1-phonological processing abilities as well as different linguistic domains in L1 (Luxembourgish), L2 (German), and L3 (French).…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Executive and phonological processes in second-language acquisition.

Abreu¹,

Gathercole²

2012

Journal of Educational Psychology

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This paper reports a latent variable study exploring the specific links between executive processes of working memory, phonological short-term memory, phonological awareness, and proficiency in first (L1), second (L2), and third (L3) languages in 8-to 9-year-olds experiencing multilingual education. Children completed multiple L1-measures of complex span, verbal short-term storage, and phonological awareness, and tests of proficiency in a range of linguistic domains (vocabulary, grammar, and literacy) in Luxembourgish (L1), German (familiar L2) and French (unfamiliar L3). Results indicate that executive processing abilities, phonological short-term memory, and phonological awareness operate as distinct but related constructs that manifest differential associations with native and second language proficiency in multilingual children: Phonological short-term memory was uniquely linked to vocabulary in L1 and the structurally similar L2; executive processes were related to grammar across languages, reading comprehension, and spelling; and phonological awareness made specific contributions to word decoding, spelling, and language proficiency in the structurally dissimilar L3. Phonological processing abilities appear to be critical for acquiring the sound structure of a new language, whereas executive processes share more general links with higher-order linguistic abilities in second language learners.Keywords: working memory; executive processes; phonological short-term memory; phonological awareness; second language acquisition; multilingual education Executive and phonological processing has been proposed to play a key role in children's native language learning. If and how these processes account for individual variability in second language acquisition is at present unclear. In an increasingly globalized world with growing international immigration and vigorous debates on foreign language education, an understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of second language learning is of considerable practical as well as theoretical importance. The aim of the present study was to identify the underlying factor structure of executive and phonological processing abilities in young second language learners and to explore the relationship between the identified factors with proficiency in several domains of first (L1), second (L2), and third (L3) languages.

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“…Ultimately, being praised for a good command of one's native tongue can be upsetting: "Of course, I can speak well, this is my mother's tongue!". This has clear repercussions on their cultural identification and bears out the observations of Kirsch (2006) when claiming that "second language learning (…) is not an 'automatic' or 'natural' process but (…) depends on their personal goals, interests, competence, confidence and understanding of what counts as appropriate language use. "…”

Section: Psychological and Cognitive Consequencesmentioning

confidence: 78%

Unexpected Disadvantages of a Simultaneous Quadrilingual Upbringing, a Case Study

Dumetz¹,

Vishnyakova²,

Dumetz-Vishnyakova³

et al. 2021

IJOTE

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At the crossroad between linguistics and cross-cultural communication, multilingualism is frequently presented through its most positive perspective. However, if the long-term benefits outrun the disadvantages, frustration is often the dominant feeling among the speakers during their early years. Based upon meticulous observations and careful collection of examples in a multilingual family, this article is a case study of the difficulties encountered by polyglots growing up with four simultaneous languages: Russian, French, Czech, and English. Using the research framework usually developed for the study of bilingualism, the article reviews not only the psychological and cognitive difficulties encountered by tetraglots, but also the social and linguistic drawbacks they are confronted with. It also examines common multilingual strategies such as code-switching, words creation and language mixing. It concludes that the linguistic development of tetraglots does not differ much from bilingual ones, except for the elongated period before acquiring production speech. Quadrilingual children tend to speak later than not only monolingual children, but also bilingual ones.

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Young Children Learning Languages in a Multilingual Context

Cited by 13 publications

References 26 publications

FLP and homescapes: Employing walking tour methodology in researching children’s and parents’ perspectives

FLP and homescapes: Employing walking tour methodology in researching children’s and parents’ perspectives

Executive and phonological processes in second-language acquisition.

Unexpected Disadvantages of a Simultaneous Quadrilingual Upbringing, a Case Study

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