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Book of Abstracts
International Conference: “Multilingualism in Society, Politics and Education”
Freiburg im Breisgau, 16-18 March, 2017
Table of Contents
Strand 1: Multilingualism across the lifespan
2 – 10
Strand 2: Multilingualism policy as integration policy
11 – 22
Strand 3: Didactics of multilingualism
23 – 47
Strand 4: English-medium instruction: Encouraging multicultural interaction?
48 – 62
Posters
63 – 74
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Strand 1: Multilingualism across the lifespan (HS 1132)
Thu, 15:00 – 15:30 Irina Leca “Multilingualism across the lifespan and its impact upon the brain health in the elderly. A new perspective in the European context of population ageing” Thu, 12:00 – 12:30 Lee Cher Leng “Arresting Total Language Shift in Singapore Chinese Language Education” Thu, 12:30 – 13:00 Adriano Murelli „Mehrsprachig durch Interkomprehension?“ Thu, 15:30 – 16:00 Bajiro Muric “Coping with Difficulties of Language Maintenance and Shift: Language Policy and Planning in the Bosnian Muslim Immigrant Families in Germany” Thu, 11:30 – 12:00 François Pichette & Justyna Leśniewska “Crosslinguistic influence in unbalanced bilingual children” Fri, 10:00 – 10:30 Hanna Pułaczewska “Parents in focus: perspectives on passing on a heritage language exemplified by Polish in Regensburg” Fri, 09:30 – 10:00 Jacopo Torregrossa, Maria Andreou, Christiane Bongartz & Eva Knopp “The benefits of balanced biliteracy on heritage speakers’ narrative skills” Thu, 11:00 – 11:30 Julia Vagg,Tobias Bormann & Verena Haser “Tapping into L1 processes: Implicit vs. explicit vocabulary acquisition in GermanEnglish bilinguals”
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Multilingualism across the lifespan and its impact upon the brain health in the elderly. A new perspective in the European context of population ageing Irina Leca Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium Currently Europe has the highest percentage of population aged 60 or over and the estimates indicate it will remain the continent with the oldest people in the coming decades. By 2050, European population aged 60 or over will exceed 30%, and those aged 80 or above will be approximately 12% of the total EU population. Due to this demographic change, the prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases associated with ageing is also expected to increase. Therefore, ensuring a smoother transition to an older population by preserving the cognitive health of European seniors may be one of the most important challenges of the following decades. This paper critically examines the latest studies investigating the putative role of multilingualism in delaying the cognitive decline, by contributing to the preservation of cognitive health. Web of Science, Pubmed, and PsychInfo databases were searched for research articles published in English using “cognitive reserve AND multilingualism”, “cognitive reserve AND bilingualism”, “cognitive decline AND bilingualism”, as keywords for study retrieval. Despite some controversies, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting multilingualism may play a significant role in preserving the cognitive health in the elderly by enhancing cognitive reserve. The roles of language proficiency and the age of acquisition, as well as the number of language spoken in maximizing the positive effects in the elderly are also considered. Implications of these results in bringing together cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists and educationists in a constructive dialogue with the aim to promote lifespan multilingual education with role in preserving the cognitive health in the elderly, in the European context of population ageing, are discussed. Keywords: multilingualism, cognitive reserve, cognitive decline, multilingual education
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Arresting Total Language Shift in Singapore Chinese Language Education Lee Cher Leng National University of Singapore, Singapore The language situation in Singapore has undergone many changes throughout history. This language shift is guided predominantly by pragmatism, globalization, language policy, and economic forces of the world. Singapore is currently a small nation of 5 million population made up of ethnic Chinese (76.1%), Malay (15.0%), Indian (7.4%), and others (1.5%) (Singapore population census, June 2016). This multiracial state used to be multiracial and multilingual in the early 20th century when the Chinese people spoke their own southern dialects of Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka and Hainanese, the Indians spoke Tamil, Urdu, Hindi among other Indian languages. When Singapore gain independence from the British rule, there are four official languages: English was chosen as the main working language to maximize economic benefits, while the Malay (the National Language), Mandarin and Tamil were chosen as ‘mother tongues’ to represent the major ethnic groups (Malay, Chinese, and Indian respectively). The main working language is English which also became the medium of instruction in all schools in 1987. A Speak Mandarin Campaign was launched in 1979 to replace all southern Chinese dialects with Mandarin. Majority of Chinese children in Singapore speak English at home and learn Mandarin as a standalone lesson in schools. They are fast becoming monolinguals. This paper proposes that one solution to bring back multilingualism is to increase the learning of Mandarin in preschools. Research shows that there is only about 30% of Mandarin lesson time in preschools. The recommendation is to increase this to 50% at least to ensure that children increase competence in their Mandarin. However, given that Singapore is sensitive to balance equal rights for all races, increasing Chinese language education in preschools will mean doing the same for Tamil and Malay as well. Multilingual education has to be considered together with political considerations of the society
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Mehrsprachig durch Interkomprehension? Adriano Murelli University of Insubria, Italy Seit nun gut zwei Jahrzehnten wird Mehrsprachigkeit als erstrebenswertes Ziel jedes EUBürgers. Mehrsprachige Individuen sollen einerseits bessere Chancen auf einem europäischen, ja einem globalisierten Arbeitsmarkt haben, andererseits Zugang zu einer neuen Kultur erhalten – was wiederum als Grundlage für einen fruchtbaren interkulturellen Dialog und ein vertieftes Völkerverständnis gilt. Doch das Erlernen einer oder sogar mehrerer Fremdsprachen ist mit einem hohen Zeit- und Energieaufwand verbunden. Abhilfe könnte hierbei ein Lernansatz schaffen, der auf dem (in der tagtäglichen sprachlichen Realität vorkommenden) Phänomen der Interkomprehension beruht und dessen Potenzial nutzt: Lernende sollen über die eigene Muttersprache oder eine bereits erlernte Fremdsprache in relativ kurzer Zeit imstande sein, die rezeptiven Fertigkeiten – vor allem das Verstehen schriftlicher Texte – in einer neuen Fremdsprache rasch zu entwickeln (Meißner/Tesch/Vázquez 2011). Im Vortrag soll der Begriff ‚Interkomprehension‘ erläutert und anhand von Beispielen erörtert werden, welchen Beitrag ein interkomprehensionsbasierter Ansatz zur Förderung der individuellen Mehrsprachigkeit leisten kann.
Literatur: Meißner, Franz-Joseph; Tesch, Bernd; Vázquez, Graciela. 2011. Interkomprehension und Kompetenzförderung mit Blick auf die Konstruktion von Lehrwerken. In: Meißner, Franz-Joseph; Krämer, Ulrich (Hrsg.): Spanischunterricht gestalten. Wege zu Mehrsprachigkeit und Mehrkulturalität.
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Coping with Difficulties of Language Maintenance and Shift: Language Policy and Planning in the Bosnian Muslim Immigrant Families in Germany Bajro Muric University of Regensburg, Germany For most of the immigrants, who without deliberate institutional commitment and support try to pass down their heritage languages to their children, the family is considered to be the primary unit of language policy formation and planning. The family is, as recognized by Joshua Fishman, “the most common and inescapable basis of mother tongue transmission, bonding, use and stabilization” (1991: 94) and it plays a critical role in the maintenance of immigrant and ethnic minority languages (Schwarz 2010). As a result, family language policy, as a new field of inquiry, emerged providing “an integrated overview of research on how languages are managed, learned and negotiated within families” (King et al. 2008:907). Relying on Spolsky’s model (2004, 2009, 2012), which divides language policy in the family domain, into three components: language ideology, language practice, and language management, this paper reports on the family language policy and planning in three Bosnian Muslim Immigrant families in Stuttgart, Germany. The paper is set out to reveal language practices, ideologies and beliefs that these families stick to in order to preserve their heritage language and avoid language shift in the families. The parents belong to the first generation of Bosnian Muslims immigrants in Germany and they are all members of a larger extended family. The study deals with the ways in which the issue of heritage language preservation is perceived and approached and how family language policy has been negotiated among the family members. The paper attempts to uncover what strategies parents employ in order to transmit their heritage language to their children, their attitudes to heritage language, and the importance of the wider socio-economic, educational, religious and cultural contexts in which these families live for the transmission, preservation and positive attitude towards the heritage language. The paper also shows the importance of social networks for heritage language maintenance and transmission and investigates the interrelationship between the motivation to preserve heritage language in the family and religious and ethnic identity and nationalism. The data are collected through ethnographic research, semi-structured interviews and observations. The interviews are recorded and transcribed. Given the lack of studies that deal with Bosnian immigrants in Germany, this paper is one of the first attempts to investigate the sociolinguistic reality of Bosnian immigrants in Germany. Some preliminary results suggest that Bosnian Muslim immigrant families cope well with the transmission of heritage languages in the families and that some of the main motivations behind heritage language transmission stem from understanding the direct connection between language and identity, and especially ethnic identity, as well as the belief that communication in the heritage language creates a stronger emotional bond between family members. The results also imply that Muslim religious education in heritage language is of critical importance for the parents, as they believe that in such way they can transfer religious values and behaviours to their children. Also, language policy and planning is influenced by different context in which these families live, and to a large extent it is not carefully planned and successfully implemented. The process of language planning and policy is rather flexible and inherent to parents’ own identity and world views.
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Crosslinguistic influence in unbalanced bilingual children François Pichette1 & Justyna Leśniewska2 1
Université Téluq, Canada, 2Jagiellonian University, Poland
Cases of bilingual language acquisition that are characterized by a significant degree of asymmetry have been receiving attention in bilingualism research, and one of the key questions is whether the so-called “weaker” language of simultaneous bilinguals bears similarities to a language acquired sequentially (e.g., Meisel, 2007). While second language acquisition typically shows considerable crosslinguistic influence from the L1, most models of bi- and multilingualism (e.g., De Houwer, 2009), regardless of language imbalance, embrace the tenet that the different languages of a multilingual person develop separately, showing limited crosslinguistic influence. This study compared bilingual (but strongly unbalanced) language acquisition in children to second language acquisition in general, with respect to the extent of crosslinguistic influence. To that end, we 1) examined crosslinguistic errors in the language production of 60 unbalanced French-English and Polish-English simultaneous bilinguals; and 2) compiled a review of the extent of crosslinguistic influence in the SLA literature, suggesting that L1-induced errors average 35% of all errors. Our participants described three wordless cartoons. Errors affected an average of 6% of the English words they produced, and that percentage is statistically equivalent across both language groups. Among the errors made, the percentage of crosslinguistic ones – 22% – while lower than that reported for SLA, is still rather high, suggesting that the amount of input/interaction is an important factor in the development of the weaker language. Regarding policies, it implies that speakers of a minority language -even when exposed to it from a very early age- should be encouraged to interact in that language for it to develop normally rather than like a second language. References De Houwer, A. (2009). Bilingual first language acquisition. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Meisel, J. M. (2007). The weaker language in early child bilingualism: Acquiring a first language as a second language? Applied Psycholinguistics, 28(3), 495–514.
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Parents in focus: perspectives on passing on a heritage language exemplified by Polish in Regensburg Hanna Pułaczewska University of Stettin, Poland / University of Regensburg, Germany The study is rooted in the recognition that while multilingual children have frequently become the object of sociolinguistic studies, parenting of multilinguals has not yet received the attention it deserves in its own right. Models of multilingual parenting are missing in both psychology and sociolinguistics. Using inductive methodology to analyse interviews conducted with 19 mothers of teenagers with Polish family background living in Regensburg, Germany, since birth or infancy, we have attained a pioneering account of multilingual parenting under conditions of dispersed migration. At the core of the model is a typology of parents’ attitudes to parenting affecting the decision of whether and in how far Polish is being passed to children. Besides, it includes continuous change of social context, antagonisms, emotional experience, and the oppositional relation between communication and language tutelage as its central elements. While we do not claim a universal validity for the so derived model, our account can be extended and refined by adding further geographical and sociocultural locations and constellations of languages, analysed by the same means.
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The benefits of balanced biliteracy on heritage speakers’ narrative skills Jacopo Torregrossa1, Maria Andreou2, Christiane Bongartz2 & Eva Knopp2 1
University of Hamburg, Germany, 2University of Cologne, Germany
Recent studies have considered the positive effects of balanced biliteracy on cognition and language [1]. We investigate whether balanced biliteracy contributes to the enhancement of narrative abilities. We analyze narrative production by three groups of bilingual children (mean-age=11.3): GreekGerman (N=15) and Italian-German (N=15) in Germany, and Greek-English in the USA (N=15). The children were administered questionnaires targeting input in each language and tested for language proficiency. (Im)-balanced biliteracy was defined as the difference in teaching hours in each language. Greek-German are the most balanced (33% of exposure in Greek), followed by Italian-German (20% in Italian) and English-Greek (7% in Greek). Narratives were elicited using the ENNI stories [2] and analyzed for story grammar, mental state words, syntactic complexity (story length in units, subordinations and complex noun phrases) and patterns of reference tracking (characters’ shifts). These measures address knowledge of narrative structure, independently of language-specific form-function mappings. The results concerning the non-dominant language of instruction reveal that, for all the measures, Greek-German bilinguals outperform the other two groups. For example, in story grammar, GreekGerman obtain better results than Italian-German and Greek-English (ANOVA: F(2)=6.76, p
