(Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics) Anat Stavans, Ulrike Jessner - The Cambridge Handbook of Childhood Multilingualism-Cambridge University Press (2022)

The Cambridge Handbook of Childhood Multilingualism
Childhood multilingualism has become the norm rather than the exception.
This is the first handbook to survey state-of-the-art research on the uniqueness
of early multilingual development in children growing up with more than two
languages in contact. It provides in-depth accounts of the complexity and
dynamics of early multilingualism by internationally renowned scholars who
have researched typologically different languages on different continents.
Chapters are divided into six thematic areas, following the trajectory, environ-
ment and conditions underlying the incipient and early stages of multilingual
children’s language development. The many facets of childhood multilingual-
ism are approached from a range of perspectives, showcasing not only the
challenges of multilingual education and child-rearing but also the richness in
linguistic and cognitive development of these children from infancy to early
schooling. It is essential reading for anyone interested in deepening their
understanding of the multiple aspects of multilingualism, seen through the
unique prism of children.
anat stavans is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics in the English

Department at Beit Berl Academic College. Recent publications include
Multilingualism (co-authored with Hoffmann, 2015) and Multilingual Literacy (co-
edited with Breuer, Lindgren, and Van Steendam, 2021).
ulrike jessner is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of

Innsbruck and of Applied Linguistics at the University of Pannonia. Recent
publications include The Multilingual Challenge (co-edited with Kramsch, 2015)
and International Research on Multilingualism: Breaking with the Monolingual
Perspective (co-edited with Vetter, 2019).
Published online by Cambridge University Press

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The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics, edited by Adam Ledgeway and
Martin Maiden

The Cambridge
Handbook of Childhood
Multilingualism
Edited by
Anat Stavans
Beit Berl College, Israel
Ulrike Jessner
University of Innsbruck, Austria
University of Pannonia, Hungary

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108484015
DOI: 10.1017/9781108669771
© Anat Stavans and Ulrike Jessner 2022
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Contents
List of Figures page ix

List of Tables x
About the Editors xi
List of Contributors xiii
Acknowledgments xvi
Multilingualism Is Not Bilingualism +1: An Introduction

Anat Stavans & Ulrike Jessner 1
Part I Becoming and Being a Multilingual Child

1 Infant Bi- and Multilingual Development Judit Navracsics 13
2 The Development of Childhood Multilingualism in Languages
of Different Modalities Laura Kanto 38
3 Multilingualism in Early Childhood: The Role of the Input
Margaret Deuchar 58
4 Multilingual Education in Formal Schooling: Conceptual Shifts
in Theory, Policy and Practice Latisha Mary & Christine Hélot 82
Part II Cognition and Faculties in Multilinguals

5 Language and Thought in Multilingual Children
Ashley Chung-Fat-Yim & Ellen Bialystok 113
6 Multilingual Exposure and Children’s Effective Communication
Satomi Mishina-Mori 141
7 Metalinguistic Awareness and Early Multilingual Learning
Barbara Hofer & Ulrike Jessner 163
8 Code-Switching among Bilingual and Trilingual Children
Jeanine Treffers-Daller 190
9 Children’s Perception of Their Multilingualism Brigitta Busch 215
10 Multilingualism and Language Play Xiao-lei Wang 235

viii CONTENTS
Part III Family Language Policy

11 Establishing and Maintaining a Multilingual Family
Language Policy Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen & Baoqi Sun 257
12 Parental Input in the Development of
Children’s Multilingualism Andrea C. Schalley
& Susana A. Eisenchlas 278
13 Multilingualism, Emotion, and Affect Ana Christina DaSilva
Iddings, Eliza D. Butler, & Tori K. Flint 304
14 Siblings’ Multilingual Discourse Vicky Macleroy 325
Part IV Language(s) and Literacy of Multilingual Children

through Schooling
15 Being Plurilingual in the Language Classroom Andrea S. Young 355
16 Literacy Development in the Multilingual Child: From Speaking
to Writing Iliana Reyes 376
17 Attitudes, Motivations, and Enjoyment of Reading in
Multiple Languages Sara A. Smith & Victoria A. Murphy 393
18 Growing Up with Multilingual Literacies and Implications
for Spelling Constanze Weth & Christoph Schroeder 415
19 Assessing Multilinguals Becky H. Huang & Alison L. Bailey 441
20 Plurilingualism and Young Children’s Perspectival Cognition
Maureen Hoskyn & Danièle Moore 472
Part V Socialization in Childhood Multilingualism

21 Building a Plurilingual Identity Adelheid Hu 491
22 Multilingual Parenting in the United States: Language, Culture
and Emotion Gigliana Melzi, Nydia Prishker, Viviana Kawas
& Jessica Huancacuri 515
23 The Development of the Heritage Language in Childhood Bi-/
Multilingualism Silvina Montrul 537
24 Social Cohesion and Childhood Multilingualism in South Africa
Susan Coetzee-Van Rooy 555
25 Growing Up in Multilingual Societies: Violations of Linguistic
Human Rights in Education Ajit K. Mohanty
& Tove Skutnabb-Kangas 578
Part VI Multilingual Children’s Landscape

26 Linguistic Landscapes in the Home: Multilingual Children’s
Toys, Books and Games Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer 605
27 Linguistic Landscapes in School Eva Vetter 623
28 Children’s Perception of Multilingual Landscapes in Interaction
Asta Cekaite 649
Subject Index 668

Country Index 675
Language Index 677

Figures
7.1 MXL task: Two of the following three sentences have

the same meaning page 173
7.2 MXL task: Translation 173
7.3 Metalinguistic Abilities Test: MAT2 (Grammatical
functions task) 175
7.4 Metalinguistic Abilities Test: MAT2 (Acceptability task) 176
9.1 Template for language portraits with children 217
9.2 Avin’s language portrait 222
12.1 Continuum of discourse strategies 293
13.1 “This is Grandma Zeca and Grandpa Zezico (in memory)” 315
13.2 Selected pages from a child’s picture book 317
14.1 Bilingual siblings engaging in a media workshop
at the BFI 339
14.2 Storyboard frame no. 4, The Lost Boy and Girl 340
14.3 Storyboard frame no. 8, The Lost Boy and Girl 341
14.4 Bilingual siblings engaging in a pre-production workshop 344
14.5 Bilingual siblings’ back story, mood board and stage set
for their digital story 346
16.1 Zindi’s bilingual letter in Xhosa and English (originally
published Bloch & Alexander 2003) 382
16.2 Sercan’s bilingual representation of Chango-Marano 384
16.3 Sercan’s multilingual representation of A-B-C song in
English and Spanish 384
18.1 Example of the motor-cognitive requirements for spelling
in an emergent writer by means of a story written and
dictated by 5-year-old Merle in cooperation with her mother 419
18.2 Excerpt from 6-year-old Osman’s narrated version vs
the dictated version of The Lost Envelope 420
18.3 Schematic representation of the function of literacy
practices in four multilingual contexts: (a) balanced
multilingualism, (b) similar literacies, (c) partly different
literacies, (d) different literacies 423
24.1 Ages of acquisition 564

Tables
2.1 Examples of multilingual children acquiring sign

language(s) and spoken language(s) from their linguistic
environment in Finland page 42
2.2 Code-blended utterance produced by Lauri at the age of
24 months 50
2.3 Code-switched utterance produced by Leon at the age of
18 months 50
18.1 Schematic representation of language-acquisition settings
as combinations of first/second spoken language and
first/second written language 427
18.2 Word separation in Turkish spelling of children with
German as their first written language 432

About the Editors
Anat Stavans, PhD, is Professor in Applied Linguistics in the English

Department at Beit Berl College, Kfar Saba, Israel and the University of
Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary. Her research focuses on developmental and
educational linguistics, trilingual acquisition and development, and cross-
cultural and cross-linguistic literacy development. She has published exten-
sively on code-switching, narrative input and development, immigrant
multilingualism, educational language policy, parent–child interaction,
multi-literacy development, and multilingual pragmatics. She co-edited
the volume Studies in Language and Language Education: Essays in Honor of
Elite Olshtain (with Irit Kupferberg, Magnes, 2008) and Multilingual Literacy
(with Esther Odilia Breuer, Eva Lindgren, and Elke Van Steendam,
Multilingual Matters, 2021); she wrote Linguistic and Developmental Analysis
of Child-Directed Parental Narrative Input (in Hebrew, NCJW) and
she co-authored Multilingualism (with Charlotte Hoffmann, Cambridge
University Press, 2015). She has developed and led intervention projects
on early language and literacy development among educators and parents
and served as consultant on multilingualism and multi-literacy to several
international agencies and institutions. She served as a management com-
mittee member on the EU-COST actions on New Speakers in a Multilingual
Europe: Opportunities and Challenges and the European Literacy Network.
Her most recent research concerns the development of text quality in
written expository texts among elementary school children in Israel and
pragmatic abilities in bi- versus trilingual young adults.
Ulrike Jessner, PhD, is Professor at the University of Innsbruck, Austria,

and at the University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary, where she is a
founding member of the International Doctoral School of
Multilingualism. She has published widely in the field of multilingualism,
with a special focus on the acquisition of English in multilingual contexts.
She is the co-author of A Dynamic Model of Multilingualism (with Philip

xii ABOUT THE EDITORS
Herdina, Multilingual Matters, 2002), which pioneered dynamic systems

and complexity theory in international language acquisition research, and
the author of Linguistic Awareness in Multilinguals: English as a Third Language
(Edinburgh University Press, 2006). She has been engaged in the develop-
ment of the research area of third language acquisition/multilingualism as
a founding member and past president of the International Association of
Multilingualism. She is a founding editor of the International Journal of
Multilingualism (Routledge) and of the book series Trends in Applied
Linguistics (Mouton). In her most recent research projects she has focused
on the role of linguistic awareness in language attriters, as well as on
linguistic and cognitive competences in multilingual kindergarten children
in North and South Tyrol.

Contributors
Alison L. Bailey, EdD, Department of Education, School of Education and

Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Ellen Bialystok, PhD, Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto,
Canada
Brigitta Busch, PhD, Department of Linguistics, Vienna University, Austria
and Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Eliza D. Butler, PhD, College of Education, Early Childhood Education,
Miami Dade College, Miami, USA
Asta Cekaite, PhD, Department of Thematic Research, Linköping
University, Linköping, Sweden
Ashley Chung-Fat-Yim, PhD, Department of Communication Sciences and
Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA
Susan Coetzee-Van Rooy, PhD, UPSET research entity, Faculty of
Humanities, North-West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa
Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen, PhD, Department of Education, University of
Bath, Bath, UK
Ana Christina DaSilva Iddings, PhD, Department of Teaching and
Learning, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA
Margaret Deuchar, PhD, Department of Theoretical and Applied
Linguistics, University of Cambridge, UK
Susana A. Eisenchlas, PhD, School of Humanities, Languages and Social
Science, Griffith University, Australia
Tori K. Flint, PhD, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, College of
Education, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, USA
Christine Hélot, PhD, Faculty of Education and Lifelong Learning (INSPÉ),
University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France
Barbara Hofer, PhD, DyME Research Group, Innsbruck University,
Innsbruck, Austria
Adelheid Hu, PhD, Department for Humanities, Faculty for Humanities,
Education and Social Sciences, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

xiv LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Jessica Huancacuri, MA, Applied Psychology, New York University, New

York, USA
Becky H. Huang, PhD, Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies, College
of Education and Human Development, University of Texas at San
Antonio, San Antonio, USA
Laura Kanto, PhD, Department of Language and Communication Studies,
University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland
Viviana Kawas, BA, Department of Applied Psychology, Steinhardt School
of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University,
New York, USA
Vicky Macleroy, EdD, Educational Studies, Goldsmiths, University of
London, London, UK
Latisha Mary, PhD, Faculty of Education and Lifelong Learning (INSPÉ),
Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer, PhD, Faculty of Education, University of Hamburg,
Hamburg, Germany
Gigliana Melzi, PhD, Department of Applied Psychology, New York
University, New York, USA
Satomi Mishina-Mori, PhD, College of Intercultural Communication,
Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan
Ajit K. Mohanty, PhD, National Multilingual Education Resource
Consortium (NMRC), Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
Silvina Montrul, PhD, Department of Spanish and Portuguese/Department
of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA
Danièle Moore, PhD, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University,
Vancouver, Canada and DILTEC, Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France
Victoria A. Murphy, PhD, Department of Education, University of Oxford,
Oxford, UK
Judit Navracsics, PhD, Department of Applied Linguistics, Institute for
Hungarian and Applied Linguistics, University of Pannonia, Veszprém,
Hungary
Nydia Prishker, PhD, Applied Psychology, Steinhardt School of Culture,
Education, and Human Development, New York University, New
York, USA
liana Reyes, PhD, Center for Latina American Studies, Education,
University of Arizona, Tucson, USA
Andrea C. Schalley, PhD, Department of Language, Literature and
Intercultural Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Karlstad
University, Karlstad, Sweden
Christoph Schroeder, PhD, German Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of
Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, PhD, Åbo Akademi University, Vasa, Finland; retired
Sara A. Smith, PhD, Department of Language, Literacy, EdD, Exceptional
Education, and Physical Education, University of South Florida,
Tampa, USA

List of Contributors xv
Baoqi Sun, PhD, Centre for Research in Child Development, Office of

Education Research, National Institute of Education, Nanyang
Technological University, Jurong West, Singapore
Jeanine Treffers-Daller, PhD, University of Reading, Department of English
Language and Applied Linguistics, Reading, UK
Eva Vetter, PhD, Centre for Teacher Education/Department of Linguistics,
University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Xiao-lei Wang, PhD, Adelphi University, College of Education and Health
Sciences, Garden City, USA
Constanze Weth, PhD, Faculty of Humanities, Social and Educational
Sciences, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Andrea S. Young, PhD, Faculty of Education and Lifelong Learning (INSPÉ),

Acknowledgments
The Cambridge Handbook of Childhood Multilingualism gestated during different

encounters of the editors in Austria, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Israel,
Hungary, and in cyberspace. As it goes to press, we wish to extend our
thanks to all the contributors, who have not only generously and patiently
endured the perils of the project and production of the volume but have
also shown understanding and endurance of the unexpected delay due to
the Covid-19 pandemic.
We thank our colleagues for the invaluable intellectual contribution,
across languages and geographic sceneries, to the field of childhood multi-
lingualism – a field that is typically embedded in sociolinguistic, psycho-
linguistic, and educational treatments of multilingualism. Their
contribution is paramount to putting childhood multilingualism center
stage in understanding major trends of worldwide linguistic realities. For
us, the editors, who have either grown up multilingual or become multi-
lingual in the course of life, this has been an enriching and educating
experience that exposed us to realities in different corners of multilingual-
ism, of the children’s world, and of places around the globe. We thank
you all.
We wish to thank the team at Cambridge University Press, Edward,
Helen, Josh, Dhivya, and Lesley for their hard work, guidance, and help
throughout the process which enabled us to bring this ship to port. We
extend our gratitude to Beit Berl College for the grant that supported this
publication and to Dr. Miriam Ovadia for her work on the production of
the index.
We wish to thank our academic institutions, University of Innsbruck,
Beit Berl College, and University of Pannonia, for providing us with the hub
from which we expand our expertise bringing this volume to fruition.
This book has been a very central part of our lives over the years of its
production, often blurring the borders in our minds and hearts between
work and life. We wish to thank our families for their understanding and

Acknowledgments xvii
patience in enduring our moments of absence (both mental and physical),

our ups and downs, our worries. Most importantly, we wish to acknow-
ledge that the idea of this book has been as much their contribution as our
academic endeavor. Our parents, spouses, children, and grandchildren
have been the mirror and compass of the planning and outcome of
this project.

Multilingualism Is Not
Bilingualism +1:
An Introduction
Anat Stavans & Ulrike Jessner
Multilingualism in all its possible shapes plays an integral part in human

socialization. The existence of multilingualism as a lifestyle has prevailed
among most of the world’s population from biblical times to today
(Stavans & Hoffmann 2015), where people function with multiple languages
on a daily basis. Throughout historical and geopolitical events, the spread
and need for more than one language has almost translated into a sustain-
able commodity. Languages become “currencies” that have different and
changing ‘“exchange rates” in different spheres of human interaction in
the “communication market” at different times, in different places, and for
different purposes. Multilingualism today typifies individuals of all back-
grounds – educated and less educated, affluent and poor, in rural and urban
communities, and in different geographical areas. The spread and roots of
multilingualism are grounded in circumstances that have turned monolin-
gual and bilingual societies into multilingual ones. Such circumstances
are political, historical, educational, and economic in nature and occur in
different times and spaces, consecutively or simultaneously. Certain
regions in the world, such as Asia and Africa, have had a long multilingual
tradition, whereas Europe had a primarily monolingual, nation-based trad-
ition until the establishment of the European Union (EU). The establish-
ment of the EU, linguistically, became a catalyst and a magnifying glass for
the changing linguistic diversity of recent decades. Multilingualism, or
rather plurilingualism as defined by the European Council, has become a
central and propelling force through the evolving attention it has received
in terms of research, implementation, policy, and management. Hence,
bilingualism and multilingualism (plurilingualism), as opposed to mono-
lingualism, are spread throughout the world, and are not a novel human
capacity.
What has made interest in multilingualism escalate is its centrality and
growth worldwide, which has generated a new linguistic reality in recent
decades. The advances in technology, the ever-growing need for
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108669771.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

2 A N AT S T A V A N S & U L R I K E J E S S N E R
international communication, and the readily accessible international

mobility and recent waves of migration have all led to the need for people
to have command of more than one language and, more pronouncedly of
late, more than two languages. The number of languages in the world is in
constant flux, as new languages are discovered every day and the ones
already known are themselves under constant changes as a result of their
dynamic nature and in response to the changes imposed on people’s lives
and communication needs. Thus, multilingualism should come as no sur-
prise, and in fact mirrors the linguistic reality in which we live. With 7,099
languages used in 204 countries on six continents (Eberhard et al. 2017),
multilingualism comes as no surprise, making it a fundamental human
characteristic, just like the ability to reason and to feel.
Despite the prevalence of multilingualism in the world, the center of
gravity of research remains geographically constrained to North America
and Europe, with fewer, albeit growing numbers of studies from Africa,
Asia, and Latin America. This research is often based on upper- to middle-
class individuals with a Western language and literacy tradition, whose
multilingualism involves a limited language combination fostered by social
forces in limited contexts (such as schooling) to conform with monolingual
expectations. There are, however, regions such as India and some other
areas of Asia where the social and cultural conditions have shaped different
multilingual outcomes. These regions showcase the multilingualism that
constitutes typologically different language repertoires, revealing new
types of multilingualism resulting from crosslinguistic interactions that
shed a broader light on the understanding of this linguistic phenomenon.
It would be fair, though speculative, to say that nowadays bilinguals and
multilinguals outnumber monolinguals. This, in turn, calls for a greater
impetus in the study of multilingualism as a window to a better under-
standing of language development, awareness, use, and maintenance, as
well as the cognitive, socialization, and educational benefits (or deficits) for
the individual (driven by internal forces) and society (driven by and driving
external forces).
Much has been studied and published on multilingualism in research
disciplines that have hitherto often been fragmented (see seminal work by
Gumperz & Hymes 1972; Haugen 1956; Fishman 1967; Genesee 1989;
García 2009; Bialystok 2001). Internationally, psycholinguistic approaches
to the study of multilingualism, including second language acquisition
studies (Cook 1991 on multicompetence; De Bot et al. 2007) and bilingual
development studies (Grosjean 1982, 2010; Genesee 1989; Lanza 1992;
Pavlenko 2014), have focused on individual and cognitive/mental processes,
while sociolinguistic approaches have focused on society, at both individual
and group levels (Edwards 2004; Heller 2006; Aronin et al. 2011), all of
which has yielded different theoretical approaches to the study of multilin-
gualism. Still, the fundamental shared premise is that a multilingual
person is not the sum of many monolinguals in one and the same person

Multilingualism Is Not Bilingualism +1 3
(in line with the seminal ideas regarding bilingualism proposed by Grosjean
2008), nor is a trilingual person the sum total of three monolinguals
(Herdina & Jessner 2002) or the sum total of a bilingual plus a monolingual
(Hoffmann 2001; Stavans & Hoffmann 2015). Rather, multilingualism is
distinct from both monolingualism and bilingualism, for it requires more
complex crosslinguistic interactions and the increased multilingual
awareness that is imposed by the influence of the different language
systems (Montanari & Quay 2019; Jessner & Allgäuer-Hackl 2020), which
can facilitate novel language learning in multilinguals (Jessner et al. 2016).
Consequently, multilingualism cannot be seen through the same lens as
bilingualism; it is inherently more dynamic, complex, heterogenous, and
multidimensional when explaining learning, use, processing, and mainten-
ance of more than two languages across modalities, ages, and contexts.
The Cambridge Handbook of Childhood Multilingualism provides a state-of-the
art view of intra- and interdisciplinarity in linguistics, psychology, sociology,
and education through a kaleidoscope of languages, countries, scholars,
and cultures. The purpose of this handbook is to bring together knowledge
on multilingualism, not from a lifelong perspective but rather from the
inception stages of early multilingualism, that is, childhood multilingualism.
Numerous studies have included under the term of multilingualism a wide
variety of individual and societal processes that have led to the use of more
than one language by an individual (simultaneous, sequential, SLA, etc.) and
a society (revitalization, endangerment, linguistic landscape, language use,
etc.). However, in this volume we focus on what we consider to be the root
of multilingualism as an ever-changing phenomenon, starting with but also
generating a “new linguistic reality” for many children in the world.
The current linguistic reality in which children develop and their child-
hood unfolds is the unavoidable result of population mobility, geopolitical
contingencies, natural disasters, and other life-threatening situations. Early
childhood and initial stages of schooling (from birth to 10 years of age) are
paramount to a child’s intensive social, emotional, linguistic, and cognitive
development. The incipient and most significant transitions that children
experience from home to the wider social environment (childcare, school,
community centers, etc.) are paramount to human development, socializa-
tion, and the progress of society, starting from the very early stages of life.
These emergent first stages of the development of multilingualism weave
the linguistic, cognitive, social, and cultural tapestry of people’s identity
and sense of belonging. The perspective taken in this handbook is one that
focuses both on the process of becoming and the product of being a multilin-
gual child, tracing the trajectories and profiles of new forms and varieties of
multilingual productions in both spoken and written language(s).
This handbook was conceived over a number of years of conversations,
meetings, research, and intervention experiences the editors have accumu-
lated. From the outset, the aim of the volume has been to present state-of-
the-art scientific knowledge on individual and societal aspects of childhood

multilingualism from internationally renowned scholars whose work has

spearheaded the challenge and potential that multilingualism fosters for
the individual in the family, school, and community contexts. This project
is evidence and outcome of a common outlook on incipient multilingual-
ism, which has at its center the multilingual child and the worlds that
constitute and create this unique type of childhood. The motivation for this
volume derived from the need for (1) a clearer understanding that for most
children multilingualism is the linguistic reality into which they come and
in which they grow; (2) an analysis of the incoming flow of languages from
different sources, at different times, and in different forms that affects
childhood multilingualism as a human capacity to process language that
goes beyond monolingualism and bilingualism; (3) an elucidation of the
diversity in which most multilingual children engage and grow through
unique socialization events, yielding a multilingual childhood with
imprints in their evolution to adulthood; (4) an elaboration of the triangu-
lation of childhood, parenthood, and schooling as natural cultivating con-
ditions motivated by different internal and external forces in developing
multilingual children; (5) an integrative approach to looking at multilin-
gual children and their development where the child and childhood are at
the center and multilingualism and languages are the contour (in contrast
to most studies of multilingualism, which take a linguistic, educational,
sociolinguistic, or psycho-neurolinguistic perspective); and (6) a clear and
distinguishing focus on multilingualism as a capacity/skill/ability detached
from and independent of monolingualism and bilingualism.
Intended to inform scholars and practitioners, linguists, educators,
psychologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, sociologists, and communica-
tion experts, as well as others interested in the language of multilingual
children and the environments in which they grow, this volume consists of
seven sections, each of which takes a unique perspective on childhood
multilingualism. The volume will cover the major domains of contempor-
ary childhood multilingualism research, including the early trajectories of
being and becoming a multilingual, the agents and forces affecting child-
hood multilingualism such as the family, the society, and the school, the
evolution of the child’s processes and faculties toward the development and
awareness of multilingualism, and the cognitive bases for emergent
multilingualism in childhood. Scholars who have worked on multilingual-
ism in different language typologies, in different countries, and on different
continents have gathered to integrate and tease out that which is universal
to childhood multilingualism as an agent of the “new linguistic realities.”
The volume begins with a cluster of chapters entitled “Becoming and
Being a Multilingual Child.” This section is concerned with the multiple
ways and realities in which children become multilingual. It sets up the
different ways in which scholars report, study, analyze, and understand
multilingualism in different contexts, the challenges and needs the child
has in acquiring and using the languages in contexts (Deuchar, Chapter 3),

the different routes into different types of early multilingualism

(Navracsics, Chapter 1), the multilingual child’s understanding of the
multilingual individual they become and the multilingual society into
which they grow (Mary & Hélot, Chapter 4), and the multilingual child’s
interpretation of the different language modalities to which they are
exposed (Kanto, Chapter 2).
The second cluster of chapters, entitled “Cognition and Faculties in
Multilinguals,” centers on issues pertaining to the processing of a
multilingual repertoire. As the section title states, there are two related
main themes – cognition and faculties. Early research on bilingualism and
cognition reflects the belief that acquiring more than one language places
undue stress on a child’s mind and has negative effects on cognitive
development. Bilingual children were often judged to be semilingual or a
“social or cognitive Frankenstein” (Hakuta & Diaz 1985). Since then, there
have been numerous studies to show the opposite, highlighting a positive
relationship between bilingualism and intelligence, distinguishing between
and separating special language impairment and multilingualism, noting
cognitive advantages in multilingual communication and the positive
impact of multilingualism on cognition, and establishing that multilin-
guals perform differently from (bi- and) monolinguals on certain types of
nonlinguistic, linguistic, and, particularly, metalinguistic tasks. Three
chapters contribute to the framing of multilingual cognition to address
three distinct issues: processing language(s), metalinguistic awareness,
and language exposure. The cognitive processing of multilinguals concerns
the long-standing debates regarding the relations between language and
thought (Chung-Fat-Yim & Bialystok, Chapter 5) and, more specifically,
which cognitive faculties are affected or affect an individual’s cognitive
ability. In light of the complexity of the cognitive processes involved, a
central aspect of multilingualism is that the individual develops knowledge
of and about the languages beyond the mechanics of multilanguage pro-
ductions as an emergent property of the multilingual mind. The metalin-
guistic awareness of multilingual individuals develops much earlier than
their exposure to formal language input, just as with monolinguals (Gopnik
& Meltzoff 1997; Gopnik et al. 1999). Yet, the complexity and dynamic
processing that is grounded in a unique metalinguistic awareness stands
in unique contrast to that of monolinguals and bilinguals (Hofer & Jessner,
Chapter 7). The churning wheels of the processing and metalinguistic
awareness of the multilingual machinery are closely related to the exposure
to the linguistic repertoire and the compelling forces that eventually lead to
multilingual communication (Mishina-Mori, Chapter 6).
The dexterity of multilinguals is best seen in informal and naturalistic
contexts where their multilingual faculties are exposed while interacting
with other individuals. Three such faculties are discussed in this section to
elucidate and foreground a multilingual faculty that is often undervalued,
if not deemed deficient by monolingual standards: the faculty to code-

switch between the languages, to describe and explain the place of the
languages in the child’s actions, and to use the languages in play. The
ability to alternate between the language systems (code-switch) or to draw
on different items in the multilingual’s repertoire (translanguage) for the
purposes of efficient and effective communication is one of the most prom-
inent and unique phenomena associated with multilinguals and bilinguals
(Stavans & Porat 2019). The different levels of linguistic features conjured to
produce a code-switched utterance are discussed (Treffers-Daller, Chapter 8)
to elucidate that this unique multilingual phenomenon is not rooted in
fallacious language abilities but rather in felicitous and sophisticated ones.
Drawing on and combining the different “nuts and bolts” of the languages
to build the multilingual utterance is greatly reliant on the ability to
perceive the linguistic repertoire in all its grandeur and to assign to it a
particular value and functionality (Busch, Chapter 9), not only the unique
forms and functions that service multilingual communication but also the
de facto application of these in real-life contexts where humans are called
on to socialize. The multilingual faculty is summoned in natural “online”
communication from early childhood onward in the context of one of the
most prevalent activities of children – play (Wang, Chapter 10).
Following the theoretical frames and the individual aspects of multilin-
gual issues in early childhood, the third cluster of chapters, entitled
“Family Language Policy,” assumes that multilingual children are not only
the product of their own abilities and personalities but the outcome of the
habitat in which they develop. Within this habitat, the first and more
immediately incipient circle of language agents are the family that sur-
rounds the child, more specifically the parents (Schalley & Eisenchlas,
Chapter 12), and the language provisions they make. Multilingual families
are characterized by the language capital and currencies they have, by the
planning and management of the language practices they establish (Curdt-
Christiansen & Sun, Chapter 11), adopt, and sustain, by the experiences and
realities of their daily lives (da Silva Iddings, Butler, & Flynt, Chapter 13),
and by the variety of members who have different roles, relations, and
communicative needs in respect of the multilingual child (Macleroy,
Chapter 14). These topics are discussed in this section in the context of
multilingualism in the child and the construal of the child’s
multilingual childhood.
From the home/family circle in the lifespan of children, the next social-
ization contexts in which children engage are (in)formal educational frame-
works. In the fourth section, entitled “Language(s) and Literacy of
Multilingual Children through Schooling,” the chapters contend with the
challenges, expectations, and provisions made within the schooling
environment for multilingualism and multilingual children. More specific-
ally, multilingual children have to master not only the different languages
but possibly also different writing systems that encode them (Reyes,
Chapter 16). While monolingual children are busy learning to read and

write in one language, multilingual children must learn to do that in all

their different languages (Stavans 2014). The bridge between the spoken
and the written language occurs in the schooling years, taking us from
being spoken language listeners and speakers to being written language
readers and writers (Smith and Murphy, Chapter 17). Beyond the technical
and scholastic aspects of crossing the bridge between spoken and written
forms of one language, the multilingual child must do this in all the
languages, often taking into consideration stylistic, cultural, and concep-
tual, as well as linguistic means (Young, Chapter 15) that the child may
have for “packaging” a thought (Weth & Schroeder, Chapter 18). Of para-
mount challenge for any child, and exponentially more so for the multilin-
gual child, is the transition into academic literacy, which is highly reliant
on the development of reading and writing, a protracted process mediated
in the scholastic environment. Success at learning not only the language as
valued in achievement and its assessment (Huang & Bailey, Chapter 19) but
also the lifelong habits that are fostered by learning to read (Smith &
Murphy, Chapter 17) draws on multilingual experiences, languages, and
literacy traditions. Such traditions of inquiry, curiosity, and motivation
depend to a great extent on the way teachers mediate the languages, their
literacies, and the educational contents (Hoskyn & Moore, Chapter 20).
Humans, adults, and children alike have an innate need for socialization
that is mediated by language. The need to acquire and develop tools for
communication and hence enable our membership and participation in a
social group is not only the individual’s need but also the need of the
different social groups in which the individual develops. The next context
that affects the child’s multilingualism directly and indirectly is often
driven by external forces exerted by the society/community. In the fifth
cluster of chapters, entitled “Socialization in Childhood Multilingualism,”
we discuss different angles and issues that concern how multilingual chil-
dren perceive languages and their use from a number of perspectives and
how, in an indirect way, the social contexts in which they grow shape their
multilingual childhood. These issues are grounded in both psycho- and
sociolinguistic forces that play a crucial role in the development of multi-
lingualism in the early years. Multilingualism in the family is dependent on
the sociopolitical framework in which it is embedded (Coetzee-Van Rooy,
Chapter 24) and is subject to change in case of migration or minoritized
speech communities (Melzi, Prishker, Kawas, & Huancacuri-Harlow,
Chapter 22). Parents and wider family contribute to the building of a child’s
identity (Hu, Chapter 21), as does the environment. Whether the heritage
language is maintained (Montrul, Chapter 23) also depends on the status of
a language and/or its ethnolinguistic vitality, not to forget language rights
(Mohanty & Skutnabb-Kangas, Chapter 25).
Last but not least is the sixth section of the volume, entitled “Multilingual
Children’s Landscape,” which is the rather new research area of linguistic
landscape that offers a number of perspectives in relation to childhood

multilingualism. Most of the work conducted in the first wave of research

on linguistic landscape was essentially cartography with a strong focus on
distribution analysis of public signs to determine the presence and domin-
ance of languages in the landscape and from there extrapolate to the
vitality of languages within a given context. In the course of child develop-
ment in (mostly) monolinguals, some attention has been given to how
spaces and places where the child spends time contribute to and support
the child’s language and literacy development. These spaces have an
important, albeit less quantifiable, role in child development in general
and in language and literacy development in particular. With a focus on the
linguistic landscape – as it objectively exists or as it is perceived or under-
stood and used by the multilingual child – the spatial landscape that carries
language and cultural representations for different purposes is the (infor-
mal) input, recognition, acculturation, identity, and belonging traces inher-
ent in the growing multilingual child’s environments. By focusing on
exposure to multilingualism as mediated by the linguistic landscape
(Shohamy & Gorter 2008) and material culture (Aronin & Ó Laoire 2013)
of the child’s home (Melo-Pfeifer, Chapter 26), the peer-community
(Cekaite, Chapter 28), and school (Vetter, Chapter 27), we showcase further
insights into both child and childhood multilingualism.
In summary, we have brought together different experts to share their
state-of-the-art take on childhood multilingualism through different speci-
fications of what and who is multilingual; how and why the greater under-
standing of multilingualism elucidates our understanding of linguistic,
cognitive, social, cultural, and educational processes of teaching and learn-
ing; the formation of multilingualism from incipient stages of development
in terms of acquisition and learning; the agency of parents, siblings, peers,
spaces, schools, policy makers, and, above all, the child in the construal of
multilingualism. The volume presents examples and cases as well as real-
ities from different regions of the world, leaving the reader informed and
aware of the similarity between and uniqueness of the different multilin-
gual realities of and for children, all of which contribute to the readiness
with which children will embrace the “new” linguistic realities that go
beyond languages and geographical borders, and which have become even
more present with globalization, mobility, and technology.
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Part One
Becoming and
Being a Multilingual
Child

1
Infant Bi- and Multilingual
Development
Judit Navracsics
1.1 Introduction
Every adult learning a new language faces the complexity of the task, and
often assumes that acquiring a language in early childhood is much sim-
pler, thinking that children just pick up the language within the environ-
ment in a very short time, without special effort. However, the time during
which children develop and finally master their language is only seemingly
short, and the process is far from effortless. It takes three to five years from
birth even for monolingual children to acquire the correct articulation of
the speech sounds, the meanings of words and grammar, to be able to use
complex sentences, and to learn the discourse rules as well as the pragmat-
ics of the language in order to become competent speakers-hearers, that is
to be able to communicate. The sophistication of the human brain enables
children to acquire more than one language at a time, from birth, or from
very early childhood on, with the same apparent ease (Werker & Byers-
Heinlein 2008). The question arises: Is the acquisition of one, two or even
more languages at a time the same, or are there differences, other than
quantitative, in the acquisition of one, two or multiple languages? This
question is crucial for the investigation as the number of children develop-
ing in multilingual contexts is intensely increasing as a result of a more
open and mobile world. These questions have been of interest not only to
researchers but also to educators, policy makers, parents, psychologists,
sociologists and other paraprofessionals.
This chapter surveys research on bi- and multilingual child language
development in the first five years of life, drawing specifically on multilin-
gualism as an independent branch of research tracing the evolution and
conceptualization of the field from bilingualism to multilingualism in
I acknowledge the financial support of Széchenyi 2020 under the EFOP-3.6.1-16-2016-00015.

14 JUDIT NAVRACSICS
contrast to monolingualism (Hoffmann 1991; Aronin & Hufeisen 2009;

Stavans & Hoffmann 2015). In the first part of the chapter, I describe the
history of infant bilingualism research with the basic questions in focus.
Then I review infant bi- and multilingualism and cognitive development. In
the description of language perception, I rely on neurolinguistic findings,
while in the development of speech, I give a brief analysis of the language
development of some multilingual children with a special emphasis on that
of a trilingual pair of siblings. I provide examples at the phonetic-
phonological and lexical levels as well as evidence of metalinguistic aware-
ness taken from my own data (Navracsics 1999, 2000, 2004, 2009, 2013,
2014), in addition to other infant multilingual development facts.
1.1.1 An Overview of Infant Bilingualism Research

Research on early bilingual development has grown rapidly in the past 30
years. Prior to that, there were only a few systematic descriptions of lan-
guage development of bilingual children (Ronjat 1913; Leopold 1939–49),
which have paved the way for an intense interest toward infant
bilingualism. From the very beginning, the main focus has been to see
how the developing mind can handle two (or more) linguistic systems
during the acquisition process: Are these systems separated or do they form
one unitary whole (De Houwer 1990; Meisel 1989; Taeschner 1983)?
Interestingly, irrespective of the data analyses supporting the unitary or
the separated systems, researchers have considered language mixing and
code-switching as evidence for their views. For the unitary system support-
ers, language mixing and code-switches were the proof of the child being
unable to differentiate between their languages, while for the separated
systems supporters it was evident that the unintentional switch between
the languages took place as a result of the interference across the lan-
guages, and cross-linguistic influences would only occur if the child could
make a difference between the languages. It also means that the bi- and
multilingual child’s metalinguistic awareness develops faster than that of
the monolingual child (Göncz & Kodzopeljic 1991).
The proponents of the unitary-system hypothesis, Volterra and
Taeschner (1978) proposed a three-stage model for early phases of language
development in bilingual children. The first stage is the common lexical
system, which comprises words from both languages, and the child is not
able to differentiate between the languages. As a result, there are language
mixings in the child’s developing speech. In the next stage, the child
develops two distinct lexical systems while applying the same syntactic
rules to both languages, which causes incorrect structures in either or both
of the languages. It is only in the third stage, at about 2.8 years of age that
the differentiation of the two linguistic systems, lexical as well as syntactic,
takes place. As Genesee (1989) notes in his critical article, early mixed
utterances are thought of as evidence for the child being unable to

Infant Bi- and Multilingual Development 15
differentiate between the languages, and emphasizes the role of parental

input that might result in the child’s language mixing in the early years of
bilingual development.
Contrary to Volterra and Taeschner’s one-system (also called unitary-
system, or single-system) hypothesis, Meisel (1989) finds it very difficult to
discover positive evidence in support of the one-system stage. He supports
the idea that bilinguals do differentiate between the two grammatical
systems from early on. The question is: At what point of language develop-
ment may one reasonably assume that the child is able to use syntactic (or,
more generally grammatical) modes of language processing? In Meisel’s
opinion, monolinguals and bilinguals alike start out with a mode of pro-
cessing which follows general semantic-pragmatic strategies rather than
more language-specific grammatical principles.
In fact, if one can show that a bilingual child uses different grammatical
means for expressing the same or similar semantic-pragmatic functions
in both languages, this not only indicates that s/he is indeed
differentiating the two grammatical systems, but also constitutes what
I believe the clearest evidence that one can and, indeed must attribute to
the child – the ability to use the grammatical mode.
(Meisel 1989: 20)
De Houwer (1990) criticizes Volterra and Taeschner’s views. In her opinion,

they use psycholinguistic terms to prove that during the mixing stage the
child has one lexical system. However, she claims that the child uses mixed
utterances due to pure sociolinguistic categories.
Whether the unitary or the separated developing system is the focus of
attention, researchers of both camps rely on the interactions of the two (or
more) systems, which trigger cross-linguistic phenomena at all linguistic
levels. Cross-linguistic influences (transfers, code-switches) are the bench-
marks of the complexity of multilingual development, showing that there
is a constant interaction between the languages (Stavans & Porat 2019), as
multilingual people can never deactivate any of their languages (cf.
Grosjean 1998). What determines the direction of the influences depends
on many factors. One might assume that the dominant language influences
the weaker one(s), but that is not always the case (Navracsics 2014). In a
multilingual acquisition process, the systems under development are inter-
related and are always active (though to different extents). In addition to
the linguistic structures, the multilingual setting, the individual variability,
the proficiency levels of the languages, etc. trigger a myriad of interferences
or cross-linguistic influences. The Dynamic Model of Multilingualism
(Herdina & Jessner 2002) views multilingual development and multilingual-
ism holistically, as a complex, nonlinear process in the attainment of
multicompetence. In the study of multilingual development, we must
consider the M-Factor, that is, the “function of the interaction between
more than one language system” (Herdina & Jessner 2002: 131), which is

16 JUDIT NAVRACSICS
an emergent property of the multilingual system. How the M-Factor func-

tions depends on a range of components, such as language aptitude, lan-
guage learning skills, and metalinguistic and cross-linguistic awareness.
It is not the sum of linear language acquisition processes in the different
languages of the developing multilingual. On the contrary, all system
variables are interrelated, and one can never really tell what causes the
alterations in the acquisition period (cf. butterfly effect), because of the
sensitive dependence on initial conditions and how the developing language
systems influence each other, resulting in different qualities in the multi-
lingual person’s language command. The Dynamic Model of
Multilingualism is based on Dynamic Systems Theory and views multiple
language acquisition as unpredictable and dynamic.
1.1.2 Infant Bi- and Multilingualism and Cognition

Early life experiences impact cognition and brain development. Infant
multilingualism yields significant changes to the functional organization
of children’s prefrontal cortex for attentional control (Arredondo et al.
2017). Most research in this field has been done on bilingual infants, who
monitor and control their languages during real-time language listening.
This ability helps bilinguals’ language learning to keep pace with that of
their monolingual peers.
Brito et al. (2014) carried out a comparative study of monolingual, bilin-
gual and trilingual 24-month-old toddlers, in which they tested cued recall,
memory generalization and working memory performance. All the toddlers
were exposed to all of their languages from birth. In the cued recall test,
there was no difference between the three experimental groups. In the
memory generalization test, only the bilingual group differed from the
other groups, and there were no significant differences between the mono-
lingual and trilingual groups. In the working memory performance, the
three groups did not show significant differences, either, though the results
were quite variable. The differences may be attributable to both cognitive
development and to cultural practices.
Early (i.e., preschool) environmental variations can shape the trajectory
of different cognitive domains. This is described by Kuwabara and Smith
(2012) in their comparative study of children growing up in Eastern and
Western cultures. The linguistic environment (i.e., being exposed to three
languages) is a greater cognitive load. The proportion of each language’s
exposure is crucial in cognitive and language development. For a bilingual
child, a balanced exposure is 50 percent in L1 and 50 percent in L2. The
same balance results in 33 percent in L1, 33 percent in L2 and 33 percent in
L3 for a trilingual child. In addition to the quantity of input, the quality is
also important for the ideal linguistic and cognitive development. On aver-
age, children whose daily language exposure is divided between two or
more languages are likely to hear less of each language than children whose

daily language exposure is in only a single language – unless bilingualism in

the home doubles the amount of talk addressed to young children. As input
is considerably more divided in trilingual situations than in bilingual ones,
many children exposed to three languages do not have a substantial enough
amount of input of a second or third language to become as productive in
them as in their L1 (Montanari 2013).
When considering the cognitive advantages of bi- and multilingual
children, we should also bear in mind that there are also differences in
child-rearing customs in different cultures, which may contribute to
children’s cognitive development. Socioeconomic status (SES) is another
factor that may be taken into account when examining cognitive develop-
ment. It has been documented that individuals having higher SES back-
grounds have better working memory (Lipina et al. 2013). However,
Archila-Suerte et al. (2014) concluded that despite a general socioeduca-
tional disadvantage, early bilinguals may improve abilities in higher-order
cognition by the extended practice of switching between the two language
systems. This may counteract the negative effects of low SES on cognition.
Becoming trilingual before age 3 is an even more complex process as
compared to bilingual development, as the brain has to cope with more
than two developing language systems. In a longitudinal study with an
English-Persian bilingual pair of siblings (Navracsics 1999, 2004), who
started the acquisition of Hungarian as their L3 at 1;10 and 2;11 years of
age, respectively, I carried out a three-and-a-half-year observation and ana-
lyzed the language development of the children. The children were exposed
to two languages from birth, but the amount of input differed greatly:
English was the dominant language when the father was at home. The
mother used Persian (her L1) only in limited and intimate situations with
the children; she said prayers and told bedtime stories, according to her
self-reports. During the observation it became clear that, apart from the
conscious activities in Persian, the mother also used her L1 unintentionally
and subconsciously in sudden, unexpected situations, at emotionally dense
moments (Navracsics 2014). However, the amount of Persian input lagged
significantly behind that of English.
When the acquisition of L3 started, the older child was already able to
produce sentences in her dominant language (English), and she was in the
one-word utterance phase in Persian. At the same time, the younger child
was in the one-word utterance phase in English and spoke no Persian at all,
but his perception was developing. This was the time when they moved to
Hungary, where the children started to attend a Hungarian monolingual
nursery school in the same group and started to acquire their L3 from their
peers and their caretakers.
Despite the same amount of time spent and the same number of activities
carried out in the Hungarian environment, there were great differences
between the language development processes of the children. In the begin-
ning, the children were silent in the Hungarian monolingual environment;

18 JUDIT NAVRACSICS
they did not use any of their languages. But the length of the silent period
was different for each of them: the older child started to use Hungarian
after two weeks of being exposed to it, while it took four months for the
younger one to produce words in the new language. At the same time, it
was noticeable that his Hungarian was developing at the perception level
from the very beginning. The older child caught up with her monolingual
Hungarian peers within six months, the younger one within 11 months.
Within three and a half years in Hungary, they were absolutely fluent in
their L3.
The children’s multilingual awareness was on a high level from the start
of their exposure to the third language: never did they say an English or a
Persian word in the Hungarian monolingual environment. As their
Hungarian language development progressed, the newly learnt L3 became
their dominant language. Hungarian became the common language
between the children during play sessions. Quay (2011) also finds in her
two German-English-Japanese children’s case studies that Japanese (L3), the
language of the day care, became the strongest language for the children.
1.1.3 Perception and Processing Patterns

in Bi- and Multilingual Infants
Bi- or multilingual adaptation in language leads to perception and
processing patterns distinct from those found in monolingual infants.
These differences influence infants’ development across linguistic, cogni-
tive and social domains. Drawing on recent research, I suggest a middle
ground position in the debate whether dual language input is harmful or
results in bilingual development that proceeds at the same pace as mono-
lingual development, as variation in the quantity and quality of input in
each language and the manner of acquisition affect the rate at which each
language is learned.
Much research has been dedicated to understanding the effects of bilin-
gualism on cognition and neural processing, especially in the realm of
attention and inhibition (Bialystok 2001; Bialystok et al. 2008), but no
studies have investigated the effect of bilingual perceptual knowledge on
neural processing. Stimuli effects on perception have been examined, for
example, distance between L1 and L2 sounds, perceptual weighting of
acoustic cues (Best, McRoberts, & Goodell 2001; Best, McRoberts, & Sithole
1988). Some studies focus on the decline in perception for non-native
speech sounds throughout early childhood (Kuhl et al. 2008; Werker &
Tees 1984) and the retention of perceptual sensitivity for non-natives in
bilinguals (Albareda-Castellot et al. 2011; Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés 2003;
Sundara et al. 2006). However, these studies fail to take into account factors
that impinge on the neural processing of L2 sounds: the age of L2 acquisi-
tion (AoA), the participants’ socioeconomic status (SES) and their language
proficiency levels.

Infants begin life with a broad sensitivity to any distinctive perceptual

detail, which is fundamentally characterized by the effect of the immediate
language environment. Even before birth, babies start to develop their
perception abilities, and if bilingual babies receive stimulus from both
languages, they will perceive them alike, unlike monolingual babies, for
whom stimulus from a language they have not heard before will be indiffer-
ent. Thus, monolingual and bilingual children alter in language distinction
from birth. Moon et al. (1993) showed that monolingual children sucked on
a pacifier more frequently and strongly when they heard sentences in their
native language, and they showed less interest when they heard sentences
in a different language. However, bilingual newborns whose mothers spoke
both languages, and so the newborns already had prenatal exposure to both
their languages, showed no difference in their sucking when they were
exposed to sentences in their two languages (Byers-Heinlein et al. 2010).
How can language discrimination ability be proved among bilingual
babies? How do we know that the developing language systems are being
recognized? Similarly to the above-mentioned results, Werker et al. (2009),
in their experiment with newborns exposed only to English and with
English-Filipino bilingual newborns who were exposed to a series of sen-
tences first in one language then in the other, found that while the mono-
lingual babies increased the decline in their sucking when they started to
hear sentences from a new language, the bilingual babies’ sucking
remained the same when, after listening to sentences in the same language,
they were exposed to hearing sentences from their other language. The
authors claim this result is proof that neonates being exposed in utero to two
distinct languages that have different suprasegmental features can discrim-
inate their two languages and preserve their interest in acquiring both.
Bilingual infants first tag their languages by recognizing and discrimin-
ating according to their unique rhythms, and then attend to cues that are
important in each language through statistical learning (Sundara &
Scutellaro 2011). Byers-Heinlein et al. (2017) claim that sensitivity to
language-specific perceptual differences helps infants to start separating
and constructing distinct representations of each language. In their study,
they provide experimental evidence of language differentiation in bilingual
infants’ word representations, which makes it possible to learn two
languages simultaneously.
Bilingual infants who are continually exposed to two languages can main-
tain the ability to differentiate between L1 and L2 contrasts (Byers-Heinlein
et al. 2010; Sebastián-Gallés & Bosch 2009). This ability may be explained by
children’s acute perception of within-category and between-category
phonemes. Speech sound–shape correspondences develop as a function of
linguistic experience with the auditory, visual and sensorimotor properties
of speech in both monolingual and bilingual infants (Pejovic & Molnar 2017).
Bilingual infants exploit the greater perceptual salience of redundant audio-
visual speech cues earlier and longer than monolinguals to support their

20 JUDIT NAVRACSICS
dual language acquisition processes. Another difference between mono- and

bilingual infants (Pons et al. 2015) is that while processing audiovisual
speech in L1, bilingual infants, in order to benefit from visual speech cues
that can help them with identifying the language, shift their attention from
the face to the mouth earlier than monolingual infants, at 4 months of age,
while monolingual infants do so only by 8 months.
Phonetic processing in bilingual and monolingual babies is accomplished
with the same language-specific brain areas as observed in adults, including
the left superior temporal gyrus (STG) (associated with phonetic processing)
and the left inferior frontal cortex (associated with the search and retrieval
of information about meanings, and syntactic and phonological pattern-
ing), with intriguing developmental timing differences: left STG activation
is early and remains stable active over time, while the left inferior frontal
cortex shows greater increase in neural activation in older babies notably at
the precise age when babies enter the universal first-word milestone, thus
revealing a first-time focal brain correlate that may mediate a universal
behavioral milestone in early human language acquisition (Petitto et al.
2012). There is a difference in older bilingual babies’ resilient neural and
behavioral sensitivity to non-native phonetic contrasts at a time when
monolingual babies can no longer make such discriminations.
Early bilinguals recruit an area of higher-order executive function and
cognitive control to process fundamentally sensorial speech sound infor-
mation (Bialystok 2015). They are raised in a unique linguistic environment
that requires the ability to distinguish speech sounds from very early child-
hood, and this enhances the engagement of prefrontal areas to process sound
information that is usually processed by temporal brain regions dedicated to
auditory perception. For monolinguals, it is the STG that is recruited to
process new speech sounds. Abutalebi (2008) claims that the learning of
grammatical and lexico-semantic representations in a second language is
supported by the same networks as the ones that enable these processes in
the first language. While monolinguals recruit perceptual areas (STG) in
early (i.e., pre-puberty) and late (when L1 categories are established) child-
hood to process native speech, bilinguals recruit perceptual areas (STG) in
early childhood and higher-order executive areas in late childhood (i.e.,
bilateral middle frontal gyrus and bilateral inferior parietal lobule, among
others) to process non-native speech (Archila-Suerte et al. 2013). However,
advanced learners of L2, and late bilinguals also show greater STG activity
(Archila-Suerte et al. 2016). On this basis, we can assume that late bilinguals
recruit the same cortical regions for processing L1 and L2 speech sounds.
1.2 Phonetic/Phonological Development
Bilinguals’ ability to correctly perceive both languages’ phonemes is essential

to learning speech, which is in turn fundamental to developing other, higher-

level linguistic skills. How babies perceive speech sounds helps them acquire
the correct, language-specific pronunciation. Languages differ in the sound
realizations of the same phonemes (e.g., aspirated vs. neutral plosives, or
short and long vowels, etc.), and mono- and multilingual babies transitioning
from universal listeners narrow in on the native contrasts in their one and
only or multiple languages. Sebastián-Gallés & Bosch (2009) report on some
decline in sensitivity of Spanish-Catalan bilingual babies at 12 months after
the initial ability to recognize contrasts, but later in development at 16
months, the ability to discriminate the contrasts re-emerges.
Child language literature discusses two different views on the phoneme
set of bi- or multilingual children, based on the mentioned unitary vs.
separated systems hypotheses. The first argues that there is one common
set of phonemic units that covers all the phonemes possessed by the child,
not separating them according to languages. This one unit serves all the
different languages spoken by the child.
Burling (1959), living and working in a Garo environment, observed
that his bilingual son’s English sound system developed later than his
Garo phonological system. At the age of 2;9 separation of the English and
Garo vowel systems seemed to occur, but the consonant systems never
became really differentiated. Ruke-Dravina (1967) found that the uvular
roll sound was acquired before the apical sound, and the former tended
to be used in both languages. The same phenomenon occurred in
Hoffmann’s trilingual daughter’s speech (Hoffmann 1985). She, by age
3, had internalized the German and Spanish phonological systems, with
the exception of the Spanish /r/ and some German and Spanish consonant
clusters, notably those involving the uvular and apical roll. Fantini’s
son’s Spanish consonantal system was almost complete at the age of
2;6, at which stage he used virtually no English sounds other than those
which had close equivalents in Spanish (Fantini 1985). The correct pat-
terns for English began to appear only after the near-completion of the
Spanish, in a quick burst from 2;6 years to 3 years – though the aspir-
ation of unvoiced consonants did not appear before 3;2. Even then, the
two systems were not properly separated in production; the /th/ and /dh/
sounds were not mastered until the age of 6, and numerous Spanish-
influenced pronunciations, such as /x/ for /h/, remained until this stage.
Mario also showed some signs of interference from English in his
Spanish pronunciation. Once he had mastered the English aspirated
consonants, he began to inappropriately aspirate certain Spanish conson-
ants. Deuchar and Quay (2000), observing the same phenomenon in an
English-Spanish bilingual child’s phonological development, give a pos-
sible explanation for this. The linguistic input greatly determines what
sounds are acquired first: for instance, the language that has greater lag
differences between the contrasting pairs of stops (e.g., English) must be
perceived more easily by the child, and thus the child might produce this
contrast in both languages.

22 JUDIT NAVRACSICS
On the other hand, the absence of sound confusion has been remarked
upon more often than its presence. Ronjat (1913), Oksaar (1989) and a
number of other researchers claim that there was no confusion of their
bi- or multilingual children’s sound systems.
Fantini (1985) argues that it would be quite possible, despite differences
in the acquisition process, for a hypothetically perfectly balanced bilingual
to have two completely independent phonological and phonetic systems,
each identical in all ways to those of monolinguals. On the other hand,
there could be a degree of integration between the two systems. Or, as a
third possibility, the bilingual may have two systems, which differ in some
way from those of monolinguals. Whether there is a period of fusion or not,
after differentiation, children described in the literature clearly develop
two sound systems, but there is variation in the correspondence of these
systems to those of monolinguals, especially in their phonetic detail. At the
phonemic level, even children who are dominant in one language seem to
achieve a near-perfect match with monolinguals in both languages. In their
productions they may, however, retain noticeable traces of interference in
the realizations of particular phonemes, that is, at the phonetic level.
According to Fantini (1985), the developing bilingual has to learn
processing skills that are unnecessary for the monolingual. Bilinguals have
to recognize that a sound system is entirely arbitrary, in that it is possible to
use more than one to communicate. They must therefore learn to assign
similar physical events to different systems of oppositions according to the
linguistic context. However, each phonological system is not necessarily
acquired in a way analogous to monolingual acquisition. Fantini also finds
that one system will dominate the other, so it is due to the cross-linguistic
influence that the child fails to make some oppositions in one language, or
at least produces some sounds in a foreign way.
A number of bilingual development studies claim that related languages
may enhance and accelerate the rate of development of the different lan-
guages at the different linguistic levels (cf. Fabiano-Smith & Barlow 2010;
Gawlitzek-Maiwald & Tracy 1996; Goldstein & Bunta 2012). However, the
number of studies investigating phonologically unrelated, noncognate and
typologically distant languages is very small.
Watson (1991) claims that bilinguals simplify their phonological pro-
cesses the same way monolinguals do, but do so in each language and
cross-linguistically. This simplification, particularly the replacement of
consonant clusters with single consonants, was very noticeable in
Hoffmann’s son’s speech (Hoffmann 1991). He used sequences of sounds
that never appeared in any of the languages he was acquiring.
In a Navracsics (2000) study, examples prove that the phonetic character-
istics of the three languages were perceived and produced by the children
from the beginning of their multilingual acquisition. In spite of the fact
that English, Persian and Hungarian differ in their prosodic properties
(English has variable stress, Persian and Hungarian have fixed stress:

Persian on the final syllable, Hungarian on the initial), the children under
observation never had problems with stress differentiation. In their phon-
etic acquisition, it was clear from the beginning that they recognized the
sound differences in the three languages. They were able to produce
language-specific sounds correctly, and recognized and produced the sound
contrasts in the three languages. In their acquisition of Hungarian phon-
ology, much was identical with the developmental characteristics of
Hungarian monolingual children. They made sound substitutions (e.g.,
bilabial plosive /b/ for the voiceless bilabial plosive /p/: pata – basa; bilabial
plosive /b/ for the labio-dental fricative /v/: bonat – vonat) and omissions (e.g.,
baana – barna).
Montanari (2011) in her case study of a Tagalog-Spanish-English trilin-
gual child at age 1;10 compared the child’s phonetic inventories in each
language to those produced by monolingual peers to assess whether trilin-
gual exposure had any consequence on phonological production. She found
that the child’s accuracy levels in word-initial segments differed signifi-
cantly from language to language, reflecting distinct levels of phonological
development.
1.2.1 Cross-linguistic Influences at the Phonetic Level: Aspiration

Bi- and multilingual children may have Voice Onset Time (VOT) values
different from the normal monolingual range. Johnson and Wilson
(2002), whilst studying their VOT data from two Japanese-English bilingual
children, found that the children could differentiate their two languages in
their speech production lexically and pragmatically, and they both sounded
like adult-like native speakers of both languages. Fabiano-Smith and Bunta
(2012) tested and measured the VOT values of Spanish and English mono-
lingual and Spanish-English bilingual 3-year-old children. They found that
monolingual and bilingual children differed in VOT in English, but not in
Spanish. I experienced the same kind of cross-linguistic influence with the
children I observed, occasionally, when the otherwise normally pronounced
sounds sounded strange to the Hungarian ear. I carried out acoustic
measurements of the Hungarian plosive sounds of the observed English-
Persian-Hungarian trilingual children (Navracsics 2000), and found that
occasionally their VOT data did not fit in the range of the Hungarian norms
(cf. Gósy 2000), and their plosives were aspirated. In the Hungarian lan-
guage, in normal speech situations, there is no aspiration. In Persian, on the
other hand, all voiceless consonants are aspirated, irrespective of their
positions within the word (Jeremiás 1986). English uses aspiration word-
initially in voiceless bilabial plosive /p/, voiceless alveolar /t/ and voiceless
velar /k/. In the children’s data, there are examples of all aspirated plosives
in Hungarian words regardless of their appearance in word-initial, inter-
vocalic or word-final positions (e.g., [phiros], [thenthi], [khi:kh]), which sug-
gests that the dominant phonological system for the children is the Persian

24 JUDIT NAVRACSICS
one, and Persian influences the VOT features of the Hungarian consonants
which, as a result, become aspirated.
1.2.2 Contrast According to Voice

Voicing contrast in simultaneous and sequential multilinguals is perceived
differently. In simultaneous bi- and multilinguals, this contrast is easier to
perceive as children are tuned into their languages from birth and even
before. McCarthy et al. (2014) in their VOT study with 52-month-old sequen-
tial Sylheti-English bilinguals found that sequential bilinguals’ perception
and production of L2 or Ln sounds are initially driven by their experience
with their L1, but after starting kindergarten or school, the sounds change
to match that of their monolingual peers.
Voicing contrast also exists in Hungarian and English consonants. The
opposition of voiced and voiceless sounds is exhibited to a lesser degree in
English than in Hungarian. English [g] is closer to English [k] than to the
Hungarian [g]. This caused some trouble for the children in my study
(Navracsics 2000) in the discrimination of voiced and voiceless consonants
in, for example, rág (chewing) vs. rák (lobster).
There are language-specific benefits of language exposure to phonological
memory skill and language-specific benefits of phonological memory skill
to language development (Parra et al. 2011). However, the similarity of the
phonological shape of a word known in one language may trigger the
associative memory in the recognition of an unknown word in the other
language independently of the different sound realizations. Because of this,
phonological paraphasia can also be observed (Navracsics 1999), as
happened in a situation when the child, on hearing the Hungarian word
“rak” (put), associated it with the English “rock” and answered “kavics”
(pebble). The consonant and vowel phonemes are similar. However, she
ignored the phonetic features specific to the Hungarian speech sounds,
and identified the familiar English word.
1.2.3 Vowels
Languages differ in the vowel sound directory as well. The Hungarian
language has 14 vowel sounds, which have both qualitative and quantita-
tive contrasts, as opposed to English, which has 11 monophthongs and
several diphthongs depending on the variety, with no quantitative differ-
ences within the same quality vowels, and Persian, which has only six
vowels and four diphthongs. In Navracsics (1999), from among the vowel
sounds the most critical for the trilingual children proved to be the sound
/e:/. In many cases, both children substituted this sound for /i/, as is the
tendency in colloquial Persian (Jeremiás 1986). Data taken from the
mother’s collection indicate that the same substitution is going on in
English: they pronounce teddy bear as [ti:di beə], and get up as [git ʌp].

I found a great number of examples when the children used /i:/ instead of
/e:/ in the Hungarian utterances as well. This means that in the develop-
ment of both consonant and vowel sounds, Persian was the dominant
language; Persian made an impact on the phonetic features of the other
two languages.
Neither child could perceive the quantitative difference of the vowels
(e.g., ‘őrült’ [mad] vs. ‘örült’ [was happy]), and consequently, they were not
able to pronounce these sounds correctly at the beginning of their L3
development. Kehoe (2002) in her study on German and Spanish monolin-
gual and bilingual children also found that bilingual children were lagging
behind monolingual children in the acquisition of vowel length contrast.
However, by ages 4 and 5, respectively, when the children in my study had
already been acquiring Hungarian for two years, they had learnt this
distinctive feature, which does not exist in their other two languages.
1.3 Lexical and Grammatical Development
There is substantial evidence from the study of children developing in a

monolingual context that the amount of speech children hear is related to
their rate of language development, supporting the view that language
development is paced by children’s access to input (Hart & Risley 1995;
Hoff & Naigles 2002; Pan et al. 2005).
Word recognition in infants has rarely been studied. Vihman et al. (2007)
compared Event-Related Potentials (ERP) of English and Welsh monolingual
and English-Welsh bilingual infants to see how the brain responds to
familiar and nonfamiliar words. In the monolingual data, there was a
difference between the recognition of familiar words and nonfamiliar ones.
However, in the bilingual data, responses to the Welsh lists showed a
similar, but temporally later difference in response to familiar (English)
and rare (Welsh) words.
Kovács and Mehler (2009a, 2009b) trained 7-month-olds and found that
both monolinguals and bilinguals were equally able to learn the rules, but
bilingual infants were better able to inhibit the previously taught rules
under changed conditions. In learning associative word–object pairings,
Byers-Heinlein et al. (2013) did not find an advantage or a disadvantage
for the bilingual infants at ages 12 and 14 months. The authors demon-
strated that the ability to learn the associative link between a word and an
object emerges simultaneously in both monolingual and bilingual infants.
At 14 months of age, both monolingual and bilingual infants fail at learning
similar-sounding words, but at 17 months, monolinguals are already able to
learn them, unlike bilinguals. Bilinguals can be successful at minimal pair
word learning at a later age, at 20 months (Fennell 2005). Mattock et al.
(2010) suppose that the more stable phonological representations emerge
more slowly in bilingual infants not because of their bilingualism

26 JUDIT NAVRACSICS
specifically, but rather because of the variability in the input they hear (see
Deuchar, Chapter 3 in this volume).
Byers-Heinlein and Werker (2009) claim that the number of languages
experienced in the input affects the word learning process. While the
tendency to link a novel noun to a novel object is robust at 18 months for
monolingual infants, it is less so in bilinguals and not evident at all in
infants growing up with three languages.
The relative amount of time spent in each language can affect the relative
vocabulary size in each language of a bilingual (Pearson et al. 1997). When
bilingual children’s vocabulary size is compared with that of monolinguals,
bilingual children will lag behind, as was the case in Hoff et al.’s study
(2012), which also demonstrated that this effect of bilingualism was
observed in high SES samples, and the same was observed for measures of
grammatical development.
The vocabulary size is hard to study in the acquisition process, since it keeps
growing all the time. It is of greater interest how the lexical categories are
distributed, what word classes appear first. According to Nicoladis (2001), the
distribution of lexical categories (e.g., noun, verb, etc.) in the early lexicons of
bilingual children is similar to that observed in monolingual children.
In the acquisition of vocabulary, not only the quantity but also the
quality of input is decisive. Input quantity (total number of word tokens)
appears to be less important than quality (total number of word types; i.e.,
lexical diversity), which is a stronger predictor of the vocabulary size of the
developing child (Jones & Rowland 2017). In a computational analysis of
caregiver speech, Jones and Rowland demonstrated that an input rich in
lexical diversity outperformed an input equivalently rich in quantity for
learned sublexical and lexical knowledge.
Bilingual infants reach linguistic milestones (babbling, one-word utter-
ances, two-word utterances) at the same rate as monolingual infants. In
their vocabulary acquisition, which very much depends on the relative
distribution of exposure in each language, they soon begin to incorporate
translation equivalents. Uneven exposure patterns result in uneven pat-
terns of vocabulary growth (De Houwer 2007). Evidence has been found
for balanced language acquisition to acquire a greater proportion of trans-
lation equivalents (David & Li 2008), but it was also found that the quantity
of L2 exposure is a poor predictor of the quantity of translation equivalents
in the child’s vocabulary (Byers-Heinlein & Werker 2013). Legacy et al.
(2017) assumed that more balanced exposure in the two languages would
result in more balanced appearance of translation equivalents. On the
contrary, they found that language exposure per se is not a significant
predictor of translation equivalent development, as it is the children’s
ability to utilize the input in their environment to learn new words that
matters in this respect. Bosch and Ramon-Casas (2014) demonstrated that
the extent of translation equivalent facilitation is limited by the phono-
logical similarity of the two languages the child is learning.

The ability to make a context-based language choice (i.e., the children can
track language choices by their interlocutors and can alter their language
choices accordingly) provides evidence of the ability of pragmatic differen-
tiation. Thus, a common semantic representation is built up with prag-
matic labels for the same notions used in different contexts with
different lexemes.
Lexical and grammatical development differ from individual to individ-
ual. In the following subchapters, I will describe how differently bilingual
siblings (a girl aged 2;11 and a boy aged 1;10, respectively), having the same
exposure to their languages, acquire vocabulary and grammar in
Hungarian, their third language (Navracsics 2004). Since Hungarian is an
agglutinating language, and as such, grammaticality is possible by adding
prefixes and suffixes to the root morphemes, it is difficult to separate
lexical and grammatical development, especially in the first three years of
life, when even the one-word utterances may be conjugated words. I will
discuss the general order of lexical development in the Hungarian language
in the first 16 months.
1.3.1 Lexical Development: Child 1

The silent period for Child 1 lasted about two weeks when she did not use
any Hungarian words at kindergarten. However, even at home, with her
Persian-English bilingual mother she did utter Hungarian words in the
recordings. In the first month of her exposure to Hungarian, I recorded
65 Hungarian tokens and 17 types produced by the child. They were names
referring to plants (e.g., levél [leaf], virág [flower], alma [apple]), animals (e.g.,
cica [kitty], zsiráf [giraffe], állat [animal], maci [bear], nyuszi [bunny], ló [horse]),
toys (e.g., guriga [roll], labdqa [ball], baba [doll]), vehicles (e.g., hajó [boat], autó
[car], repülő [plane], busz [bus]), and some others (e.g., ház [house], fül [ear],
kalap [hat], papucs [slippers], teja [tea], ajtó [door]) as well as adjectives (e.g.,
piros [red], kék [blue], sárga [yellow], zöld [green], fehér [white], fekete [black],
másik [other], finom [delicious]) and some conjugated verbs (e.g., tenci, alszik
[sleeps], csüccs [sit], ugat [barks], szeret [likes], szeretsz [you like], *szereszte
[I like]).
Within six months her productive vocabulary increased by at least five
times, which led to 306 tokens and 110 types. After another three months
she doubled her vocabulary size. From this time the growth of her vocabu-
lary was hard to follow. After two years she uttered 2,513 tokens and
almost 800 types in the 30-minute recording. From the ninth month she
used full sentences and different sentence types.
1.3.2 Lexical Development: Child 2

The first six months spent in Hungary was basically the silent period for
Child 2 when he hardly uttered a word during a recording. However, he

28 JUDIT NAVRACSICS
developed his passive vocabulary in all three languages. He participated in

all activities, and with his nonverbal behavior he demonstrated that he
understood what was going on around him, and reacted appropriately.
After six months, he started uttering individual words/utterances; his one-
and then two-word stage began. The next turning point was between ages
0;11 and 1;4 spent in Hungary. His linguistic behavior changed and both his
produced tokens and types doubled from recording to recording (i.e., within
a couple of months). He also started using full sentences of different types.
The type–token ratio shows that in the beginning, Child 2 did not use words
frequently. His lexicon was dominated by names of objects: toys (e.g., guriga
[roll], toll [pen], labda [ball]), animals (e.g., maci [bear], cica [kitty], kutya [dog],
csiga-biga [snail], elefánt [elephant]) and vehicles (e.g., busz [bus], autó [car],
kukásautó [dust-cart], repülő [plane], bicikli [bicycle]). He used nouns, but
function words were more frequent (e.g., ez [this], itt [here], ott [there], a
[the], nem [no]). After a long silent period and a one- and two-word period
(i.e., after spending 1;4 years in Hungary), he used simple and complex
sentences in Hungarian.
The rates and paths of lexical acquisition were different for the two
children. Child 1 had a rapid growth of vocabulary, while Child 2 developed
rather his receptive skills in the first months. The younger child main-
tained his silence period for a longer time than the older one. At the same
time, he was motivated and absorbed the new language and built up his
comprehension. Not only age but also other factors, like personality, gender
etc., may contribute to the length of the silent period. The individual
differences in the language development can be demonstrated in the case
of these siblings as well.
1.4 Metalinguistic Awareness
Metalinguistic awareness is the ability to see language as a code; to analyze

the language and to think about it, to manipulate language forms.
Metalinguistic awareness develops from very early on. Multilinguality con-
tributes to even more rapid awareness, as children exposed to more than
one language have an accelerated development (Cummins 1978; Göncz &
Kodzopeljic 1991; Bialystok 2001). As is observed in monolingual child
language development, at around age 3, children start using hypercorrect
forms, that is, they use the phonological forms (the base forms) instead of
derived forms. While this occurs in monolingual acquisition at age 3,
multilingual development may have an effect on the age of the occurrence
of such phenomena in the different languages. The advantage of
multilingual children in the development of metalinguistic awareness is
in the duration of time, since the more languages they acquire, the better
skills they develop in drawing inferences about the languages themselves.
In my study (Navracsics 2004), hypercorrect forms started to appear after

one and a half years of exposure to Hungarian at ages 4;5 and 3;5, respect-
ively, and not only in Hungarian (the third language) but also in English
(the first language in order of acquisition). The acquisition of the third
language slowed down the first language development and accelerated the
process in the third language. What reveals the development of metalin-
guistic awareness is that the children at this age (4;5 and 3;5) had no access
to hypercorrect input from the environment, as their Hungarian peers had
already passed this stage of speech development, and there were no English
peers available for them, either.
Still, through the examples given here, it can be observed that the
multilingual development processes in this respect are not identical to
those of the monolingual. Similarly to what monolingual children can
produce, multilinguals also give examples of bringing the two base mor-
phemes together as an indicator of their metalinguistic awareness: olyanval
(‘with such’: the correct form is ‘olyannal’), runned (correct: ‘ran’). However,
unlike monolingual Hungarian children, multilingual children abuse
the vowel harmony in, for example, ilyenval (‘with such like this’). In the
monolingual acquisition, Hungarian children use ‘ilyenvel’, obeying the
rules of the vowel harmony. This means vowel harmony, which in
Hungarian, unlike English or Persian, is something new that children have
to learn as a rule. The most intriguing example of how complex multilin-
gual development can be is hallgasjatok (‘listen to’ in 2nd person plural,
imperative). Here we can observe partly the correct morphophonetic
change in the root morpheme: hallgas- (without this change the indicative
form is ‘hallgat’), partly the base suffix of the Imperative j, and the perfectly
correct suffix –atok as an indicator of 2nd person plural. The only stage
that is missing in this very complex composition is the assimilation of
the last consonant of the root morpheme (s) and that of the suffix of the
imperative (j). Not much later, they used the word correctly: hallgassatok.
All this implies that both multilingual and monolingual children acquire
their languages consciously (i.e., there are a lot of learning elements in the
acquisition processes). They discover certain regularities in their languages,
build hypotheses, and try to check them by applying the acquired rules in
different contexts. The difference is that multilingual children increase
multicompetence as a result of their additional skill in differentiation between
the languages at their disposal, that is, by their multilingual awareness.
An example of multilingual awareness observed in the early days of the
acquisition of Hungarian as a third language (Navracsics 1999) is given in
Example (1.1):
(1.1) Mother: What did she [the Hungarian nursery school

teacher] say?
Child 1: She said tenti [SLEEP].
Mother: Tenti?
Child 1: Yeah, tenti. Sleep. I did tenti. I did tenti.

30 JUDIT NAVRACSICS
The child realizes that she cannot say the Hungarian verb in the past tense,
so she uses the English did with the Hungarian tenti, and this is how she
explains that she was sleeping. It is not language mixing; this is another
proof of developed multilingual awareness.
Example (1.2) shows the ability of the child to discriminate the languages
according to situations. The tea consumed in the Hungarian kindergarten is
not identical with the tea that is at home. For this distinction, the child uses
the corresponding languages.
(1.2) Mother: Did you have tea?

Child 1: No, it’s teja not tea.
Mother: Tea [with Hungarian pronunciation] is tea [with English
pronunciation]?
Child 1: No, not tea [in English]. Just teja [in Hungarian].
Mother: Just teja.
Child 1: Yes . . . I liked teja.
The appropriate language choice is evidence of the children’s multilingual

awareness.
Tare and Gelman (2011) analyzed English-Marathi bilingual families’
dyadic conversations, and they highlighted the importance of pragmatic
differentiation, metalinguistic strategies and sociolinguistic factors in the
language choice of the children. They observed that in the presence of a
third (monolingual) party, the children did not show pragmatic sensitivity,
which reflects the children’s knowledge of the limitations of the
monolingual speaker.
In a multilingual social environment, even if the children themselves
do not speak two or more languages, language development impacts
early communication abilities (Fan et al. 2015). Children growing up
being exposed to more than one language are provided with many
communication puzzles to solve. They need to map out who is speaking
what language, and who is able to understand the utterances in what
language(s). Liberman and her colleagues (2017) in their visual perspec-
tive-taking study found that children who are exposed to a multilingual
environment are also better at taking other people’s perspectives than
children raised in a monolingual environment. They claim that this
perspective-taking advantage emerges in the second year of life and is
social in nature. Quay (2008) finds that in multilingual families, by the
mutual involvement of parents and children in different common
family activities or contexts (e.g., dinners), language socialization
enhances the children’s pragmatic development. Navracsics (1999) in
a study with a 3;5-year-old Arabic-English-Hungarian trilingual child
presents how developed the multilingual awareness of the child is, as
not only can she distinguish the people with their languages, but she
can also evaluate the people’s proficiency levels in their languages
(Example (1.3)).

(1.3) Child: I know a lot of English. A lot, lot, lot . . . of English.

Int: And who do you speak English with?
Child: My father. Just my father.
Int: With your daddy?
Child: Not my mother.
Int: How do you speak with her? What language do you use
with her?
Child: Arabic.
Int: Do you speak Arabic, too?
Child: Uhum.
Int: Well, you are a very smart girl then.
Child: But my mother speaks English. English and Hungarian,
and my father also speaks a little Hungarian. My aunt
speaks little English. Just like you.
1.5 Closing Remarks
Not only the individual (cognitive, identity, literacy etc.) but also the social
benefits of multilingual exposure emerge in infancy. Even minimal multi-
lingual exposure may enhance communication skills. Multilingual environ-
ments provide children with a wide range of communication challenges
(Liberman et al. 2017). They must discover which is the appropriate lan-
guage to be used in a certain situation, what the language proficiency level
of the partner in communication is, and whether code-switching is sustain-
able in the conversation, which contributes to the development of the
children’s metalinguistic and multilingual awareness (see also Jessner
2006). These challenges constitute a complex process that impacts chil-
dren’s cognitive development, and language acquisition and maintenance.
Yet, the “road” to success of becoming multilingual in early childhood
depends on a wide range of factors, the interactions of those factors, and
the unique and particular individual child. Hence the path to childhood
multilingualism may not be “one size fits all,” with great individual differ-
ences among multilingually developing children harnessed in their cogni-
tive and linguistic assets.
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2
The Development
of Childhood
Multilingualism
in Languages of
Different Modalities
Laura Kanto
2.1 Introduction
Bimodal multilingual children form a highly heterogeneous group with

varying levels of hearing and access to different languages. This variation
affects their development of multilingualism in multiple and significant
ways (e.g., Pizzo 2016). These children can be: (1) deaf children who have
Deaf or hearing parents, (2) hearing children of Deaf parents (kodas, Kids of
Deaf Adults), and (3) hearing siblings of deaf children. Access to different
languages varies greatly between hearing and deaf children. The cochlear
implant (or other types of hearing aids) does not result in the same level of
hearing as that experienced by children with normal audiological status.
Thus, access to spoken languages differs, and it can be reduced among these
children, compared with their hearing peers. Additionally, in many cases,
hearing parents of deaf children rarely have knowledge of the sign language
or the Deaf community before the hearing loss of their child is diagnosed;
only after the diagnosis do the parents start to learn the sign language of the
community. For this reason, access to natural sign languages for deaf chil-
dren of hearing parents can vary, being less, at least during the early phase of
language development, compared with children with Deaf parents or deaf
older siblings. The majority (95 per cent) of deaf children are born to hearing
parents, and the majority (95 per cent) of children born to Deaf parents are
hearing (Mitchell & Karchmer 2004). Thus, only a small number of deaf
children have deaf parents. Furthermore, in some cases bimodal multilingual
children can be defined as heritage signers and/or speakers. Chen Pichler et al.

Development of Childhood Multilingualism 39
(2018) defined the children who acquire sign language from their fluent
signing parents and who do not receive formative education in the sign
language used at home as heritage signers. With this definition, kodas and deaf
children who acquire a sign language in an immigrant context, where at least
one of the Deaf parents is using a sign language that is different from the sign
language of the larger community, can be regarded as heritage signers.
Research until recently has mainly focused on either bimodal
bilingualism of deaf and hearing children when children are acquiring
one spoken language and one sign language during childhood (see, e.g.,
Hofmann & Chilla 2015; Kanto 2016; Lillo-Martin et al. 2014) or on the
multilingualism of children acquiring different spoken languages (see, e.g.,
Mieszkowska et al. 2017; Montanari 2013). To date, only a few recent
studies have focused on the multifaceted multilingualism of the signing
community and, more specifically, on the multilingualism of deaf and
hearing children (e.g., Vere 2014). Thus, the research on bimodal
multilingualism is still in its early stages, even though the number of these
children has been growing, for example, due to the migration and global-
ization of sign language communities during the twenty-first century
(Hiddinga & Crasborn 2011; Sivunen 2019). It is clear that this field urgently
needs further research. As recent studies have mainly focused on the
multilingualism of children acquiring different spoken languages, the ques-
tion remains: What are the features of being and becoming multilingual
across two modalities during childhood? This chapter seeks to address this
gap and create an opening for further research and discussion to advance
the field of research on childhood multilingualism.
2.2 Multifaceted Linguistic Landscape and Environment

of Children Acquiring Multilingualism across
Multilingualism among children acquiring sign language involves at the

same time multilingual language acquisition and the linguistic ability of
the individual child, but also a social phenomenon of the community
surrounding the child where the multilingual language development takes
place (see, e.g., Cenoz 2013). The status and vitality of different sign lan-
guages and Deaf communities in different countries and societies vary
greatly (De Meulder 2016; De Meulder et al. 2019; Sivunen 2019). Notably,
sign languages always have the minority status and spoken languages the
majority status in the community, which traditionally contributes to the
multilingualism of signers. In order to integrate into the education system,
working life and wider society, knowledge of the spoken/written language
of the majority community is necessary for signers. For this reason, multi-
lingualism and multiculturalism where a person uses different modalities
(such as signing, writing and speaking) in daily communication are often

40 LAURA KANTO
seen among signers, both adults and children. Thus, the initial setting and
context for language acquisition of deaf and hearing children acquiring
sign language(s) are at least bilingual but often also multilingual. However,
the access to different languages and the visibility of the languages the
children acquire across different modalities can vary greatly, depending on
the community and the contexts where the languages are used and the
language acquisition takes place.
In multilingual developmental paths, the environment plays a crucial role.
Many previous studies on multilingual children acquiring different spoken
languages have focused on the amount of language exposure experienced
by the studied children (Paradowski & Bator 2018). However, in contexts
where children are acquiring multilingualism across different modalities it
is also important to take a broader perspective vis-à-vis the environment,
namely, the kind of linguistic landscape in which these children are develop-
ing their multilingualism. The term ‘linguistic landscape’ traditionally refers
to the language used visibly and seen in public spaces, as well as the motiv-
ations and ideologies behind the display of different languages (see review in
Gorter 2018). Majority spoken languages commonly have more written dis-
plays in public spaces, compared with minority sign languages, and in this
way the linguistic landscape reflects the power of languages in different
contexts. Spoken and written languages contribute to the majority part of
the linguistic landscape of children acquiring both spoken and signed
languages, as sign languages do not have a written form and can rarely be
seen on signs and in public spaces. Macalister (2010) noted in his research on
New Zealand that there was no awareness of the Deaf community or of
New Zealand Sign Language in the linguistic landscape he studied. In add-
ition, sign language and Deaf communities still suffer from varied aspects
of suppression and stigmatization (De Meulder et al. 2019). Research on the
linguistic landscape has grown rapidly during the past years, which has
deepened the theoretical framework and broadened our understanding of
the concept of the linguistic landscape and its role also in educational settings
(see, e.g., Cenoz & Gorter 2008). However, the majority of these studies have
focused on spoken and written languages, perhaps because sign languages
and the Deaf community are lacking in the linguistic landscape in general.
The linguistic landscape in educational settings of bimodal multilingual
children varies greatly. Hearing bimodal multilingual children mainly
attend mainstream schools and often do not receive teaching in sign lan-
guage and nor do they have sign language lessons in the curriculum. Thus,
they often acquire the sign language in the home language context. Deaf
bimodal multilingual children also often attend mainstream schools, due to
inclusion, where usage practices and the visibility of sign languages vary
from co-teaching with two teachers (one using the sign language and one
using the spoken one) to classrooms where sign language is not used at all
(Swanwick 2017). The challenge that lies in mainstream schools is often (i)
the smaller amount of sign language in the environment compared with
the amount of spoken language and (ii) the lack of age peers, (iii) of other

children using a sign language, and (iv) of the Deaf community. Notably,
the World Federation of the Deaf estimated that 80 per cent of children
with hearing loss have no access to education and of those children just 1–2
per cent receive education in a sign language.
The research on the linguistic landscape of multilingual children is still in
its early steps. As previous studies have noted that languages in the linguistic
landscape also function as a recourse of input for learning languages and
gaining language awareness (Barni et al. 2014), it might be reasonable to
question how the lack of visibility of the Deaf community and the sign
language(s) that the child is acquiring from his or her linguistic landscape
influence the children’s own attitudes towards spoken and signed languages.
The rapid development of technology has changed the Deaf community and
also the access to sign languages for children. However, this raises the ques-
tion of how much and from what variety of sources the children see spoken
and signed languages around them, if the features of the linguistic landscape
have an impact on the quantity and quality of the linguistic exposure of the
languages the child is acquiring, and how sign language(s) are valued in the
environment where the child is developing his or her multilingual identity
and language abilities at the same time. Thus, this field of research would
make an important contribution to the study of both childhood bimodal
multilingualism and linguistic landscape in minority language context.
2.3 Multilingual Language Exposure and the Input

of Children Acquiring Multilingualism across
Similar aspects (e.g., globalization, mobility, new technologies and media)

that have contributed to the current degree of multilingualism among
spoken communities have furthered the multilingualism of signing com-
munities. Sign language communities around the world have become more
global during the twenty-first century (Hiddinga & Crasborn 2011). The
amount of national and transnational migration has increased in recent
years as people move to different countries, integrate into new cultural and
linguistic landscapes, and form intermarriages and multilingual families.
At the same time, parents in multilingual families are concerned about
what languages should be used when communicating with their children,
what languages of their multilingual children should be maintained and
supported to develop further, and what factors and practices support or
constrain the multilingual development of their children.
According to the previous studies on children acquiring sign languages,
these children are often acquiring different sign languages in the home
context and spoken languages both at home and outside the home, as can
be seen in the cases presented in Table 2.1 (see also Kanto et al. 2013). To
describe the multifaceted linguistic environment of children acquiring
multilingualism across different modalities, four case examples (two

Table 2.1 Examples of multilingual children acquiring sign language(s) and spoken language(s) from their linguistic environment in Finland
Languages used at home Languages used outside the home

Different language users that
With close relatives At the school/day Relative amount of exposure the child meets regularly*
Child With parents With siblings and family friends care centre estimated by the parents outside the home
Hearing (5;10) SignL X SignL X SpokenL X SpokenL Y SpokenL Y 50% SpokenL Y

SignL Y SignL Y SignL Y 25% SpokenL X
SpokenL Y SpokenL Y SignL X 20% SignL X
SpokenL X 5% SignL Z
SignL W
Deaf (6;1) SignL X SignL X SignL X SpokenL X SignL X 50% SignL X
SignL W SpokenL X SpokenL X SpokenL X 45% SpokenL X
SignL W SignL W 5%
Hearing (7;4) SignL X SpokenL Y SpokenL X SpokenL Y SpokenL Y 50% SpokenL Y
SignL Y SignL X SignL X 30% SpokenL X
SpokenL Y SignL Y SpokenL Y 15% SignL X
SpokenL X 5% SignL Z
SignL Y
Deaf (7;11) SignL X SignL X SignL X SignL X SignL X 50% SignL X
SignL W SpokenL X SpokenL X SpokenL X SpokenL X 50% SpokenL X
SignL W SignL W
To protect the anonymity of the children studied, the languages the children are acquiring are referred to as language ‘W, X, Y, Z,’ and SignL = Sign Language, SpokenL =
spoken language.
* At least twice in two weeks
hearing and two deaf children of Deaf parents) were chosen from a larger
(N = 87) data set on language development and assessment of children
acquiring Finnish Sign Language in Finland (Hanhikoski 2020). From
the data on 87 children, parents reported that 34 children (39 per cent)
were exposed to at least three different languages and used these languages
on a regular basis (at least once in two weeks). In all the case examples
presented in Table 2.1, children were exposed to at least two sign languages
and two spoken languages. Concordantly, Pizzo (2016) found that approxi-
mately 35 per cent of school-age deaf children in the USA are multilingual.
These findings clearly show that multilingualism plays a considerable
role for children acquiring a sign language and it should be studied
more thoroughly.
The data presented in Table 2.1 was collected using a parental question-
naire that aimed to investigate the linguistic environment of the studied
children. The questionnaire was based on the parental questionnaire
methods of PaBiQ (Questionnaire of Parents of Bilingual Children, in
Tuller 2015), BiLEC (Bilingual Language Experience Calculator, in
Unsworth 2013) and MAIN (Multilingual Assessment Instrument of
Narrative, in Gagarina et al. 2012), which have been used in previous
research on bilingual and multilingual children. In Finland, in addition to
the two national languages (Finnish and Swedish), Saami, Romani, Finnish
Sign Language (FinSL) and Finland-Swedish Sign Language (FinSSL) are offi-
cially recognized as minority languages.
The amount of exposure in the languages the child receives has been
found to be an important predictor of multilingual development, but the
relationship between the amount of exposure and the rate of acquisition is
not straightforward (De Houwer 2007; Hoff et al. 2012; Thordardottir 2011).
Monolingual children receive their language input only from one language,
whereas the language input for multilingual children is divided between
the languages the child is acquiring. Even though the language input for
multilingual children is divided between the languages, this does not neces-
sarily lead to slower acquisition. In the previous studies on bilingual chil-
dren, researchers have found that the child needs to receive at least 20 per
cent of their input in a language in order to be able to speak it (Hoff et al.
2012; Pearson et al. 1997). However, among multilingual children in the
context where the languages have considerably different status, the lan-
guage exposure needed for multilingual development in a particular lan-
guage might be different compared with that of bilingual children. The case
examples presented in Table 2.1 show considerable differences in their
relative exposure and how much exposure the children received in the
different languages on a daily basis. In some cases presented here, the
relative exposure from a particular language is highly limited, which might
predict slower development and lower abilities to produce the languages
according to previous studies. Additionally, in a heritage language context,
De Houwer (2017) noticed that at least one of the parents needs to speak a

44 LAURA KANTO
heritage language in order to maintain the child’s competence in it, and she
argued that families whose parents mixed both heritage and community
languages at home were often unable to maintain the heritage language
among their children. However, as mentioned above, signers are often
bilingual or multilingual, and a mixed use of the heritage sign language
and the majority spoken language has been reported in many different
studies (e.g., Kanto et al. 2017; Lillo-Martin et al. 2014; Pizer 2018).
According to the questionnaire, Deaf parents reported sign languages to
be the main language they used when communicating with their child.
However, with hearing children, the spoken language was used regularly by
both the deaf and hearing parents and the children.
Paradowski and Bator (2018) found in their study that parental language
use and usage practices were among the most important factors affecting
the language the child would eventually use. Parents thus provide both
their language use and input but also their attitudes and ideals towards the
languages the child is acquiring and towards the multilingualism of their
child (Gharibi & Boers 2017). This might influence how the child eventually
values multilingualism and the different languages being acquired and
what motivates the child towards multilingualism.
Research on family language policy among signing multilingual families is
still rather limited (see, e.g., Kanto 2016; Pizer 2018). However, further
research in this field could provide important knowledge on the forms of
multilingual language practices, ideology and management; how the fea-
tures of family language policy are influenced and motivated by the Deaf
parents’ own past experiences with languages; how family members use the
family language policy as their linguistic resources; and how deliberate and
explicit or subconscious and imprecise the parents’ investments are when
providing the multilingual language context for their children (Curdt-
Christiansen & Lanza 2018). Lanza and Curdt-Christiansen (2018: 231) point
out that, ‘As language plays a key role in multilingual families, family
members’ social aspirations mediated through language may be confronted
with challenges within the family and in society.’ The examples presented in
Table 2.1 show that both different sign languages and spoken languages are
used in the home context, which suggests multidimensional practices of
family language policy in these families. However, further study is needed.
In addition to the amount of input and the family language policy, the
opportunities to use the heritage language with other language users out-
side the home, as well as engagement and attainment with the minority
community, have been found to be beneficial for heritage language
development and thus also for the development of multilingualism and
multiculturalism (Paradowski & Bator 2018). Additionally, access to many
different speakers of the heritage language has not been found to negatively
affect the majority language development. Thus, it would be important to
discover how access to other signers and attainment within the Deaf com-
munity affect the multilingual development process of children.

A recently published paper on deaf asylum seekers brings forth an

important group of signing families. Describing the experiences of deaf
adult asylum seekers during the asylum process in Finland, Sivunen
(2019) found that the sign language proficiency of deaf asylum seekers
varied from gesturing and home sign to fluent Arab Sign. Some of the deaf
asylum participants received formal FinSL teaching and started to use FinSL
with family members. FinSL teaching was only provided to deaf adults, even
though hearing children (and other hearing family members) were often
functioning as language brokers communicating on behalf of their deaf
parents. However, after FinSL began to be used in daily interaction between
family members, hearing children of deaf asylums also started to learn and
use FinSL daily. This group of bimodal multilingual children is unique, and
it is often invisible and understudied.
The factors affecting the developmental path of bimodal multilingual
development may vary over time, and can shift throughout the course of
the child’s development due to dynamic environmental features causing
changes in language dominance. In terms of the minority home language,
the home language tends to be dominant during the child’s early years but
after starting school the exposure from the majority language increases,
resulting in the shift of language dominance towards the majority lan-
guage. This is especially the case among hearing children of Deaf parents,
who are also regarded as heritage signers (Chen Pichler et al. 2018).
2.4 Becoming Bimodal Multilingual
Defining the multilingualism of children is problematic. In past research,

many different main characteristics of multilingualism have been high-
lighted, including communicative competence and the level of proficiency
and usage of multiple languages (Cenoz 2013). However, because the lan-
guages of the child are still developing, the definition cannot be based only
on proficiency level, competence and usage. Among multilingual children,
linguistic exposure and the quality and quantity of language input play
important roles (De Houwer 2007; Hoff et al. 2012; Thordardottir 2011).
Notably, it should not be assumed that all the languages the child is
exposed to and acquires in his or her environment would follow identical
developmental patterns. There are many factors affecting the developmen-
tal patterns of different languages and the multilingualism of individual
children, and proficiency level, competence and usage may change in dif-
ferent periods, phases or even contexts. Additionally, many bimodal bilin-
gual children are often heritage signers, which has been found to have an
influence on the developmental patterns of languages in multiple and
unique ways (Chen Pichler et al. 2018).
In several previous studies (Cenoz 2013; Hoffmann 2001), many different
paths to becoming multilingual during childhood have been reported.

46 LAURA KANTO
The child might be exposed to different languages from birth and start to
acquire and use languages simultaneously; alternatively, he or she might be
exposed to different languages successively and accomplish multilingualism
later on during childhood. In the latter case, the acquisition of the new
language is added (additive multilingualism) to the linguistic resources of the
child while the first language continues to develop as well. Additionally,
subtractive multilingualism is often found in the immigration context, as the
different language of the new home county is acquired, eventually
replacing the first language, especially in circumstances where there is no
support to maintain the development of the first language (Cenoz 2013).
Recent findings support the idea that actual usage practices and experi-
ences in languages may play a more important role than the age of onset for
the different languages the child is acquiring on the multilingual
developmental path (Paradowski & Bator 2018). However, the most import-
ant factor for multilingual development among bimodal multilinguals is to
secure exposure and access to the languages being acquired, as discussed
earlier in this chapter. Additionally, in the context of bimodal
multilingualism, the different developmental paths of various types of
multilingualism need to be explored and described more profoundly.
Monolingual children receive all of their language exposure only from
one language, while among multilingual children the language input is
divided between the different languages the child is acquiring. Thus, the
quantity of language exposure for each of the languages is less compared
with that of the monolingual peers. In many previous studies, reduced
input from each language among bilingual and multilingual children has
been found to have an influence, for example, on the development of both
the receptive and expressive vocabulary of the languages the child is acquir-
ing. Mieszkowska et al. (2017) found that in the immigration context,
trilingual children acquired vocabulary knowledge of the majority lan-
guage equally well as their monolingual peers. However, the vocabulary
knowledge of the minority language (home language) was significantly
lower compared with that of the monolingual peers. Thus, the exposure
to the majority language seemed to be sufficient to ensure a favourable
development. However, the exposure to the minority language in the home
context seemed to be clearly lower and not enough to ensure its develop-
ment equally well as the majority language (see also Grosjean 2010). As
noted earlier in this chapter, sign language always has the minority status,
and it is mostly used in a home language context. Similar kinds of develop-
mental trends in vocabulary development were noticed by Kanto (2016)
among bimodal bilingual children, but studies on bimodal multilingual
children are still lacking and this subject demands further research. If the
home language is the clear minority and social prestige language of the
surrounding community, as different sign languages often are, it may
require more attention and support for favourable development
(Gathercole & Thomas 2009). In some cases, parents may have different

sign languages as their mother tongues than the sign language used in the
community (e.g., in the immigrant context). In these situations, a single
parent may be the only one providing exposure for the child from his or her
mother tongue as was shown by the data. For this reason, the quantity of
exposure to this language is inevitably lower than to the other languages
that the child is acquiring. As the quantity of exposure is lower, the quality
of the exposure needs to be highlighted.
Qualitative input factors have been studied in previous research by
exploring, for example, the number and percentage of native language
users, receiving input from multiple sources, different conversational part-
ners providing input in a given language for the child, and the degree of
language mixing by parents (Byers-Heinlein 2013; Hammer et al. 2009;
Place & Hoff 2011). Hammer et al. (2009) found that non-native input is
less likely to support language acquisition than native input. However, in
the context of signers the definition of a native language user is problematic
(Costello et al. 2006). Additionally, the hearing parents of a deaf child often
start to learn sign language only after their child being diagnosed with
hearing loss. For this reason, it is highly challenging for hearing parents to
reach native-like or near-native language competence in sign language. In
the context of sign language users, varying levels of code-blending of Deaf
parents and bimodal bilingual children were reported by Kanto (2017).
However, the findings of previous studies suggested that a high amount
of language mixing by parents predicted a smaller vocabulary of bilingual
children acquiring two spoken languages (Byers-Heinlein 2013). Thus, in
the home language context it has been recommended that at least one
parent should use only the home language, with no code-mixing (De
Houwer 2007). The child should be provided with rich and varied child-
directed input in different interaction contexts with different people, as
well as opportunities to use the language with others. Thus, it would be
important to research the roles and influence of the quality features of
input (e.g., diversity of vocabulary, grammatical structures and language
context) among bimodal multilingual children, in order to study the factors
that contribute to the development of multilingualism among these
children.
When building their lexicon, multilingual children need to acquire at
least some translation equivalents; this refers to words in two or more lan-
guages that share the similar meaning (Montanari 2010). Previous studies
have shown considerable variation in the amount of translation equivalents
in the developing lexicon of bi- and multilingual children. In her study,
Kanto (2016) found that approximately 43 per cent of kodas’ productive
vocabularies between the ages of 12 and 30 months consisted of translation
equivalents. The share of translation equivalents seemed to increase by age.
Among bimodal multilingual children, however, this area is still understud-
ied. It would provide important knowledge on how children build their
vocabulary across different languages in different modalities. De Weerdt

48 LAURA KANTO
and De Weerdt (2017) described the language use of multilingual kodas

acquiring simultaneously VGT (Flemish Sign Language), FinSL and spoken
Finnish. In their article, they described, for example, how a child at the age
of 18 months first used the FinSL sign for ‘frog’ and then produced a
translation equivalent in VGT.
From a heterogeneous group of bimodal multilingual users described at
the beginning of this chapter, some children acquire their multilingualism
in a heritage language context. The acquisition of languages in a heritage
language context creates a special form of language acquisition conditions,
which is highlighted by the minority status of the home language to which
the child is exposed to a limited degree outside the home. Often during the
early years of language acquisition, the development of the home (minority)
language is progressing but, especially after attending a mainstream school
where the formal education is in the majority language, language domin-
ance often changes towards the majority language. Heritage language users
are commonly shown to be weaker in their home (minority) language (e.g.,
competence of grammar and vocabulary) compared with their competence
in the majority language (Gharibi & Boers 2017). Due to the limited amount
of exposure to the home language, language skills can be affected by
language attrition or development may show divergent patterns compared
to that of non-heritage language users. In order to prevent language attri-
tion, the importance of frequency of language use cannot be
highlighted enough.
Regarding the multilingualism of a bimodal child, the primary challenge
is to maintain proficiency in the minority language, particularly in sign
languages. Previous studies on bimodal bilinguals have shown developmen-
tal trends parallel to heritage speakers but divergent from the development
of Deaf children of Deaf parents, who acquire the languages in a non-
heritage context; for instance, productive skills are clearly lower than
receptive skills in the heritage sign language, being marked by the
increased number and type of phonological, lexical and grammatical errors
(Chen Pichler et al. 2017; Chen et al. 2018; Palmer 2015; Reynolds 2018).
Research into heritage signers is still in its early stages, having mainly been
based on bimodal bilingual language users, and many questions are
still unanswered.
2.5 Dynamic Linguistic Proficiency and Languages in Use
Bimodal multilingual children acquire a broad repertoire of linguistic and

communicative resources because of the differences of the modality and
communication patterns of the languages the child is acquiring. Thus, a
bimodal multilingual child navigates between different languages and dif-
ferent ways of communicating, following the different patterns of spoken
and signed communication (e.g., different usage of gaze and non-manuality

to share meanings). Such communicative sensitivity and language differen-

tiation are part of the metalinguistic awareness, language proficiency and
competence in language use that the child is acquiring and developing.
In their article, De Weerdt and De Weerdt (2017) describe the finely
developed communicative sensitivity and multilingual language differenti-
ation across different modalities of their hearing bimodal multilingual
child at the age of 4. The authors detail the patterns of both code-blending
(simultaneous production of lexical items from different modalities within
the same utterance) and code-switching produced by the child. In code-
blended utterances, the child often produced simultaneously spoken words
from his acquired spoken languages (Finnish and English) and signed signs
from his acquired sign languages (FinSL and VGT) within one utterance. In
code-switched utterances, the child produced lexical items from the lan-
guages that shared the same modality within the same utterance, which
happened especially between the sign languages (FinSL and VGT) the child
acquired. Thus, both code-blending and code-switching are combined
among bimodal multilingual children in a unique way that is still rather
understudied but would make an important contribution to the field.
Past research on code-blending focused mainly on bimodal bilinguals
acquiring one spoken and one signed language (see the review of Tang
and Sze 2018). Considerable research has pointed out that the amount of
code-blending among bimodal bilingual children and adults is higher com-
pared with code-switching produced by bilingual peers acquiring two
spoken languages (Emmorey et al. 2008; Petitto et al. 2001). It has been
suggested that the differences found between the amount of code-blended
and code-switched utterances between bimodal and unimodal bilinguals
relate to the lower cognitive cost in language inhibition during the lan-
guage production process. As bimodal bilinguals can access two linguistic
systems simultaneously like other bilinguals, but sign language and spoken
language are produced in two different modalities and spoken words and
signed signs can be produced simultaneously, bimodal bilinguals do not
need to inhibit the languages to the same extent that unimodal bilinguals
need to (Emmorey et al. 2012; Emmorey et al. 2016). Many previous studies
focused on the structural patterns of code-blended utterances and the
contextual features that motivate and shape them (Kanto et al. 2017; Lillo-
Martin et al. 2014; Tang & Sze 2018). Children have been found to combine
linguistic elements from one language to another in highly systematic and
synchronic ways following the semantic and syntactic patterns of each
language, as presented in Table 2.2. The language developmental patterns
and contextual patterns have been found to have an effect on the amount of
code-blending, as children have been determined to produce more code-
blended utterances when communicating with their Deaf parents than
with a hearing adult (Kanto et al. 2017).
Even though a significant amount of research on code-switching (the
production of, e.g., lexical items within the same modality within the same

50 LAURA KANTO
Table 2.2 Code-blended utterance produced by Lauri at the age of 24 months
Utterance Spoken Haukku-huu pupu-ø hauhhu-u pupu-ø

Signed KOIRA PUPU HAUKKUA KOIRA PUPU JUOSTA point
Gloss Spoken bark-3sg bunny-nom.sg bark-3sg bunny-nom.sg

Signed DOG BUNNY BARK DOG BUNNY RUN point
Translation ‘The dog is barking at the bunny (and) the dog is chasing the running bunny.’
(Kanto 2016: 58)
Table 2.3 Code-switched utterance produced by Leon at the age

of 18 months
Utterance Signed Point_to_book FROG_in_FinSL FROG_in_VGT

Translation ‘It is a frog.’
(De Weerdt & De Weerdt 2017)
utterances among bilingual persons using two spoken languages) has been
published so far, among sign bilingual users with the knowledge in two
different sign languages it is still an emerging field of research. There are
only a few studies conducted on the code-switching of sign languages among
adults (e.g., Quinto-Pozos 2009; Zeshan & Panda 2015) and even fewer among
children (De Weerdt & De Weerdt 2017). The findings and descriptions of
these studies suggest that code-switching between different sign languages is
not random; it follows certain patterns, being partly concordant but also
different from the findings of previous studies on code-switched patterns
among spoken bilinguals and code-blended patterns among bimodal bilin-
guals (see Table 2.3). Zeshan and Panda (2015) pointed out that the previous
studies and theoretical viewpoints on code-switching among spoken lan-
guage bilinguals (e.g., the Matrix Language/Embedded Language distinction)
seemed not to offer a universally valid approach for research on signed
discourse. Researchers found that participants code-switched linguistic
elements that were closely related with both sign languages that compli-
cated to determine the base language. Due to the high number of ambiguous
and shared forms, lexical overlap, indexical points, highly iconic classifier
constructions, and directional signs that can be found in most of the differ-
ent sign languages, the researchers were not able to determine which sign
language (Burundi Sign Language or Indian Sign Language) the person was
producing in each moment. Results also showed a rather high frequency of
code-switches produced by the participants.
The previous research on the code-blending of bimodal bilinguals and
code-switching of unimodal sign bilinguals opens the door for further
research among bimodal multilinguals (e.g., on the inhibitory control of
children acquiring multilingualism across different modalities). These find-
ings raise highly interesting questions on the structural patterns,

contextual features, cognitive processing and on the modality effect of both

code-blending and code-switching patterns among bimodal multilinguals;
how they might diverge from other bilinguals and multilinguals is a topic
for further research. Such research could focus on questions about how
different languages are selected, how different linguistic elements are code-
blended and code-switched, and how this is influenced by the different
language developmental patters of children.
In addition to code-blending and code-switching, varied cross-linguistic
influences can also be found from the language production of children
acquiring two or more languages. Cross-linguistic influence is not yet a
very researched phenomenon among multilingual children acquiring dif-
ferent spoken languages at the early phase of language development
(Paradis 2007), and it is even less studied among children acquiring bimodal
multilingualism. Cross-linguistic research between signed and spoken lan-
guages has been found to vary from sign language structured spoken
language (also referred to as Coda-talk), discovering features related to
heritage language users (Lillo-Martin et al. 2012) signing in spoken word
order (also referred to as Manually Coded English) and strategies of
translanguaging, a concept which is sometimes also used in the educational
context of deaf children (Bishop 2010; Tang & Sze 2018). Regarding children
acquiring a sign language, the different studies have mainly focused on the
cross-linguistic influence between the spoken and signed languages among
bimodal bilingual children. Lillo-Martin et al. (2012) found cross-linguistic
influence in both directions among bimodal bilingual children as a result of
their simultaneous acquisition of both sign and spoken language. The
researchers found that in spoken utterances, bimodal bilingual children
produced significantly more non-sentence-initial wh-questions that are
grammatical in the sign language the children acquired, and in their sign
language utterances children produced significantly more sentence-initial
wh-questions than their monolingual peers. As the relative degree of expos-
ure and language dominance have been found to motivate the cross-
linguistic influences among bilingual children, these questions would be
highly interesting to follow up among multilingual children between their
different signed languages as well. This would also deepen our understand-
ing of the relationship of input factors and language production among
multilingual children.
Recent research on code-blending, code-switching, cross-linguistic influ-
ences and translanguaging among sign language users has opened new
highly interesting theoretical viewpoints on the multifaceted ways in which
semiotic and linguistic resources and multimodality are used in different
communicative contexts. These studies also question the idea of language
as discrete bounded entities, and they challenge us to consider bimodal
multilingual children’s languages as a hybridity of features and resources
in their multilingual communication. Children immersing in these differ-
ent multimodal multilingual contexts and acquiring multifaceted linguistic

52 LAURA KANTO
proficiency across different modalities provide fascinating perspectives and

openings for further research. Thus, these findings suggest that the child
starts to acquire dynamic and adaptive linguistic resources from an early
phase onwards and uses his or her linguistic resources in multiple ways in
different interaction contexts with varying conversational topics. Children
use the acquired languages as resources, and they employ elements from
the different languages in different modalities at their disposal.
2.6 Conclusion
Multilingual language acquisition across different modalities challenges

the traditional definition of multilingualism and the process of language
acquisition. As demonstrated by this chapter, bimodal multilingual acqui-
sition is a highly complex and dynamic process that is influenced by multi-
layered features in the linguistic landscape, as well as language exposure,
and represents an entity which is manifested by the acquired languages, the
attitudes and sociocultural factors in the environment, and the policy and
features of their language use in different contexts. The linguistic landscape
and multilingual exposure of bimodal multilingual children comprise a
summary of multifaceted features of the hearing status, family language
policy, accessibility and visibility of different languages, educational set-
tings and engagement in multilingualism and multiculturalism. Also, the
challenges that families with bimodal multilingual children encounter in
the surrounding majority community need to be noted.
As highlighted in this chapter, further studies are needed and they will
deepen our understanding of the relationship between the different fea-
tures of language exposure and the developmental patterns of the acquired
languages, especially among bimodal multilingual children. Further
research in this field will make important contributions and should be
broadened also to include multilingual heritage signers. For future
research, an increased knowledge on the relationship between reduced
language exposure and the acquisition of different grammatical aspects is
clearly needed, and it would provide us with important information about
the requirements for ensuring heritage language development and
bimodal multilingualism.
However, the research of bimodal multilingual children should bear in
mind a holistic view on their multilingualism, remembering that language
resources and competence are variable and shift in multiple and dynamic
ways according to the course of the child’s development and changing
environmental features (Herdina & Jessner 2002). Among bimodal multilin-
gual children, the languages should be seen as dynamic and adaptive
linguistic resources supporting the attainment of hybrid linguistic
resources and multiculturalism. A special attention should also be paid to
ensuring the development of bimodal multilingualism and the

maintenance of language abilities acquired as heritage language users. It is

necessary to focus on the linguistic and cognitive abilities that bimodal
multilingual children display, applying caution when comparing them with
their monolingual peers. Additionally, in that the communicative context
of a bimodal multilingual child is highly multimodal – including visual,
sound, textual and different semiotic symbols and resources, where the
boundaries between languages and different semiotic devices are blurred –
this ought to be studied further. Using languages across different modal-
ities in different interaction contexts requires sensitivity and acknowledge-
ment of communicative situations, metalinguistic awareness, language
competence and the differentiation of children.
The great challenge for research on bimodal multilingual language acqui-
sition is in the high heterogeneity and the small number of available chil-
dren for the study. However, the special nature of this type of multilingual
language acquisition can reveal new insights into the faculty of human
language and deepen our understanding of multilingual language processes.
The challenges surrounding a small and heterogeneous group of children
highlight the need for detailed descriptions and well-planned research
methods as well as international research collaboration, especially among
small communities. In this way, these challenges can be overcome and
altered, with the power of research bringing forth the findings of this unique
type of multilingualism for more general multilingual research, establishing
more fluid and dynamic features of multilingual language acquisition, and
expanding our understanding of the faculty of human language.
This chapter described the multifaceted linguistic landscape and environ-
ment of bimodal multilingual children, the access to different languages of
bimodal multilingual children, and the diversity in the use of different
languages in a variety of social contexts. Additionally, the chapter focused
on the process of bimodal multilingual language acquisition and attain-
ments of hybrid linguistic resources and multiculturalism during child-
hood as well as the challenges to maintain the acquired language abilities
as heritage language users. The aim of this chapter was to build a holistic
view of bimodal multilingualism by bringing forth a different dimension of
this special type of multilingualism: bimodal multilingual children as lan-
guage users and their linguistic resources across different modalities and
the social context where development takes place. All of these topics
address gaps in the current research and call for further study.
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3
Multilingualism in Early
Childhood: The Role
of the Input
Margaret Deuchar
3.1 Introduction
This chapter will focus on the role of the input in the development of
multilingualism in early childhood. Despite more than a century of work
on bilingual and multilingual development, we still know relatively little
about the specific role of the input in a multilingual child’s development.
I shall argue that this is partly due to the influence of the Chomskyan
paradigm in the twentieth century and its assumption of ‘the poverty of the
stimulus’. Although work on multilingual acquisition has probably contrib-
uted to the development of the more recent ‘usage-based’ approach to
acquisition, I shall suggest that purist assumptions about language separ-
ation have hampered the development of our knowledge on the specific role
of the input in multilingual acquisition. Note that my use of the term
‘multilingual acquisition’ is used to mean the acquisition of one or more
languages, and thus includes both bilingual and trilingual acquisition.
3.2 Theoretical Approaches to Language Acquisition
The assumption of ‘the poverty of the stimulus’ (cf. Chomsky 1980: 34) is
the assumption that there is not enough information in the language input
to children for them to adequately acquire the language they are exposed
to, unless they come to the task already equipped with some language-
specific mental predisposition that assists the language learning task.
However, Pullum and Scholz (2002), while commenting how widely this
assumption is accepted by linguists, point out that it has less empirical
support than has been claimed. They argue that more attention should be
paid to the data of corpora which can give us a detailed idea of the language
input to which children are exposed.

Multilingualism in Early Childhood 59
While the Chomskyan assumption held sway during the latter part of the
twentieth century, that period also saw the beginnings of an alternative
approach to language acquisition which did indeed focus on the role of the
language input to the child. This is sometimes described as the ‘usage-
based’ approach, a term which was used by Langacker (1987: 46) in his
book on Cognitive Grammar. An actual instance of language usage is
referred to as a ‘usage event’, and a direct relation is assumed between
structure and usage (Langacker 2008: 221). Those who espouse usage-based
approaches to language acquisition argue that language acquisition
involves the use of general learning mechanisms of the kind that occur in
other areas of cognition (cf. Behrens 2009). Scholars who argue in this vein
reject the modular approach of Chomskyan linguistics, which assumes
there is a language-specific capacity for language learning. Rather than
assuming this capacity, usage-based theorists generally subscribe to what
Behrens (2009: 397) describes as the [common] idea that ‘learning language
consists of pattern recognition and generalization over these patterns such
that language structure can be induced from distributional patterns’. The
distributional patterns in the adult input thus have a direct effect on the
child’s language acquisition, as has been demonstrated by various studies.
For example, Behrens (2006: 2) found from analysing corpora of adult
interactions with a child acquiring German that there was a ‘steady
approximation towards the adult distribution’ of parts of speech in the
input to the child.
At the time of Langacker’s (1987) publication of his book on Cognitive
Grammar, his advocacy of usage-based approaches to language acquisition
represented a minority view in comparison with the strong influence of the
Chomskyan paradigm with its emphasis on the poverty of the stimulus.
However, at around this time there began to be increasing interest in the
question of how children acquire more than one language from birth, for
example if their parents speak different languages from those of the com-
munity in which they live. This attention to multilingual acquisition inevit-
ably led to more focus on the input than a Chomskyan approach would
allow, and thus arguably helped to develop usage-based approaches to
language acquisition.
3.3 Early Case Studies of Multilingual Acquisition
The early case studies of multilingual acquisition mainly focused on the

acquisition of just two languages, and mainly on cases where two languages
were acquired. Some were inspired by the classic studies by Ronjat (1913) on
French and German acquisition, or Leopold (1939–49) on German and
English acquisition. There was a burgeoning of case studies in the 1980s
and 1990s, for example Kielhöfer and Jonekeit (1983), Fantini (1985), De
Houwer (1990), Döpke (1992), Deuchar and Clark (1996), Hoffmann (1985)

60 MARGARET DEUCHAR
Lanza (1997), Köppe (1997), Mikes (1990) and Stavans (1992). At this stage,
very few studies dealt with trilingual acquisition, though Hoffmann (1985),
Mikes (1990) and Stavans (1992) are notable exceptions.
Relevant aspects of the input which were studied in the early days of
bilingual acquisition studies were the source of the two languages (i.e., who
speaks the languages to the child), when bilingual input began (whether at
birth or later) and what was the relative frequency of each language in the
input. The focus in relation to the source of the two languages was over-
whelmingly on the parents in these early studies, with relatively little
attention being paid to other interlocutors such as speakers from the local
community. A great deal of importance in the early studies was ascribed to
the parents’ ‘strategy’ in addressing the child, for example whether each
parent speaks their own language to the child or whether there is a
common family language as distinct from that of the community. This
focus on ‘strategy’ is probably influenced by Ronjat’s (1913) advice that
parents should follow the ‘one person one language’ (Romaine 1995: 183)
approach in order to ensure that the languages are presented to the child
separately. Deuchar and Quay (2000) point out the prescriptive nature of
this approach and the fact that it involves assuming that language separ-
ation is necessary and that it can be achieved in only one way. Ronjat’s
advice further assumes that the parents may have a goal of achieving some
kind of dual monolingual competence in the child rather than simply
letting the child adopt the parents’ linguistic norms and those of the local
community without any specific intervention. The fact that ‘dual mono-
lingualism’ seems to be the goal of the parents in most studies published in
the twentieth century also explains the preoccupation of many of these
studies with the importance of avoiding ‘language mixing’, doubtless
because mixing is often assumed to violate prescriptive norms and reflect
badly on the competence of the speaker. The influence of these prescriptive
norms on twentieth-century researchers is shown by the fact that they have
often hastened to argue that the production of any mixed utterances by
developing bilinguals is only a temporary stage and that children will
eventually separate the languages concerned.
3.4 Age of Acquisition (AofA)
Even before investigators took a detailed interest in the effect of the input
on multilingual development, the importance of the timing of language
exposure was recognised, and is reflected in the distinction mentioned by
McLaughlin (1978: 9) between ‘simultaneous’ and ‘successive’ bilingual
acquisition. This distinction has been widely adopted by subsequent investi-
gators, although there is some disagreement as to where the line should be
drawn between simultaneous and successive exposure. McLaughlin con-
sidered exposure to more than one language before the age of three years

to count as simultaneous, whereas Padilla and Lindholm (1984: 376) con-

sidered that exposure to more than one language needs to start at birth for
it to be considered simultaneous acquisition. Swain (1972) used the term
‘Bilingual first language acquisition’ as the title of her PhD dissertation, and
this term (sometimes abbreviated as ‘BFLA’, cf. De Houwer 2009) is now
widely used to refer to simultaneous bilingual acquisition. De Houwer
(2009: 2) defines ‘BFLA’ as ‘the development of language in young children
who hear two languages spoken to them from birth’. Although reference is
made to two languages in her definition, she recognises that some children
may be exposed to three instead of two languages from birth, but considers
the research on trilingual acquisition to be in its very early stages.
Although a distinction between simultaneous and successive bilingual
acquisition had been drawn by investigators as early as the 1970s, the focus
in the early case studies was on the simultaneous acquisition of more than
one language. Romaine (1995) argues that successive acquisition really
belongs to the realm of second language acquisition, and that most of the
studies of second language acquisition have been of adults rather than of
children. However, the twenty-first century has seen more of a focus on
child second language acquisition, including some fine-grained approaches
to the subtle effects of different ages of onset of the second language. Thus
it is not just the distinction between simultaneous and successive acquisi-
tion that is important, but the specific age of acquisition (AofA) of the
second or third language to which the child was exposed. The AofA has
thus become one of the main factors whose influence needs investigating in
the successive acquisition by children of more than one language. Paradis
(2011) points out the importance of drawing a distinction between the
effect of AofA on long-term and short-term outcomes. Hyltenstam and
Abramsson (2000) investigated the long-term effect of AofA on second
language acquisition in both adults and children in order to determine to
what extent it affects ‘nativelike proficiency’ in a second language, a ques-
tion of considerable controversy since Lenneberg (1967) proposed his crit-
ical learning period hypothesis. On the basis of the evidence available,
Hyltenstam and Abramsson (2003) summarise their conclusion that acqui-
sition of a second language up to age 6 or 7 will allow speakers to achieve
nativelike proficiency ‘provided that there is sufficient input and that the
learning circumstances are not deficient’ (Hyltenstam and Abramsson
2003: 575). However, after that age there will need to be certain social or
psychological factors to compensate for the negative effects of maturation.
These factors will include motivation, aptitude, amount of input, instruc-
tion etc. Support for this argument is provided by the neuroscientific
evidence of Weber-Fox and Neville (1999), who studied adult Chinese
second language speakers of English who had been exposed to their second
language at ages from 1 to after 16 years. Those who had been exposed after
age 11 were less accurate in detecting semantic anomalies and showed
slower processing than those who had learned English earlier in life.

62 MARGARET DEUCHAR
As for short-term effects of AofA that can be perceived in the process of

second language development, Paradis (2011) reports differential effects on
different areas of language. For example, vocabulary seems to be acquired
more quickly with onset after five years than before (see Goldberg et al.
2008), while the acquisition of morphology is favoured by younger ages of
acquisition. For example, Meisel (2010) found that German-French bilingual
children in Hamburg who had been exposed to French after the age of
3 produced errors in morphology which were virtually absent in those
acquiring the two languages simultaneously. In her own study conducted
of children acquiring English as a second language in Canada from about
the age of 4 years, Paradis (2011) measured the effect of AofA in terms of
months of exposure to English. She found that AofA measured in this way
showed a significant relation to the children’s lexical and morphological
development.
Taken together, these and other studies of the long- and short-term
effects of AofA suggest that it is not enough to draw a binary distinction
between simultaneous and successive bilingual acquisition, but that
research needs to take into account the age of onset of exposure to the
two languages, as this will affect the process of development.
3.5 Language Mixing in the Input
In this chapter I use the term ‘mixing’ or ‘language mixing’ interchange-

ably with ‘code-switching’ and do not distinguish between the two except
when reporting on other researchers’ views that there is a difference.
Lanza (1997) is probably the first attempt to look in detail at the issue of
language mixing in developing bilinguals. Her study sets out to examine in
detail the relation between mixing in the input and in the child’s speech by
means of case studies of two children acquiring English and Norwegian in
Norway. Lanza developed a system of classifying adult responses to child
mixes according to whether they encouraged the use by the child of one
language at a time, or alternatively accepted the use of both languages in
the same conversation. She labelled the types of utterances ‘strategies’, and
placed these on a continuum from the most ‘monolingual’ (involving dis-
couraging the child from using the inappropriate language) to the most
‘bilingual’ (fully accepting the use of both languages). She found that one of
the children (Siri) used more lexical mixing with her father (a native
speaker of Norwegian) than with her mother (a native speaker of English)
and attributed this to Siri’s father’s apparently greater willingness to accept
insertions of English into an otherwise Norwegian conversation.
Few studies of mixing in the input have looked at the actual mixing or
code-switching patterns of adults and related them to the patterns acquired
by children. Quay (2012), however, is a notable exception. She carefully
quantifies the language use of two mothers addressing their developing

trilingual children in Japan, and compares the mixed utterances of the

Chinese-speaking mother with those of her daughter (Xiaoxiao), showing
the greater effect of the environmental language (Japanese) in the
daughter’s mixes.
Other investigators, however, have been less interested in the nature of the
actual mixing and more in the effect of parental mixing on other child
language outcomes, such as vocabulary. For example, Unsworth (2013: 39)
reports that Byers-Heinlein (2013) found that ‘higher rates of language
mixing by parents predicted smaller receptive vocabularies at age 1.5 years
and marginally smaller productive vocabularies at age 2’. However, perusal of
the original article by Byers-Heinlein reveals that they measured only English
vocabulary in the bilinguals, who were also acquiring other languages includ-
ing Chinese, Spanish and French. Additionally, the identification of mixing
and of the children’s knowledge of English vocabulary was based on parental
reports. Ideally this study should be repeated using both child and adult
corpora to obtain an independent measure of children’s vocabulary in their
speech output and to identify what type of adult mixing is occurring.
In their discussion of the results from Lanza’s (1997) study, Nicoladis and
Genesee suggest that it may be the actual rates of parental language mixing
which affect children’s mixing patterns rather than the strategies chosen
by parents to influence their children’s language choice. While the mixing
of the children in Lanza’s study was analysed in quantitative terms, the
analysis of the adult speech was qualitative. However, Lanza criticises a
more quantitative analysis of different data attempted by Nicoladis and
Genesee (1998) and a similar attempt by Deuchar and Muntz (2003) as not
paying sufficient attention to the sequential development of the conversa-
tion in the recordings analysed. Certainly, both Nicoladis and Genesee
(1998) and Deuchar and Muntz (2003) had difficulty with coding some of
Lanza’s strategies, as the chosen code sometimes depended on the analyst’s
interpretation of the parent’s intention. Arguably, it is problematic to
assume that every adult response to a child mix involves an intention to
influence the child’s language choice. It may therefore indeed be preferable
to investigate the overall relation between adult and child mixing in the
conversation as a whole, rather than focusing only on adult responses to
child mixed utterances. But Lanza’s (1997)’s study was instrumental in
encouraging investigators to pay more attention to the adult input to
developing bilinguals, and it no doubt paved the way for later studies
making detailed use of adult and child corpora to trace the influence of
the input on multilingual development.
3.6 Studies of Code-Switching in Children
However, the first studies of code-switching in children did not look at this
in terms of how it was influenced by the adult input, but more in terms of

64 MARGARET DEUCHAR
whether it was subject to grammatical constraints in the same way as had

been suggested for code-switching in adults (see, e.g., Poplack 1980; di
Sciullo et al. 1986). Meisel (1994) was one of the first investigators to tackle
this issue, which was mostly ignored in the early case studies of bilingual
acquisition with their focus on ‘dual monolingualism’ and language
separation.
Meisel suggested that the term ‘code-mixing’ should be applied to ‘those
instances where the speaker violates the constraints on code-switching that
normally govern the linguistic behaviour of the bilingual community’
(Meisel 1994: 414). In contrast, he defined the term ‘code-switching’ as a
‘specific skill of the bilingual’s pragmatic competence . . . the ability . . . to
change languages within an interactional sequence in accordance with
sociolinguistic rules and without violating specific grammatical con-
straints’ (Meisel 1994: 414).
Looking back at this work more than 25 years later, it is interesting to
note his reference to the norms of the community, since these have in fact
not received much study until recently. Instead Meisel focused on the
grammatical constraints which had been proposed to apply to adult code-
switching, suggesting that children only begin to do code-switching in an
adult-like way once they have specific grammatical knowledge, and in
particular that this should coincide with the appearance of functional
categories in child speech, usually after age two. An example of the appear-
ance of functional categories is the use of noun determiners, which Meisel
illustrates from his German/French bilingual data. Vihman (1998) tested
the more recent Matrix Language Frame theory (MLF) of code-switching
(Myers-Scotton 1997) on Estonian/English data collected over four years
from conversations between her two children, aged roughly 3–7 and 6–10
years respectively. She found that the predictions of the MLF were generally
observed in that either English or Estonian provided the morphosyntactic
frame of the utterance (the ‘matrix language’) in which items from the
other language were inserted, and found that the constraints were gener-
ally observed. She noted that Estonian was much more frequent as the
matrix language than English, so that ‘When we speak of CS [code-
switching], then, we are essentially speaking of the use of English words
and phrases within Estonian utterances’ (Vihman 1998: 60). She did not
discuss how much this pattern might be attributed to the input, although
she stated that ‘Estonian was the language of the home as a matter of
policy’ (Vihman 1998: 50) and that both parents tended to avoid code-
switching. However, since they were living in the USA she does report that
they used ‘cultural borrowings’ in their Estonian input, such as Halloween,
popcorn and spaceship. It is debatable to what extent the use of these cultural
borrowings provided the pattern for the children’s frequent insertion of
English items in their Estonian, but it seems likely that they heard at least
some code-switching into English from Estonian speakers in the commu-
nity, compared with presumably rather little intraclausal switching from

English into Estonian. It is interesting to compare Vihman’s (1998) with a

study by her daughter (V. Vihman 2018) 20 years later of her own children
using both Estonian and English. The pattern of language input here is that
the data were mostly collected in Estonia, in a home where the mother
spoke Estonian and the father Estonian. V. Vihman (2018) reports that the
parents did some intraclausal code-switching, but that it was not as fre-
quent as in the children’s speech. Most but not all of the code-switched
utterances produced by the children involved the use of English as a matrix
language with the insertion of Estonian items, hence the reverse of what
was found by M. Vihman (1998). This difference can no doubt be explained
by the difference in both the main community language and the language
used by the mother, who was collecting the data.
Paradis et al. (2000) also tested the MLF in analysing their French/
English data, and found that ‘the children obeyed all the constraints set
out in the Matrix Language Frame model the majority of the time’ (Paradis
et al. 2000: 245). They did note a developmental trend towards the gradual
reduction of violations of the model’s prediction, but failed to find support
for Meisel’s suggestion that code-switching by children only emerges after
the development of functional categories. Some of the children were at a
pre-functional stage in some of the recordings, and yet they conclude that
the children in their study showed ‘evidence from the outset of language-
specific, INFL-related grammatical knowledge in their mixing patterns’
(Paradis et al. 2000: 259). Unlike Vihman (1998), Paradis et al. did not
document the choice of the matrix language by the children quantita-
tively, but did look at the extent to which violations of the model were
related to dominance or proficiency in each language. They could not
establish a relation. Like M. Vihman and V. Vihman, they also did not
analyse the language of the input, but it should be noted that parental
input is recorded in the transcripts of the recordings of six of the children
that are available on the CHILDES database (https://childes.talkbank.org/
access/Biling/GNP.html) and so could be studied even by other investiga-
tors. It would be interesting to determine not only to what extent the
parents code-switch, but also how often they choose French vs English in
their bilingual clauses. As we shall see below, we might expect matrix
language choice by the children to match that of their parents, at least at
the early stages of acquisition.
However, Stavans and Swisher (2006) show, in a study of code-switching
in trilingual acquisition (Hebrew/Spanish/English) by two children from the
ages of 2;6 and 5;5 living in the USA, that the children mostly used English
as the matrix language with insertions from Hebrew and Spanish, the
languages of their parents. They find that intraclausal switches involve only
two languages (agreeing with some previous findings regarding trilinguals)
but that interclausal or intersentential switches show that all three lan-
guages can be used in the same conversation. I interpret this as suggesting
that each clause will be either monolingual or bilingual, but that

66 MARGARET DEUCHAR
monolingual clauses from all three languages can occur in the same con-
versation through interclausal switching. This is an interesting finding that
could be tested in further research. I note that Quay (2012: 449) finds six
mixed utterances from all three languages in the data from one of her
developing trilinguals, but almost all include the vocative mommy, and a
clause-based analysis is not included in her study.
Not all analyses of code-switching in children have made use of the MLF
model. In Cantone’s study of five Italian/German developing bilinguals living
in Hamburg she adopts a Minimalist approach to code-switching. This
involves taking the position that only what is grammatical in the separate
languages will be grammatical in code-switching. In other words, ‘as long
as language-specific requirements are respected, all kinds of mixes will be
felicitous’ (Cantone 2007: 159). This means that Cantone has to explain ‘the
cases in which mixes apparently violated language-specific constraints’
(Cantone 2007: 226). However, the role of the input does not figure in her
discussion, reflecting the Chomskyan approach outlined above.
A study which does not take a grammatical approach to analysing chil-
dren’s code-switching but focuses more on its impact on proficiency is that
by Yow et al. (2018) in Singapore. This study has the great advantage of
making available the Mandarin/English recordings with transcriptions on
the CHILDES website (see https://childes.talkbank.org/access/Biling/
Singapore.html). The data were collected at private childcare centres of
children aged 5–6 years old and include utterances produced by teachers,
although these are mostly not transcribed. Nevertheless, transcription by
other investigators interested in the input might be possible. Information
regarding parental input was obtained by parental report only. The main
purpose of the project as described on the website was to ‘to investigate the
relationship between code-switching frequency and language competency
in bilingual pre-schoolers’. As in the study by Byers-Heinlein (2013), the
main concern was the effect of code-switching on proficiency in both
English and Mandarin, and the investigators conclude that code-switching
is a ‘marker of linguistic competence’ (Yow et al. 2018: 1075). In their
analysis they included both intra-sentential and inter-sentential switching
in the total number of code-switched utterances produced by each child,
and calculated what proportion of the child’s utterances overall involved
code-switching. They did not provide information on the structure of the
intra-sentential code-switching, as this was not their main interest. Their
interest in the proficiency of bilinguals in each separate language can be
seen to continue the twentieth-century concern with the potentially nega-
tive effects of switching or mixing. Nevertheless, the open-access availabil-
ity of the data means that future investigators with an interest in the
structure of the children’s code-switching could take this issue further.
And although there may not be extensive data from adults in the corpus,
the children’s patterns could be compared with the code-switching patterns
found in an adult Mandarin/English code-switching corpus such as the

SEAME corpus described by Lyu et al. (2010) (see also https://catalog.ldc

.upenn.edu/LDC2015S04).
3.7 Relation between Adult and Child Switching
Despite the fact that few investigators have looked directly at the relation
between code-switching in the adult input and in child speech, an early
pioneer in this area was Goodz (1989). She used transcripts of both adult
and child speech to investigate quantitatively the relation between parental
mixing (or code-switching) in the input and mixing in the children’s
productions. Any utterances in the parental input containing elements
from two languages were counted as mixed, and child utterances in the
parent’s ‘non-native’ (in this case, non-designated) appear also to have been
counted as mixed. Goodz found significant positive correlations between
the child’s and the mother’s code-mixing in three out of the four children,
but only in one of the child’s mixing in relation to the father’s. The study is
set in a context of evaluating parents’ success in keeping the two languages
separate, and this parental and social ideology of the time is also reflected in
the paper by Genesee et al. (1995), which argues that although language
mixing in adults and children occurred, children are nevertheless well able
to differentiate their languages. They report finding no evidence of a con-
nection between parental and child mixing.
So while the studies published in the 1980s and 1990s reflect the general
ideology, often implicit, that mixing is bad while language separation is
good, Comeau et al. (2003) published ground-breaking evidence that chil-
dren’s mixing can reflect that in the input. Instead of focusing on the
potentially negative effects on children’s multilingual development of
mixing in the input, Comeau point out that ‘it is widely recognised that,
in the long run, children acquire the sociopragmatic constraints and pat-
terns that characterize adult language usage in their community’ (Comeau
et al. 2003: 2014). They adopted an experimental method to test what they
call the ‘modelling hypothesis’ or ‘the hypothesis that child BCM [bilingual
code-mixing] is directly related to BCM in the input’. They made recordings
of six French/English bilingual children interacting with their parents, in
Canada and used those recordings to calculate for each language their MLU
in inflections and words, the number of word types and tokens, and the
number of multiword utterances. Once they had identified the child’s less
developed of their two languages, a bilingual research assistant was
recorded speaking to that child in that language, on the assumption that
code-mixing into this language was more likely than in the other. The
assistant deliberately varied her rates of (mostly inter-utterance) mixing
over three recording sessions. They found that the children varied their rate
of mixing to reflect that of their interlocutors, suggesting that children may
aim to mirror the input in their productions. Interestingly, they found

68 MARGARET DEUCHAR
more of a relation between the children’s mixing and the input of the
research assistants than that of their parents. However, they explain this by
suggesting that, following Lanza’s (1997) work on parents’ role in the language
socialisation of children, this may not be surprising. Their suggestion seems
reasonable, since Lanza showed how parents could use discourse strategies
to either discourage or accept language mixing, and this might mean that their
input came with additional messages about appropriateness. The emphasis on
this study of the role of community norms as opposed to parental strategies
is refreshing, and provides an incentive for more detailed investigation of
the role of the community in input to developing multilinguals.
More evidence regarding the important role of the community
language(s) in multilingual acquisition is provided by the detailed longitu-
dinal and cross-sectional studies conducted by Patuto et al. (2014) of children
simultaneously acquiring either German and a Romance language, or two
Romance languages. Nineteen children were included in the longitudinal
study and 46 in the cross-sectional study. The children in the longitudinal
study were aged between 1;6 and 5 years old, while those in the cross-
sectional study were aged between 2;6 and 6 years old. The investigators’
focus was the role of four specific factors in influencing code-switching by
the children: (1) the degree of language balance (whether the child was
dominant in their proficiency of one language compared to another); (2) the
language of the community (defined as that of the country); (3) the setting
(exposure to monolingual vs bilingual speech); and (4) parental strategies. In
relation to language balance, it has previously been argued that children
are more likely to code-switch when using their weaker (or ‘non-dominant’)
language, in which they may have lexical gaps (cf. Bernardini & Schlyter
2004). Patuto et al. suggest that because the dominant language is often
assumed to be that of the community language, the role of the community
language per se is often ignored. Patuto et al. advocate examining the effect
of the two variables, dominance and community language, separately.
Contrary to their expectations, Patuto et al. found that language balance
(dominance) and parental strategies did not have an effect on the rate of
code-switching by the children. However, the two other factors studied did
make a difference: the bilingual vs monolingual setting and the community
language. The children in the cross-sectional setting were recorded in both
a bilingual setting (e.g., in a bilingual kindergarten) and a monolingual
setting, and the results showed that ‘The bilingual children indeed produce
significantly more mixed utterances in the bilingual than in the monolin-
gual setting: (p < .01)’ (Patuto et al. 2014: 204). As for the results relating to
the effect of the community language, they also found a significant
difference between the amount of code-switching by the children in their
community vs non-community language. As they point out, this may be
because speakers of the non-community language will usually be bilin-
gual (and have the option of code-switching), whereas many speakers of
the community language will be monolingual and unable to code-switch.

However, both significant factors relate to the input received by the child,
and in order to understand the role of this in detail, we would need
recordings of both monolingual and bilingual speakers in the commu-
nity. Patuto et al. remark on the generally low amount of code-switching
in the children they examined, and speculate that this may be due to
the cognitive cost of switching. However, another explanation would be
a relatively low rate of code-switching in the communities where
they conducted their research, and this is where adult corpora would
be useful. Nevertheless, even without this detailed information, Patuto
et al. have succeeded in drawing our attention to the potentially import-
ant role of the language of the community, thus shifting the balance
from almost exclusive concern with the role of the parents in multilingual
acquisition.
The role of community language norms is also demonstrated, though not
examined in detail, by Yip and Matthews (2016) in their study of the influ-
ence of the input on the simultaneous acquisition of Cantonese and English
by nine children in Hong Kong. They report from the work of Chan (2003)
that when adults in Hong Kong mix Cantonese and English in their speech,
it is Cantonese which provides the matrix language or morphosyntactic
frame. An example of adult code-switching is provided in another publica-
tion by Yip (2013:134), where she reports on an adult addressing a child
with the utterance in Example (3.1).
(3.1) ngo5dei6 waan2-zo2 # turtle sin1 laa1, hou2-mou2 aa3

we play-ASP turtle first SFP good-not-good SFP
‘Let’s play with the turtle first, shall we?’
In this example the English noun turtle is inserted in an otherwise

Cantonese utterance. The alternative scenario, where a Cantonese word is
inserted in an English morphosyntactic frame, is reported to occur much
more rarely in adult speech (cf. Chen 2015). It is interesting to note that Yip
(2013) finds the child in the conversation exemplified in (1) to mirror the
pattern provided by the adult, as shown in Example (3.2).
(3.2) ngo5dei6 jau5 [/] jau5 loeng5 go3 turtle gaa3

we have have two CL turtle SFP
‘We have two turtles!’ (Yip 2013: 134)
In the study reported by Yip and Matthews (2016), the children’s mixing
showed the same asymmetry as found in adult speech, such that they
mixed English into their Cantonese utterances much more than the
reverse. Yip and Matthews argue that the frequency of this mixing
appeared to be affected by English dominance, in that the only English-
dominant child mixed more English into her Cantonese utterances than the
other children, who were Cantonese-dominant. However, it is important to
note that the Cantonese-dominant children still mixed English into
Cantonese more than Cantonese into English. If mixing had been affected

70 MARGARET DEUCHAR
solely by dominance, then we would have expected the Cantonese-

dominant children to show the reverse pattern. Instead we see that the
pattern of the input is the most important.
3.8 Methodological Issues Concerning Mixing
All investigators who make use of the notion of mixing or switching need to
decide how to identify a switch or a mix. They do not all use the same
criteria, and this needs to be understood when comparing the results of a
range of different studies.
The most common approach to date in multilingual acquisition studies
has been for mixed utterances to be defined as those containing words in a
different language from that being used by the adult interlocutor, what we
shall call the ‘designated language’. For example, Yip and Matthews (2016)
analysed sets of data that had been recorded in separate contexts defined as
‘English’ where the researcher addressed the child in English, and
‘Cantonese’ where they addressed the child in Cantonese. They coded
utterances as mixed if they contained words from both Cantonese and
English. They then calculated the proportion of mixed utterances in each
of the designated Cantonese and English ‘contexts’, defined by the language
used by the adult researcher when addressing the child. This use of the
designated language as a yardstick (common to many researchers) had the
effect, as Yip and Matthews (2016: 3) point out, that some utterances like
Example (3.2) above, if occurring in the English context, would be included
in the mixing rate for English, even though they might have a Cantonese
morphosyntactic frame.
While many investigators would agree with Yip and Matthews’s (2016)
definition of a mixed (multiword) utterance, there is less agreement on how
to classify utterances consisting of one word in the non-designated lan-
guage. Cantone (2007: 114) argues that a one-word utterance that does
not match the designated language of the context should be considered
mixed. For example, one of the developing bilinguals in her study produced
the Italian word palla at age 1;9 in what she describes as a German context,
and palla was therefore considered to be a mixed utterance. However, in her
study of the development of code-switching at a later stage, she only
includes multiword utterances in her analysis. Lanza (1997: 124) defines
the notion ‘mixed utterance’ in her study as ‘the combination of elements
from two languages within a single utterance’. However, she also uses the
term ‘lexical mixing’ to refer to words in Norwegian produced by the child
Siri in conversation with her mother, who addresses her in English (Lanza
1997: 215). The examples show that some of these lexical mixes are one-
word utterances in Norwegian. This suggests that Lanza does, like many
others, take a ‘designated language’ as a reference point to identify mixing.

As we saw in Section 3.5, Lanza’s focus in her study was on adult responses
to child mixes away from the designated language.
Now that we know more about the multilingual practices of adults,
particularly adult code-switching (see, e.g., Gardner-Chloros 2009;
Deuchar 2020), we may question whether it is reasonable to always assume
a designated (adult) language in the study of multilingual acquisition. As we
have seen in Section 3.7, developing multilinguals do not always receive
exclusively monolingual input in their various languages.
An innovative solution to the problem of using the designated language
as a yardstick for mixing is shown in the study by Eichler et al. (2012), who
instead code mixed utterances in terms of their matrix language or mor-
phosyntactic frame. Eichler et al. (2012) concluded in their study of
16 developing bilinguals that the language of the context (designated lan-
guage) does not necessarily provide the matrix language of utterances.
Their data are taken from 16 of the 19 children in the study described by
Patuto et al. (2014) and their analysis focused specifically on the mixed DPs
(Determiner Phrases) produced by the children. An example of a mixed DP
is le bett (‘the bed’) in which a child acquiring both French and German
produced the determiner from French and the noun from German (see
Eichler et al. 2012: 249). The investigators wanted to know which of the
two words is being ‘mixed’, the determiner or the noun. In the case of this
example, the context language (that spoken by the adult) was German,
which might have led some investigators to conclude that the French
determiner was the ‘mixed’ item. However, in this case the entire DP was
part of a longer utterance by the child c’est fini le bett (‘the bed is made’) in
which Eichler et al. noted that the verb and determiner are both in French.
They discovered that in their data, the language of the determiner over-
whelmingly matched that of the verb and thus (taking the verb as indicative
of the matrix language) the matrix language. This was the case for the
majority of utterances even by those children who were more dominant in
one language than another, and who according to previous research had
been expected to mix more in their non-dominant language. But of course
these earlier results were based on assuming that the matrix language
matched that of the context, an assumption that Eichler et al. have shown
to be unreliable. The findings of Eichler et al. are more pathbreaking than
has been acknowledged, especially since their insights preceded work on
adult data showing that the determiner also overwhelmingly matches the
language of the verb in adult code-switching (see Blokzijl et al. 2017).
3.9 Parental Report and the Neglect of Community

Language Input
As mentioned above, the early case studies of simultaneous bilingual

acquisition focused mostly on parental rather than community language

72 MARGARET DEUCHAR
input, and parents would be asked to report on the relative frequency of each
language in the input. This was often expressed in terms of the percentage of
time in which the child heard one language vs the other. For example,
Deuchar and Quay (2000: 6) estimated that the child M heard English
71 per cent of the time, and Spanish 29 per cent until age 1;0. Then from
age 1;0 until age 2;0 she heard English 48 per cent of the time and Spanish
52 per cent. The estimates assumed 12 waking hours per day and were based
on M’s typical exposure in daily life, excluding, for example, holidays abroad.
There was a tacit assumption in some of the early case studies that equal
quantities of input from the two languages was ideal in order to avoid one
language lagging behind the other in development. Of course, this assumed
that equal competence in the two languages was the goal (of parents) and
that parents had some control over the relative quantities of the two lan-
guages heard by the child, ignoring the role of other interlocutors who were
not parents. The overemphasis on the role of parents is also reflected in the
way in which Ronjat’s recommended strategy of ‘one person one language’
has been reinterpreted as ‘one parent one language’, as can be seen for
example by the use of the phrase in Bain and Yu (1980)’s study in which
parents were instructed to use this strategy, and in the title of Döpke’s (1992)
book, One Parent One Language: An Interactional Approach.
The danger of ignoring the role of community languages in the input is
illustrated by De Houwer’s (2007) survey of 18,046 families in Flanders,
Belgium. The children in this study were aged between 6 and 10 years old.
The aim of the survey was to determine ‘why some children raised in a
bilingual setting speak two languages and others do not’ (De Houwer 2007:
412). Eleven per cent of the families (1,942) reported that a family member
spoke one language other than Dutch, the majority language, at home. In
addition, 308 families reported that they spoke two or three languages
other than Dutch. The ‘minority’ languages (those other than Dutch)
spoken in the families included French, Turkish, English, Arabic, Berber,
German, Spanish and Italian. When the reported adult use of the minority
languages was compared with their use by children, ‘a sharp decline in
use across generations in favour of the majority language’ was found
(De Houwer 2007: 417). Thus the fact of speaking a minority language to
children did not guarantee its use by the children. Of course, the children
all spoke the majority language, Dutch, because they were exposed to it at
school. In investigating which particular parental input patterns led to the
greatest and least success in children speaking languages other than Dutch,
De Houwer found (perhaps not surprisingly) that the more Dutch was
spoken in the home, the less the children would speak other languages.
This finding also applied to trilingual families in which De Houwer found
that ‘The presence of Dutch in the parental input is strongly associated with
a lack of active trilingualism in the children, whereas the absence of Dutch
in the parental input is strongly associated with child active trilingualism’
(De Houwer 2004: 126). A further implication of her results was that the

‘one person one language’ strategy does not provide enough input in the
minority language, and thus De Houwer concludes that it is ‘neither a
necessary nor a sufficient condition’ for children to speak more than
one language.
Additional and important evidence on the effect of quantity of input for
the acquisition of minority languages is provided in the study by Gathercole
and Thomas (2009) of the bilingual acquisition of Welsh and English in
611 primary school-age children. In Wales, English is the dominant societal
language and spoken by all adults who also speak the minority language
Welsh. The children provided information about their home languages, and
were tested on Welsh vocabulary, grammatical gender and understanding
of word order in Welsh. They were also tested on English vocabulary. The
results showed that ‘regardless of home language background, speakers
develop equivalent, mature command of English, but that command of
Welsh is directly correlated with the level of input in Welsh in the home
and at school’ (Gathercole and Thomas 2009: 213). As in De Houwer’s study
outlined above, the authors suggest that a ‘one parent one language’
approach may not be the best way of facilitating bilingual acquisition of a
majority and a minority language. In Wales, it may be optimal instead for
parents to use only Welsh at home.
Both the early case studies and later studies of multilingual acquisition
have relied largely on parental report to estimate the input from different
languages, but other more recent approaches have sought to measure it
more directly. Two examples of direct approaches are the use of a dense
naturalistic corpus and the use of automated analysis technology. The use
of a dense naturalistic corpus is advocated for the study of multilingual
acquisition by Xiangjun and Yip (2018) but was first pioneered in the study
of monolingual acquisition. Lieven and Behrens (2012) describe how a dense
corpus can capture 7–15 per cent of the input to the child compared to an
estimated 1–2 per cent in traditional longitudinal studies. Alternatively, an
even larger amount of the input can be collected automatically, for example
using the ‘LENA’ device, which can be worn unobtrusively by the child and
which allows recording for up to 16 hours. Connecting the device to a
computer with the LENA analysis software then yields an automatic count
of adult words and child vocalisations. For a review of its use, mostly
relating to the monolingual acquisition of English, see Ganek and Eriks-
Brophy (2018). However, Oller (2010) used LENA in an innovative study of
the role of the adult input in his child’s trilingual acquisition of German,
Spanish and English. Since the automatic analysis software was not able to
identify the language spoken in each of the child and adult utterances, Oller
took five-minute samples from all the recordings and manually assigned all
words in these samples to one of five categories: Spanish, German, English,
Ambiguous or Unintelligible. The child’s output in each language was
found to be proportionally related to the utterances in that language that
were specifically directed to her.

74 MARGARET DEUCHAR
Marchman et al. (2017) used similar technology to compare parental

estimates of the percentage exposure of children to each language with
proportions of words from each of Spanish and English in LENA record-
ings of 18 Spanish/English developing bilinguals aged about 3. They found
a closer relation between child-directed words in each language and the
children’s language outcomes than between these outcomes and parental
reports of the proportion of input in each language. Outcomes were
measured in terms of vocabulary and speed of processing. The importance
of studying absolute word counts in the input is shown by the finding in
several studies that parents vary a great deal not only in their language
choice but also in their quantity of talk to a child and their speech rate (cf.
De Houwer 2014, 2018). De Houwer (2018) argues on the basis of such
studies that we need to challenge the widespread assumption that bilin-
gual children receive ‘reduced input’ and the use of this assumption to
account for differences in the process of monolingual and multilingual
acquisition.
3.10 Comparison of Adult and Child Corpora
Several of the recent studies reviewed above show that data from develop-
ing multilinguals’ code-switching demonstrates children’s tendency to pro-
duce patterns similar to those found in adults. But very few studies to date
have made a detailed comparison of the specific morphosyntactic patterns
found in corpora of adult and child multilingual language usage.
However, Phillips and Deuchar (2022) report on an innovative study of
the development of code-switching in bilingual children by using both pre-
existing data on the acquisition of Welsh (available in the CHILDES data-
base, cf. MacWhinney 2000) and the results of a study of adult Welsh/
English code-switching based on a corpus of bilingual adult conversation
named Siarad (see bangortalk.org.uk) by Deuchar et al. (2018). Deuchar
et al. had found following an analysis of more than 65,000 clauses in the
speech of 151 Welsh/English bilinguals that there was a clear asymmetry in
their code-switching patterns. When speakers combined Welsh and English
in the same clause, the morphosyntactic frame (word order and subject–
verb agreement) was that of Welsh rather than English. This kind of
asymmetry in the normal choice of matrix language (= morphosyntactic
frame) in bilingual clauses is common in many communities, as pointed out
by Hebblethwaite (2010), who suggests that it is generally the lower status
language which is most commonly the matrix language. Certainly this
seemed to be the case in the Siarad data, where we found that Welsh was
overwhelmingly the more frequent matrix language in both monolingual
(98 per cent) and bilingual clauses (99 per cent). (See Deuchar et al. 2018: 90,
table 5.3.)

The Siarad Welsh/English data were collected between 2005 and 2008
almost entirely from adult speakers. Before that date, however, in 1996,
data had been collected in Bangor and Aberystwyth for a project on the
acquisition of Welsh conducted by Borsley, Morris Jones and Aldridge (see
Aldridge et al. 1998). The corpus is named CIG1 and can be found at childes
.talkbank.org/access/Celtic/Welsh/CIG1.html. It consists of 84 hours of
recordings from seven children between the ages of 18 and 30 months.
All had parents who spoke Welsh as a first language, but it is clear from the
data that all are also exposed to English. The data provides an important
source of evidence regarding the patterns of code-switching in adults when
addressing children, and complements well the adult data in the Siarad
corpus collected just 10 years later.
Phillips and Deuchar (2022) were able to make use of both sets of data to
compare the patterns in both adult and child bilingual speakers. In line
with Eichler et al. they used the verb in child utterances as well as word
order to determine the matrix language in mixed utterances, finding that
97 per cent of mixed utterances had Welsh as their matrix language. This is
astoundingly close to the percentage of bilingual clauses (defined in a
similar way to child mixed utterances) with a Welsh matrix language in
the adult Siarad data (99 per cent). Not only that, but when Phillips and
Deuchar did a similar detailed analysis of the adult speech addressed to one
of the children included in the CIG1 data (Dewi), the proportion of bilingual
clauses with Welsh matrix language was found also to be 99 per cent.
3.11 Desiderata for Future Studies
As we have seen from the above, detailed studies of input corpora in

multilingual acquisition have been few and far between, while instead
there is still considerable emphasis on parental report as the main source
of information on the input to the child. Not only does this method have
inherent limitations concerning comprehensiveness and accuracy, but it
also perpetuates the widespread assumption that the parents are the only
important source of input to the child in early multilingual acquisition.
This assumption finds less and less support when one considers the fact
that many mothers work outside the home nowadays as much as fathers,
and that caregivers are not limited to the parents. In addition, may parents
rely on childcare in the community, in creches, nurseries or day-care
centres. Thus in addition to knowing about the languages spoken by the
parents to the child, and whether the parents were monolingual or bilin-
gual, we also need to know about the interlocutors that the child is exposed
to in the community. In communities where bilingualism or multilingual-
ism is common, the input to children will clearly be different from that in
more monolingual communities, and we need to know for example,

76 MARGARET DEUCHAR
whether the community practises code-switching and, if so, what the code-
switching norms are.
An influential twentieth-century typology of simultaneous bilingual
acquisition by Vihman and McLaughlin (1982) emphasises the importance
of taking into account input from both the parents and the community and
of noting to what extent the input in each environment is either monolin-
gual or ‘mixed’ (involving code-switching). But as we have seen, most
studies have paid little attention to the language usage of the community,
focusing instead on the input from the parents. Some studies actually
provide no information at all on the community’s language usage and
whether it is monolingual or multilingual and if multilingual, whether
there is code-switching. These gaps in our knowledge should be remedied,
and I would therefore advocate that full ethnographic information should
be provided in future studies about the community setting and its language
usage. Furthermore, the language usage by the community should be
studied in detail including the code-switching patterns, if any. It will not
be sufficient in future studies to talk vaguely about language ‘mixing’
without paying any attention to the morphosyntactic frame of utterances
in the data. Armed with more detailed information as in the pioneering
study by Phillips and Deuchar, we should thus be able to determine how
and to what extent community language usage patterns become reflected in
the usage of the child.
3.12 Conclusion
In this chapter I have documented an increasing concern with the role of

the input in multilingual acquisition over the last half-century. This has
been fuelled partly by the emergence of usage-based approaches in contrast
to Chomskyan assumptions about the poverty of the stimulus, and partly
by technological advances which have enhanced the collection and storage
of corpus data. Research on adult multilingual usage has revealed that
focus on the acquisition of individual languages as if they were always kept
separate is misguided, and that adult corpora provide evidence for commu-
nity norms of multilingual usage. Because of these developments we have
seen the beginnings of a progression from an unrealistic focus on the
parents as the providers of input in two or three separate languages, to a
growing realisation of the importance of community patterns in children’s
multilingual development. However, I have argued that this progression
should be taken further by more detailed comparison of adult and child
corpora from the same community, and by an analytic approach which
moves away from a notion of mixing defined in relation to a prescriptively
designated language and takes into account the actual morphosyntactic
patterns found in both adult and child speech.

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4
Multilingual Education
in Formal Schooling:
Conceptual Shifts
in Theory, Policy
and Practice
Latisha Mary & Christine Hélot
4.1 Introduction
Multilingual education has been defined as ‘the use of two or more lan-
guages in education provided that schools aim at multilingualism and
multiliteracy’ (Cenoz 2013: 2). The general understanding of what multilin-
gual education means is far wider though and is synonymous with learning
several languages as objects of study in themselves, with the objective that
children develop a plurilingual competence. The reasons for learning mul-
tiple languages in formal schooling contexts are varied and can be attrib-
uted to various factors: the presence of different languages within one
country or region, European and national policy makers’ desire to increase
communication and collaboration between member States and/or individ-
ual initiatives to provide children with the linguistic skills deemed neces-
sary to succeed in an increasingly globalised marketplace.
These factors and concerns have impacted the age when children begin
learning multiple languages in formal school contexts around the world,
which has significantly decreased in the past two decades (Enever 2011;
Muñoz 2014a) providing more possibilities for childhood multilingualism.
This has not been without some criticism from scholars with regard to the
quality of implementation of language teaching to young learners (Nikolov
& Djigunovic 2006) and lack of conclusive evidence of the long-term bene-
fits of formal learning of languages from a young age within some insti-
tutional contexts (Muñoz 2011; 2014b). The issue of which languages are
chosen for instruction has also left room for speculation as to whom

Multilingual Education in Formal Schooling 83
bi-multilingual education benefits and which type of multilingual educa-

tion is being promoted (Coleman 2011; Coupland 2012; Flores & Baetens
Beardsmore 2015; Hélot & García 2019).
Currently a desire to increase the learning and use of multiple languages
in formal school systems can be observed as a global trend. Recent statistics
from around the world have shown increases in top-down language-in-
education policies promoting early language learning and bilingual
education in formal contexts in Europe (European Commission/EACEA/
Eurydice 2017), South America (Barahona 2016; de Meija 2009), Asia
(Butler 2017; Hu 2007; Manh et al. 2017) and Africa (van Ginkel 2017). In
addition to higher enrolments in language classes and bilingual education
programmes, the starting age at which foreign/additional languages are
introduced in formal education systems has been lowered in many coun-
tries, at times with children beginning to learn a second/additional lan-
guage from the age of 2 (Enever 2018.) English has increasingly become the
most learned L2/L3 in European countries and around the world due to
increasing globalisation and developing countries’ ideologies equating pro-
ficiency in English with economic development and the promise of
increased employment and improved socio-economic conditions (Coleman
2011; Jessner 2006; Seargeant & Erling 2011).
This chapter examines models of multilingual education currently imple-
mented in formal education systems around the world. Within the presen-
tation of these models the chapter addresses the ideologies underlying the
conceptualisations of the various programmes, the issue of the choice of
language to be learned in relation to local contexts, types of learners
enrolled in these programmes and the diverse outcomes of these models.
This overview will (1) provide a backdrop to a discussion on the dominance
of English and dominant European languages within these curricula, and
(2) address the minoritisation of migrant and indigenous minority
speakers’ bi-multilingualism and home languages. We conclude with a
discussion of new approaches to the conceptualisation of multilingual
education as a more flexible and dynamic process and the impact of such
findings for language policymakers and educators at all levels.
4.2 Multilingual Education Models: From Bilingualism

to Trilingualism at School
Many educational models around the world aim to provide opportunities

for children to become multilingual and/or to develop and support the
competences in the languages they speak. In addition to extensive foreign
language teaching models such as those promoted in European policy
documents (European Commission 2002), bilingual education models are
considered to be the most common type of multilingual education along-
side other types of multilingual education which include three or more

84 L AT I S H A M A R Y & C H R I S T I N E H É L OT
languages as medium of instruction (Cenoz 2013). Recent research on bi-

multilingual models of education has identified various types of models
classified according to factors such as the overarching educational aims of
the programmes (Baker & Wright 2017; Cenoz & Gorter 2014; Weber 2014),
the use of languages either as medium of instruction or as taught subjects
(Beetsma 2001) and the sociolinguistic contexts in which multilingual
schools are situated (Ytsma 2001). Ytsma (2001: 12) proposes a typology of
‘trilingual education’ (programmes which deliberately aim to ‘establish
additive trilingualism among its students’) based on the (socio)linguistic
context in which the educational models are implemented (whether the
languages present in each trilingual model are also spoken in the school
environment and whether these languages are being used as the medium of
instruction or as taught subjects), the linguistic distance between the lan-
guages concerned and the programme design used.
Following Ytsma’s analysis (essentially of European contexts), trilingual
education models can be identified as falling into one of the following
categories: (1) bilingual programmes based on a dominant/national
language and a minority language (L1 + L2) in which another language
(L3) (usually English) is taught as a subject (for a discussion of our use of
the terms L1, L2, L3 in this chapter see Section 4.6); (2) programmes in
which all three languages are being used as the medium of instruction and
where at least two of the languages are spoken in the environment (for
example, in Luxembourg, Friesland, the Basque Autonomous Country and
the Ladin Valleys in South Tyrol); and (3) programmes in which immigrant
children attend bilingual schools and learn the two languages of that
particular bilingual system in addition to their home or heritage language
(Beetsma 2001; Ytsma 2001). Concerning the first example, Ytsma (2001:14)
highlights that the educational goals set for the L3 in this model will
typically be lower than for the languages taught through the L1/L2 bilingual
model given that the input in the language is more limited, both quantita-
tively and qualitatively, in this context. However, if the aim of the pro-
gramme is the development of ‘additive trilingualism’ (Ytsma 2001: 12) and
the development of a plurilingual repertoire unique to each learner, vary-
ing levels of competence in the three languages are recognised as normal
and legitimate (Council of Europe 2001).
Cenoz (2013) emphasises the importance of the sociolinguistic context of
multilingual education models as well as the linguistic distance between
languages used in the different programmes. Her Continua of Multilingual
Education model provides a holistic and flexible tool to describe the diver-
sity of situations relating to multilingual education and takes into account
important factors such as the number of multilingual speakers in the
surrounding area, the status of the languages used and their presence in
the media and/or linguistic landscape as well as the languages used at home
with family or community members. Also included in the continua are the
different educational variables such as the teachers’ backgrounds (their

ability to communicate in the different languages and the amount and

quality of training they have received), the amount of time dedicated to
language instruction and the age of introduction of the various languages
within the curriculum.
Ultimately, different models of multilingual education have been
developed to serve the needs of different learners and educational systems,
which can be identified as either attending to the needs of minoritised
students or as reinforcing existing social hierarchies (Flores & Baetens
Beardsmore 2015; Hélot & García 2019). At the top of the hierarchy of
multilingual education we find models in which children who are already
bi/plurilingual see their plurilingualism supported through formal educa-
tion in private or international schools. In contexts where an indigenous
language has become minoritised through colonisation or monoglossic
policies, some students avail of bilingual education in so-called ‘regional
minority’ languages, and sometimes these programmes include a third
language as well. Students who are least of all served by bilingual education
are those who speak minority migrant languages, and indigenous peoples
in many parts of the world where the issue of language rights is often
invoked. Thus, as Flores and Baetens Beardsmore (2015: 205) remind us,
multilingual education programmes can be used either as means of reinfor-
cing privilege and contributing to social inequality or as measures to pro-
mote empowerment, emancipation and the valuing of linguistic and
cultural diversity.
We begin our discussion of these different types of learners by firstly
examining the various contexts in which they are educated, starting with
the European context and then moving on to present different contexts
situated in the global south. Throughout this analysis we focus in particular
on the learners who benefit from multilingual education in formal
schooling, thus questioning who in particular these models are serving
and why, as well as arguing how and why all (multilingual) learners should
be better served by multilingual education within a social justice paradigm.
4.3 The Conceptualisation of Multilingual Education

in European Language Education Policies
Language education policies enacted in the European Union have aimed to

foster multilingualism through formal education systems in Europe since
its creation in 1954. It is important to firstly highlight the use of termin-
ology in these policy documents when referring to different models of
multilingual education as they designate the types of language education
provision implemented, on the one hand, and the sociolinguistic contexts
and types of learners concerned, on the other hand.
The terms foreign language (FL) or modern foreign language (MFL) teach-
ing, for example, are used in policy documents to refer to languages taught

as formal subjects through a limited number of hours (from one to three

hours weekly) (Enever 2018) and are aimed at learners in mainstream
education. The term bilingual education (BE) is employed when two lan-
guages are used as languages of instruction rather than one. Both languages
are thus medium and subject of learning. The term can be used to refer to a
large variety of models in which learning through two languages is bal-
anced in terms of time: 90/10 per cent to 50/50 per cent or less than 50 per
cent for the second language when it is assigned less time than the domin-
ant language of schooling (as in most content and language integrated –
CLIL – learning models).
In European policy documents reference is also made to language learn-
ing with regards to ‘regional’, ‘minority’ (European Commission/EACEA/
Eurydice 2019) and ‘migrant languages’ (Council of Europe 2009). Speakers
of regional/indigenous minority languages are officially entitled to be edu-
cated in or taught the minority language. It is important to specify that the
term ‘minority language’ in official European documents refers solely to
the regional minority languages and that the terms ‘migrant’ or ‘immigrant’
languages are used when making reference to minority languages con-
sidered as non-autochthonous to European countries, and therefore spoken
by migrants or immigrants. As we will see later, this type of labelling allows
for some languages to be accepted as the medium for bi-multilingual
education (for example, bilingual instruction in regional languages such
as Basque or Breton or CLIL provision through dominant European FLs)
whereas speakers of minoritised languages such as Turkish or Arabic are
not provided the same opportunities (Hélot and Erfurt 2016).
These terms also lead us to examine the various models aiming at multi-
lingualism in formal education systems in Europe and their target popula-
tion. At one end of the spectrum we find examples of weak forms of
multilingual education, which rely on the teaching of FLs as subjects
through mainstream education, often maintaining a strict separation of
languages and ignoring the plurilingual repertoire of learners. At the other
end of the spectrum are bi-trilingual models in which regional or minority
languages are given equal status with dominant national languages, and
learners are encouraged to use their entire linguistic repertoire. In such
cases, language practices in the classroom reflect those of multilingual
learners and communities in informal contexts. In the following section
we investigate these models and the learners they serve within the
different contexts.
4.3.1 From Foreign Language Teaching to Bi-Multilingual Education

Efforts to foster multilingualism in Europe through formal education
systems can be seen in multiple European policy documents positioning
competences in the languages of member states as fundamental skills that
need to be acquired through education and lifelong learning (European

Commission 2000, 2002, 2008). The Barcelona European Council conclu-

sions reinforced this foundational principle by proposing that member
states improve their citizens’ mastery of foreign languages by specifically
teaching ‘at least two foreign languages from a very early age’ (European
Commission 2002: 20). In addition, the Council’s Conclusions on
Multilingualism (European Commission 2008: 2) insisted on the importance
of linguistic and cultural competences situating them again at ‘the heart of
education’ and advising that language provision be improved through
‘early language learning, bilingual education and Content and Language
Integrated Learning (CLIL)’.
4.3.2 Foreign Language Learning

Following the recommendations that schools implement language teaching
including the national language plus two FLs from a very early age
(European Commission 2002), the number of primary pupils learning FLs
at school in Europe increased by 16 per cent in 2014, with 83 per cent
studying at least one FL and the mandatory age starting between six and
eight in the majority of European countries (European Commission/EACEA/
Eurydice 2017).
Despite the increase in the number of pupils studying FLs in formal
education systems in Europe and a general trend of children learning an
FL at a younger age, recent statistics show varying outcomes in language
proficiency across countries. The lack of success in promoting multilingual-
ism through FL teaching in Europe is one of the reasons researchers
developed a new approach which they termed CLIL, where FLs became the
medium of instruction, therefore offering learners more exposure to the FL
and access to knowledge through the medium of the FL (Nikula 2016).
4.3.3 The CLIL Model of Bilingual Education

The term CLIL was adopted by European Policy Makers in 1994 and is
considered a specifically European approach to bilingual education
(Nikula 2016). CLIL provision can be implemented with FLs, regional or
minority/territorial languages, and in some cases with migrant languages,
and is implemented in all but 6 European countries (Eurydice 2006).
Provision varies from one country/one school to the next, with 216 different
types of CLIL provision (Coyle 2007) being documented across countries and
contexts. This includes variations in the number of hours of instruction in
the second/third languages, the subjects chosen for provision and the focus
of the instruction (focus on subject content or on language teaching). CLIL is
considered a ‘weak’ form of bilingual education, given the limited number
of hours dedicated to such programmes in certain curricula (Hélot & Cavalli
2017). In the case of minority languages, however, CLIL can become a strong
form of bilingual education in that it allows institutions to redress the

balance of power between the dominant school language and the minority
language which sees its status improved when it becomes a language of
instruction (Hélot & García 2019).
CLIL programmes have been promoted as a kind of panacea to reach the
EU’s objective of developing multilingual citizens. However, concerns have
been raised with regard to the selection processes implemented in many
countries, which are considered to be discriminatory and elitist (Hélot &
Cavalli 2017; Lasagabaster & Sierra 2010; Somers 2017). Officially, eight
European countries (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, the
Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Slovakia) implement selection criteria
in one or several of the following areas: pupils’ general knowledge in
certain subject areas, their knowledge of and proficiency in the target
language, previous academic performance, and pupil motivation. Despite
official statistics stating that the majority of European countries do not
apply such selective measures, Somers (2017) highlights the presence of
covert practices in many countries, which follow a ‘silent agenda of select-
ivity’ (Apsel 2012 cited in Somers 2017: 513). Such practices occur, for
example, when teachers advise parents against enrolling their children in
CLIL programmes because they may be too demanding. Often, this means
that children from low socio-economic and immigrant minoritised lan-
guage backgrounds are excluded from CLIL education programmes.
4.3.4 Multilingual Education in International Languages

Bi-multilingual education has existed in immigration contexts for expatri-
ates of high socio-economic standing in Europe since the first part of the
twentieth century through the medium of International schools (Carder
2007) and since 1953 through the establishment of European schools for
European civil servants (García & Baetens Beardsmore 2009).
International schools were initially designed to serve the same function
as ‘national schools’ but within the context of a foreign country. For
example, French schools abroad are considered international, but the lan-
guage of instruction and curriculum are French, and two FLs are taught as
subjects. Such schools are described as ‘monolingual schools that serve as
linguistic and cultural islands’ to children of expatriates (García & Baetens
Beardsmore 2009: 237).
The ‘European School’ model has a language policy aimed at the develop-
ment of a European identity through the use of two languages of instruc-
tion (the child’s first language and an additional European language) and
the mandatory learning of a third language as a subject. The first language
(designated as dominant language) is the language of instruction starting in
Nursery 1 after which the second European language (English, French or
German) is introduced in the first year of primary school. The third lan-
guage, an official European language, is taught as a subject from the first
year of secondary school. The model thus aims for an additive approach to

multilingualism and places an important emphasis on European values

through the implementation of ‘European hours’ based on project-based
pedagogy and mixing children of different L1 background.
These two models clearly target privileged international migrant
populations. This is in sharp contrast to the situation of the less privileged
children whose families have migrated in search of shelter from war,
persecution or famine. Their languages are still too often perceived as a
handicap for the acquisition of the dominant national languages. Whereas
the plurilingual repertoires of the former are seen as valued cultural and
social capital to be supported (Hélot & Cavalli 2017; Sierens & Van Avermaet
2017), the language competence of the latter are stigmatised and blamed
for poor national evaluation performance and rarely considered as learning
resources to develop multilingual education. The absence of bi-multilingual
education programmes for migrant minoritised speakers, as well as the
lack of qualified teachers and teaching resources in formal education, has
been denounced by many researchers (Nusche 2009; Sierens and Van
Avermaet 2017). Rightly, Sierens and Van Avermaet (2017) explain that
the main obstacle to bilingual or multilingual education for minoritised
language speakers is in fact ideological.
4.3.5 Multilingual Education in Regional Languages

Multilingual education has flourished in bi/trilingual border contexts in
Europe – contexts where borders have shifted due to historical and political
reasons, often multiple times, and therefore where several languages are
used daily by the inhabitants (Hélot & Cavalli 2017). Such areas are found in
Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the
Netherlands and Spain, among others. Ytsma (2001) distinguishes two
categories of border contexts: the first concerns areas in which three school
languages are spoken in the surrounding environment, such as in
Luxembourg, the Ladin Valleys of South Tyrol and the North Frisian area
of Germany; the second category focuses on bilingual programmes in areas
where the population is bilingual and where a third language is taught as
an additional language, as in the Basque Country in Spain, Friesland in the
Netherlands and the Aosta valley in Northwest Italy. In the first case, three
languages are used as languages of instruction at some point in the curricu-
lum. In Luxembourg, for example, the three main languages are introduced
consecutively: Luxembourgish is the mandatory language of instruction in
pre-school (3–5 years), followed by standard German in primary school as
the language of literacy acquisition. French is then introduced as a formal
subject in the second year of primary school, eventually becoming the main
language of instruction at the secondary level (Weber 2014). In the trilin-
gual schools in the Ladin Valleys of South Tyrol, Ladin, German and Italian
are all used as languages of instruction in pre-school. At the primary level,
the bilingual education model is then implemented with an equal number

of hours of instruction in German and Italian and with Ladin being taught
as a subject two hours a week and also used in class as ‘an assistant
language’ (Alber 2012: 409).
Within the second context, bilingual models of education are often
implemented from pre-primary (Basque Country, Aosta Valley) or primary
(Friesland) with an FL (usually English) being introduced as a subject
between the ages of 4 (some schools in the Basque Country), 6 (Aosta
Valley) and 9 (Friesland). Trilingual education is either offered to all stu-
dents (as in the Aosta Valley) or proposed as one of the educational choices
offered to parents (Cenoz 2005; Gorter & Cenoz 2011; Hélot & Cavalli 2017).
In many areas, multilingual schooling has been successfully promoted
due to the rights and status accorded to Regional Minority Languages in
official EU policy documents. The European Charter for Regional or
Minority Languages (1993) guarantees the speakers of regional or minority
languages the right to be educated in these languages (only in countries
having ratified the charter). Given that bilingual education in (national)
regional minority languages is an essential factor in maintaining minority
languages, bi-multilingual education in these languages has contributed to
some degree to their revitalisation (García & Baetens Beardsmore 2009;
Gorter & Cenoz 2011). In addition, research has demonstrated the benefits
for third language acquisition of bi-multilingual education in regional
minority languages particularly, and for the development of (multi)literacy
competences (Cenoz & Gorter 2011; Cenoz & Valencia 1994; Sanz 2000).
However, these same opportunities for the development of multiliteracy
and language maintenance are not available to all minority language
speakers. Whereas the right to bilingual education in regional minority
languages such as those mentioned above are supported by European lan-
guage policies, because these languages are considered part of European
culture and history, immigrant minority languages (also referred to as
‘non-territorial’ languages) do not benefit from the same legitimacy
(Extra & Gorter 2001). Researchers today consider this inequality as an issue
of social justice or a matter of discrimination or glottophobia (Piller 2016;
Blanchet 2016; Conteh 2018; Avineri & al. 2019).
4.4 Multilingual Language Education Policies

in the Global South
Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide an exhaustive

review of multilingual education models around the world, it is nonetheless
of vital importance to extend the discussion of multilingual education in
formal schooling to contexts outside of Europe, as these contexts raise
different questions and challenges. We focus in this section in particular
on three countries – India, South Africa and China, situated in an area
referred to by some authors as the Southern context (Heugh 2018) or

context of the global South. Although each of these countries is different at

the political, historical and social levels, the challenges met by policy-
makers and educators are somewhat similar. These countries differ from
countries in the European (‘Northern’) context due to the number of
national and indigenous languages spoken within their territories and the
fact that most of the inhabitants are multilingual because colonial policies
that imposed European languages in state institutions did not manage to
eradicate local languages. The history of colonisation poses different chal-
lenges concerning the implementation of multilingual education in formal
schooling, in particular with regard to meeting the needs of highly multi-
lingual individuals speaking a great variety of different languages. We
agree with Heugh (2018), who points out that examining these contexts
in which multilingualism ‘is a normal every day practice in schools for both
teachers and students . . . may add value to current debates in northern
countries’.
Another major challenge for policymakers in these countries is the
greater disparities existing between the highly educated middle and upper
classes living in mainly urban areas and benefiting from elite forms of
multilingual education and the economically underprivileged populations
in the rural areas where schools are fewer and under-resourced.
Multilingualism in the highly valued ex-colonial languages or globalised
languages plays a critical role in many debates on multilingual education
policies in such contexts, at times opposing mother tongue activists con-
cerned with the maintenance and survival of learners’ mother tongues with
scholars who argue that access to ‘global’ languages whilst maintaining
mother tongue instruction is a means of providing more social justice for
underprivileged and marginalised populations (Weber 2014). We will use
the same framework as for European contexts, that is distinguishing
between bi/multilingual programmes either reinforcing social hierarchies
or attending to the needs of numerous minoritised student populations,
and consider the role of the English language in reproducing these
inequalities.
4.4.1 Multilingual Education in Colonial

and National/State Languages
The colonial past and use of dominant European languages in post-colonial
countries continues to weigh heavily on language-in-education policies. In
many of these contexts instruction in the medium of the former colonial
language is equated with greater opportunities and access to socio-
economic resources. Despite their role in repression and domination within
the colonial contexts of the past, colonial languages nonetheless became
official national languages and main languages of instruction in many post-
colonial countries after independence and continue to be symbols of pres-
tige and power. In many of these contexts, we find at the top of the

language hierarchy bi-multilingual models (often within the remit of

expensive private schools) in which the post-colonial language and a dom-
inant national or state language (often not the pupils’ L1s) are the languages
of instruction. This is the case, for example, in India, which, despite its
official tripartite language-in-education policy supporting learners’ ‘mother
tongues’, regional languages and the official pan-national languages Hindi
and English, is faced with a growing demand for English-medium instruc-
tion in both urban and rural communities (Canagarajah & Ashraf 2013).
This demand has led to a parallel private education system in which a select
elite who are able to afford the most expensive bi-multilingual schools have
access to the highest quality education and abundant pedagogical resources
whereas those populations who can only afford the lower-tiered fee-paying
schools receive low-quality instruction and suffer from lack of pedagogical
resources leading them to limited proficiency in English. Canagarajah
and Ashraf (2013) highlight the continuing inequity of these models
stressing that:
such differences in types of schooling and English acquisition reproduce

social inequality. The quality of education confirms the social hierarchy
assigned to the children and families of poorer communities. As many
scholars have observed, the major indicator for class in both India and
Pakistan is English.
(Canagarajah & Ashraf 2013: 266)
Outside of private multilingual education in India, multilingual public

schools are also present. In many of these schools children are educated
through a state/regional language, which, depending on the location, may
or may not be the same as their home language. Panda and Mohanty (2015)
also highlight the language hierarchies that exist not only between the
former colonial language and the national state or regional languages but
also between the national state languages and indigenous minority
languages which are often ignored in language-in-education policies.
Furthermore, in some contexts, as state languages may be seen by differ-
ent populations as symbols of domination of one group over another, they
contribute to increasing competition between language groups (such as
Hindi in South India and Putonghua in Hong Kong). In these situations
former colonial languages may serve as ‘neutral’ languages (Bunyi &
Schroeder 2017: 315) promoting their value even more. In addition, in some
post-colonial countries colonial governments favoured mother tongue
instruction for the local population as a means of social domination (through
the denying of access to the language of power), and only provided bilingual
education for the leaders, elite and a select number of the local population
chosen for administrative functions. Thus, following decolonisation, mother
tongue instruction was seen as a means of continued marginalisation and
forbidding access to employment opportunities and social mobility (Weber
2014). This can be seen in contexts such as South Africa where, instead of

rejecting bilingual English-medium schooling in favour of mother tongue

medium instruction, parents insist on having access to English and look
upon mother tongue instruction with a wary eye (Weber 2014).
4.4.2 Multilingual Education in Indigenous languages

Despite evidence of the benefits of mother tongue education for children,
multilingual countries continue to face the challenges of providing multi-
lingual education in the vast number of languages spoken in different
areas. India, for example, has 22 officially recognised languages and 447 lan-
guages identified as spoken by the population (Ethnologue, cited by Groff
2017). South Africa has 11 official languages but a number of ‘pan-ethnic
urban vernaculars’ are also spoken by the many urban inhabitants (Weber
2014: 135). China also has a highly heterogeneous linguistic context com-
prised of 56 ethnic groups. In addition to ‘standard Chinese’ (Putonghua in
its spoken form and Standard Written Chinese as its written form) spoken
by the majority Han group, over 290 languages are spoken by the other
55 ethnic groups (Gao & Wang 2017). Although minority rights and the
right to education in mother tongues are protected in India (Canagarajah &
Ashraf 2013), South Africa and China (Adamson & Feng 2014; Gao & Wang
2017), models which offer instruction in children’s first languages in public
schools often provide instruction in indigenous minority languages in the
early stages of education, but with the aim of rapidly transitioning to
instruction in a dominant national language or, in many cases, to English.
In addition, as higher education in these countries privileges English as the
language of instruction (as well as a major national or regional language in
certain areas), the motivation for children to learn through indigenous and
minority languages decreases among families and parents, who often find
themselves having to choose between supporting the minority language
and increasing their child’s chances of accessing higher education
(Canagarajah & Ashraf 2013; Weber 2014). The complexities and challenges
of providing mother-tongue-based education are discussed in further detail
in the following section.
4.4.3 Mother-Tongue-Based Education Models

4.4.3.1 India
In addition to English, instruction is provided in regular school pro-
grammes in India in 33 languages of which 22 are official languages
recognised in the constitution. Apart from these 22 official languages,
11 other languages including ‘three to five indigenous tribal languages
are used in regular school programmes’ (Panda & Mohanty 2015: 543).
Officially, according to the Three-Language Formula policy, the ‘mother
tongue’ (or regional language) is to be taught for 10 years, as well as an

official national language (Hindi or English) for six years and another
modern Indian or foreign language for three years (Groff 2017). In reality,
however, instruction most often takes place in the official regional lan-
guage of the State (which may or may not be the pupil’s mother tongue),
followed by English as a second language and then the introduction of a
third language as a subject in secondary school – Hindi, or in regions where
it is not the official regional language, Sanskrit or yet another Indian
language (Weber 2014).
This means that many pupils who speak an indigenous (tribal) minority
language are forced into submersion forms of education through a domin-
ant regional language, thus creating a language barrier and most often
leading to academic failure (Panda & Mohanty 2015). Even when the
instruction takes place in the pupils’ ‘mother tongue’, there is often a gap
between the variety of the language spoken at home and the standardised
version taught at school, and this contributes to limited classroom instruc-
tion and increased rates of failure (Khubchandani 2003).
Recently, however, some mother-tongue-based multilingual initiatives
have been implemented in two states, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, in order
to address these problems. In these models an indigenous tribal minority
language is used as the medium of instruction along with a national or state
language and a post-colonial or major European language (usually English).
These experimental programmes were first put in place in 2004 in the state
of Andhra Pradesh in 240 primary schools and in eight tribal languages.
Similar programmes were developed in 2006 in Odisha in 195 schools with
10 tribal languages. The teachers intervening in these programmes come
from the respective language communities and are proficient in the tribal
mother tongue, the state majority language and English. From the start of
primary school, in Grade 1, children’s home languages are used as the
language of instruction and for the development of literacy. In Grade 2,
the state majority languages are introduced for the purpose of developing
oral communication skills with further emphasis on reading and writing
skills in this language starting in Grade 3. English is also taught as a subject
from Grade 1 in Andhra Pradesh and from Grade 3 in Odisha. At the time of
writing, the Odisha programme was functioning in 21 tribal languages in
1,485 schools with over 140,000 students (Grades 1–5) (Mohanty 2019).
Evaluations of these multilingual education initiatives showed positive
effects on academic results, school attendance and participation, as well as
more positive attitudes from teachers and communities (Panda & Mohanty
2015). Despite evidence of the programme’s benefits on pupils’ learning and
engagement, the pilot was unfortunately stopped in Andhra Pradesh due to
the subsequent government’s unwillingness to fund it.
4.4.3.2 Mainland China

The right to mother tongue education in China is protected by law, and
bilingual education in ‘ethnic minority languages’ is considered a form of

recognition of linguistic and cultural identities. Bilingual programmes in

minority languages officially aim to ensure the acquisition and comprehen-
sion of Standard Chinese, thus promoting the integration of ethnic minor-
ities into mainstream Chinese society whilst maintaining and promoting
the cultural and linguistic identities of ethnic minority groups (Gao & Wang
2017: 221). Despite this favourable position towards minority languages in
national language-in-education policies, actual implementation at the local
level varies greatly, with many programmes actually practicing ‘concealed
assimilation’, that is, the main priority being the development of Standard
Chinese (Feng 2007: 271, as cited in Weber 2014: 98).
Adamson and Feng (2014) describe four multilingual models of education
in China in which the mother tongue of a minority group and/or standard
Chinese are used as media of instruction and in which an additional
language, namely English, is taught as a subject. The four models can be
seen as existing on a continuum with strong support for the minority
language on one end and complete absence of instruction in the minority
language on the opposite end.
In the first model, the ethnic minority language benefits from strong
support and recognition at all levels, and the minority language is
employed as the main language of instruction for the first nine years of
schooling with Chinese and English being taught as subjects. The minority
language is also strongly supported by the linguistic landscape and environ-
ment of the school and by the surrounding community. The other two
languages, Chinese and English, are supported and allotted ample time in
the curriculum, leading to a high level of competence in the second lan-
guage, Chinese, and a developing competence in the third language (usually
English).
In the second model, both standard Chinese and the minority language
are used equally as languages of instruction, and the linguistic landscape
and ethnicity of the teachers and pupils of the school also reflect this
‘balance’ (Adamson & Feng 2014: 39). English is introduced as a taught
subject, and instructors are able to use either the minority language or
standard Chinese to scaffold the learning of the third language.
The third model, a subtractive model in which standard Chinese is the
main language of instruction and in which English is taught as a subject,
functions in two different ways according to the population of pupils
attending the school. In mixed community areas in which the linguistic
diversity of the pupils is high but where there is a substantial minority
population, standard Chinese is used as the medium of instruction and the
dominant ethnic minority language in the region is taught as a subject to all
students. This language is taught, however, only in the initial stages of
schooling and loses importance over time. In areas in which one minority
language dominates, the minority language is used as language of instruc-
tion for the first few years but only until Year 3, when all school subjects
are then taught in standard Chinese. These transitional models are often

implemented in locations where the minority language possesses ‘a weak

degree of ethno-linguistic vitality’ or in areas in which the language pos-
sesses a strong degree of vitality but where there is also a large percentage
of Han (the majority ethnic group in China) pupils (Adamson & Feng
2014: 40).
Studies examining multilingual education programmes favouring
mother tongue instruction in China highlight the success of multilingual
education for those minority groups whose languages possess high linguis-
tic and cultural capital such as Korean and Russian due to the role these two
countries play on a global and economic level. Likewise, the geographical
location and ties that some minority groups have to countries outside of
China and their prospective value for economic or political purposes have
also contributed to strengthening positive attitudes towards these minority
languages, thus reinforcing their status and fostering the support they
receive in schools and the communities concerned.
4.4.3.3 South Africa

The constitution of the Republic of South Africa recognises 11 official
languages – isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Sepedi, Setswana, Xitsonga, siSwati,
Tshivenda, isiNdebele, English and Afrikaans – and guarantees citizens the
right to be educated through the (official) language of their choice. This
right is delegated to local school bodies, who in consultation with parents
determine together the languages of instruction. Despite recent language-
in-education policies which make specific reference to the importance of
supporting and fostering additive multilingualism and to providing instruc-
tion in learners’ home languages (Wildsmith-Cromarty & Balfour 2019;
Mohohlwane 2020), the complex linguistic reality of South Africa has made
achieving additive multilingual education challenging. The current
National Curriculum (DBE 2015) states that schools are to provide instruc-
tion in the home language (in one of the official languages) starting in
Reception (pre-school) and continuing in Grades 1–3. A first additional
language (usually English) is introduced in Grade 1. A second additional
language may also be introduced at this level on the condition that the
school provide supplementary hours for this instruction and that it not
impede the learning of the other two languages. One of the aims of intro-
ducing a third language into the curriculum from an early age was to
provide the opportunity for all pupils to learn one African language (DBE
2013). Prior to this policy, the learning of African languages in schools had
mainly been provided for children for whom they were home languages.
Cook (2009, cited in Weber 2014) provides one example of mother tongue
education in schools in Tlhabane and Phokeng in the North West Province
of South Africa. In the schools she observed, the language of instruction in
Grade 1 was standard Setswana, with English also being taught as a subject
at this time and with the third language (most often Afrikaans) being
introduced in Grade 3 (Weber 2014). The curriculum stipulates that pupils

who begin mother tongue education in an African language must shift to

learning through their additional second language, English or Afrikaans, in
fourth grade, as one of these becomes the language of instruction for the
remaining years of schooling; the home language is then only taught as a
subject (Wildsmith-Cromarty & Balfour 2019; Mohohlwane 2020). This
means that pupils whose home language is English or Afrikaans are able
to benefit from instruction in their home language throughout their entire
schooling, whereas pupils whose home language is an African language are
forced to learn through the medium of a second language. According to
Mohohlwane (2020), one of the difficulties in providing continued instruc-
tion in African languages is the lack of sufficient material and human
resources, such as textbooks and qualified teachers in these languages for
lower and upper secondary education.
Given that schools can determine their own language policy in collabor-
ation with parents, some schools offer English immersion starting in
Grade 1, despite studies indicating higher rates of school failure in such
programmes (Wildsmith-Cromarty & Balfour 2019). It is often parents who
demand such programmes out of a fear that mother-tongue-based bilingual
education programmes are ‘second-class’ streams disadvantaging their chil-
dren, as was the case during the apartheid era when through the Bantu
Education act the apartheid government imposed compulsory mother
tongue education for all blacks as a means of increased segregation and a
denial of access to English (Weber 2014). English is also perceived by many
as ‘the language of power and status, and as an “open sesame” by means of
which one can acquire unlimited vertical social mobility’ (Kamwangamalu
2001: 367). And just like in Europe, there is a strong belief that an earlier
start to learning English will provide better chances of mastering this
language.
Yet, the successful implementation of mother tongue education in South
Africa has not been hindered solely by parents’ hopes and demands for
English-medium schooling. Weber (2014) draws attention to standardised
varieties of pupils’ home languages used in mother tongue instruction
which bear little resemblance to most pupils’ home languages. Makoni
et al. (2007: 32) describe these standard varieties as ‘mother tongues in
search of speakers’, ‘written languages – produced as much by colonial
agency as by southern African, and bearing at times little resemblance to
the spoken language of the region’s peoples’.
For example, in the case of those schools in the North West Province
mentioned above, pupils’ home language was not standard Setswana but
street Setswana, ‘a more hybrid urban vernacular that incorporates lexical
material from English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Tsotsitaal’ (Weber 2014: 134).
The language of instruction in such cases is more like a ‘foreign language’
to these pupils, and many of them are more comfortable with English than
with the standard variety of their ‘mother tongue’ (Cook 2009 cited in
Weber 2014: 135). Recently, researchers have questioned the sole use of

the standard variety of the language in mother tongue education, explain-

ing that most children are already multilingual (Makoni et al. 2010; Weber
2014). Murray (2002: 441) highlights that ‘the whole notion of a single
home language or mother tongue has been challenged, and it has been
suggested that for many urban children English is very much part of their
home repertoire’. We address this issue below in our discussion of new
theoretical approaches to multilingual education.
4.5 The Role of English and Dominant European

Languages in Multilingual Education
In our discussion of multilingual education we have systematically

addressed the role of dominant European languages, in particular English,
in bi-multilingual education models and the ambiguous discourses found in
language-in-education policies. With regard to official policy in the
European context, the 2008 European Council conclusions encouraged
education systems to offer access to the ‘broadest possible range of lan-
guages’, to ‘non-European’ languages and to ‘less widely used’ languages
(European Commission 2008: 2) whilst emphasising the need to uphold the
position of European languages as well. Despite these recommendations,
the 2017 statistics show that English remains the most studied foreign
language both at primary (79.4 per cent) and secondary levels (85.2 per
cent) and that it is the declared mandatory language to be studied in most
countries (exceptions to this policy include French as the first mandatory
language in Belgium [German-speaking and Flemish communities] and
some Cantons in Switzerland). It is also the second mandatory foreign
language in Cyprus, Luxembourg and some cantons in Switzerland during
compulsory schooling (European Commission 2017: 43). Officially multilin-
gual countries in Europe have different language-in-education policies from
monolingual states, because they have several official languages (for
example Luxembourg, Switzerland and Finland). In addition, for historical
and political reasons, some Nordic languages are mandatory for all students
in Finland and Iceland. In Finland, the second state language, Swedish or
Finnish, is mandatory depending on the main language of schooling,
whereas Danish is mandatory in Iceland (European Commission 2017: 44).
Despite these European language-in-education policies the dominance of
English everywhere seems to be impossible to counteract. The ideologies
regarding the economic value of English in a globalised world (Ricento
2015) and the discourses on positioning English as an international lan-
guage spoken everywhere have a strong influence on the demands for that
language in education, forgetting that it can in some cases put local lan-
guages in danger.
This said, there are contexts where multilingual education has been
implemented successfully regarding the protection of a minority language

and the pressing demands from parents for English. This is the case of the
Basque Autonomous Country, where English is included in the language
ecology of the education system and where Basque immersion is offered
either with Spanish as a language of instruction or as a taught subject
(Cenoz 2005). This means that children learn English early on but it does
not put the minority language Basque or Spanish at risk.
Within the southern contexts described, English is also the dominant
language in formal schooling, despite the negative impact it has had and
continues to have on endangered indigenous languages. One of the aims of
mother tongue education is the revitalisation of these endangered lan-
guages in the face of the hegemonic spread of English. However, Panda
and Mohanty (2015: 541) draw attention to the entrenched status of English
in India as ‘a language of power, economy, and privileges’, stating that ‘any
reversal of this position seems highly unlikely’. In Southern contexts,
where currently only a small privileged elite population has quality access
to the dominant languages in society, scholars question whether (quality)
English instruction could provide the most equitable educational opportun-
ities to underprivileged marginalised populations (Canagarajah & Ashraf
2013; Vaish 2008; Weber 2014). It seems to be the case that underprivileged
populations suffer from additional challenges compared to their more
privileged peers, such as learning English through a second language (and
not their home language) and lack of appropriate resources and competent,
qualified teachers. Despite these drawbacks, there are also situations where
English may serve as a bridge between different languages or language
varieties and be used as a scaffold to learning.
These issues contribute largely to our discussion below of the need for
more flexible multilingual approaches to language education in formal
education and a better understanding of what it means to learn academic
subjects through the medium of several languages.
4.6 Multilingual Education: New Theoretical approaches
The examples of multilingual education initiatives in formal schooling

presented above describe the many challenges educators face in attempting
to implement equitable multilingual education models that serve learners’
needs. Benson (2014: 17) reminds us that in both Northern and Southern
contexts the aim of many bi-multilingual models is for learners to become
highly proficient language speakers, readers and writers in dominant lan-
guages, with non-dominant language learners participating in these
systems under the same conditions as learners whose home languages are
one of the dominant languages of instruction. Moreover, a ‘Northern mono-
lingual habitus’ continues to pervade research and practice in Southern
contexts (Benson 2014: 12), with many policymakers and educators viewing
the languages present in the classroom as strictly compartmentalised

entities which need to be kept separate and learned or used in isolation.

This contrasts surprisingly with the everyday experience of multilinguals
living in Southern contexts where, outside of the classroom, language
practices continue to be fluid and communication takes place in several
languages without the imposition of such boundaries (Heugh 2018;
Mohanty 2010). The monolingual ideologies and practices prevalent in
schools have been called into question by numerous scholars from both
Northern and Southern contexts who advocate for the implementation of
more dynamic and inclusive multilingual pedagogies. Such pedagogies have
been referred to in a variety of ways: ‘Flexible Multilingual Education’
(Weber 2014), ‘Integrated Plurilingual Education’ (Canagarajah & Ashraf
2013), ‘Functional Multilingual Learning’ (Sierens & Van Avermaet 2014)
and ‘Focus on Multilingualism’ (Cenoz & Gorter 2014), among others.
However, proponents of these flexible approaches all argue for the same
type of multilingual education model in which teachers and learners are
allowed and encouraged to use their full semiotic and plurilingual
repertoire to communicate, learn and make meaning in the classroom
(Hélot & García 2019), and where the focus is on placing learners, and not
only languages, firmly at the centre of educators’ preoccupations (Cenoz &
Gorter 2014; Weber 2014). In Northern contexts, this could mean, for
example, that multilingual pupils whose home languages are different
from the dominant languages of instruction would see their plurilingual
competence put into practice to develop literacy and foster learning.
In the highly multilingual contexts of the South, this would mean
employing flexible multilingual practices, resources and assessment meas-
ures, such as translanguaging, the use of multilingual textbooks, texts and
bilingual evaluations (Canagarajah & Ashraf 2013; García & Li We 2015;
Weber 2014).
The notion of translanguaging has been the main conceptual shift pro-
posed by García (2009) and now taken up by many other researchers in the
field of bi/multilingual education. García and Kano (2014: 261) explain
translanguaging as ‘a process by which students and teachers engage in
complex discursive practices that include all the language practices of
students in order to develop new language practices and sustain old ones,
communicate and appropriate knowledge, and give voice to new socio-
political realities by interrogating linguistic inequality’. The issue of how
to implement such a shift in the role of language and languages in the
appropriation of knowledge is complex, and what it implies among other
aspects for teacher education should not be underestimated. At the heart of
translanguaging pedagogy lies the notion of power and its main aim is to
empower learners:
By deliberately breaking the artificial and ideological divides between

indigenous versus immigrant, majority versus minority, and target
versus mother tongue languages, translanguaging empowers both the

learner and the teacher, transforms the power relations, and focuses the
process of teaching and learning on making meaning, enhancing
experience, and developing identity.
(Li 2018: 15)
Translanguaging also allows teachers to further develop pupils’ metalin-

guistic awareness by drawing on the different languages or language var-
ieties present in the classroom, pointing out similarities and building
bridges between languages. Research and classroom observations have
shown that these practices are already happening in some multilingual
classrooms, but that they are often considered to be transgressions of
explicit or implicit language policies and/or a sign of weakness and lack of
competence on the part of the speakers (Li & Lin 2019; Manan & Tul-Kubra
2020; Probyn 2019; Weber 2014). However, promising research has increas-
ingly been emerging in this field around the world (García & Kleyn 2016;
Duarte 2019; Makalela 2015; Mary & Young 2017; Probyn 2019), contrib-
uting to a greater understanding of the importance and benefits of such
practices for the learners.
4.7 Conclusion: Implications for Educators

and Policymakers
In this chapter we have aimed to present how multilingual education has

been interpreted and implemented in various contexts around the world.
We have focussed on different understandings of multilingual education
and more specifically on which learners actually benefit from such lan-
guage education models; in other words we have questioned whom they
serve, and why, as argued by García (2009), all learners in the twenty-first
century are still not entitled to a language education that answers their
learning needs. In both contexts evoked, multilingual education policy is
still synonymous with learning several languages according to an additive
approach, rather than with a new conceptualisation of language education
based on the actual multilingual practices of learners. We have argued that
this calls for flexible models and pedagogical practices that start with
learners’ plurilingual repertoires and their varied semiotic resources and
whose aims are to implement more equitable and empowering learning
experiences. Achieving such aims, however, requires, both in colonial con-
texts and elsewhere, an understanding of the prevailing role of monoglossic
ideologies and monolingual practices in controlling institutional power and
robbing learners of their voices. In other words, multilingual education is
about reclaiming the voices of so many learners who have been silenced at
school. It is not about adding one, two or three languages in the curricu-
lum, or moving from bilingual education to include a so-called third lan-
guage, but about reconceptualising the relationship between languages in

the plural and the appropriation of knowledge. This requires of educators

and policymakers that they understand this conceptual shift, which implies
three main domains of action: (1) a deeper understanding of the nature of
multilingualism and of the practices of multilinguals; (2) a different
approach to teacher education so that teachers understand the ethical aims
of ‘translanguaging pedagogies’ (García et al. 2017), learn to create
translanguaging spaces (Sánchez et al. 2017) and devise multimodal and
multilingual resources (Canagarajah & Ashraf 2013); and (3) recognition by
policymakers that multilingual teachers speaking minoritised languages
hold the very competences needed by so many learners today to engage in
their understanding of the world and to become critical citizens who can
make their multilingual voices heard (Benson 2017).
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Part Two
Cognition and
Faculties in
Multilinguals

5
Language and Thought
in Multilingual Children
Ashley Chung-Fat-Yim & Ellen Bialystok
In the past 50 years there has been a transformation in opinion from both the
research community and the general public regarding the impact of bilingual
environments on children’s development. The first half of the twentieth
century was characterized by strong negative views that warned of dire
consequences of bilingualism on children’s cognitive ability (Darcy 1953;
Macnamara 1966; Saer 1923). However, following a landmark study by Peal
and Lambert (1962) that reported better performance by bilingual children
than their monolingual peers on verbal and nonverbal tasks, the possibility
emerged that not only might bilingualism not be harmful to children’s
development, but it might in fact be beneficial. A large body of research
conducted since then has contributed to a complex picture in which bilingual-
ism is generally associated with better performance on some cognitive tasks,
particularly those that are based on executive functioning (see Bialystok 2017
for a review), but poorer performance on measures of verbal proficiency (e.g.,
Bialystok et al. 2010). However, not all studies find these effects, particularly
the positive effects on cognitive function (e.g., Antón et al. 2014; Duñabeitia
et al. 2014; Gathercole et al. 2014; Paap & Greenberg 2013; Papageorgiou et al.
2018). What is now clear is that there is no simple binary answer and the
potential impact of bilingualism on children’s cognition must be explained
through multifaceted examinations of relevant factors.
5.1 What Is Bilingualism?
One factor that determines the outcomes of multilingual experience is the

nature of the environment to which children are exposed to and the
Preparation of this chapter was partially supported by grant R01HD052523 from the NIH National Institute of Child
Health and Human Development and grant A2559 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of
Canada to EB.

114 A S H L E Y C H U N G - F AT - Y I M & E L L E N B I A LY S T O K
circumstances under which children are learning and using multiple lan-
guages. Children become bilingual for many reasons, including immigra-
tion (language of the home becomes different from the language in the
community), education (language of the home is different from the lan-
guage of instruction), the presence of multiple languages in the home, and
being raised in a community where multiple languages are used. Hence, the
context of the community, home, and educational system must be con-
sidered, as they each play a role in the child’s language development. Most
of the research has investigated only bilingual environments and their
possible difference from monolingual experiences, but a more nuanced
description of the environment that accounts for the presence of multiple
languages is required to clarify the research results.
Not all multilingual communities provide the same level and quality of
exposure to each language, and the situation is more complex if there are
more than two languages. If the community promotes the home language,
then the child is provided with the opportunity to practice both languages.
Compare, for example, the sociolinguistic profiles of Montreal and Toronto,
both considered to be multilingual cities in Canada. Individuals living in
Montreal are regularly exposed to French and English in all domains
(i.e., work, school, and home), and so both languages are viable options in
every communicative interaction. In contrast, in Toronto, the various lan-
guages tend to be compartmentalized, such that one language is exclusively
used in the home while the other language is exclusively used in the
community or at work. Although Toronto is linguistically diverse, the
language of the community is predominantly English. The reason for
this difference is that Montreal reflects societal bilingualism in which most
people are expected to be able to function in both English and French, but
Toronto represents heritage language bilingualism where diverse home
languages are embedded in a strong majority language culture. This differ-
ence in environmental opportunity to use both (or all) languages is
explained in the Adaptive Control Model by Green and Abutalebi (2013),
in which they outline how these contexts lead to different cognitive out-
comes. In a recent study, Spanish-English bilinguals who lived in three
contexts (Spain, USA, and Puerto Rico) that differed in language use and
support for both languages completed cognitive tasks; despite all partici-
pants using both Spanish and English, the cognitive outcomes depended on
the language use opportunities in each context (Beatty-Martínez et al. 2020).
Linguistic variability also exists within the home environment of
bilingual families. Depending on whether one or both parents speak the
second language and the extent to which that language is directed to the
child, the child will be exposed to multiple languages to varying degrees
(Espinosa et al. 2017). Other individuals, such as caregivers, grandparents,
and siblings, can also impact the way language is being used. For example,
older siblings may communicate with each other and to their younger
sibling in the language of the community, while the grandparents only
communicate in their native language. Cultural factors associated with the

Language and Thought in Multilingual Children 115
language may be valued to varying degrees, and that too will impact the
child’s experience.
Finally, the language of instruction in school or day care can impact the
child’s language development and, in turn, the potential for language to
impact cognitive development. A variety of education options that include
dual-language instruction or instruction in a language other than the
majority community language provide opportunities for children to acquire
multilingual language proficiency (Bialystok 2018 for review). As with the
linguistic environment, the outcomes of these programs depend on the
details of language use.
In addition to these contextual factors, language and cognitive develop-
ment in multilingual children is impacted by individual factors, such as
children’s level of proficiency in each language, how often they use each
language, the age at which they acquired each language, the context of
acquisition for each language, and their language of preference, all of which
are multiplied if there are more than two languages in the child’s environ-
ment. Because bilingualism is a multidimensional construct (Luk & Bialystok
2013), a clear definition for “bilingualism” has been elusive, creating chal-
lenges for researchers, policymakers, and educators. For example, Grosjean
(2012) defined bilingualism as, “the use of two languages or more languages
(or dialects) in everyday life” (p. 5), placing greater emphasis on language
usage, whereas Li (2008) defined a bilingual as “anyone who can communi-
cate in more than one language, be it active (through speaking and writing)
or passive (through listening and reading)” (p. 4), stressing the importance of
proficiency in speaking and understanding. But bilingualism is not meas-
ured or operationalized the same way across studies, so it is not even clear
which definition is relevant for a particular set of outcomes.
Surrain and Luk (2017) reviewed 186 studies published between
2005 and 2015 and found that the labels used to operationalize bilingualism
and the degree to which bilingual experience was reported varied dramatic-
ally. Many studies used general labels for “bilingual” without additional
qualifiers. Proficiency and home language usage were the most frequently
reported factors (77 percent and 79 percent of studies, respectively). Only
67 percent of studies reported the age of acquisition, and an even a smaller
percentage (30 percent) described the sociolinguistic context. Clearly, greater
transparency and systematic methods for measuring and reporting language
context and language background are needed (Byers-Heinlein et al. 2019;
Marian & Hayakawa, 2021). Moving from bilingualism to multilingualism
complicates the equation, but the essential need to ground the interpretation
within a description of the context and individual remains constant.
For these reasons, rather than use “bilingualism” or “multilingualism” as
umbrella terms, an evaluation of the research requires clarifying the spe-
cific language context from which the results emerged on an individual
basis. We will review the evidence for cognitive performance of children in
multilingual environments and evaluate those results in terms of the type
of cognitive ability being assessed and the type of environment children are

experiencing. We will also review how early the effects of multilingualism

are detected, how long these effects last, and how childhood multilingual-
ism can lead to brain plasticity. We will conclude with a brief discussion of
how multilingualism impacts other areas of cognitive functioning, such as
theory of mind, creativity, and problem solving.
5.2 The Cognitive Consequences of Multilingualism
Executive functions are a core set of higher-order mental processes used to

control and coordinate behavior based on changing environmental
demands (Diamond 2013). Previous research has shown that children raised
with two languages outperform monolinguals on nonverbal tasks that
recruit executive functioning (Barac et al. 2014 for a review; Adesope
et al. 2010 for a meta-analysis). The explanation for the effect of bilingual-
ism on executive functioning has been attributed to the finding that bilin-
guals simultaneously activate all languages in parallel, even when only a
single language is required (see Kroll et al. 2012 for a review; Marian &
Spivey 2003), creating the need to monitor the languages in the environ-
ment and select the target language in order to avoid intrusions from the
unwanted language. Routine practice managing attention between lan-
guages has been proposed to fortify executive functioning for other tasks,
including nonverbal purposes (Bialystok 2017; Bialystok et al. 2009).
Much of the literature on the cognitive effects of bilingualism in children
has used the Attentional Networks Task (ANT; Fan et al. 2002), Simon task
(Simon & Rudell 1967), or Dimensional Change Card Sorting Task (DCCS;
Zelazo 2006) to assess executive functioning. Although these simple tasks
involve executive functioning, they lack convergent validity (Valian 2015).
Rather than measuring a single construct, they each engage multiple pro-
cesses. The tasks vary along such factors as domain, complexity, and pro-
cess. Hence, it is an oversimplification to map one task to a single aspect of
executive functioning (Kroll & Bialystok 2013). For instance, in the DCCS,
which is considered to measure cognitive flexibility and set-shifting, chil-
dren are first told to sort a set of cards based on a single dimension (e.g.,
shape) and then halfway through are asked to sort the cards based on the
other dimension (e.g., color). Until about the age of 4, children perseverate
and continue to sort by the first dimension. In order to succeed in this task,
children must avoid attending to the dimension that is now irrelevant to
the task, remember the rule, and flexibly switch from one rule to the other.
Thus, the task involves inhibition, selection, switching, and working
memory, all part of executive functioning. Previous studies have shown
that after the switch, bilingual children are able to more accurately categor-
ize the cards based on the new dimension than monolingual children
(Bialystok & Martin 2004; Carlson & Meltzoff 2008; Okanda et al. 2010).
However, interpreting that performance only in terms of set-shifting

ignores the other relevant processes and therefore misrepresents the per-
formance of bilingual children.
The Attentional Networks Task (ANT; Fan et al. 2002) is a combination of
the flanker task (Eriksen & Eriksen 1974) and cued reaction time task
(Posner 1980) and has been used to measure attention. A child’s version of
the task was created by Rueda et al. (2004) in which the stimuli are rows of
fish instead of arrows. The ANT explores three attentional networks –
orienting, alerting, and executive attention – but most relevant to bilingual
performance is the executive attention network. In the executive attention
condition, children are required to indicate the direction the center fish is
facing when it is surrounded by fish pointing in the same (congruent trial)
or opposite direction (incongruent trial). Specifically, conflict arises from
the interference of the surrounding fish that point in the opposite direc-
tion. To overcome conflict, children must maintain attention on the center
fish and supress interference from the flanking fish. Bilingual children
outperform monolingual children on this task, with higher accuracy on
all trial types (Yang et al. 2011; Yoshida et al. 2011).
The Simon task (Simon & Rudell 1967) is an executive function task that
is used to measure inhibitory control (see Lu & Proctor 1995 for a review).
Children are asked to identify a stimulus by clicking an associated response
key located on each side of the monitor. The stimuli are presented either on
the left or right side of the screen so that half the time the stimulus is
displayed on the same side as its response key (congruent trials) and half the
time it is on the opposite side (incongruent trials). The interpretation is that
inhibition is required to avoid interference from the irrelevant spatial
dimension (i.e., location of the stimulus) and focus only on the relevant
stimulus information (i.e., the identity of the stimulus). Bilingual children
generally perform better than monolingual children on this task (Bialystok
et al. 2005; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok 2008; Morales et al. 2013).
On average, bilingual children outperform monolinguals on all these
executive function tasks. However, all of the factors discussed earlier that
distinguish between bilingual experiences affect performance, creating
variability in the results. Thus, understanding the effects of bilingualism
or multilingualism on these cognitive outcomes requires considering dif-
ferences in linguistic, social, experiential, and educational factors.
5.2.1 Age of Second Language Acquisition

Earlier exposure to a second language and prolonged practice being bilin-
gual produces changes in speech perception (Choi et al. 2018), lexical
representation (Sebastián-Gallés et al. 2005), and brain structure (Wei
et al. 2015). Does earlier acquisition of a second language also produce
greater changes in cognition? Kapa and Colombo (2013) examined the effect
of age of acquisition by comparing monolinguals, early Spanish-English
bilinguals (who spoke English and Spanish prior to the age of 3), and late

Spanish-English bilinguals (who spoke English after the age of 3) on the

ANT task. Overall reaction time was significantly faster for the early bilin-
gual children than the late bilingual or monolingual children, with no
differences on accuracy between groups. Such findings suggest that earlier
acquisition of a second language contributes to an earlier development of
attentional monitoring.
5.2.2 Language Proficiency

Executive functioning may be mediated by second language proficiency,
such that higher vocabulary knowledge in the second language leads to
better cognitive performance. Tse and Altarriba (2014) tested bilingual
children between ages 5 and 9 who varied in their level of proficiency on
the Simon task and found that both first and second language proficiency
predicted performance; the more proficient children were in either lan-
guage, the smaller the Simon effect. Similarly, Videsott et al. (2012) found
that higher scores on linguistic competence, measured by the children’s
and teacher’s ratings of proficiency for Ladin, German, and Italian, was
associated with overall faster reaction times on the ANT task. The children
were from South Tyrol, Italy, where Ladin is the dominant language. At
school, they were instructed half in German and half in Italian. Therefore,
the children in this study were multilingual and proficient in Ladin,
German, and Italian to varying degrees.
Some studies focus on the development of second language proficiency
without taking into account the relative proficiency between the two lan-
guages. Proficiency across languages can be considered to be equivalent if
the child is able to carry out conversations or similar activities in both
languages. Thomas-Sunneson et al. (2018) investigated the effect of degree
of bilingualism on cognitive outcomes in a sample of Spanish-English
children from families with low SES. Degree of bilingualism was operation-
alized as the absolute difference between standardized English and
Spanish vocabulary scores; a score close to 100 indicated perfect balance
between English and Spanish, and lower scores indicated less balanced
proficiency. Results from a regression analysis revealed that more balanced
proficiency in Spanish and English was associated with better performance
on the flanker task. Similar results have been reported in other studies. For
example, Vega and Fernandez (2011) found a positive correlation between a
bilingualism score and perseverative errors on the DCCS card sorting task,
with more “balanced” proficiency between Spanish and English associated
with fewer errors. Goriot et al. (2018) tested Dutch children between ages
4 to 12 who were in the process of learning English through an immersion
and found that children with more balanced Dutch-English ability per-
formed better on the DCCS than did children with less balanced language
ability. Thus, both absolute and relative levels of language proficiency affect
the cognitive outcomes of bilingualism.

5.2.3 Degree of Home Language Usage

Children differ in how much they hear or use each language in the home
with their parents, siblings, or caregivers. Sorge et al. (2017) computed a
bilingualism score based on the responses to the questions about the lan-
guage used by the child when speaking to family members, the language
used by family members when speaking to the child, the language used by
parents when speaking to other family members, and the language used
with various media. Higher scores across these items indicated more bilin-
gual home environments. In addition, the investigators were interested in
attention because it has been shown to impact executive functioning and it
varies naturally amongst individuals. Hence, an attention score was
obtained from parent and teacher ratings on the Strengths and
Weaknesses of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Symptoms and
Normal Behavior Scale (SWAN; Swanson et al. 2012), with higher scores
indicating better attentional control. A regression analysis with perform-
ance on the flanker task as the dependent variable from children who had
some second language exposure showed that both degree of attentional
control and degree of bilingualism independently predicted overall accur-
acy. A significant interaction was also found, such that children low in
attention experienced a greater boost from bilingualism than those who
scored high in attention. Therefore, greater exposure to another language
in the home can positively impact performance on the flanker task.
5.2.4 Immersion
In immersion education, children acquire a second language by attending
education programs in which a portion of the academic subjects are taught
in another language. A study by Carlson and Meltzoff (2008) found no
differences between monolingual kindergarteners and kindergarteners
who had been attending an immersion program for six months on a battery
of executive control tasks that included the ANT task. However, children’s
bilingual experience in this case was very minimal and possibly insufficient
to reveal the benefits found for native Spanish-English bilinguals in the
same study. Poarch and Van Hell (2012) reported similar findings when
comparing German children enrolled in English immersion programs for
less than two years to German-English bilinguals, German-English-L3 tri-
linguals, and German monolinguals: The performance of the second lan-
guage learners did not differ from the monolingual group or the
multilingual groups (bilingual and trilingual group). Nonetheless, their
performance fell somewhere between the monolingual and multilingual
groups, suggesting that these effects emerge gradually, and in proportion to
the amount of practice and fluency.
Evidence that the amount of time enrolled in an immersion program
impacts outcomes was shown in a study by Bialystok and Barac (2012).
Children between 8 and 11 years old who were in the process of becoming

bilingual through immersion education were tested on a set of executive

function tasks. Length of time spent in the immersion program and degree
of balanced bilingualism both explained a significant amount of the vari-
ance in predicting performance on the flanker task, with more immersion
experience and greater balance between the languages being associated
with better performance. Hence, the outcomes of bilingualism depend on
both the proficiency in each language and the amount of time exposed to
each language.
5.2.5 Fluency in More than Two Languages

Considering that monitoring and controlling two languages on a regular
basis has an impact on executive functioning, it is possible that the addition
of a third language would yield additional beneficial effects to executive
functioning. Poarch and Van Hell (2012) asked school-aged children
between 5 and 8 years old who were German monolinguals, German-
English bilinguals, and German-English-L3 trilinguals to perform the ANT
and Simon task. On both tasks, the bilingual and trilingual children showed
a smaller conflict effect than did the monolingual group, with no differ-
ences between the bilingual and trilingual groups. Similar results were
reported by Poarch and Bialystok (2015), who compared children between
8 and 11 years old who were monolingual, partially bilingual (native
English speakers with an average of 2 years of French), bilingual (who spoke
a non-English language in the home), or trilingual (who spoke two non-
English languages at home) on a flanker task. Bilingual and trilingual
children outperformed partially bilingual and monolingual children, with
no differences between the bilingual and trilingual children. Finally, chil-
dren studying French in an immersion program in an English-speaking
environment performed a flanker task better as a function of their level
of French-English bilingualism with no additional modification in perform-
ance for those children who spoke a third language at home (Chung-Fat-
Yim et al. 2020). Together, these findings suggest that regular maintenance
of at least one additional language is sufficient to reap the enhanced
cognitive benefits associated with bilingualism with no additional modula-
tion for more languages. However, it should be noted that in most studies,
children are simply designated as monolingual or bilingual even though
some of the bilingual children may speak additional languages, but inad-
equate detail is provided in those reports (see Surrain & Luk 2017 for a
discussion). Therefore, more directed research on potential differences
between bilingualism and multilingualism is necessary before clear conclu-
sions can be drawn.
Together, these studies show that earlier exposure to a second language,
more balanced proficiency between languages, greater use of home lan-
guage, and longer exposure in an immersion program impact children’s
development of executive functioning. The pattern is that the more fluently

bilingual or more balanced the individual’s bilingualism is across the two

(or more) languages, the better the behavioral performance. Importantly, in
each case, the effect of bilingualism was manifested differently. In some
studies, the effect was found in the incongruent condition or the conflict
effect (e.g., Poarch & Van Hell 2012; Tse & Altarriba 2014), while for others
it was in overall reaction time and accuracy (e.g., Kapa & Colombo 2013;
Sorge et al. 2017). Hence, greater precision is needed in the descriptions of
the type of bilingualism and the type process the task is measuring.
5.3 How Early Do These Differences Emerge?
Being raised in a multilingual household from birth requires infants to

continuously monitor the incoming speech stream for phonemic variations
between languages from multiple sources in their environment. Demands
are placed on the attention system as the infant gains an understanding
that certain languages are only spoken and understood by certain interlocu-
tors. Thus, infants raised with two languages have complex linguistic
environments and need to adapt to these demands by deploying attentional
resources differently from those in monolingual environments in order to
successfully recognize and discriminate between languages.
Remarkably, infants raised in a bilingual household are able to distin-
guish between languages more efficiently than infants raised in a monolin-
gual household. Weikum et al. (2007) explored infants’ capacity to visually
discriminate between languages by presenting 4-, 6-, and 8-month-old
infants, who were either exposed to English only or to French and
English, with a silent video of a speaker who recited sentences in one of
the languages. When habituation had decreased looking time to 60 percent,
the speaker switched languages and recited sentences in the other lan-
guage. All infants aged 4 and 6 months looked significantly longer at the
switch trials, but only the bilingual infants detected a language switch at
8 months of age from the visual cues. The same videos of French-English
sentences were used in a second study with Spanish or Catalan monolin-
guals and Spanish-Catalan bilingual infants who had no exposure to French
or English (Sebastián-Gallés et al. 2012); the findings replicated those in the
original study. Therefore, the need to attend to regularities in speech and
keep track of perceptual information from each language since birth
heightens attentional ability to detect and remember perceptual cues.
During the first year of life, infants typically shift their attention from
the eyes to the mouth of a speaker. This shift is useful for language
acquisition because of the salient visual cues that are relevant for language
production (Lewkowicz & Hansen-Tift 2012). Pons et al. (2015) showed a
silent video in either the native (Spanish or Catalan) or non-native language
(English) to 4-, 8-, and 12-month-old Catalan or Spanish monolinguals and
Catalan-Spanish bilinguals. Eye-tracking data revealed that monolingual

infants at 4 months of age looked longer at the speaker’s eyes, at 8 months

of age looked longer at the mouth regardless of the language spoken, and at
12 months of age looked equally at eyes and mouth but only in response to
native speech. Bilingual infants, in contrast, showed equivalent preference
for the eyes and mouth regardless of the language at 4 and 8 months. At 12
months, bilinguals looked longer at the mouth of a speaker regardless of
the language, suggesting that bilingual infants have an earlier start in the
important attentional shift from eyes to mouth, possibly facilitating devel-
opment of both languages.
These studies show differences in attention to language by infants, but
the cognitive effects of bilingualism are domain-general and extend to
nonverbal domains. The first study to examine such differences in infants
was conducted by Kovács and Mehler (2009). Seven-month-old monolingual
and bilingual infants completed an anticipatory reward task. In the pre-
switch trials, infants were presented with a meaningless string of trisyllabic
words (ABA pattern) followed by a reward that always appeared on the
same side of the screen. In the post-switch condition, infants were pre-
sented with different trisyllabic words (AAB pattern) with the reward
presented on the opposite side of the screen, so they had to redirect their
gaze to the new location. Both groups correctly anticipated the location of
the reward in the pre-switch trials, but only the bilingual infants success-
fully made anticipatory looks to the new location of the reward.
In the design by Kovács and Mehler (2009), the reward was always in the
same location in the pre-switch condition regardless of the cue, so it is
possible that the results did not reflect better attentional control but rather
a novelty preference for bilinguals and a familiarity preference for mono-
linguals. Comishen et al. (2019) addressed this concern by using a visual
expectation cueing paradigm and recording the eye movements of infants
raised in monolingual households and bilingual households on this para-
digm. In the pre-switch condition, a checkerboard predicted a reward on
the left side of the screen and a bullseye cue predicted the reward on the
right. Both monolingual and bilingual infants were able to form expect-
ations and make similar anticipatory eye movements towards the reward.
After the switch, each cue predicted the target on the opposite side,
demanding greater attention. When the cue-location pattern switched,
performance of monolingual infants was reduced to chance, but bilingual
infants continued to correctly anticipate the target’s location. Thus, infants
raised in bilingual environments allocated their attention more efficiently
than monolingual infants when updating expectations to create new
associations.
The findings from the infant studies demonstrate that as early as
4 months of age and within the first year of life, the home language
environment plays a role in shaping attention to linguistic and nonlinguis-
tic information. These results are dramatic considering the infants are
preverbal and are still in the process of mastering language, and yet

differences in the allocation of attention emerge between those raised in

monolingual and bilingual households. This earlier development of atten-
tion for bilinguals is a plausible basis for the observed effects of bilingual-
ism on executive functioning.
5.4 How Long Do These Differences Last?
Continued effects of bilingualism on cognitive function have been reported

across the lifespan (see Bialystok 2017 for a review). However, in the young
adult population, behavioral studies often yield mixed findings, in which
some studies report differences between language groups (e.g., Costa et al.
2008; Prior & MacWhinney 2010) and others do not (e.g., Bialystok et al.
2005; Gathercole et al. 2014; Paap & Greenberg 2013). It has been proposed
that young adults are operating at peak efficiency on these simple tasks, so
performance is at ceiling. Adolescence falls between childhood, where
effects are found, and young adulthood, where they typically are not. Do
the differences observed in childhood persist into adolescence or do they
diminish and plateau? Adolescence is a key developmental period because
executive functioning is continuing to develop and many physiological,
hormonal, and structural changes occur (Blakemore & Choudhury 2006;
Carlson et al. 2013).
Chung-Fat-Yim et al. (2019) tested monolingual and bilingual high school
students on a flanker task. The task was modified to include several levels
of difficulty by introducing a color cue to determine the response. On the
block that presented the conventional flanker task, bilingual adolescents
were faster on all trial types than monolingual adolescents. The conditions
that incorporated the color rule, making the task more difficult, produced
no differences between language groups. It is possible that this color rule
changed the task from one requiring the avoidance of interference,
for which bilingual effects are routinely found, to one requiring the inhib-
ition of a prepotent response, for which monolinguals and bilinguals do
not differ (Barac et al. 2016; Carlson & Meltzoff 2008; Martin-Rhee &
Bialystok 2008).
Krizman et al. (2012, 2014) compared performance between English
monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual adolescents on the Integrated
Visual and Auditory Continuous Performance Task. The task presents a
string of 1s and 2s visually or auditorily in pseudorandom order, and
participants indicate if a 2 (and not a 1) was presented. Bilinguals were
more accurate than monolinguals in discriminating between stimuli and
monitoring for the correct target information, providing evidence that
bilingual adolescents attend to sensory information differently than
monolingual adolescents.
The adolescent studies described above included bilinguals who learned
their second language at an early age. Do the effects of bilingualism extend

to bilinguals who learn their second language later in life in secondary

school? Christoffels et al. (2015) compared two groups of late bilinguals
from the same school on the global-local task. The first group pursued their
studies in an immersed bilingual environment (Dutch and English), while
the other group was instructed exclusively in Dutch. In the global-local
task, participants are presented with either rectangles and squares (global
feature) that are composed of smaller rectangles or squares (local feature),
and participants make judgments about the global or local feature. The
dependent variables were switch costs and the global precedence effect.
Switch cost is the difference in reaction time between switch trials and non-
switch trials in the mixed block. The global precedence effect (GPE) occurs
when there is a bias to attend to the global information and is calculated as
the additional time needed to respond to local than global information.
Bilingually educated students had smaller switch costs and GPE than those
who were instructed in Dutch only. The authors concluded that adolescents
educated in a dual-language environment had better attentional scope than
those educated in a single-language environment.
Bilingual adolescents, like bilingual children, are more adept at nonver-
bal tasks based on conflict or detection than their monolingual peers. These
students are learning and maintaining another language in school,
engaging with media in a foreign language, or pursuing their studies
abroad, yet are experiencing the same effects of bilingualism found for
children. Adolescents also have a better understanding than children of
the value of languages for work opportunities or the preservation of their
cultural identity. Thus, the motivation for learning another language will
be different for this age group than for children.
5.5 Brain Development in Multilingual Children
With the advancement of noninvasive neuroimaging techniques, research-

ers have been able to gain a better understanding of how early exposure to
multiple languages shapes the brain. Neuroimaging data have revealed
group differences in structural, functional, and electrophysiological
measures.
5.5.1 Language Processing

Event-related potentials (ERP) studies have found processing differences
between monolingual and bilingual children in their ability to discriminate
between languages (Kuipers & Thierry 2012) and extract semantic infor-
mation (Kuipers & Thierry 2015). ERPs measure electrical brain activity at
the surface of the scalp and are time-locked to a specific event. The
resulting wave forms represent an average of the activity from similar
trials, consisting of negative and positive peaks. Each peak is labeled

according to its position within the waveform post-stimulus onset

(e.g., P300 is a positive-going peak at 300 ms) and typically serves as an
index of a particular cognitive process. Kuipers and Thierry (2012, 2015)
found that the differentiation between languages (English versus Welsh;
Kuipers & Thierry 2012) or semantic information (semantically related
versus unrelated; Kuipers & Thierry 2015) occurred at an earlier time
window for bilingual toddlers (P2, a positive-peak occurring approximately
200ms) than monolingual toddlers (P3, a positive-peak occurring approxi-
mately 300ms). These findings suggest that earlier exposure to multiple
languages afforded bilingual toddlers the ability to detect and categorize
information more readily than monolinguals, as they are continuously
attending to detailed information in the environment.
Magnoencephalography (MEG) uses electrophysiological signals to pin-
point the timing and the location of activity in the brain by detecting changes
in magnetic fields. Ferjan Ramírez et al. (2017) compared the brain signal of
speech sounds in 11-month-old infants from Spanish-English households to
those of age-matched infants from monolingual English households. Infants
listened to speech sounds that were specific to either English, Spanish, or
common to both languages while MEG recordings were taken. Bilingual
infants were sensitive to both languages, but also showed stronger responses
in the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortex than monolingual infants. These
areas are largely associated with executive functioning skills.
Using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), Jasinska and Pettito
(2013, 2014) asked English monolingual, early-bilingual (exposure to both
languages since birth), and late-bilingual children (exposure to second lan-
guage around ages 4 to 6), between the ages of 7 and 10 years to perform a
single-word reading task in English. The non-English languages consisted of a
wide variety of languages, including Cantonese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Tamil,
Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi, Spanish, Russian, German, and Greek, although most
of the children were English-French bilinguals. Regular, irregular, and non-
sense words were presented sequentially while children read each word aloud
into a microphone. Compared to monolinguals, both early- and late-bilingual
children showed greater bilateral activation in the classic language areas (left
inferior frontal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, and inferior parietal lobule)
and homologous areas in the right hemisphere. Bilinguals also had greater
activation in the prefrontal cortex, an area typically used for executive con-
trol tasks. These findings replicate those of Ferjan Ramírez et al. (2017) who
also reported greater activation of the areas associated with executive func-
tioning by bilinguals when engaging with linguistic information.
5.5.2 Nonverbal Processing

There is limited research that examines brain function while children
perform nonverbal executive control tasks, so little is known about how
bilingualism might modify these relations. Barac et al. (2016) asked 5-year-

old monolingual and bilingual children to perform a go/no-go task while

their EEG was recorded. The instructions were to press a button if a purple
shape appeared and withhold a response if a white shape appeared.
Bilinguals had an earlier N2 and P3 than monolingual children as well as
a larger P3 amplitude. The N2 and P3 components are considered to be an
index of conflict monitoring and attentional processes, respectively. Brain–
behavior correlations revealed that shorter latencies on the N2 and P3, as
well as larger P3 amplitude, were associated with better discriminability on
the go/no-go task (d prime score) for the bilingual group only. These results
suggest that bilingual children are more efficient at detecting and resolving
conflict than monolingual children on nonverbal tasks.
Della Rosa et al. (2013) tested multilingual children around 10 years of
age at two time points over the span of one year to investigate changes in
structural grey matter density and the conflict effect (incongruent–
congruent trials) on the ANT task. The children were from South Tyrol,
immersed in a multilingual environment, and were proficient in Ladin,
German, and Italian. A negative correlation between the child’s “multilin-
gual competence” and conflict effect was found, illustrating that children
who were more multilingual had less interference from incongruent trials.
Furthermore, an increase in grey matter volume in the left inferior parietal
gyrus (LIPG) between the two testing times was related to the conflict
score and to the child’s degree of multilingual competence, such that
children who were more multilingual showed larger increases in grey
matter volume in the LIPG, an area known for domain-general attentional
processes. Arredondo et al. (2017) employed fNIRS on Spanish-English bilin-
gual children and monolingual children to test activation in prefrontal
cortex during the ANT task. Bilinguals had greater activation in the left
prefrontal cortex during incongruent trials relative to congruent trials,
while monolingual children showed larger prefrontal activation in the right
hemisphere. The left hemisphere specialization for bilinguals can be
explained as the overlap in recruiting the same regions for language pro-
cessing and nonverbal attentional control.
5.5.3 Brain Structure

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has been used to measure the rate and
directionality of water diffusion in the axonal cell membrane and is a
strong indicator of cognitive function. It is generally indicated by fractional
anisotropy (FA). Increased FA has been associated with improved reading
performance in children (Deutsch et al. 2005) and executive functioning
(O’Sullivan et al. 2004). Mohades et al. (2012) found higher FA values in the
left inferior occipitofrontal fasciculus (lIFOF) for those who acquired two
languages from birth (simultaneous bilinguals) than children who acquired
a second language after the age of 3 (sequential bilinguals) and monolingual
children. The lIFOF is the bundle of nerve fibers that connects the anterior

regions of the brain to the posterior regions in the temporal occipital lobes.
A higher FA value for this bundle signifies faster and more efficient trans-
mission of semantic information. When the same children were tested two
years later (Mohades et al. 2015), the FA in the lIFOF increased only in the
sequential bilinguals and was related to the amount of time they spent
using two languages. These data show that second language acquisition and
usage can produce maturation in the areas of the brain associated with
language processing.
The neuroimaging literature demonstrates that early childhood bilin-
gualism reshapes the brain. Bilingual children are more efficient than
monolingual children at discriminating between stimuli in both verbal
and nonverbal domains. There is also greater activation in areas of the
brain associated with executive functioning for bilinguals when performing
nonverbal tasks. Unlike monolinguals, bilingual children engage areas
typically associated with executive functioning when processing verbal
information.
5.6 Domains That Involve Integrative Cognitive Processing
All the effects discussed to this point were found by using controlled
laboratory tasks. How does a difference in milliseconds between monolin-
guals and bilinguals on a simple executive functioning task manifests in the
real world? Bilingualism has also been examined in more integrative
domains that mirror real-life scenarios, such as theory of mind, creativity,
and mathematical reasoning.
5.6.1 Theory of Mind

Theory of mind is the ability to infer the mental states of others, including
their intentions, attitudes, and beliefs, in order to understand that another
person can have a perspective that is different from one’s own. This ability
develops late in children and marks a significant cognitive achievement.
One task that is frequently used to assess theory of mind in children is the
Sally–Anne task (Baron-Cohen et al. 1985). Children see a character named
Sally put a marble into a basket. Sally then leaves the scene, and while
away, a second character named Anne removes the marble from the basket
and puts it into a box. Sally then returns to retrieve the marble. The key
question for the child is: “Where will Sally look for the marble?” The
correct answer is that Sally will look in the basket, because that is where
she put it. However, the child knows that the marble is in the box and has
to understand that Sally does not know that. This is the essence of theory of
mind. Typically, 3-year-old bilingual children outperform their monolin-
gual peers on standard false belief tasks, such as the Sally–Anne task (see
Rubio-Fernández 2017 for a review), and a meta-analysis of 16 studies found

a small bilingual advantage on raw theory of mind scores (Schroeder 2018).

When controlling for language proficiency, the effect of bilingualism
increased. Earlier development of theory of mind abilities for bilinguals
has been shown as well on other false belief tests, such as the unexpected-
location and unexpected-contents tests (Farhadian et al. 2010; Goetz 2003;
Kovács 2009), as well as nontraditional theory of mind tests, such as
perspective-taking tasks (Fan et al. 2015; Greenberg et al. 2013).
Several accounts have been proposed for why bilingual children show
superior performance on theory of mind tasks. One view focuses on the
relationship between theory of mind and executive functioning, and in
particular inhibitory control (Carlson & Moses 2001; Carlson et al. 2002).
From this perspective, children raised in a bilingual environment are able
to inhibit their own mental state in order to accept the alternatives.
Another account attributes the effect of bilingualism on theory of mind
to metalinguistic awareness. It is generally acknowledged that bilinguals
have better metalinguistic awareness than monolinguals (Altman et al.
2018; Friesen & Bialystok 2012), this appreciation that a concept can have
different labels may facilitate the understanding that two people can have
different mental states for the same event. Finally, Rubio-Fernández (2017)
proposed that bilingual children may be better at effectively managing
their attention than monolingual children. False belief tasks require focus-
ing on an agent through a series of events that may disrupt the process of
tracking the protagonist’s perspective. Bilingual children may be less sus-
ceptible to the misleading information than monolingual children and as a
result can easily revert their attention back to the protagonist’s perspective.
These accounts for language group differences in theory of mind have
also been used to explain why bilingual children are better than monolin-
guals at interpreting complex meanings in ambiguous figures. Ambiguous
figures are optical illusions in which one image can portray two different
referents (e.g., duck/rabbit). Once one interpretation is perceived, it
becomes difficult to ignore the salient features associated with that inter-
pretation. In order to perceive the competing image, selective attention is
required to disengage attention from the first perspective and shift atten-
tion towards the features relevant to the new meaning. With children,
ambiguous figures tasks are typically administered by first presenting the
child with an ambiguous image (duck/rabbit). They are then asked to name
the image and point to features that are consistent with that interpretation,
such as the duck’s beak. The experimenter then informs the child that the
image can also be something else. If the child correctly names and points to
features that support the alternative image, they are awarded full points. If
the child is unable to perceive the alternate image, the child is shown one
salient feature from the alternative image, such as the rabbit’s ears. If
children can perceive the new interpretation and point to features that
are consistent with the alternate image, they are awarded one point less.
The point system continues until the child is able to correctly identify the

alternate image. Using this system, bilingual children score higher than
monolingual children and require fewer cues to perceive the alternative
image (Bialystok & Shapero 2005; Wimmer & Marx 2014).
5.6.2 Creativity and Problem Solving

Creativity is defined as the ability to generate new ideas or new connections
based on the processes of divergent and convergent thinking (Simonton
2008). Divergent thinking is the ability to generate as many unique ideas as
possible to a problem whereas convergent thinking is the individual to
identify the single best solution to a problem (Cropley 2006). The
Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT; Torrance 1998) tests aspects of
divergent and convergent thinking by evaluating responses along four
dimensions: fluency, originality, elaboration, and flexibility. Fluency is
the total number responses produced; Originality is the degree to which
responses differ from one another; elaboration reflects the amount of
detail; flexibility is the ability to fluidly switch between ideas. Leikin and
Tovli (2014) found that 5-year-old Russian-Hebrew bilingual children had
higher scores in fluency, flexibility, and originality on the TTCT than
Hebrew monolingual children. Lee and Kim (2011) examined the role of
proficiency and found that the more balanced the bilingual based on rela-
tive proficiency in Korean and English, the higher the scores on a composite
measure of the TTCT.
Adi-Japha et al. (2010) compared creativity evident in the drawings of
English-Hebrew and Arabic-Hebrew 4- and 5-year-old bilinguals to their
English or Hebrew monolingual counterparts. Children were asked to draw
an object, such as a house, a person, or an animal, that does not exist.
Typically, children before the age of 7 make size adjustments or shape
deletions within their drawings and then progress towards more detailed
drawings by adding extra elements from the same representation or
adopting features from other categories (Karmiloff-Smith 1990). Cross-
category insertions are more sophisticated than within-category deletions
because cross-category insertions require synthesizing different representa-
tions and “thinking outside the box.” Adi-Japha et al. (2010) found that
bilingual children generally inserted features from other representational
categories in their drawings, such as drawing a flower as a heart, called a
cross-category insertions, whereas monolingual children showed within-
category deletion, such as drawing a flower without petals. Therefore,
bilingual children produce inter-representational changes earlier than
monolingual children possibly due to the need for bilinguals to flexibility
switch between languages.
Executive functioning is also important for mathematical achievement
(Bull & Lee 2014 for a review). When presented with a mathematical
problem, one must focus on the relevant information while ignoring mis-
leading details, shift attention between different types of mathematical

operations, and maintain the goal and sub-steps in working memory.

Hartanto et al. (2018) found that bilingualism positively predicted teacher-
rated mathematical reasoning, emergent numeracy, mathematical word
problems, and standardized mathematical assessments in pre-
kindergarteners aged 4 to 5. In another study, 8-year-old German monolin-
gual children were compared to age-matched Turkish-German bilinguals on
mathematical problems that varied in their demands for attentional con-
trol (Kempert et al. 2011). Monolingual children outperformed bilingual
children on problems without distractors, but that effect was due to the
monolinguals’ stronger proficiency in German. However, when the math-
ematical problems included distractors that required attentional control,
no significant differences between groups emerged. Therefore, when com-
paring monolingual and bilingual performance on mathematical word
problems, it is important to consider the level of proficiency in the language
in which the test is administered as this could be mediating the
observed effects.
Much of mathematical ability is assessed through standardized tests. Are
there differences in outcomes attributable to children’s language environ-
ment? Marian et al. (2013) examined the effect of bilingual education on
mathematics achievement in students from third to fifth grades enrolled in
a two-way immersion program. Across all three grades, bilingual students
had higher scores on the standardized tests than did monolingual students
enrolled in the traditional classrooms.
5.7 Conclusion
The effect of bilingualism is pervasive and has ramifications for cognitive

processes and brain structure from a very young age. Within the first year
of life, preverbal bilingual infants attend more carefully to subtle changes
in their environment, shaping the way in which attentional resources are
being deployed. Mere exposure to multiple languages at an early age can
impact cognition. In childhood and adolescence, several factors related to
language experience were shown to modulate performance on executive
function tasks. Despite the variability in measures used and how bilingual-
ism was defined across studies, a consistent pattern emerged; the more
bilingual the linguistic profile, the better their cognitive performance.
To account for the individual differences in language experience, recent
studies treat bilingualism as a continuous variable by creating individual
scores for children on the degree of bilingualism and determining its
impact on performance (e.g., Chung-Fat-Yim et al. 2020; Sorge et al. 2017;
Thomas-Sunneson et al. 2018). By adopting a more nuanced and multifa-
ceted approach to studying bilingualism, the research captures a greater
range of linguistic and demographic variability. Future studies should
continue to move away from treating bilingualism as a dichotomous vari-
able by examining the factors that interact with bilingualism along a

continuum. The lack of consistency across studies in the definition of

bilingualism and categorization of participants may be in part responsible
for the mixed findings reported in the literature.
Differences in language experience and abilities appear to impact the
course of executive function development in children. Only a small number
of studies have compared these effects in children who know two or more
than two languages, but the preliminary evidence suggests that the number
of languages beyond monolingualism does not fundamentally alter these
developments. Therefore, the relevant category is multilingualism in gen-
eral rather than a distinction between two or more than two languages. Yet
many questions remain unanswered. Future studies should consider con-
ducting longitudinal studies to trace the development of executive function
over time in children, as they are still in the process of mastering language.
Longitudinal studies provide information not only the trajectory of lan-
guage acquisition, but also the dynamic interplay between language abil-
ities and executive function abilities, while accounting for intra-individual
and inter-individual differences. By examining the relationship between
verbal and nonverbal skills in childhood, we gain a better understanding
of how these factors interact in explaining the effects of multilingualism
across the lifespan.
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6
Multilingual Exposure
and Children’s Effective
Communication
Satomi Mishina-Mori
6.1 Introduction
This chapter discusses the possible cognitive and socio-cognitive benefits

children may enjoy due to multilingualism. More specifically, I argue that
children acquire advanced communication skills through everyday engage-
ment in multilingual interaction with their family members and surround-
ings from the earliest stages of development. As background, I will first
outline the major findings on the nature of multilingual language develop-
ment, parental input, and parent–child interactions in multilingual
families in order to understand the context in which multilingual children
may acquire their assumed advanced abilities in communication. I then
provide an extensive overview of current research scrutinizing the
advanced abilities multilingual children develop in the earliest years of life.
This review will cover cases of multilingual first language acquisition
(Unsworth 2013), which refers to the acquisition of two or more languages
from before the age of 3, a cut-off age generally used to distinguish between
simultaneous and successive development of multiple languages
(McLaughlin 1978; Paradis et al. 2011). Cases of bilingual first language
acquisition (BFLA hereafter) (De Houwer 2009) involve children acquiring
two languages from birth mainly through a one person-one language (OPOL
hereafter) environment, one of which is typically the majority language of
the community. Cases of trilingual first language acquisition (TFLA) (De
Houwer 2009) in this chapter will refer to children acquiring two minority
languages in OPOL environments, with the third language being the major-
ity language of the community (Hoffmann 2001). Although this handbook
makes a clear distinction between bilingual and multilingual development
and focuses on the latter, the current review will draw on studies from both
bilingual and multilingual (trilingual) first language acquisition, as many of
the studies of bilingual children preceded those of multilingual children
and can give meaningful insight into multilingual development.

142 S AT O M I M I S H I N A - M O R I
6.2 Bilingual/Multilingual Acquisition in the Incipient

Stages of Development
This section will review studies of the simultaneous acquisition of multiple

languages, all of which endeavor to clarify the similarities and differences
in the features and paths of acquisition between monolingual and multilin-
gual development. These studies show a clear indication of multiple linguis-
tic capacities developing in these children from the very beginning of their
lives, which will help us understand the nature of the cognitive and social
advantages these children may have.
6.2.1 The Capacity to Acquire Multiple Languages

Numerous studies of the earliest stages of bilingual development have
supported the idea that with a certain amount of exposure and experience
in the two languages, children will develop the two languages simultan-
eously as two separate systems (e.g., overall language development: De
Houwer 1990; Genesee 1989; phonology: Paradis 2001; vocabulary: De
Houwer et al. 2014; Pearson & Fernandez 1994; syntax: Gawlitzek-
Maiwald & Tracy 1996; Lindholm & Padilla 1978a, 1978b; Meisel 1989;
Mishina-Mori 2002; Paradis & Genesee 1996; Sinka & Schelletter 1998). In
the 1970s and 1980s, a majority of researchers in the field argued for an
unseparated unified language system at the incipient stages of language
development, the so-called Unitary Language Development Hypothesis
(ULDH hereafter), based on the observations that children mix the two
lexicons, and that they use the different respective syntactic structures
alternatively (Vihman 1985; Volterra & Taeschner 1978). However, an
influential article by Genesee (1989) has propagated the idea that the
ULDH has serious flaws. More specifically, Genesee argued that (1) chil-
dren mix the two lexicons for much the same reasons adult bilinguals mix
languages, such as a lack of vocabulary in one language or adjusting
language choice to that of the interlocutor, and (2) there is far more
evidence showing that children do not use the respective syntactic
structures alternatively.
De Houwer (1990), on the basis of a comprehensive analysis of a simul-
taneous bilingual child acquiring Dutch and English, presented clear
and strong evidence for a separate development of the two language
systems among these children. Furthermore, numerous studies analyzing
different structures in children acquiring a variety of language pairs –
English and French (Genesee et al. 1995; Paradis 2001; Paradis & Genesee
1996), French and German (Meisel 1989), English and Latvian (Sinka &
Schelletter 1998), English and German (Gawlitzek-Maiwald & Tracy
1996, Sinka & Schelletter 1998), English and Spanish (Lindholm & Padilla
1978a, 1978b; Pearson & Fernandez 1994), and English and Japanese

Multilingual Exposure and Children’s Communication 143
(Mishina-Mori 2002, 2005) – provided further evidence for this claim in the
areas of lexical, phonological, and syntactic development.
Studies of early trilingual first language development also favor separate
development, showing that trilingual children’s uses of each language are
comparable to those of their monolingual peers (Mikes 1991; Montanari
2009, 2010; Quay, 2001), although the number of studies is still limited and
future investigations are necessary. Mikes (1991) is one of the earliest studies
focusing specifically on the simultaneous development of the morphosyntax
of three languages at the incipient stages of language development, showing
that two young children exposed to Hungarian, German, and Serbo-Croatian
from birth have three separate grammars, a finding parallel to the results of
many bilingual studies. Quay (2001) followed this by conducting a thorough
investigation of the development of a Japanese, German, and English trilin-
gual child growing up in Japan, and then Montanari (2009) reported a
balanced development of the morphosyntax and lexicon of English,
Spanish, and Tagalog in California, USA, both of which fully support the
separate development of the three linguistic systems.
Separate development does not, however, suggest that the multiple
systems are completely independent. Researchers have consistently found
limited but clear differences between the features of bilingual children’s
language and those of their monolingual peers, and many have suggested
the possibility of systematic interaction between the languages being
acquired, as a natural consequence of language contact. Inquiries on the
locus and level of cross-linguistic influence (CLI hereafter) have been a
major research topic in the past few decades, coming to suggest that certain
structures are more vulnerable to the influence of the linguistic system of
the other language (Döpke 2000; Hulk & Muller 2000; Kang 2013; Mishina-
Mori 2020; Mishina-Mori et al. 2015; Muller & Hulk 2001; Paradis & Navarro
2003; Serratrice et al. 2004; Yip & Matthews 2007). Muller and Hulk (2001)
were one of the first to propose that the ambiguities in the input (partial
overlap of surface structures in the two languages) at the syntax–
pragmatics interface structure (where pragmatic considerations govern
the selection of syntactic structures) are the drivers of CLI.
The most recent studies by Sorace and her colleagues of bilingual adults
suggest that monolingual-bilingual differences in both production and
comprehension may not necessarily be solely due to such interactions but
may involve different factors such as processing – the burden of processing
two different structures causing the differences (Sorace 2011, 2019;
Sorace & Serratrice 2009; Sorace et al. 2009), or bilinguals’ preference for
explicitness leading to differential language use (Sorace 2019). However,
whatever the root of the difference (CLI, processing, or preference for
explicitness), the accumulation of studies indicates that bilingual infants
develop multiple grammars from the start but in ways that are different
from their monolingual peers due to a systematic interaction between the
two systems leading to unique features in each language.

Although still scarce compared with studies on CLI in bilingual

acquisition, a number of studies have investigated how the three languages
interact with each other in trilingual acquisition, and report a complex
picture of interlinguistic interaction among the three languages under
development (e.g., Hattori 2016; Kazzazi 2011). Hattori (2016) investigated
the Majority Influence Hypothesis first proposed by Clyne (1997), which
claims that if two of the three languages share a structure different from
the other language, the structure common to the two languages transfers to
the third. Hattori’s Chinese-Japanese-English trilingual subject transferred
the preverbal negation shared by English and Chinese to his Japanese
negation (e.g., *janai (neg) katazuke (clean-up) “Don’t clean up”), but not vice
versa, supporting the Majority Influence Hypothesis. However, in wh-con-
structions, where Japanese and Chinese share an in situ structure and
English does not, such transfer was not observed in English, which is
explained by the fact that the word order flexibility of Japanese and
Chinese gave ambiguous input leading to a lack of transfer. Kazzazi
(2011), on the basis of her observation of two German-Farsi-English trilin-
gual children, also reports counterevidence to the Majority Influence
Hypothesis. German and English share preverbal modification, whereas
Farsi is postverbal, but the children showed CLI in both directions, with
some preverbal modification in Farsi and very frequent postverbal modifi-
cation in German and English. Kazzazi conjectures that this may be due to
the iconicity of the order or to the correspondence between topic–comment
structure and noun-modification of the noun structure. Although further
investigations are awaited, these initial studies do suggest that the inter-
actions among the three languages seem to reveal an even more complex
picture than in bilingual CLI in how languages can affect each other during
the developmental process. Studies on whether theories on CLI in BFLA can
be applied to trilingual development and of the similarities and differences
between bilingual and trilingual CLI would further clarify the nature of
trilingual acquisition and the linguistic competence of trilingual children.
More recent studies in the field of cognitive psychology provide intri-
guing evidence further supporting the separate system hypothesis (Byers-
Heinlein et al 2010; Fennell et al. 2007; Werker & Byers-Heinlein 2008). On
the basis of experimental studies of preverbal bilingual infants, these
researchers claim that the perceptual sensitivity of newborns (and perhaps
even at prenatal stages) enables them to discriminate different languages
that differ in phonological characteristics. Studies indicate that newborns
show different reactions to familiar vs. non-familiar languages in terms of
suprasegmental features or rhythm (e.g., Mehler et al. 1988; Nazzi et al.
1998), which suggests that bilinguals have ample clues to discriminate two
different language systems using their potential capacity for language
acquisition in general. Werker and Byers-Heinlein (2008), drawing on
Nespor et al. (1996), suggest that phonological discrimination assists or
“bootstraps” syntactic discrimination, as there seems to be a

correspondence between rhythmicity and the underlying syntax of a lan-

guage. Thus, up-to-date studies of bilingual and trilingual language devel-
opment lend support to the idea that these children separate the two or
more language systems from the start, which in turn indicates that human
beings are born with a capacity to acquire multiple sets of systems just as
they acquire one.
6.2.2 Variability in the Level of Attainment in the Weaker Language

Although all the studies cited above suggest that children are born with the
hardware to acquire multiple languages, we know from experience that the
degree of proficiency children will achieve in each language will vary to a
large extent. This is mainly because bilingual/multilingual development or
loss depends heavily on the social and linguistic environment children are
surrounded by (Unsworth 2016) and, needless to say, their individual
motivation to use each language.
Large-scale surveys on language choice among bilingual families have
indicated that children do not necessarily become speakers of the languages
they are exposed to at home.
De Houwer (2007) investigated the relationship between parental language
choice and that of children in 1,899 bilingual families (where at least one of
the parents speaks a minority language of the Dutch-speaking community)
and shows that, even though children are exposed to the minority language in
their families, about a quarter of these 4,556 children spoke only Dutch at
home. Similarly, Yamamoto’s (2001) study on bilingual families in Japan also
reveals that about one third of the children exposed to languages other than
Japanese in their homes did not speak that language. It has been reported that
nonproductive use of a language takes away or does not equip the children
with a full knowledge of the morphosyntax of the language (Sherkina-Lieber
et al. 2011), although there are studies indicating reacquisition of the non-
productive language when certain conditions are met (Slavkov 2015).
What causes such variability in the attainment of productive bilingual-
ism, or what is the major determining factor for one language to be
dominant over the other? The difficulty in developing productive abilities
in multiple languages is mainly due to the fact that schooling and the
community typically support one majority language of the community
(unless the community itself is bilingual), and the non-community lan-
guage is in most cases limited to use within the family (De Houwer 2007;
Yamamoto 2001). Furthermore, the language choice patterns in interlin-
gual family interactions are not uniform – there are a variety of different
factors involved (such as the level of multilingualism of the parents and
other members of the family, the availability of books and other supportive
educational materials in the minority language, and the prestige of the
minority language) that can add complexity to the language choice, which
in turn will determine the children’s level of exposure to each language

(Unsworth 2016; Yamamoto 2001). Similarly, most trilingual children show

different levels of proficiency in each language, especially after socializing
into the community through schooling and other activities, as there is no
necessity for them to use the three languages equally in their daily lives
(Quay & Montanari 2018; Stavans & Hoffmann 2015).
Thus, the current findings suggest that, although humans are born with
the capacity to develop multiple languages, the level of attainment in each
language can vary to a great extent because of differences in the level of
exposure to each language, which is mainly determined by complex lan-
guage choice decisions made by each participant in the family.
6.3 Communicating in Multiple Languages

within the Family
In the previous section I argued that language choice patterns in the family
can be one of the major determining factors of the level of attainment of
productive multilingualism. In this section I will review the literature on
communication in multilingual families – how languages are selected by
each speaker in order to communicate effectively with members whose
language proficiencies may vary – in order to shed light on the nature of
the interactions bilingual/multilingual children are exposed to and
socialized into.
It will be shown that, especially before school age, the parents typically
negotiate a monolingual interaction; that is, each parent attempts to com-
municate in his/her first or preferred language with the child to create a
monolingual context for communication, to secure enough input for the
acquisition of that language. However, they also tend to adapt to children’s
language choice for smooth communication. Children, too, show sensitivity
to the parents’ language proficiency and choose the language accordingly,
although they may start to negotiate bilingual (both parent and the child
speak two languages) or dual-lingual (the child and the parent share recep-
tive abilities in both languages but speak in different languages to commu-
nicate) (Nakamura 2018; Saville-Troike 1987) interactions after they start
schooling in the majority language.
6.3.1 Pragmatic Differentiation among

Bilingual/Multilingual Children
In the early 1990s, when researchers were trying to establish the claim that
simultaneous bilingual children do have separate language systems from
the start, one of the supporting arguments was that these children can use
the multiple languages discriminatively according to the context, which
has been referred to as pragmatic differentiation (De Houwer 1990; Genesee

et al. 1995; Lanza 1992; Mishina 1997; Montanari 2009; Nicoladis & Genesee
1996; Quay 2008).
Many of the studies investigating children’s pragmatic differentiation
when growing up in OPOL environments investigated the language choice
patterns of parent–child interactions in each language separately: that is, in
a context that Grosjean (1982) refers to as monolingual mode. De Houwer’s
(1990) longitudinal case study of a Dutch-English simultaneous bilingual
child includes an extensive study of the language choice patterns of the
child during the second and third years of her life, which shows that the
child spoke predominantly in Dutch to the Dutch-speaking parent and
English to the English-speaking parent. Genesee et al. (1995) conducted a
cross-sectional study of language choice patterns of five French-English
bilinguals around the age of 2, which also revealed that these children
always selected French more often with the French-speaking parent than
with the English-speaking parent, and vice versa. Nicoladis and Genesee
(1996) further confirmed the onset of pragmatic differentiation through a
longitudinal study of four children from before 2 years old up to around the
age of 3, and report that there is a short period of time when children do
not show such differentiation, but they start to exhibit such an ability from
around the second birthday.
For children exposed to three languages, the picture seems to be more
complicated. Generally speaking, a typical trilingual family involves one
language for each parent, and one more language from the community
which is different from the languages of the parents. In addition to the
variation of languages involved, the language use patterns of the parents
may vary, since they typically know two or more languages themselves and
may have a unique language use practice between themselves (Quay 2008).
However, despite such assumed complexity, studies of simultaneous trilin-
gual acquisition demonstrate that the children are capable of using each of
the three languages in accordance with the linguistic knowledge and
proficiency of each interlocutor in the family whose linguistic profiles
differ. Quay (2008) investigated the pragmatic differentiation of a
Chinese-English-Japanese trilingual 2-year-old acquiring Chinese from her
mother, who herself is trilingual in the three languages, English from her
English-Japanese bilingual father, and Japanese at day care. By observing
the multilingual interaction when both parents were present in a dinner
conversation, Quay demonstrated that the child addressed each parent
mainly in his or her native language. She further points out that, being
aware of the bilingualism or trilingualism of each parent not only through
direct interaction but also by overhearing their speech, the child skillfully
differentiated the use of intra-sentential code-mixing: for example, refrain-
ing from mixing Chinese when speaking to her father. Montanari (2009)
reports similar findings from her longitudinal study of a child addressed in
Tagalog by her mother and grandparents, Spanish by her father, and
English by her older sister. The trilingual child differentiated the languages

according to the interlocutor in a multiparty conversation. Thus, these

studies indicate that the children are capable of selecting the language in
accordance with each interlocutor’s language proficiency, exhibiting sensi-
tivity to the context. These two studies make a strong case for context-
sensitivity because such differentiation was observed even when multiple
languages were assumed to be activated, making the attuning of the lan-
guage even more demanding.
6.3.2 Negotiating Language Choice and Its Dynamic Nature

In the previous section I reviewed the studies of the relationship between
parental input and children’s language choice patterns, most of which
indicate that children growing up in a multilingual environment show
pragmatic differentiation from the earliest stages of development.
However, as suggested in Section 6.1 and as has been documented in a
number of studies (Döpke 1992; Kasuya 1998; Mishina-Mori 2011), in reality
not all children will attune their language choice to those of their parents,
even though they do have the sensitivity to do so, presumably because of
language dominance, preference, and other related reasons. This is espe-
cially the case when the language proficiencies as well as their identities
change over time later as they become socialized into communities other
than their family. In this section I will review studies that analyzed the
interactive nature of language choice and the possible determining factors
of the language chosen at every turn.
Lanza (1992) was one of the first researchers to apply the framework of
language socialization to the analysis of parent–child interaction in interlin-
gual families. According to language socialization theory, we acquire a cer-
tain pattern of interaction by participating in it (Ochs 1988). Within this
framework, Lanza argued that the ways adult interlocutors respond to child
utterances (especially to the nonpreferred language choice) can have a signifi-
cant impact on the language choice patterns of the child, as different types of
reactions can eventually create either monolingual or bilingual interaction
styles in the parent–child interaction. She categorized parents’ responses to
children’s mixed utterances into five different types as indicated below,
partly adopting discourse strategies proposed by Ochs (1988) (Lanza 1992:
649): Minimal grasp strategy (Ochs 1988) (adult requests clarification to self-
repair), Expressed guess strategy (Ochs 1988) (adult requests clarification in
yes/no question), Adult repetition (restatement in the other language), Move-
on strategy (the conversation continues), and Code-switching.
The five strategies differ in the degree to which they impose or create a
monolingual interaction with the child, thus constituting a continuum
from Minimal grasp strategy (assumed to have the strongest effect impos-
ing a monolingual interaction) to Code-switching (assumed to have the
strongest effect imposing a bilingual interaction). For example, when
the child violates the language policy of the family and uses English with

a non-English-speaking parent, that parent may ask for clarification by

showing that he/she didn’t understand (Minimal grasp strategy), and thus
negotiate a monolingual interaction. On the other hand, the parent can
respond in his/her preferred language without referring to the non-
preferred language choice and continue with the interaction (Move-on
strategy), or incorporate the nonpreferred language into his/her speech
(Code-switching), making the interaction more bilingual.
Through her analysis of parent–child interactions, Lanza (1992) argues
that there seems to be a clear relationship between the parental response
styles and the child’s language choice: the child almost exclusively used the
mother’s language when communicating with the mother, who tended to
negotiate a monolingual interaction by typically using the strategies on the
monolingual end of the continuum. On the other hand, the child freely
mixed languages with the father, who allowed code-switching and thus
created a bilingual context. Kasuya (1998) longitudinally observed the lan-
guage choice patterns and discourse strategies of four Japanese-English
bilingual children and their mothers, contending that discourse strategies
that explicitly demand the child use Japanese instead of English elicited the
children’s Japanese utterances the most. Juan-Garau and Pérez-Vidal (2001)
document changes in the child’s language choice patterns before and after
the minority-language-speaking parent changes his discourse strategies.
Montanari’s (2009) analysis of the language choice of a trilingual child
further supports this idea. Thus, from these studies we can understand
how parents’ language choices and negotiations of language choice can
create certain patterns of interaction, socializing both the parent and the
child into either a monolingual or a bilingual context.
There have been several studies providing counterevidence to the parental
strategy hypothesis presented above. Nicoladis and Genesee (1998), for
example, examined the language choices of children in their utterances imme-
diately after each utterance as implementing different strategies, and con-
cluded that the children did not react as expected under the hypothesis: For
instance, children did not self-repair and switch the language to the preferred
one after the Minimal grasp or “A request to self-repair” strategy. More
specifically, children would repeat what they had said in the same language
after a request to self-repair, simply taking the request as meaning “say it
again.” This finding may imply that children do not necessarily interpret the
message conveyed by the parental strategies as intended, or even if they do
understand, they may not have enough language proficiency to respond in the
way indicated or switch the language as implicitly requested. The finding
sheds light on the complexity or the bi-directional nature of language choice –
parental discourse strategies work only when the child has the linguistic
capacity to adhere to the parental choice and is willing to react accordingly.
Fogle and King (2013), Gafaranga (2010), Mishina-Mori (2011), and
Pearson (2007) pointed out that children can also determine the parent–
child interactional style. Mishina-Mori (2011) conducted a longitudinal

analysis of two Japanese-English bilingual children living in the United

States and their parents’ language choice patterns as well as the parental
discourse strategies, and pointed out that parent–child interactional style is
not determined solely by the strategy on the part of the parent, but also by
the child, who may have his/her own reason to choose one language over
the other and thus not necessarily converge to the language choice of the
parent or accede to an explicit/implicit request to use one language over the
other. The parents then shift their language choice patterns accordingly,
again showing sensitivity to accommodate to the child’s language choice.
Thus, the ways in which interactional style is formulated in parent-child
interactions are highly interactive in nature. One of the children in the
study, Rie, showed balanced development in the two languages, which is
probably why it was possible for each parent to employ monolingual strat-
egies to which the child responded in the “desired” language, thus creating
monolingual interactions in both mother–child and father–child inter-
actions. On the other hand, Ken gradually became English-dominant in
the latter half of the data collection period due to increased exposure to
English in his daily life, which made it more natural for the Japanese-
speaking mother to accept his use of English and create a bilingual context
for the mother–child interaction. Thus, even though both Japanese-
speaking parents had a strong wish to maintain the minority language
and were in principle in favor of a one parent-one language policy, this
was not always realistic in terms of communication to constantly negotiate
a monolingual context, as in some cases it was obvious that the child
preferred to respond in English. This study suggests that both children
and parents exhibit or develop a high sensitivity to what is desired or
needed by the interlocutor in the communication, thereby creating a par-
ticular interaction style and socializing into that pattern of communication.
6.4 Multilingual Children’s Effective Communication
The previous section suggests that children exposed to and interacting in two
or more languages in their daily lives are naturally embedded in a context
where one needs to be sensitive to the interlocutors’ language abilities or
preferences so that they can adjust their choice of language. This leads to the
idea that bilingual/multilingual children may have or develop enhanced
ability to take other people’s perspectives and therefore be able to communi-
cate effectively in different contexts. Such socio-cognitive outcomes of multi-
lingualism in communication will be discussed in this section.
6.4.1 Cognitive Advantages of Bilingual/Multilinguals

It is well documented that bilinguals/multilinguals regardless of age enjoy a
certain level of cognitive advantages over monolinguals (or least bilingual

populations) as they are constantly faced with choosing one language over the
other(s) depending on the situation or interlocutor in daily interactions,
forcing them to use the necessary cognitive abilities to attend to language
and make appropriate choices (Bialystok 2001; Bialystok et al. 2004; Bialystok
et al. 2008; Bialystok & Craik 2010; Costa et al. 2009; see also the list of studies
of the enhanced cognitive control of bilinguals in Costa et al. 2009).
Numerous studies have been conducted of bilinguals of all generations, from
preschoolers to the elderly, using a variety of cognitive tasks testing the level
of executive functioning or the abilities for conflict resolution (i.e., to inhibit
certain information while focus on the other under incongruent conditions)
such as the Simon task (Bialystok et al. 2004), Stroop task (Bialystok et al.
2008), and flanker task (Costa et al. 2009), as well as metalinguistic tasks
(Bialystok 2001), all of which suggest a bilingual advantage over monolingual
peers. In recent years, further investigations have been conducted, for
example on the effect of age at onset or immersion in the second language
(i.e., simultaneous or successive acquisition) on these proposed advantages
(Luk et al. 2011; Sabourin & Vinerte 2015) or of differences in the socio-
economic status of the participants (Calvo & Bialystok 2014).
This constant exposure to challenging context and input can be traced to
the earliest stages of their lives as bilinguals/multilinguals. As discussed in
Section 6.2, recent studies of the early language discrimination of multiple
languages among very young children exposed to two languages strongly
suggest that children are born with the perceptive abilities to differentiate
two different sound systems, typically starting from the suprasegmental
aspects of the language (rhythm, intonation), and then passing to the phono-
logical features (Byers-Heinlein 2018; Byers-Heinlein et al. 2010; Fennell et al.
2007; Werker & Byers-Heinlein 2008). This early separation of different
language systems leads to the early development of two different processing
paths for the different languages, which then contributes to the growth of
cognitive abilities to attend to the two different phonological, syntactic, and
semantic systems. Bialystok has presented numerous pieces of evidence
supporting the idea that bilingual children (especially those who have bal-
anced proficiency in the two languages) have cognitive advantages over less
bilingual children, performing better on tasks that require metalinguistic
abilities (the ability to analyze the structure and function of the language),
for example, grammatical judgment tests or other cognitive testing that
requires the child to selectively attend to certain information and inhibit
attention to the other (e.g., Bialystok 1988). This type of cognitive function-
ing is precisely developed through the acquisition and use of two different
linguistic systems from the early stages of development.
6.4.2 Socio-cognitive Advantages of Bilingual/Multilinguals

More recent research has drawn our attention to the fact that the unique
abilities that bilingual/multilingual children develop are not restricted to

executive functions, such as attentional control or inhibitory control, that

for the most part are assumed to have consequences for the children’s
academic achievement, but also include abilities that are more relevant to
everyday interpersonal interactions. These studies claim that such
advantages also include socio-cognitive advantages – the ability to take
different perspectives in communication, increased awareness of communi-
cative intent or needs of the interlocutor, and heightened sensitivity to
linguistic, paralinguistic, and nonlinguistic cues to detect the needs within
communication (Gampe et al. 2019; Genesee et al. 1975; Siegal et al. 2009;
Yow & Markman 2011a, 2011b, 2016). Since bilingual/multilingual children
are surrounded by speakers of different languages, they are constantly
exposed to different languages, different interactional styles, and different
cultures. Everyday communication for these children can thus be more
challenging than interactions in less bilingual context, because they need
to understand different languages and communication/cultural styles,
adapt to each one of them, learn to switch accordingly, and perhaps over-
come more communication breakdowns due to such challenges. This seem-
ingly extra effort (compared to monolingual interaction) to understand and
adapt to different communicative needs or intent and experiences in over-
coming communication failures may boost the children’s ability to be
highly attentive to or aware of the communicative needs/intent of the
interlocutor; i.e., better at perspective taking in communication.
Genesee et al. (1975) was one of the first to argue that bilinguals seem to
develop higher sensitivity to the interlocutor’s needs in interaction and
thus are advanced in perspective taking. Compared with their monolingual
peers, the bilingual 5- to 8-year-olds who attended French immersion
schools showed increased sensitivity to their interlocutors’ communicative
needs, adjusting the amount of information needed for better communi-
cation. More specifically, when both bilingual and monolingual children
were asked to give explanations about a game to blindfolded and sighted
audiences, bilingual children gave more explanation to the unsighted lis-
teners, but monolingual peers did not show such differentiation. The
authors argue that the bilingual environment may have contributed to
such a difference – being exposed to two different languages may have
fostered sensitivity to different communicative needs.
Gampe et al. (2019), in line with Genesee et al. (1975), argue that bilingual
children tend to be better at taking the interlocutor’s perspective and
adjusting the ways of communication in accordance with the needs of the
interlocutor. Their study compared 3-year-old simultaneous bilinguals and
their monolingual counterparts in how they responded to different types of
communicative needs. They explored the issue with the help of two differ-
ent puppets who need help finding a piece of a puzzle, where one type
shows positive feedback to the help offered by the child, whereas the other
type shows negative feedback with an insistence on working on its own.
A clear difference was observed between the two groups of children: bilin-
guals helped the puppet who wished to be independent without overt

mention of the help (showing a low level of “ostension”), whereas monolin-

gual children showed no adjustment to the different types of interaction,
that is, no selective use of ostension was observed. From these results,
Gampe et al. (2019) argue that this observed advantage of bilingual children
is a result of experiencing “challenging communication” in everyday life
(Yow & Markman 2011a, 2011b) – children who are exposed to multiple
languages and are accordingly in constant need to communicate in differ-
ent languages and different cultural styles develop skills to adapt to the
needs of their interlocutors.
Bilingual/multilingual children’s sensitivity to the language(s) being used
by the interlocutor may also lend support to this argument. Genesee et al.
(1996) and Comeau et al. (2003) have shown that 2-year-old bilingual chil-
dren adjust the amount of code-switching in accordance with that of the
interlocutors: when children encountered an adult who frequently mixed
the two languages, children’s code-mixed utterances increased, whereas
when they met with someone whose code-switching was infrequent, chil-
dren also mixed less. Comeau et al. (2003) further pointed out that chil-
dren’s language dominance did not affect such adaptation, and that
children’s adaptation was on a turn-to-turn basis but an exact repetition
of the adult speech was rare. Thus, even emergent bilinguals show a high
level of adaptation to the interlocutor in terms of level of code-switching.
Most studies above are in agreement with the claim that it is through the
experience of challenging communication that bilingual/multilingual
children gain more advanced communicative competence. But what exactly
does “challenging communication” refer to? Wermelinger et al. (2017) state
that daily communication for such children is typically more demanding
than for monolingual children, not only because they constantly face situ-
ations where they must select languages according to the context, but also
because they may have a smaller vocabulary and other linguistic resources
in a given language, which would cause more communication breakdowns,
placing them in situations in which they must compensate for their lack of
vocabulary or are forced to repair the inappropriate (or unexpected by the
interlocutor) language choice. In their study testing two-year-old bilingual
children and their monolingual counterparts, Wermelinger et al. (2017)
found that the bilinguals repair misunderstandings in the communication
they encounter more often than do monolingual children.
The above studies indicate that bilingual/multilingual children develop
the capacity to make changes to actual language use by adding further
information to meet the needs of the interlocutor, changing communication
styles to adapt to their interlocutors, adjusting the level of code-switching in
the interaction, or learning to repair communication breakdowns. What
makes this possible? How sensitive are they to the “communicative needs”
of the interlocutors? The following studies looked at the level of sensitivity
these children develop through bilingual/multilingual experience.
A series of studies by Yow and Markman (2011a, 2011b, 2016) suggest
that bilinguals develop heightened sensitivity to different types of

nonlinguistic and paralinguistic cues as they constantly face challenging

communication or need to monitor different communicative needs by
speakers of different languages. Yow and Markman (2011a) found that
bilingual 3- to 4-year-olds are more sensitive to the paralinguistic cues (tone
of voice) used to judge the interlocutor’s emotions in interpersonal commu-
nication. In two experiments children were asked to judge whether the
speaker presented on the screen was feeling happy or sad, but the first
experiment was designed so that the content of the speech was not always
intelligible, whereas in the second experiment the children were presented
with speech where paralinguistic cues and the content were contradictory.
The results indicate that although both monolingual and bilingual children
were sensitive to the paralinguistic cues when the content of the speech was
not clear (and thus children attended mainly to the paralinguistic cues),
bilinguals showed higher sensitivity to such cues when they contradicted
the semantics, suggesting heightened sensitivity to such cues among bilin-
gual children. Yow and Markman’s (2011b) investigation of the use of
nonverbal referential gestures such as eye gaze in interpersonal communi-
cation also revealed that bilingual preschoolers (3–4 years old) are more
advanced than their monolingual counterparts in utilizing such informa-
tion to interpret the communicative intent of the interlocutor.
Studies also suggest that bilingual children not only develop advanced
sensitivity to information besides the literal meaning of the utterance for
more effective communication, but they seem to develop a better under-
standing of conversational principles from early stages of development
(Siegal et al. 2009, 2010; Surian et al. 2010). Siegal et al. (2009, 2010) found
that children growing up in a bilingual environment perform better than
monolinguals when asked to detect conversational violations (e.g., violations
of the Gricean principles of being informative, truthful, relevant, and polite),
suggesting that these children have an advanced awareness/understanding
of the nature of effective communication. Surian et al. (2010), studying
school-age bimodal children, also argue that children who grew up in a
bimodal environment from the earliest stages of development exhibited a
better understanding of effective communication than later signers.
In sum, recent investigations of the necessary foundations of successful
communication overall suggest that early bilingual and multilingual
development leads to a stronger awareness and better appreciation of
different types of cues to better understand the communicative intent of
the interlocutor, which in turn boosts the ability to understand the basic
principles of effective communication.
6.4.3 Are Advantages in Communication Related to Executive

Functioning?
What is the relationship between the advantages bilinguals/multilinguals
may have in executive functioning and those in effective communication?

Researchers contend that the development of effective communication can

be attributed to the social experience they gain through multilingual inter-
actions in their daily lives. For example, Siegal et al. (2009) argue that the
“flexibility” in attention that bilingual children show in actual communi-
cation – i.e., adjusting their attention to information other than the literal
meaning of the language, turning their attention to relevant information
besides the literal meaning of the language that may help them understand
the communicative intent – is the key to their advanced abilities to
communicate effectively.
Fan et al. (2015) also propose that early exposure to multiple languages is
crucial in developing skills for effective communication, but argue that this
is not due to the executive functioning in which bilinguals are claimed to
have an advantage over monolinguals, but rather is social in nature. They
argue that early exposure not only gives them abundant training to under-
stand different perspectives, but also opportunities for diverse social experi-
ences, as being exposed to different languages means that they are exposed
to different social groups of people who may have different cultures and
interaction patterns and beliefs. In order to support their view, they com-
pared three different groups of 6-year-olds, bilingual, exposure (monolin-
gual but had limited exposure to another language), and monolingual, in
the level of perspective taking – the extent to which the children are able to
take another’s perspective. They carried out an experiment in which chil-
dren were tested on how well they understood the experimenter’s perspec-
tive when giving them instructions, and it turned out that the bilingual and
exposure groups outperformed the monolingual group. Since in executive
function testing the exposure group did not do as well as the bilingual
group, the authors argue that this perspective-taking ability is not rooted in
executive functions or attributable to the actual use of the languages, but is
presumably due to the social skills that develop through exposure to and
the actual use of multiple languages.
6.5 Future Directions
The current chapter introduced the most recent investigations of how

exposure to multiple languages and the linguistic capacities and experience
children gain through such linguistic input can foster enhanced communi-
cative abilities in them. As is clear from the review, this is a field still in its
earlier stages, and further investigations are awaited. First, for young
children to benefit from exposure to multiple languages, we need to assume
in children the highly sensitive perceptive ability to distinguish the pros-
odic and other features of the multiple languages they are exposed to, and
to develop separate language systems from the earliest stages of
development. There are only a few studies providing evidence for the
separate development of the three languages. The interactions among the

three languages are also underinvestigated. Whether or not theories con-

structed to account for CLI in bilingual acquisition apply to trilingual
acquisition also awaits further investigation. Furthermore, from the pion-
eer studies it appears that CLIs in trilingual acquisition show a distinct
pattern from those of BFLA. If that is the case, their respective developmen-
tal paths may show distinct patterns.
The special features of trilingual input that children receive is another
area that needs further investigation. For example, OPOL in the case of
trilingual acquisition may have unique characteristics, presumably because
there is a higher possibility than with bilingual acquisition that each parent
is a multilingual him/herself, which means that the input children receive
may be the result of language contact involving both CLI and code-switch-
ing, which can make the children’s exposure to multiple languages
highly complex.
Needless to say, further possible investigations may include comparisons
of the efficiency of the communication of bilingual and trilingual children:
if challenging communication is what trains the children to become more
understanding of their interlocutors’ communicative intent, then would a
trilingual environment lead to even more enhanced communicative ability?
From what we understand about trilingual children’s everyday communi-
cation, it can be inferred that they are faced with far more complex
communicative challenges, as, with each of their parents being bi- or
trilingual, OPOL input may not be as straightforward as with bilingual
children.
Other investigations may include the extent to which such advantages
are uniquely due to multilingual experience. If challenging communication
is the key, then such conditions can arise even in monolingual contexts
with different dialects or when interacting with people with different
cultural styles not caused by differences in the languages they speak.
The relationship between the level of multilingualism or the level of
dominance in each language and efficient communication may also be of
interest. Considering the fact that trilingual children seldom possess bal-
anced proficiency in all three languages, it would be intriguing to deter-
mine the extent to which the children need to be balanced to exhibit such
efficient communication. It would also be of theoretical and practical
interest to determine whether receptive bilinguals can also exhibit
enhanced sensitivity in communication.
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7
Metalinguistic Awareness
and Early Multilingual
Learning
Barbara Hofer & Ulrike Jessner
7.1 Introduction
The relationship between early multilingual learning and metalinguistic

awareness is a particularly intriguing one. Not surprisingly, research into
the effects of multilingualism on children’s linguistic development and
awareness of language has attracted a lot of attention over the past years
and decades as studies have found both positive effects of multilingualism
on the development of metalinguistic awareness and facilitative effects
of metalinguistic awareness on language learning (Ó Làoire 2005: 48;
Rutgers & Evans 2015: 1). This implies that there are reciprocal effects
between metalinguistic awareness and multilingual development. In the
recent literature, metalinguistic awareness has been linked to important
qualitative changes in the language and learning processes of multilinguals
(Jessner 2008). In particular, it has been suggested that multilinguals
benefit from special emergent properties which are not found (as such) in
monolinguals and which contribute to multilinguals’ overall linguistic and
metacognitive ability (Hoffmann & Stavans 2007; Jessner et al. 2016; see
also Valone 2017 for an overview).
In this chapter we introduce readers to the notion of metalinguistic
awareness, and we investigate its role in early multilingual development.
The chapter tackles conceptual and methodological issues related to meta-
linguistic development and explores the cognitive basis of metalinguistic
awareness in young multilingual learners. First, we provide an overview of
early research into child bi- and multilingualism. We then relate these early
findings to current conceptualizations of multilingual development and
metalinguistic awareness. For illustration purposes we present qualitative
data from a study into children’s metalinguistic awareness in South Tyrol
and discuss selected learner productions gathered in multilingual class-
rooms in light of the recent literature. The aim is to provide new insights

164 BARBARA HOFER & ULRIKE JESSNER
into young multilingual learners’ (henceforth YMLs) metalinguistic under-

standing and ability. Our research is guided by the following questions:
(1) What is metalinguistic awareness and how does it relate to multilin-

gual learning?
(2) How do metalinguistic awareness and skill manifest in children?
(3) Can metalinguistic awareness be measured?
(4) Can metalinguistic thinking be trained, and if so, how?
A dynamic and holistic conception of multilingualism provides the theor-

etical framework for our discussion. The chapter closes with an outlook and
recommendations for future directions.
7.2 Early Developments
Early research undertaken in the first decades of the twentieth century and
up to the 1960s construed bi- and multilingualism as detrimental, claiming
it would impede learners’ cognitive and linguistic development. The widely
held assumption was that acquisition of two or three languages from birth
or early in childhood would have negative effects on speakers’ intellectual
ability and reasoning power with early studies purporting to demonstrate
that bilinguals were less intelligent than monolinguals (Saer 1923). In
addition, bilingualism was long held to cause stuttering and/or communi-
cation disorders (Böhme 1981). Experts even related to bilinguals as
retarded or schizophrenic (Egger 1977) and warned of neurotic disturb-
ances in children growing up in bilingual surroundings. The prevailing
view amongst scholars and lay people alike was that learning a second
(let alone third) language would result in significant delays in the develop-
ment of the first language.
The 1960s saw a sharp reversal of attitudes. Peal and Lambert (1962), in
particular, contributed to this turnaround. In their groundbreaking study,
which compared monolingual and bilingual children’s performance on a
range of cognitive and linguistic measures, they found a clear bilingual
advantage with regards to participants’ cognitive capacity and language
awareness. The bilingual children in their research exhibited a heightened
mental flexibility and creativity and appeared to have a more diversified set
of mental abilities than the monolingual control group (1962: 1).
In the years that followed, Peal and Lambert’s findings were substanti-
ated by a number of other studies which reported various positive effects of
bi- and multilingualism (Hakuta & Diaz 1985; see also Cenoz 2003 for an
overview). In particular, it emerged that bi- and multilingualism can lead to
enhanced metalinguistic awareness and skill and more divergent thinking
in children (Ben-Zeev 1977; Bialystok 1991; Galambos & Hakuta 1988;
Ianco-Worrall 1972). Over the years and decades, indications to this effect
have multiplied, with more recent studies suggesting that bi- and

Metalinguistic Awareness and Multilingual Learning 165
multilingual children have a more abstract understanding of language(s)

and are advantaged when it comes to learning additional languages
(Lasagabaster 1998: 70). Apart from linguistic benefits, scholars have also
evidenced positive effects of early bi- and multilingualism on cognition,
notably on young learners’ executive functions (Bialystok 2001, 2007).
Executive functions are known to sustain language processing and general
cognitive functions, including, in particular, controlled attention, inhib-
ition and shifting (Bialystok & Poarch 2014: 433). In addition, there are
indications that multiple language experience may lead to higher levels of
creativity (Hamers & Blanc 1989; Kharkhurin 2012). It is in light of this new
research that the scientific community today speaks of a ‘multilingual
benefit’ (Dahm & De Angelis 2018; Jessner 1999, 2006; Lasagabaster 1998).
The current line of thinking is that this multilingual benefit is closely
connected to the notion of (meta)linguistic awareness (Allgäuer-Hackl
2017; Jessner 2016; Pargger 2013; Woll 2018), with an increasing number
of studies intimating that “the cognitive advantages” that accrue for multi-
linguals are “related to an enhanced level of metalinguistic awareness”
(Jessner 2006: 65) and a broad agreement that metalinguistic awareness is
key to explaining the multilingual advantage/edge, i.e., multilinguals’ special
resourcefulness in tackling multilingual material and situations (Chen &
Myhill 2016: 100; Golonka 2006: 497–98; Lasagabaster 2001: 312).
In the following we examine the notion of awareness in some detail. First,
we consider conceptual and terminological issues. Then we discuss how
(meta)linguistic awareness relates to multilingual development.
7.3 Conceptual and Terminological Considerations
Over the years, terminological inconsistencies have led to some confusion

regarding the nature and precise meaning of the term metalinguistic
awarenesss as scholars have varyingly used linguistic awareness, language
awareness, (meta-)linguistic consciousness, metalinguistic awareness, multilingual
awareness, multilingual aptitude, knowledge about language, etc. to either refer
to the same construct, or else have recourse to the same terminology but
actually refer to different phenomena. This terminological fuzziness is
compounded by the use of yet more nontransparent denominations in
other European languages and the not always felicitous translations from
or into English. In the German literature the terms Sprachbewusstsein and
Sprachbewusstheit are employed to denote language or linguistic awareness,
but no conceptual distinction has (to our knowledge) been proposed for the
two terms. In French the concepts conscience and prise de conscience are in use,
but is it not entirely clear how they relate to the English notions awareness
or consciousness, or to the German notions Sprachbewusstsein and
Sprachbewusstheit for that matter. The same can be said to hold for the
Italian concepts consapevolezza and coscienza, which, although used

synonymously, lack conceptual precision, thus rendering cross-language

applicability difficult (Jessner 2006: 41; Pinto et al. 1999: 36). Adding to
the terminological disarray is the fact that the pertinent literature has been
drawing on notions such as metalinguistic abilities, skills, competences, behav-
ior, knowledge, understanding, etc. without supplying useful explications as to
their semantic content. In this section we aim to bring some clarity into the
terminological thicket. This said, our expositions on this issue are of course
far from exhaustive, and they also constitute a necessary simplification.
We begin with a brief definitional clarification. Due to space limitations,
we restrict our discussion to definitorial considerations in the English
language. Our propositions in this regard are the following. We propose
to treat the notions awareness and consciousness as overlapping (if not syn-
onymous; cf. James 1992; Svalberg 2007: 288). We do, however, favor the
term awareness over consciousness. Awareness of language, as we under-
stand it, relates to a person’s capacity to focus attention on language forms
and functions. We interpret the terms language or linguistic awareness as
referring to awareness of language in very general terms, without any
direct reference to mono- or multilingualism. Drawing on Jessner (2006),
we distinguish between the following more specific manifestations of lin-
guistic awareness: metalinguistic, cross-linguistic, and multilingual awareness.
Metalinguistic awareness denotes a speaker’s knowledge about linguistic
forms and functions in one or several languages. Cross-linguistic awareness
relates to knowledge about the links between languages (notably similar-
ities and differences, etymological relationships, etc.), and, finally, multi-
lingual awareness refers to that special multilingual awareness that
manifests in multilingual learner-users’ distinct dexterity and versatility
in tackling multilingual situations. By the same token, multilingual aware-
ness and ability also relate to language learning, language management,
and language maintenance skills which multilinguals develop due to their
continuous use of several languages (Allgäuer-Hackl & Pellegrini 2019;
Herdina & Jessner 2002).
We suggest reserving the term aptitude for the somewhat elusive special
talent or gift for learning languages arising from extensive experience with
language/s (cf. Singleton 2017: 90). (Note that we do not consider aptitude as
an inborn or stable trait but as emergent and dynamic, and we assume
some overlap between the concepts aptitude and awareness.)
In like manner, since we do not discern any inherent quality that would
call for a strict terminological separation, we propose to use the notions
abilities, skills, and competences interchangeably. The notion knowledge, in
contrast, can be taken to relate to so-called mental representations or
routines (note that from a DSCT perspective the term representation implies
a static knowledge base, which is why the term routine is preferred). To our
mind, the term understanding might make for a more apposite alternative
for knowledge because it does not connote any fixed mental structure. This
said, we are of course aware that ‘understanding’ will not constitute a fit-all

substitute for the concept of ‘knowledge’. Finally, behavior, as we see it,

denotes observable (performance-based) manifestations of metalinguistic
knowledge or ability.
Naturally, the above considerations are not in any way intended to be
prescriptive. The aim here is merely to illustrate that in order to enhance
transparency in the field some of the above appellations could be grouped
together without (any/much) depreciation to conceptual quality or clarity.
The definitional confusion afflicting the field of Applied Linguistics is, of
course, far too complex to be resolved on a few pages.
7.4 What Is Metalinguistic Awareness?
The notion of language awareness was first employed in Great Britain in the
1960s and 1970s. Poor mastery of L1 English and inadequate foreign lan-
guage skills in a large majority of the British school population prompted
scholars like Eric Hawkins (1999) and Carl James and Peter Garrett (1991) to
propose new approaches to language(s) learning and teaching. Premised on
a conception of language awareness as fundamental to (language) learning,
the awareness paradigm has since been taken up and applied to other
contexts, both in Europe and beyond. Withal, the central focus is not on
linguistic (i.e., grammatical) accuracy but on linguistic reflection, on the
analysis and comparison of language(s), on learner cognitions, and on
attitudes (see Jessner 2006: 36–71 for an overview of the literature).
Definitions of language awareness make special reference to individuals’
“sensitivity to and conscious awareness of language and its role in human
life” (Donmall 1985: 7), and to their “explicit knowledge about language,
and conscious perception and sensitivity in language learning, language
teaching and language use” (Association of Language Awareness, www
.languageawareness.org/?page_id=48). Similarly, the term metalinguistic
awareness, as employed by Jessner (2006), denotes a person’s ability to
“focus attention on language as an object in itself or to think abstractly
about language and, consequently, to play with or manipulate language”
(42). Jessner’s definition is consonant with Schmidt’s proposition that
(some) attention and/or noticing is a necessary condition for learning
(Schmidt 1990: 129, 1995: 7, 2001: 3; see also Van Lier 1996), which is what
most researchers today will subscribe to (cf. Leow 2006: 2–3). Arguably,
attention and noticing are central aspects of metalinguistic awareness.
In Bialystok’s Analysis/Control model (1991), the control component is
one of two processes constituting metalinguistic ability (the other being
analysis). Its main function, according to Bialystok, consists in directing
attention toward specific aspects of language and in controlling for irrele-
vant factors which distract attention away from the main point of focus.
Bialystok explains that, as children are engaged in solving metalinguistic
tasks, their “metalinguistic awareness is evident in their ability to construct

mental representations of linguistic concepts and to deliberately direct

attention to certain aspects of a representation” (Chen & Myhill 2016:
101). According to Bialystok (2011: 229), it is this attentional control func-
tion which is particularly enhanced in bi- and multilingual children (see
also Bialystok & Friesen 2012: 54; Kroll & Bialystok 2013: 507).
In the Dynamic Model of Multilingualism (DMM; Herdina & Jessner
2002), a comparable control function is performed by the so-called monitor.
The DMM posits that multilinguals develop an enhanced monitor because
they constantly have to attend to and check their languages and language
use. The multilingual monitor (EMM) enables learner/users to watch and
correct, activate and/or separate their languages, draw on common
resources, deploy appropriate strategies, transfer items from one language
to another, etc. (Jessner 2006: 59). In this sense, the EMM supervises multi-
lingual processing procedures and oversees error detection and correction
processes across all the languages. Its functions are closely linked to the
individual’s awareness of language(s).
There are indications that higher levels of awareness may result in
greater linguistic and (meta)cognitive advantages for the individual learner.
However, there is no agreement as to what this level of awareness should be
and whether awareness must (always) be explicit or whether more tacit
forms of awareness are equally beneficial.
7.4.1 What Role Does Metalinguistic Awareness Play in Children’s

Multilingual Development?
Metalinguistic awareness and skill, construed as the ability to recognize and
penetrate the patterned nature and functions of language and exploit one’s
understanding of how language works for one’s specific purposes, is a
characteristic trait of any language user whether monolingual or
multilingual (cf. Gombert 1992; Wehr 2001). However, there seems to be
scientific evidence to the effect that metalinguistic awareness is enhanced
in bilingual and, even more so, in multilingual individuals (Allgäuer-Hackl
2017; Hofer & Jessner 2016, 2017; Jessner 2006; Sanz 2012). Lambert (1991),
for instance, notes that being bilingual “provides a person with a compara-
tive, three-dimensional insight into language, a type of stereolinguistic
optic on communication that the monolingual rarely experiences” (212).
In a similar way, Vygotsky (1962) suggests that bilingual children develop
very early on an understanding that a language is just one system among
many, “and this leads to an awareness of [the child’s] linguistic operations”
(110). Consistent with this line of thinking, Nagy and Anderson (1995) argue
that exposure to second languages increases certain aspects of metalinguis-
tic awareness (5), even if learners have only limited contact with languages
(Yelland et al. 1993). However, these authors do, by way of restriction, add
that simple exposure to languages may not in itself lead to a metalinguistic
advantage (6). That is to say, children may need to be shown how to do

things with language(s). This is why we believe that form-focused multilin-

gual orientations and classroom approaches are important in order to
support children in their learning.
With regards to the reasons for this bi- and multilingual advantage,
Hakuta and Diaz (1985) explain that because “bilingualism induces an early
separation of word and referent, it is possible that bilingual children also
develop an early capacity to focus on and analyze the structural properties
of language” (326). Similarly, Bain and Yu (1980) intimate that the bilingual
advantage may be attributable to the fact that bilingual children have to
continuously monitor their linguistic operations and productions in order
to avoid interference (in Hakuta & Diaz 1985: 327, see also Johnson 1991:
210–12). More recently, Bialystok and Barac (2012) and Carlson and
Meltzoff (2008) have made a similar point, intimating that the require-
ments of bi- and multilingual processing, notably the continuous activation
and/or inhibition of languages, result in increased levels of executive
control in bi- and multilingual children (see also Bialystok et al. 2009;
Bialystok & Friesen 2012). This is also highlighted by Bialystok and Poarch
(2014), who argue that “[t]he constant recruitment of the domain-general
executive control network for resolving competition between languages has
the . . . effect of reconfiguring that network and improving its efficiency”
(338). This has been supported by recent neurolinguistics studies resulting
in strong indications that using multiple languages even leads to structural
changes in the brain (Abutalebi et al. 2013: 307; de Bot 2019: 8).
To sum up, significant changes in language and general cognitive
processing, especially at the level of monitoring, attention, and control,
thus appear to underpin multilinguals’ special capacity to juggle their
various language codes.
7.5 A DMM Perspective on Metalinguistic Awareness
Qualitative changes in the multilingual system due to the presence of more

than two languages are also highlighted in the Dynamic Model of
Multilingualism (Herdina & Jessner 2002). The DMM takes detailed account
of what these changes are at the level of cognition and language and how
they come about. A psycholinguistic model focusing on multilingual
development in the individual learner, the DMM is particularly concerned
with the complex and dynamic interactions between the languages in the
mind and the changes that take place in the system owing to the presence
and interplay of these languages.
The DMM conceives of the multilingual’s languages as highly dynamic,
tightly interwoven, and interacting all the time. The synergetic effects
engendered by the continuous cross-linguistic interactions in the mind
are seen as having potentially positive effects on the individual learner
resulting in a number of cognitive and linguistic advantages which are

subsumed under the so-called M(ultilingualism)-Factor. The M-Factor (also

referred to as M-effect) is best construed as a type of metasystem that
develops in multilingual users due to their (extensive) multilingual experi-
ence. An emergent property of multilingual systems, the M-Factor com-
prises a range of skills and abilities which support and potentially speed up
multilingual development.
Metalinguistic awareness is considered the key component of the
M-Factor and an important catalyst for multilingual growth (Jessner 2019,
see also Sanz 2012: 3933). Forming part of the cognitive underpinnings of
multilingualism, metalinguistic awareness is seen as both a prerequisite for
(multilingual) growth and systems maintenance and an emergent quality of
multilingual learning and development. From this follows that the relation-
ship between metalinguistic awareness and multilingualism is one of con-
tinuous reciprocal influences, with MLA propelling multilingual acquisition
while at the same time also being reinforced by it (i.e., by the presence of
multiple languages in the system) (Grigorenko et al. 2000: 399).
In multilinguals, metalinguistic awareness is closely linked to cross-
linguistic awareness (XLA), which is the awareness of linguistic forms and
functions across languages. Cross-linguistic skills relate to the individual’s
capacity to establish links and associations between the languages and to
exploit analogies that subsist between the different language codes. It is
reflected in the individual’s ability to contrast structural and lexical items
across linguistic borders and draw comparisons or identify differences
between the various languages.
Together, metalinguistic and cross-linguistic awareness constitute what
Jessner (2006) refers to as multilingual awareness. Multilingual awareness
and skill manifest in the many ways in which individuals engage with their
multiple languages, including their ability to monitor and calibrate their use of
language(s) and their ability to activate prior linguistic knowledge and har-
ness their extant resources to navigate multilingual situations or compen-
sate for lexical deficiencies. In short, multilingual awareness and skill
pertain to multilingual users’ awareness of their various language systems and
the interaction between them, and their special multilingual resourceful-
ness and flexibility.
Multilingual awareness works on two levels: it increases learners’ know-
ledge and understanding of their first and second languages, and it sup-
ports and potentially accelerates the acquisition of additional languages. In
other words, while multilingual awareness allows learners to consciously
attend to structural and meaning-related aspects across languages, it also
facilitates the acquisition of new languages, as it helps learners to max-
imally exploit the (multilingual) resources at their disposal (Gibson &
Hufeisen 2011; Kemp 2001; Kroll & Bialystok 2013). In this sense, multilin-
gual awareness is to be seen as a key facilitator in multilingual learning.
Degree of multilingual awareness must be taken to correlate with prior
language learning experience and amount of contact with languages. There

is robust evidence to suggest that multilingual awareness is a function of

the number of languages learned, with more languages in the system
leading to potentially more elevated levels of awareness (Jessner 2006;
Kemp 2001).
While there is some overlap between meta- and cross-linguistic aware-
ness and multilingual awareness, it is important to note that the notion of
multilingual awareness has a wider scope in as far as it relates to individ-
uals’ awareness of multiple languages and to a range of additional skills,
which emerge owing to the dynamic interplay of languages in the mind (cf.
Jessner 2019).
To sum up, metalinguistic awareness or “the ability to reflect upon and
manipulate the structural features of . . . language, treating language . . . as
an object of thought, as opposed to simply using the language system to
comprehend and produce sentences” (Tunmer & Herriman 1984: 12) is a
key property, the catalyst so to speak, of the learner/user system. In multi-
lingual learner-users, its function is amplified as awareness extends to all
the languages in the system.
In the next section we examine how the integration of languages in the
mind connects to multilingual awareness. This is followed by a brief discus-
sion of how awareness of language(s) can be measured. Next, we present
qualitative data gathered in multilingual classrooms and illustrate how
meta- and cross-linguistic awareness manifest in young children. Finally,
we look at how multilingual awareness can be trained in the classroom.
7.6 On the Integration and Co-influence of Multiple

Languages in the Mind
It has become common knowledge that the languages of multilingual

speakers are not stored in separate compartments or areas of the brain
but that they are interdependent and interact, forming a common commu-
nicative competence to which all languages and language learning experi-
ences contribute (Council of Europe 2001: 17, Singleton 2003). Moreover, as
noted earlier, much of the evidence suggests that the language systems
influence each other in multiple ways (Jessner & Allgäuer-Hackl 2015: 213).
Cummins (1991, 2013) posits a common processing system, the so-called
CUP or Common Underlying Proficiency for bi- or multilingual speakers.
Cummins argues that a bi- or multilingual’s languages, while seemingly
separate systems, are really fused and reliant on the same central operating
system (cf. Kecskes & Papp 2000). Cummins’ iceberg analogy illustrates this
point clearly: two icebergs may appear to be separate on the surface, but
below the surface level they are conjoined. The same applies to the lan-
guages in the multilingual system. They may seem to be separate systems
but, owing to the central processing system (which, as specified by
Cummins, represents one integrated source of cognitive activity), they

function as one (van den Noort et al. 2014: 191). From this it follows that
verbal and nonverbal abilities acquired in one language can be transferred
to other languages (cf. Herwig 2001: 115). Reading skills, for example, or
language learning strategies can easily be applied to new languages. The
same holds true for metalinguistic skills, which “will also transfer across
languages and, in fact, the presence and use of two codes [to which we add:
several] may prompt greater monitoring and inspection of each such that
metalinguistic awareness is enhanced” (Cummins 1987: 64).
On a related note, Vygotsky (1962) suggests that a child “can transfer to
the new language the system of meaning he already possesses in his own.
The reverse is also true – a foreign language facilitates mastering the higher
forms of the native tongue” (110). The implication is that metalinguistic
awareness and abilities resulting from experience in or with multiple
language codes will benefit all the languages in the system and augment
the individual’s overall multilingual agency.
7.7 Can Metalinguistic Awareness in Children Be Measured

and If So, How?
A range of test procedures for the measurement of metalinguistic aware-

ness and skill in children has been developed over the years (e.g., Montanari
2009, and see Valone 2017 for a comprehensive overview). For various
methodological and practical reasons, most of these procedures limit them-
selves to focusing a few select aspects of metalinguistic awareness with the
result that no comprehensive test instrument for its measurement is avail-
able as of yet. Part of the problem resides in the fact that no generally
accepted working definition for metalinguistic awareness has been agreed
upon (James & Garrett 1993: 109; Jessner 2019: 221), which renders its
operationalization difficult. In actual fact, pinpointing the exact nature of
metalinguistic awareness and skill represents a major challenge and may
well never be entirely possible (Rutgers & Evans 2015: 15), the consequence
being that it is not at all clear what a language awareness paradigm should
measure in the first place. This said, valid propositions for the assessment
of MLA have been advanced by Pinto et al. (1999, 2003). Arguably the most
comprehensive test procedures available to date, their test batteries (MAT1,
MAT2, MAT3) target different age groups, from very young children (4- to
6-year-olds) and children aged 9 to 13 to adolescents/adults (14+). In contrast
to most existing test procedures, Pinto et al. assume that metalinguistic
awareness does not exhaust itself in grammaticality judgment tasks, or
error detection and correction, but that it manifests in the individual’s
capacity to articulate her/his metalinguistic reflections (see also Sanz
2012: 3933) and explicate why a given linguistic structure or the idiosyn-
cratic use of a lexical item is admissible or not. For Pinto et al. (1999, 2003)
the metacognitive dimensions of reflecting on language, switching focus

between form and meaning, and verbalizing one’s metalinguistic reflec-

tions are major components of metalinguistic awareness and ability.
Pinto et al.’s (1999, 2003) test battery is primarily intended for native
speakers of the respective languages in which the test is available, namely
Italian, English, Spanish, French, and German (www.pintomatel.com/). In
contrast, Hofer and Jessner (2019) have developed a test procedure that
assesses multilingual awareness. The MCT, short for multilingual compe-
tence test, measures young learners’ awareness of structural and lexico-
semantic aspects in eight different languages, some of which the children
will have studied as part of their curriculum, and others which they will
not have encountered before. The MCT measures children’s ability to oper-
ate across a range of languages, perceive cross-linguistic similarities, and
harness the latter for the decoding or processing of new, other-language
material. Modeled on Pinto et al.’s (2003) MAT battery, the multilingual test
procedure requires test-takers to provide comprehensive verbal explica-
tions of their cross-linguistic metacognitions. Below we provide two
examples of the task types employed in the procedure. Example 1
(Figure 7.1) is taken from Part I of the MCT. Part I assesses how children
cope in mixed-language tasks involving their three curricular languages,
German, Italian, and English. In contrast, example 2 (Figure 7.2) is taken
Il bambino sta leggendo un libro.

The boy is reading a book.
Der Junge hat gerade ein Buch gelesen.
MV task: I think that the two sentences have the same meaning because:
Figure 7.1 MXL task: Two of the following three sentences have the same meaning. Find
them. What makes you think this is so?
Goedendag! Hoe heet jij? Goedendag! Ik heet Petra!
_____________________________
__________________________________
MV task: I can understand what the girls are saying because:
Figure 7.2 MXL task: Translation

from Part II of the MCT. Part II widens the scope and examines how
children perform when new other-language material in Dutch, Danish,
Swedish, Spanish, French, and Ladin is added.
The task in Figure 7.1 consists of three items, each of which consists of
three sentences (one in German, one in English, and one in Italian). Test-
takers first need to find the two sentences with the same meaning and
identify the odd one out. In a second step, they are asked to provide a
verbalization of their metalinguistic reflections and explain (in as much
detail as possible) how they arrived at the given solution.
The task reported below (Figure 7.2) requires test-takers to translate short
dialogues from Dutch into German. In the MV task, the children are then
again invited to provide a verbalization of their metalinguistic reflections.
The test procedure has recently been employed in an empirical study on
multilingual competences in young learners at the primary level (Hofer in
prep.).
In the following we elaborate on qualitative data gathered in the course
of a research conducted in the trilingual region of South Tyrol. The original
study contrasts YLs (young learners) in mainstream educational programs
with YLs in multilingual programs in two Italian-language schools (Hofer
2015). For the purposes of the present contribution, we include only data
collected in the multilingual classrooms.
7.8 How Do Meta- and Cross-linguistic Awareness

and Skill Manifest in Children?
The samples presented below are drawn from an empirical study carried
out in South Tyrol. They consist of selected learner productions which, we
feel, give a good glimpse of the metalinguistic reflections of young emer-
gent multilinguals. In particular, the data offer insight into how emergent
multilingual children at the primary level approach and think about lan-
guage(s), and how they exploit their meta- and cross-linguistic awareness
for their own communicative needs and purposes. The participants of our
study (n = 40) are on average 9 years old and have been studying three
languages (L1 Italian, L2 German, and L3 English) from first grade as part of
their multilingual schooling.
Mainstream education in Italian-language primary schools in South Tyrol
typically provides for subject matter teaching in L1 Italian, plus 6 hours of
L2 German and 3 hours of L3 English per week. In the multilingual pro-
grams presented here, subject matter teaching is offered in three lan-
guages, with teaching hours being distributed equally between L1 Italian
and L2 German (i.e., 12 hours respectively) and 3 hours of L3 English (which
combines language and subject matter learning). In addition, there is, in
both schools, an explicit focus on boosting learners’ meta- and cross-
linguistic awareness and abilities, with one of the two schools having taken

the extra step of freeing up curricular space for contrastive multilingual

reflection in the form of a so-called Riflessione Lingua class. In the other
school, cross-language reflection and analysis are integrated into the daily
teaching practice (but no language reflection class is provided). Pupils in
both programs are encouraged to actively engage in meta- and cross-
linguistic activities and consultations, as the aim is to nurture a multilin-
gual mindset together with an enhanced understanding of how languages
work and relate to one another, and an increased awareness of their own
learning processes.
In the following we first provide examples of learners’ written reflections
on structural and/or lexical properties of their L1, which our participants
generated as part of the Metalinguistic Ability Test 2, short MAT-2 (Pinto
et al. 2003, see above). Next, we report on verbal data collected during
intensive one-week lesson observations in the two multilingual classrooms
(see Hofer 2017; Hofer & Jessner 2016). As indicated, the data sets serve to
illustrate young multilingual learners’ awareness of linguistic structures
and functions in L1 and across languages. Attending to form aspects can be
a daunting task for young children (Kamhi & Koenig 1985: 199–200).
Indications are that bi- and multilingualism have a facilitative effect on
the development of this awareness in young learners (Bialystok et al. 2009;
Bialystok & Friesen 2012; Hoffmann & Stavans 2007).
In Figure 7.3 we reproduce a participant’s written verbalizations relative
to her metalinguistic reflections as required by the given test task.
Explaining grammatical rules is considered one of the most demanding
metalinguistic tasks (Ranta 2008: 205).
In this particular section of the MAT-2, the focus is on Grammatical
Functions in L1 Italian. Pupils are required to complete two separate tasks
for the given item. First, they have to answer a so-called L(inguistic) ques-
tion which probes into their linguistic knowledge. Then, in a second step,
they are asked to provide a possibly complete verbalization of their meta-
linguistic reflections (as part of the ML or metalinguistic answer). In the
example depicted above, the given pupil manages to provide a clear and
sufficiently exhaustive explication of her metacognitive thinking, demon-
strating considerable metalinguistic (in this particular case, grammatical)
Maria si pettina i capelli. (Maria is combing her hair.)
DL : Chi fa l’azione? (Who is doing the action?)
RL: Maria (Maria)
DML: Che cosa te lo fa dire con sicurezza? (What makes you sure of that?)
RML: É Maria il soggetto che compie l’azione di pettinarsi i capelli.

(Maria is the subject who carries out the action of combing her hair)
Figure 7.3 Metalinguistic Abilities Test: MAT2 (Grammatical functions task)

Il gattino afferrava il cordino. (The cat was playing with the string.)
DL: Si può dire? Can this be said?
RL: Si. (Yes)
Il cordino afferrava il gattino. (The string was playing with the cat.)
DL: Si può dire? Can this be said?
RML: No. (No)
DML: Perchè hai dato questa risposta? (Why did you give these answers?)
RML: Perchè nella prima c’è il soggetto e il verbo. Perchè nella seconda c’è il
soggetto e il verbo ma il cordino non è un essere vivente allora non può
prendere il gatto.
Because in the first sentence there are the subject and the verb. Because in the
second sentence there are the subject and the verb but the string is not a living
being so it cannot play with the cat.
Figure 7.4 Metalinguistic Abilities Test: MAT2 (Acceptability task)
awareness and skill. In response to the metalinguistic question “What

makes you think that Maria is doing the action?,” the pupil articulates
her thoughts as follows: È maria* il soggetto che compie l’azione di pettinarsi i
capelli (Maria is the subject who carries out the action of combing her
own hair).
Figure 7.4 relates to another test section in which the focus is on
Acceptability and on various types of (semantically and morpho-syntactically)
anomalous sentences. As in the Grammatical Functions section earlier, pupils
are required to answer L and ML questions to demonstrate their knowledge
of language use and their metalinguistic abilities. The pupil whose answers
are rendered in the above picture, evidences a sound understanding of the
nature of the semantic anomaly. He perceives and is able to comment on
the lexical incompatibility stemming from the animate/inanimate oppos-
ition: il cordino non è un essere vivente allora non può prendere il gatto (the string
is not a living thing so it cannot play with/take the cat).
In the following we cite a number of vignettes which relate to various
classroom situations and provide further evidence for our YMLs’ meta- and
cross-linguistic skill and understanding. As mentioned earlier, the data
were collected during a week-long field study in two multilingual class-
rooms. The data show that our YMLs are particularly attentive to form
aspects continuously looking for structural patterns and regularities.
7.8.1 Phonological Awareness

The first example was recorded during math lessons, which at the given
school takes place in L2 German. The sample relates to a pupil’s metalin-
guistic comment on the morpho-phonological properties of the lexeme
Griffenschachtel (Engl. pencil case). The pupil in question very matter-of-

factly remarks on the erroneous pronunciation of the lexeme

‘Griffenschachtel’ proffered by one of his classmates. As we observe him
emphasize that
P1: Griffelschachtel hat ein ‘sch’. (There’s a ‘sch’ in Griffenschachtel = pencil case)
we are led to hypothesize that the pupil’s attentiveness to form aspects and
his evident aim at morpho-phonological precision may be a manifestation
of the so-called M(ultilingualism)-Factor (see above) which takes effect
due to multilinguals’ constantly having to manage multiple language
systems, activating, inhibiting, and switching between target or nontarget
language codes.
7.8.2 Orthographical/Word Derivation Awareness

In the next example, a group of pupils are vociferously discussing the
spelling of the third person singular verb form isst (eats). One pupil argues
that ‘isst’ is spelled with one ‘s’. The others vehemently contest her pro-
posal, crying out: Nein! Das kommt von “essen”! (No! ‘Isst’ comes from ‘essen’!)
Testifying to the multilingual resourcefulness of the participants in ques-
tion, this metalinguistic repartee intimates that the pupils have formed a
habit of paying close attention to linguistic detail across languages (the
reader will recall that German is not their first but their second language).
They are clearly able to establish and exploit associations between the
multilingual entries in the mental lexicon, in this particular case by linking
the third person singular ‘isst’ to its infinitive or base form ‘essen’, from
which they then arrive at the correct spelling.
The example seems to suggest that experienced learners tend to structure
and arrange information in a way that facilitates the formation of associ-
ations and online processing and comes at a lower cost than the processing
of disconnected, isolated elements.
7.8.3 Strategy Use: Borrowing

The following vignette relates to an episode during the biology lesson which
at the given school is held in L2 German. The class are talking about
volcanoes and the recent eruption of a volcano in Iceland which has
hampered air traffic in the whole of Europe, when a pupil, keen to contrib-
ute to this topic with a personal anecdote, raises his hand and excitedly
begins his narration:
P: Mein Papi hat mir erzählt, einmal viele Tage können in Europa nicht die Flugzeuge
fliegen. So viel cenere [Engl. ash] runtergefallen . . .
(My dad has told me that many days in Europe the airplanes cannot fly . . . so
much cenere [=ash] fall down . . .)

As the example illustrates, the pupil is very well able to discuss complex
subject matter content in his second language. The pupil’s drive to commu-
nicate demonstrably overrides his lexical inadequacies in L2. In point of
fact, lexical gaps do not present an obstacle to communication. Target
lexical items which he cannot retrieve offhand from the lexicon are skill-
fully substituted with L1 items without any disruption to the speech flow.
In other words, all linguistic resources that are available are drawn upon to
keep the conversation going and get the message across, and whatever can
be transferred is transferred if it serves the purpose of successful communi-
cation and affords economy and efficiency. This particular aspect of multi-
lingual awareness is also commented on in Matras (2012). In his
investigation of young multilinguals Matras found that young multilingual
children (aged 8) are already equipped with an astonishing repertoire of
strategies and skills that allow them to manipulate languages in such a way
as to fit their own purposes (23).
7.8.4 Enhanced Multilingual Monitor: Morphosyntactic Awareness

The DMM (Herdina & Jessner 2002) assumes an enhanced monitor function
for learners of more than two languages. Our study goes some way to
underpinning this hypothesis. We found that our YMLs are constantly
engaged in linguistic monitoring and editing, regardless of whether they
are themselves generating an utterance or just listening to their classmates’
or teachers’ productions. The following example was recorded in the L2
German classroom. It exemplifies learners’ capacity to focus on
morphosyntactic features in a language that is not their first.
In German, personal pronouns have to agree with the gender, number
and case of the noun. As Pupil 1 (below) generates an incorrect pronoun
ending, another pupil promptly steps in and supplies what she thinks is the
correct morphological marker:
P 1: Ich habe meine* Zimmer aufgeräumt. (I have tidied mine* room)
P 2: meinen* Zimmer [the correct form is mein Zimmer].
A similar exchange was recorded during the English lesson. In this case a
pupil can be seen reacting to his classmate’s (correct) production of an
irregular plural form:
P1: many children . . .
P2: childrens!
P3/4/5: No!
In this particular episode, Pupil 1 has just produced the correct plural
marker for ‘children’, when a second pupil corrects him in the conviction
that ‘children’ takes an ‘s’. However, he is immediately made aware of his

mistake by the vocal interjections of three other classmates. Again, the

conclusion we draw from these observations is that attending to formal
features of language(s) appears to come very naturally to these children.
7.8.5 Grammatical Awareness

Our final vignettes relate to two episodes during a Riflessione Lingua class.
In the first episode, pupils and teacher are engaged in contrastive grammar
analysis (in this particular case, analysis of L1 and L2 sentence construc-
tions). They are dissecting the Italian sentence: Alla mamma è arrivata una
lettera (Mother has received a letter), and pupils are instructed to identify
the subject, object, and verb of the syntagma. Then, to check comprehen-
sion, the Italian teacher invites the children to explain why the lexeme
‘lettera’, and not ‘mamma’, is the subject of the sentence. A pupil instantly
proffers the following explanation:
P: Se tu metti la mamma come soggetto, è come se la mamma viene spedita alla lettera.
(If you assume that mother is the subject then it is as if the mother is sent to the
letter).
At the age of 9, the pupil already shows a sound understanding of the given
parts of speech and their function in the sentence. We like to think that
juggling three language codes on a day-to-day basis has the effect of honing
young learners’ metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities.
In the second episode, the L1 Italian teacher asks her pupils if it is
possible to drop the subject pronoun ‘loro’ (they) in the sentence ‘Loro sono
andati in giardino’ (They have gone to the garden), upon which a student
presently replies in the affirmative, adding that in questions it is even
preferable to do so. On this note, the L2 German teacher takes over, asking
the pupils to think about whether pronoun-dropping is also admissible in
the German language. The class full-throatedly (and correctly) reply in
the negative.
To sum up, our data seem to support the hypothesis that successful, i.e.,
multilingually aware learners, can rely on a well-developed and robust
metasystem, which helps them to integrate, process, and edit multiple
language knowledge (see Jessner 2019). The metalinguistic and metacogni-
tive capabilities aggregated in this metasystem capacitate learner/users to
form their own subjective metacognitions and hypotheses about how
second or third languages work and relate to their L1. As they put their
language-related assumptions to the test in online processing, multilingual
learner/users leverage all the resources at hand. If errors or intrusions are
detected in the system, or if (online) processing is slowed down by (tempor-
ary) lack of knowledge, the metasystem will kick in and initiate corrective
or compensatory measures. Importantly, the quality of this metasystem
(i.e., the overall M-effect) must be taken to correlate with other factors such

as the learner’s overall linguistic proficiency, their cognitive capacity, will-

ingness to engage, etc. As already indicated, meta- and cross-linguistic
awareness, as central components of this metasystem, are both a function
of multilingualism and a catalyst for multilingual learning.
7.9 Can Meta- and Cross-linguistic Thinking Be Trained,

and If So, How?
The recent literature suggests that meta- and cross-linguistic thinking can be
trained in the classroom by increasing contact time with other languages,
focusing on cross-language reflection, engaging in contrastive analysis, and
pointing learners to relevant features within and across language(s) (Allgäuer-
Hackl 2017; Hofer & Allgäuer-Hackl 2018; Hufeisen 2018). Contrary to (early)
monolingual reductionist views, which condemned multilingual approaches
as detrimental and causing interference, there is a growing appreciation
today that (w)holistic multilingual approaches to languageS learning can
benefit learners in significant ways (Hufeisen 2018; Jessner 2008; Thomas
1988). Integrated multilingual approaches have been credited with enhan-
cing learners’ meta- and cross-linguistic awareness (i.e., their awareness of
how languages function and relate to one another) and supporting additional
language learning. The assumption is that by focusing on multiple languages
and cross-linguistic aspects in the classroom, important synergies are created
which allow for new qualities to arise in languageS learning (Jessner 2006:
120). As has been shown, awareness-raising activities based on the systematic
comparison of multiple language systems foster inter-lingual hypothesis
building and help strengthen within- and between-language connections in
the mind (Allgäuer-Hackl 2017; Hofer 2017).
Crucially, the ability to analyze languages and identify points of com-
monality between the various codes also promotes autonomous learning
and enables young learners to work independently as they de- or encode
and integrate new, other-language material. In the next section we further
elaborate on this point.
7.9.1 Fostering Learner Autonomy and Self-Sufficiency

Promoting young learners’ awareness of languages in the classroom is
connected to a number of positive spillover effects: thematizing multilin-
gualism and multiple language learning and challenging children to go
deeper will stir their curiosity and desire to learn more about language(s)
(Hawkins 1999: 128). With curiosity and enthusiasm comes the will to
commit and take risks, which, in turn, can boost learners’ confidence in
their capacity to do things with languages (cf. Austin 1962 in Hawkins
1999: 128). As increasingly self-reliant learners build up a repertoire of
multilingual resources and language learning strategies, they also lay the

ground for lifelong learning. Contrastive multilingual approaches to

languageS teaching and learning are ideally suited to support young
learners in becoming independent and multilingually confident users of
languages (Gabrys-Barker & Otwinowska-Kasztelanic 2012; Le Pichon
Vorstman et al. 2009; Moore 2006). Moreover, as they get accustomed to
operating in a multilingual framework, children grow up to perceive
multilingualism as the norm and develop a positive attitude towards lan-
guages, language learning, and language use.
As outlined earlier, cross-language comparative approaches are an inte-
gral part of the multilingual classrooms presented in this chapter (cf. Hofer
2015, 2017). ‘Language apprenticeship’ (Hawkins 1999), constitutes a cen-
tral component of language(s) learning at both schools. Holistic conceptions
of languageS learning and/or awareness raising are also promoted in the
Curriculum Mehrsprachigkeit (Krumm et al. 2011), EuroCom (Hufeisen &
Marx 2007), the Multilingual Whole School Curriculum (Hufeisen 2011,
2018), Evlang (Candelier 2003), and in pan-European projects such as
PlurCur (Hufeisen 2015) and PluriE (Allgäuer-Hackl et al. 2018). In South
Tyrol, the Multilingual School Curriculum (Schwienbacher et al. 2016),
with its explicit focus on cross-language integrative teaching and learning,
and Gelmi and Saxalber’s Integrated Language Didactics (1992) pursue
similar targets but have unfortunately not really had much resonance.
7.10 Outlook
Recent research on second and additional language learning has found

strong associations between metalinguistic awareness and knowledge of
(multiple) languages (Andreou 2007; Barnes 2006; Bialystok 2001; Gibson
& Hufeisen 2011; Otwinowska-Kasztelanic 2011; Pinto et al. 2011; Wehr
2001). The present study lends further support to these findings (Hofer
2015). Far from being detrimental, multilingualism has been found to have
the potential to empower children. Being multilingual can enhance a
child’s awareness and understanding of his first and additional languages,
and this in turn affords them greater control over their linguistic resources
and multiple language productions. Policy-makers and educational stake-
holders need to acknowledge and capitalize on this multilingual potential.
Schools can provide multilingual learning environments through the adop-
tion of integrated multilingual curricula and through multilingual appren-
ticeship. In the classroom, meta- and cross-linguistic awareness can be
fostered through multilingual learning approaches with a systematic focus
on meta- and cross-linguistic analysis and reflection. This way, learning can
take place across languages, and as young learner/users profit from the
synergies arising from cross-fertilizations between the languages, they will
develop high levels of meta- and cross-linguistic awareness and skill and a
good level of self-sufficiency.

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8
Code-Switching
among Bilingual
and Trilingual Children
Jeanine Treffers-Daller
8.1 Introduction
One of the most remarkable characteristics of bilinguals is their ability to

switch effortlessly between two languages, and to combine grammar rules
and words from each in one sentence.* An example of the ways in which
bilingual children do this is given in (1), from Jisa (2000). The excerpt is a
transcript of a conversation between the mother (M) and Tiffany (T), a
French-English bilingual who was born and raised in France, and 2 years
and 5 months old at the time of recording, which took place during a two-
month visit to California where exposure to English was intensified.
(1) (M and T are sitting at the kitchen table. M gives T a biscuit.)

T: no:. wan ’gurt.
M: you wanna yogurt?
T: oui ‘yes’
M: oh honey. I don’t think you’ll eat it will ya?
T: oui ‘yes’
M: o:ka:y (M gives T a yogurt)
M: there yago
T: ’gurt!
M: here lemme get ya a spoon
(M gives T a spoon. T tastes the yogurt) - - -)
T: wan pas. wan pas ’gurt ‘want not, want not yogurt’
M: that’s what I thought Tiffany. you didn’t want any yogurt.
According to Jisa (2000), at the time of recording Tiffany’s strongest lan-

guage was French, and it is therefore completely understandable that she
sometimes uses this language in alternation with English when speaking to
* I would like to thank Anat Stavans and Ulrike Jessner for inviting me to contribute a chapter to this volume and two
anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

Code-Switching among Bilingual/Trilingual Children 191
the mother, who consistently uses English with her. Tiffany also uses the
French negation marker pas ‘not’ in combination with the English verb wan
‘want’ in the penultimate utterance in (1). Thus, in this conversation,
switching takes place not only between utterances (intersentential
code-switching) but also within utterances (intrasentential code-
switching).
A key question for researchers in the field of bilingual and multilingual
language development is how the skill to alternate between two languages,
and mix them within a sentence, relates to the development of children’s
competence in each language. Although multilingual families, teachers and
policy makers are often concerned that code-switching is a sign of poor
language skills, there is robust evidence from researchers working on
language development in multilingual children that code-switching is indi-
cative of highly developed skills in both languages (e.g., Meisel 1994; Yow
et al. 2018).
This can clearly be seen in (1). Jisa (2000) argues that Tiffany’s use of a
French postverbal marker of negation pas ‘not’, which appears after the
English verb wan ‘want’ in (1), is a step in the development of English
grammar: she borrows a function word from her stronger language,
French, into her weaker language, English. In other conversations, Tiffany
also uses English no as a preverbal marker of negation, as is illustrated in
(2), which is typical at the early stages of development of negation in
monolingual children too (Bloom 1970).
(2) no wan juice

(Jisa 2000: 1378)
Thus, Tiffany’s use of a French postverbal marker of negation in (1) is not a

sign of lack of competence in either language, but rather a sign that she is
able to draw on all the resources she has at her disposal to create a coherent
utterance. The current chapter aims to summarise what we know about
this skill and how it develops in childhood in bilingual children, and to look
at variability in the patterns found in data sets from typologically different
languages and social contexts. Although by comparison with the literature
on bilinguals relatively little is known about trilingual and multilingual
children (Hoffmann & Stavans 2007; Quay 2011; Stavans & Muchnik 2008;
Stavans & Swisher 2006), any differences or similarities with respect to
switching in both groups will be highlighted.
First, Muysken’s typology will be presented in Section 8.2. Although
relatively few researchers analyse children’s code-switching on the basis
of this typology, using it will allow us to obtain more in-depth insights into
the different patterns that are found in a range of language pairs and
contexts (Section 8.3), and into the difficult issue of the (lack of ) separation
of grammars in code-switching, which is the topic of Section 8.4. This will
be followed by a discussion of the frequency of code-switching at different
stages of development (Section 8.5), and an analysis of the sociolinguistic

192 JEANINE TREFFERS-DALLER
variability in multilingual communities and the impact of different code-

switching patterns on cognitive control (Section 8.6). Next the focus is on
differences between mixing practices of bilinguals and multilinguals
(Section 8.7), and the chapter finishes with a summary of the key points
and an outlook towards the future (Section 8.8).
8.2 Code-Switching and Code-Mixing: Terminology,

Patterns and Constraints
Muysken (2000: 1) suggests that the term code-mixing better reflects

instances ‘where lexical items and grammatical features from two lan-
guages appear within one sentence’ than the term code-switching, which
implies separation between systems (see also Treffers-Daller 2009), and is
more appropriate for alternation between larger chunks of language that
are only loosely attached to each other. For the purposes of the current
paper, I will only use the term ‘mixing’ when discussing the work of
researchers who have adopted this term (e.g., Hoffmann & Stavans 2007),
but elsewhere I will use the term ‘code-switching’ to cover different types of
intrasentential as well as intersentential switching.
Cantone and Müller (2005) and other researchers working in the field of
Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA) follow Meisel (1994), who
defines code-mixing as those instances where ‘the speaker violates the
constraints on codeswitching that normally govern the linguistic behavior
of the bilingual community’. In Meisel’s view, the term code-switching
refers to a specific pragmatic skill in choosing the right language in inter-
actions, without breaking the grammatical constraints. However, according
to MacSwan (1999: 146), ‘nothing constrains code-switching apart from the
requirements of the mixed grammars’. This assumption, which has been
called the null theory of code-switching, is attractive in that it does not
assume there needs to be a separate code-mixing grammar. Nevertheless, as
the grammar rules of the languages involved often differ considerably,
instances of mixing may constitute a breach of the rules or at least an
adaptation of the rules of one or both of the languages. Another problem
with applying MacSwan’s (1999) null theory to mixing in early childhood is
that the grammars are still under development. How can children be
expected ‘to follow the requirements of the mixed languages’ (MacSwan,
1999: 146) if the grammars are not yet fully developed? Could it be the case,
as Genesee (1989: 164) suggests, that bilingual children’s mixing differs
from that of adults because of the ‘lack of systematicity or compliance
to rules’?
The latter view raises an interesting issue, namely to what extent in
bilingual or multilingual communities flouting the rules is inherent in
playing the mixing game. As can be seen in (1), Tiffany does not simply
follow the requirements of the two languages, because in French pas

generally appears after the verb and in English not normally appears before
the verb. The child solves this problem creatively, albeit by bending the
rules for English to some extent and following the French rules for pos-
itioning the negation. The key message that we learn from this is that
intrasentential code-switching is not a sign of deficiency in grammar or
pragmatics, but rather an illustration of multilinguals’ ability to creatively
exploit the different resources at their disposal. In other words, it is a
special skill which allows multilinguals to create novel structures contain-
ing unexpected switches between the different languages’ structures.
Rather than pursuing the idea that there are constraints on code-
switching which may or may not have universal validity, it is more fruitful
to investigate the variability in patterns that are found across different
language pairs and communities. For the purposes of the current overview
I will follow the typology introduced by Muysken (2013), who shows that
there are four basic types of intrasentential code-switching, and that the
types found in any community depend not only on typological but also on
sociolinguistic factors. Detailed criteria that can help distinguish between
the four types can be found in Deuchar, Muysken and Wang (2007).
The first of these four patterns is insertion, that is the use of content
word (often a noun) or chunks in a grammatical frame that is mostly filled
with words from another language, as in (3), where which an English/Hebrew/
Spanish trilingual child uses Hebrew garinim ‘seeds’, is embedded into an
English utterance and marked with an English plural -s. In this kind of code-
switching there is a clear matrix language (in this case English), which
provides the function words, the morphosyntactic frame and generally also
the word order. The insertion belongs to the guest language (here Hebrew)
and is generally morphosyntactically inert, even though in (3) garinim is also
marked with the Hebrew plural -im. It is therefore a case of double marking of
the plural form. As doubling is a characteristic of alternation (Muysken,
2000), this example could therefore also be seen as alternation.
(3) Ima, take out the garin-im-s (Stavans & Hoffmann 2007) (M, 3;4)
Mum, take out the seed-plurHeb-plurEng
‘Mum, take out the seeds.’
This type of code-switching is very common, as using words from language

A in contexts of language B is a widely used strategy to fill lexical gaps.
According to Muysken, it is akin to borrowing (the adoption and integration
of words from one language into another), and is often asymmetrical: the
home or community language functions as the host language or matrix
language and provides the grammatical frame, while the societally dom-
inant language is the guest language and provides most of the
lexical items.
The second type of code-switching is alternation, namely the succession
of loosely connected fragments (adjuncts) from language A that are attached
to stretches in language B, as in (4), where an English adverbial clause is

attached to a German main clause. The switch takes place at a major con-
stituent boundary and there is no embedding of the English clause into the
German structure. In other words, there is no overall matrix language for the
entire sentence, but rather an alternation between matrix languages.
(4) Ich kann heute nicht kommen because I’m ill

I can today not come because I’m ill
‘I can’t come today because I’m ill.’ (Hofweber et al. 2019: 184,
English/German)
In the third type of code-switching, congruent lexicalization, elem-

ents from either language are used in a structure that is wholly or partly
shared by languages A and B, as in (5), where the word order is shared
between English and German and function and content words are drawn
freely from both languages. There is no matrix language here. This type of
code-switching is more common between closely related languages and in
situations with longstanding traditions of language contact.
(5) That’s what Papschi meins to say

That’s what daddy means to say
‘That’s what daddy means to say.’ (Clyne 2003: 173, English/German)
In the fourth type of code-switching, backflagging, speakers insert

heritage language discourse markers into L2 discourse, as in (6), where
the mother uses a discourse marker from the family language (French) at
the start of an English utterance (the language of the wider community), to
mark the end of an activity.
(6) Bon, should we clean up this mess?

‘Good, should we clean up this mess?’ (Jisa 2000: 1374, French/
English)
As Muysken’s typology is to a large extent based on examples from adult

speakers, the question arises whether or not the model is applicable to
children. This is not yet clear, because very few researchers who focus on
multilingual language development have adopted the typology. One might
expect children’s patterns to be similar to those of adults, because in the
course of development children are likely to adjust their code-switching
practices to the patterns found in their community, but as we will see in the
next section, there is some evidence that early code-switching differs from
that found among adults.
8.3 Code-Switching in Children and Adults:

Same or Different?
As pointed out by Cantone (2007: 173), it is very common for children to

insert nouns from language A into stretches of speech of language B. In this

respect, children’s code-switching is similar to that of adults (Meisel 1994;

Vihman 1985). Most authors attribute insertions of nouns and other lexical
items to lexical need, as neither children nor adults have translation
equivalents for all words in their two languages. According to Pearson
et al. (1995), only 30.8 per cent of words in bilingual children are doublets
or translation equivalents, and Poulin-Dubois et al. (2013) suggest the figure
is around 37 per cent. Of course, the exact percentages will depend on the
languages involved and the typological differences between them.
Another type of mixing that is common is the use of discourse markers,
such as you know or well, from language A in language B. This type of mixing
does not involve embedding of material from language A into language B, as
the discourse marker appears on the periphery of the utterance. If the
discourse marker belongs to language of the wider community, and it is
attached to an utterance in the child’s home language, it is best seen as a
case of alternation. If it is the other way around, it would be a case of
backflagging. As some discourse markers (e.g., ‘ok’) have been adopted
widely, one would not consider these as code-switches anymore.
While insertion, alternation and backflagging are widely attested in chil-
dren’s mixing, there is little discussion of congruent lexicalization in the
literature on children’s code-switching. This type of code-switching could be
more widespread than has been assumed so far. The codemix in (1) could, for
example, be seen as congruent lexicalization, as it involves a structure which
is a compromise between French and English word orders. In other words,
the sentence is neither based completely on French nor on English rules. In
this shared grammatical frame we find a French functional item (the neg-
ation marker pas ‘not’) as well as an English verb wan ‘want’ and the noun
yogurt, which could belong to either French or English and could be classified
as a homophonous diamorph (Clyne 2003). The sentence therefore displays
many characteristics of congruent lexicalization.
Analysing function words in child code-switching is important if we want
to uncover any differences between children’s and adults’ code-switching
patterns, because mixing of function words is generally severely restricted
in data sets from adult bilinguals. This is due to the lack of congruence
between functional categories from different languages (Muysken 2011):
not all languages have articles or auxiliaries, for example. There are, how-
ever, many examples of mixing of function words in very young multilin-
gual children. Redlinger and Park (1980), for example, point out that
Danny, a German-English bilingual, frequently used German articles with
English nouns, as in (7), at a stage when Danny had just acquired the
German indefinite article ein ‘a’.
(7) Ein big cow

A big cow (Danny, 1;11-2;0; Redlinger & Park 1980: 342)
Stavans and Swisher (2006) found many similar examples of combin-

ations of Hebrew determiners with English nouns as well as Spanish

determiners with English nouns or vice versa in a trilingual Spanish-

English-Hebrew trilingual child between the ages of 5;1 and 7;1. Mixes of
function words are not limited to determiners, however. Vihman (1985)
found that a great variety of English function words in Estonian utterances
were produced by the Estonian-English bilingual child Raivo in his second
year of life. Examples include the use of has in contexts where an Estonian
allative marker would be expected, as well as demonstratives (this, that,
these) and negations (no). While the list of items Vihman includes in the
category of function words has been criticized as comprising elements that
belong in other categories (Meisel 1994), there is evidence from a wide
variety of sources that young bilingual children do indeed use function
words from language A in stretches of speech that otherwise consist of
words from language B (Cantone 2007).
Vihman (1985: 309) offers the following explanation for Raivo’s use of
English functors: the child uses these as ‘a strategy for putting off the
production of the Estonian system’ which had not yet been acquired. This
could therefore be seen as an example of what Gawlitzek-Maiwald and
Tracy (1996) have called bilingual bootstrapping: the child’s stronger
language provides grammatical structures which are not (yet) available in
the weaker language. In the case of Hannah, a German-English bilingual
child living in Germany, the authors note that the left-periphery of main
clauses (modal verbs and auxiliaries) is realized in German, as in (8) and (9).
(8) Kannst du move a bit

Can-2ndSing you move a bit
‘Can you move a bit?’ (2;4) Gawlitzek-Maiwald & Tracy, 1996: 913)
(9) Ich habe ge-climb-ed up

I have PERF_PARTclimb-ed up
‘I climbed up.’ (Hannah, 2;4. Gawlitzek-Maiwald & Tracy, 1996: 914)
Thus, at this stage the child ‘pulls resources’ (Gawlitzek-Maiwald & Tracy
1996: 920) from both languages. To a certain extent the bilingual bootstrap-
ping hypothesis is an elaboration of Petersen’s (1988) dominant language
hypothesis, according to which dominance predicts the directionality of
mixing: grammatical morphemes should come from the child’s dominant
language. Once the child has developed the relevant function words in both
languages, mixing of this type disappears. Another view emerges from
Cantone (2007), who suggests that the function words determine the base
language of the utterance in child language. This would work well for (7),
where the German article ein ‘a’ would determine the base language for the
utterance, and big cow could then be an English insertion into this German
base. However, this analysis does not work for utterances which contain
function words from both languages, as in (8), which contains the German
modal kannst ‘can-2nd-SG’ as well as an English article. A more attractive
analysis is therefore Deuchar’s (1999) proposal that function words are not

language-specific in early child language, whereas content words are. This

analysis is compatible with my own view that mixing of function words in
young bilinguals constitutes a form of congruent lexicalization, because
there is no clear matrix language, but rather a shared grammatical struc-
ture in which content and function words from both languages can
be combined.
The use of function words from language A in language B should not be
interpreted as indicating a lack of syntactic knowledge: as Gawlitzek-
Maiwald and Tracy (1996) point out, the very fact that Hannah knows
how to map German and English clause structures onto each other reveals
that she has some understanding of the ways in which clauses are built,
even though she may not have the lexical means yet to realize the clause
completely in English. Köppe and Meisel (1995) concur and suggest that as
soon as the relevant function words are available in both languages, chil-
dren no longer switch function words but only content words.
Supporting evidence for the similarities between children’s and adults’
code-switching behaviour comes from Lanza’s (1997) study of a Norwegian-
English bilingual child, in which she argues that from the age of 2 bilingual
children can code-switch in the same way as adults. Thus, most observers
seem to agree that apart from the initial period, children’s code-switches
are very similar to those of adults (De Houwer 1990; Vihman 1998).
Code-switching in early child language is also a key issue in the debate
about the separation between the languages in bilingual children, which
will be discussed in the next section.
8.4 Code-Switching or Fusion of Grammars:

How Separate Are the Language Systems?
While all researchers agree that children mix languages in the early stages
of their development, there are different views on whether or not this
constitutes evidence for a fused system with undifferentiated phonological,
lexical and syntactic subsystems (Genesee 1989). One of the earliest models
which addresses this issue is Volterra and Taeschner’s (1978) three-stage
linguistic model for becoming bilingual in early childhood, which is some-
times referred to as the Unitary Language System Hypothesis (Genesee
1989). According to the model, at Stage I children have a unified lexicon
with few if any translation equivalents: mixed-language word combinations
are common at this stage. At Stage II children have distinct lexicons and
would be able combine words from one language at a time, but they would
apply the same syntactic rules to utterances in either language. And finally,
at Stage III, the child is able to differentiate fully between the lexicons and
the grammars of both languages.
This model has been strongly criticized by researchers working in the
field of Bilingual First Language Acquisition (e.g., Genesee 1989; De Houwer

1990; Meisel 1994, Stavans 1990). Importantly, Genesee (1989) notes that
the claim that there is an undifferentiated system can only be upheld if
children use mixed utterances indiscriminately with monolinguals of lan-
guage A and language B or in contexts which are predominantly associated
with either A or B. If such evidence is not available, it is not possible to
claim that there is a fused system (see also Meisel 1994). Cantone and
Müller (2005) also contend that the two languages develop separately in
bilingual children and that the use of different languages within the sen-
tence ‘follows the same route’ in adults and children. They accept
MacSwan’s null theory and suggest that there is no difference in the
syntactic organisation of monolingual and mixed grammars in children.
A problem for the null approach is, however, that it starts from the
assumption that the two grammars are separate in the first place, and that
any switching involves adhering strictly to the grammatical rules of each,
which we have already seen is not necessarily the case. As shown in the
work of Clyne (1987) and pointed out by Muysken (2000), code-switching
may involve separation between grammars, as is most clearly the case with
alternation or backflagging, and to a lesser extent with insertion, but there
are also forms of code-switching which do not involve clear separation
between languages. In congruent lexicalization, content and function
words from both languages are used within a shared grammatical frame
for which there is no identifiable matrix language. As pointed out by
Muysken (2000), this type of code-switching is more common among closely
related languages.
The case for strict separation in the early stages is not very strong,
because children’s early utterances consist of single words. Although single
words that belong to language A but occur in contexts where utterances of
language B are expected could be interpreted as ‘mixing’ (Genesee 1989), it
is not always that easy to decide to which language a particular word
belongs. This is particularly true in those cases where the phonetic systems
of the two languages overlap considerably and there are many cognates,
that is, words which are very similar if not identical in both languages (e.g.,
English/German: daddy/Pappa; mummy/mamma; bear/Bär). Finally, there is
often very little data from the early stages, and children’s pronunciation
may be variable too. In a detailed analysis of Voice Onset Time in a Spanish-
English bilingual child, Deuchar and Quay (1998) therefore conclude that
making the case for or against a unitary system is hardly possible. They do,
however, suggest that there is evidence for separate development at later
stages. Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence that children can and do
differentiate between their two languages from a very young age (De
Houwer 1990; Meisel 1994) and learn to follow sociolinguistic and prag-
matic principles in using these (Köppe 1996; Lanza 1992), even though this
is difficult to see at the earliest stages.
Clear separation is particularly difficult to maintain if the two languages
in contact are very similar, as is the case between Frisian and Dutch. These

two languages have been in contact for many centuries, and crosslinguistic
influence is visible in all subsystems. According to Bosma and Blom (2019:
1435), speakers of Frisian frequently incorporate Dutch elements into their
Frisian and ‘they often completely mix the lexicons and grammars of
Frisian and Dutch’. This suggests that they engage in congruent lexicaliza-
tion, which is typical of closely related languages which have a tradition of
intense language contact. However, according to Poeste et al. (2019),
congruent lexicalization is too complex for young children. I would like
to suggest the opposite, namely that separation of the two systems is too
complex at this stage.
In early child language, congruent lexicalization may not be limited to
closely related languages, such as Frisian and Dutch, but may also be
common between languages that are typologically further apart, such as
Estonian and English, as described by Vihman (1985). This does not mean
that both grammars are fused in the early stages, but rather that elements
of the two languages are mixed in the process of language production. An
example of the ways in which grammatical morphemes of two languages
are mixed in trilingual children can be seen in (10), produced by a 3-year-old
trilingual, who attaches the German past participle marker ge- to a Croatian
verb nosila ‘carry’ and the Croatian noun case ending -ja to the English noun
teddy. In the examples, English words are given in regular font, Croatian in
bold and German in italics.
(10) Anne genosila teddyja od Carle

Anne PTM-carry_PST-F-SG teddy-M-ACC-SG from Carla-F-GEN-SG
‘Anne carried Carla’s teddy.’ (Ivir-Ashworth 2011: 202 [EK p3.5])
Example (10) contains grammatical morphemes from two languages

(Croatian and German) and two words (teddy and Carla) that are homoph-
onous diamorphs. Both these characteristics are indicative of congruent
lexicalization.
More examples of congruent lexicalization can be found in Namba
(2012), who notes that the 7-year-old Japanese-English bilingual child
produces several utterances which contain the construction ‘it’s +
Japanese VP’, as in (11). According to the author, a matrix language
cannot be identified in this utterance, as English and Japanese grammar
co-operate.
(11) It’s mizu nai you know mokusei niwa

It’s water doesn’t exist you know Jupiter TOP
‘There is no water, you know, on Jupiter.’ [7;8]
In English one would expect to find a NP in the slot after it’s, but instead a
Japanese VP follows this expression. While the fact that both languages
provide part of the shared grammatical frame is indicative of congruent
lexicalization, the author also leaves open the possibility that this is to be
interpreted as alternation. An even clearer example of congruent

lexicalization can be found in (12), produced by a 7-year-old Japanese-

English bilingual, also from Namba (2012: 468).
(12) e is kai-ta zo
Picture is draw-PAST FP
‘As for the picture, I drew it.’ [7;6]
Namba (2012) suggests that the English copula is used as the Japanese topic
marker wa through a process of convergence between the two languages.
The use and integration of an English function word in a Japanese clause
can indeed be interpreted as indicative of congruent lexicalization, in that
the grammatical frame is shared by the two languages. Examples (10)–(12)
are remarkable, because the languages in contact are not closely related,
and congruent lexicalization is more likely to occur in typologically
related languages.
8.5 Frequency of Code-Switching and Development

over Time
The analysis of children’s code-switching is particularly challenging

because the different language systems are still under development and
likely to be highly variable. This clearly emerges from Cantone’s (2007)
study of Italian-German bilingual children, who were recorded in either a
monolingual Italian or a monolingual German mode (see Grosjean 2001 for
the concept of language modes). Despite the clear separation of the contexts
in which the children were recorded, the children mixed languages in each:
between 1 per cent and 20 per cent of the total number of utterances of the
children were mixed, although these percentages varied by language con-
text. As children’s productive abilities grow, their code-switching behaviour
may change too. This could mean an increase or a decrease in code-
switching, depending on whether or not code-switching is a common dis-
course mode in the speech community. How children mix languages at
different stages, and how this skill develops over time (in relation to the
development of the two language systems), is therefore a very difficult
issue.
There appears to be some evidence that children mix their languages
more often in the initial than in the later stages (Redlinger & Park 1980;
Vihman 1982; Volterra & Taeschner 1978). If this is indeed the case, it
would potentially constitute supporting evidence for a gradual differenti-
ation between languages in bilingual children over time. However, in their
study of two Hebrew/English/Spanish trilinguals, Hoffmann and Stavans
(2007) found the opposite, namely that children’s code-switching increased
over time until the age of 9, after which there was a decline. The increase in
the earlier phases led the authors to conclude that code-switching requires
more refined linguistic knowledge, which only gradually becomes

available. Another explanation for the higher rate of mixing in Hoffmann

and Stavans’ study could be sought in the relationship between language
dominance and code-switching. Trilingual children could be code-switching
more because they are unlikely to have equal proficiency in each of their
three languages. According to Hoffmann (2001), trilinguals have at least
one weaker language, but they could also have two weaker and one
stronger language. If it is true that children code-switch more when speak-
ing their weaker language(s) than when using their stronger language(s)
(Petersen 1988), they could be expected to code-switch more than bilingual
children (Poeste et al. 2019), although the latter did not find evidence for
this in their data. Some support for the link between language dominance
and code-switching patterns could be found in the fact that the code-
switching patterns in the children in Hoffmann and Stavans (2007) did
indeed change over time when the language of the wider environment
and input patterns in the family changed with the move from the US to
Israel. As language dominance is a multifaceted construct which can be
operationalized and measured in a variety of ways (Treffers-Daller 2016),
further study of the link between dominance and code-switching is needed
to clarify the relationship between these two, even though analysing this
relationship is complex because of the fact that dominance is task-specific
in that a bilingual can be dominant in one language on some tasks but not
on others and because dominance relationships can change over time.
The contrasting findings summarized in the previous paragraph illus-
trate that comparing the frequency of code-switching across different stud-
ies is problematic. As Genesee (1989) points out, it is difficult to obtain
robust evidence for such comparisons because it is often unclear how the
child’s speech was sampled. If children are recorded in monolingual modes
only, as in Cantone (2007), it is likely that they mix and code-switch less
than when they are also recorded in a bilingual mode. Another problem is
that researchers use different operationalisations of the notion ‘mixing’,
which makes it difficult to draw general conclusions about the mixing rates
at different developmental stages across different studies. The frequency of
(particular types of ) code-switching also depends on sociolinguistic differ-
ences between speech communities and typological differences between
languages, which complicates comparisons across studies.
In addition to the sociolinguistic and typological differences highlighted
in the previous paragraph, code-switching patterns found in the input from
caretakers and siblings may differ considerably, which is another source of
variability. Of course, patterns in the input are likely to affect the develop-
ment of code-switching in children, in that children’s code-switches might
reflect the patterns they hear in the input (Allen et al. 2002). While it is
likely that children adjust to the patterns they hear in their environment, it
is clear that this cannot be the full story, because children also produce
code-switches that do not occur in the input (Hoffmann & Stavans 2007; Jisa
2000; Serratrice 2005; Stavans & Muchnik 2008). As we have already seen in

Section 8.3, children’s code-switching can differ qualitatively from that

found among adults, in particular in relation to the use of function words,
but according to Bosma and Blom (2019), from the age of 3, children’s code-
switching patterns resemble those of adults. In this context it may be
important to note that studies which focus on the relationship between
parental (intrasentential) code-switching and children’s language
development have revealed there is little evidence that code-switching in
the input has a negative impact on children’s language development in
each language (Hoff et al. 2014; Place & Hoff 2011, 2016). Only Byers-
Heinlein (2013) found a negative correlation between parents’ self-reported
frequency of code-switching and their children’s receptive vocabulary at 18
months. Drawing general conclusions about this issue remains difficult
because more evidence is needed about the code-switching practices in
multilingual families from a wider range of countries across the world.
Some of these will be discussed in the next section.
8.6 Differences in Code-Switching Practices around

the World: Sociolinguistic Factors and Implications
for Psycholinguistic Models of Code-Switching
In recent years, more and more research has become available about code-
switching in highly multilingual societies in Asia and Africa, where code-
switching is a widely practised discourse mode, not only in the family but
also in society at large. While in Western European and North American
societies code-switching is often a stigmatized form of language behaviour
(Badiola et al. 2018; Dewaele & Li 2014; Jaworska & Themistocleous 2018;
Koban 2016; Poplack 1980), this is much less the case in other parts of the
world: in highly multilingual societies such as Ghana and other West-
African countries or Singapore, multilingualism is the norm and code-
switching is part of everyday life (Auer et al. 2014). In fact, as Guerini
(2014) points out, in Ghana, inserting English words in Twi or Akan is a
sign of being educated, while non-mixed talk can be interpreted as a lack of
education or of being rural. Similarly, in Singapore code-switching has been
reported to be ‘pervasive and prolific’ for Singaporean English-Chinese
adults (Kang & Lust 2019; Xu et al. 1998) as well as English-Chinese
Singaporean pre-schoolers (Yow et al. 2016). New evidence from non-
Western societies (see Auer et al. 2014) reveals that code-switching
practices and the social powers that encourage or discourage code-
switching differ widely across the world. As a result, the highly multilin-
gual contexts in which children grow up in Ghana or Singapore differ
strongly from the ones reported in Cantone (2007), De Houwer (1990) and
Lanza (1992), which focus on bilingual families living in North or Western
Europe. The latter tend to practise the one-parent-one-language principle
(Ronjat 1913), which implies that, at least in theory, the parents’ separate

languages in the input and encourage separation in the output. Indeed, in

some of these families code-switching appears to be actively discouraged
(Meisel 1994), although it is possible, of course, that there is a discrepancy
between official family language policies and actual bilingual practices (De
Houwer & Bornstein 2016), and code-switching may be more common in
(Western) European families than parents are willing to admit.
Nevertheless, it is also likely that family code-switching patterns are differ-
ent in multilingual societies where code-switching is widely practised out-
side the family and attitudes to mixing are also more positive than in
(Western) Europe (see Auer et al. 2014 for discussion). If this is the case,
the outcomes of multilingual development in these contexts may also
differ, and separate development of two (or more) languages that has been
widely attested in Western European bilingual families practising the one-
parent-one-language principle may not be equally likely to happen in highly
multilingual environments in other parts of the world.
For some non-Western contexts it has been claimed that the mixed
output of multilinguals has become a code in its own right (Guerini 2014).
However, this does not automatically mean that code-switching practices
can be equated with mixed languages, such as Media Lengua, for which
Quechua provides the grammatical frame and Spanish many lexical items
(Muysken 1984) or Michif, which is based on Cri and French (Bakker 1997).
In most cases where languages are classified as mixed, the speakers have
little if any knowledge of the languages from which the mixed code was
derived. Speakers of Michif, for example, do not switch between French and
Cri, as they do not know those languages: they only speak the mixed
variety. This is not the case in the situations described by Guerini (2014)
for Ghana or by Yow et al. (2016) for Singapore, where speakers only use
code-switching when in contact with speakers with the same backgrounds
but use different speaking modes or languages in other contexts. In these
cases, there is no fusion of grammatical systems as has been shown to be
the case for mixed languages. As noted in Section 8.4, the existence of code-
switching among young bilingual children does not constitute evidence for
fusion of grammatical systems either, particularly if children are also able
to separate the languages when the situation requires it (Meisel 1994).
The type of code-switching practised by multilinguals is also important
for the discussion about the bilingual advantage (Bialystok 2009), as code-
switching impacts on speakers’ cognitive control, that is, their ability to
inhibit one language while speaking another one, to monitor the processes
of inhibition or to switch between non-linguistic tasks. Bilingualism has
been hypothesized to train executive functions (Bialystok 2009; Kroll et al.
2012), because bilinguals constantly juggle two (or more) languages, and
they therefore experience an increased inhibitory processing load
(Abutalebi & Green 2007; Green 1986, 1998). While in some contexts it
has been found that bilingual children do indeed have an advantage over
monolingual children for some executive functions (Bialystok 2009), in

other contexts no evidence for such an advantage has been found (Yow et al.
2016), or correlations with executive functions were only found with
switching in one direction (Bosma & Blom 2019). The discrepancy in find-
ings could be related to the degree of separation bilinguals maintain
between their languages. According to the Control Processing Model of
code-switching (Green & Li 2014), bilinguals experience advantages in cog-
nitive control only when they have to maintain some degree of language
separation between their two languages. While the degree of separation
between languages may thus impact on executive functions, those who
engage in congruent lexicalization can also have advantages in cognitive
control over bilinguals who engage in other types of code-switching. In
their study among different groups of adult English-German bilinguals,
Hofweber et al. (2019) found that bilinguals have an advantage in those
executive functions that are practised by the type of code-switching they
engage in. Those who practise congruent lexicalization are trained in moni-
toring how to reconcile grammatical patterns from different languages. It is
this consolidation of competing grammatical systems that gives bilinguals
an advantage in monitoring skills in an Attention Network Task (Fan et al.
2002) over monolinguals or bilinguals who engage in different types of
code-switching (Hofweber et al. 2016, 2019, 2020). Thus, subtle distinctions
between the types of code-switching practices found among bilinguals are
highly relevant for the debate about the bilingual advantage, although it is
clear that there is a wide range of other linguistic variables (e.g., similarity
between languages) and non-linguistic variables (e.g., working memory, age
and non-verbal reasoning) which affect cognitive control.
8.7 Code-Switching among Trilinguals
As most studies into code-switching have focused on bilingual children, that

is, children who have grown up with two languages, relatively little is known
about code-switching in children who grow up with more than two lan-
guages, that is, trilingual or multilingual children (Clyne 1997; Hoffmann
2001; Poeste et al. 2019; Unsworth 2013). Studying trilinguals is clearly more
complex than studying bilinguals, as the variability in language learning
histories and exposure to the different languages varies greatly between
trilinguals (Hoffmann 2001; Stavans & Swisher 2006). Apart from those
who grow up with three languages from birth, there are second/foreign
language learners who learned their third language through formal lessons,
and informal second language learners who learned a third language after
migrating to another country. While it is likely that code-switching patterns
in these groups differ from each other, because their language proficiency
and language use patterns are very different too, to the best of my know-
ledge, there are no in-depth analyses of code-switching among trilinguals

other than the ones who grow up with three languages from birth. In this
section, the focus will therefore be on this group.
For the purposes of the current chapter, it is particularly important to
ask to what extent trilingual children’s code-switching practices differ from
those of bilingual children. One obvious way in which these might differ is
in that trilinguals can mix elements from three languages in one utterance,
as in (13), where bold type face represents Hebrew, italics English and
regular typeface Spanish words. The data come from Hoffmann and
Stavans (2007), who studied two Hebrew/Spanish/English trilingual children
who were first recorded when they lived in the US and were 3 and 6 years
old, as well as 3 years later when they were living in Israel.
(13) . . . ki the moscos dvorim . . .

Because the flies Bees
‘Because the flies . . . bees . . .’ (Hoffmann & Stavans 2007: 65)
Switching between three languages was also found to take place within the
noun phrase, as can be seen in (14), where a Spanish plural form -es is attached
to the Hebrew root aron ‘closet’, and an English article precedes the noun. In
monolingual utterances, the Hebrew plural -ot, would be expected instead of
the Spanish plural we find in the trilingual child’s utterance.
(14) the aron-es

‘The closets’ (Stavans & Swisher 2006: 213)
Another interesting type of switching involves lexico-phonetic switches

which consist of blends of Hebrew, English and Spanish words, as in (15),
where English garden, Spanish jardín and Hebrew gina are blended into the
novel word gardina.
(15) gardina ‘garden’

(Hoffmann & Stavans 2007: 70)
Morphosyntactic switching was also found to occur between three lan-

guages, as in (16), where the English progressive -ing form is attached to the
Hebrew root mitlabesh ‘getting dressed’, which is preceded by a Spanish
auxiliary está ‘be.’
(16) Está mitlabesh-ing

Be-SPANISH_AUX.3rdSING.pres.prog getting dressed-HEBREW.progressENGL
‘She is getting dressed.’ (Hoffmann & Stavans 2007: 70)
Establishing which of the three languages is the matrix or host language is

very difficult, as Stavans and Muchnik (2008) point out. Clearly this issue is
even more complex for trilingual mixing than for bilingual mixing.
Although (13)–(16) clearly illustrate that switching between three lan-
guages is possible, Hoffmann and Stavans (2007) also note that only 10 per
cent of the switches contained words from three languages, which may be

related to the complexity of combining elements from more than two

languages and the higher degree of sophistication involved in this type of
language behaviour (Stavans & Muchnik 2008). Because there are so few
studies of code-switching in trilinguals, it is difficult to say whether switch-
ing between two languages is the preferred pattern among trilinguals or
whether this type of switching was more prevalent in their data set because
the characteristics of the situations in which the children’s speech was
recorded made it more likely for them to use two rather than three lan-
guages at the same time. Hoffmann and Stavans (2007) attribute the fact
that the children produce relatively few trilingual mixes to the complexity
of combining elements from three different linguistic systems in a coherent
structure. If trilingual children produce more bilingual mixing than trilin-
gual mixing, this could potentially mean that the majority of code-mixes
found among trilinguals are similar to those found among bilinguals,
which is also the view taken by Clyne (1997).
Although trilingual children clearly have more choice than bilingual
children as to which of their languages they can include in their utterances,
both groups are generally found to base their choices on the language
competencies of their interlocutors: children may have more opportunities
to use two languages than to use three languages with their interlocutors.
The fact that (13)–(16) were all produced in the presence of other trilinguals
illustrates this point very clearly. Put differently, trilinguals can activate or
deactivate each of their three languages and function in monolingual,
bilingual and trilingual modes (Grosjean 2001) as the situation requires
(Hoffmann & Stavans 2007). Importantly, Stavans (1992) reveals that multi-
lingual children fine-tune into the interlocutory setting as early as 2;6
children, in that they code-switch with bilinguals or trilinguals but not
with monolinguals.
An interesting issue worth investigating is to what extent trilinguals have
enhanced abilities to analyse and control their languages, as Hoffmann and
Stavans (2015) suggest. As we have seen in Section 8.6, bilinguals have often
been found to have an advantage over monolinguals in tasks measuring
cognitive control, such as the Flanker task (Fan et al. 2002) or the Simon
task (Simon & Wolf 1963). In their study of cognitive control among 75
German-English bilingual 6- to 7-year-old children, as well as trilinguals
who had a third language in addition to German and English, and second
language learners and monolinguals, Poarch and van Hell (2012) found that
bilinguals and trilinguals did indeed have an advantage over the monolin-
guals and also (marginally) over the second language learners in that the
bilinguals and trilinguals experienced shorter conflict effects on the Simon
Task, though not on the Flanker task. There were no differences between
the bilinguals and the trilinguals, which suggests that having more than
two languages does not give trilinguals an additional advantage over bilin-
guals. It should be noted that that these trilinguals were speaking lan-
guages that were typologically similar, which may have affected the

results. Similar conclusions were reached by Khor et al. (2017) in a study

among 20-year-old bilinguals and trilinguals in Malaysia, who spoke lan-
guages that were typologically very different. Khor et al. point out that
there were differences in how frequently the informants switched between
languages, and that this variable (and other differences in informants’
language histories) might have modulated their performance on the execu-
tive functions tasks (the Stroop task and a Flanker task). Clearly, this
illustrates the complexities of working with trilinguals.
The implications of these results for models of bilingual speech process-
ing, such as the Adaptive Control Hypothesis (Green & Abutalebi 2013),
according to which inhibitory control is not unitary across different con-
texts but adapts to the different demands placed upon it, also deserves
further attention. This model is currently formulated to account for speech
processing in bilinguals, but not in multilinguals. In addition, there is little
connection between the linguistic analyses of code-switching on the one
hand, and models of speech processing on the other. Dense code-switching
as defined in the Adaptive Control Hypothesis, for example, appears to
cover different types of code-switching as distinguished by Muysken
(2013). In addition, their assumption that dense code-switching only
involves opportunistic planning (that is, ‘making it up on the hoof’) is at
odds with the extensive literature that shows that code-switching patterns
differ in systematic ways in different communities, and that these differ-
ences are related to typological differences between languages as well as
sociolinguistic variables. These points serve to illustrate that we need more
research into the relationship between code-switching on the one hand and
cognitive control on the other hand, in particular among trilinguals.
8.8 Summary and Outlook to the Future
This chapter has reviewed the different types of code-switching that are
found in bilingual and trilingual children, and shown that these can be
described adequately with Muysken’s (2013) code-switching typology,
which was developed on the basis of a careful comparison of code-switching
types in a range of language pairs and communities which differ systemat-
ically from each other with respect to sociolinguistic variables, ages of
participants and methodological approaches. While the third category of
code-switching (congruent lexicalization), which involves the use of words
from two (or more) languages in a shared grammatical structure, is not
often used in the literature on code-switching among bilingual children, in
this paper I have shown that the well-known phenomenon of the use of
function words from language A in stretches of speech of language B in
young developing bilinguals is probably best seen as an example of this type
of code-switching.

Code-switching of function words should not, however, be seen as

evidence for fusion of grammars, but rather as the result of coactivation
of two languages during processing. We also need more research into
code-switching in non-Western contexts, as children who are raised in
highly multilingual communities in Asia or Africa where code-switching
is widely practised are likely to engage in code-switching more often than
those raised in the Western world, where language separation in the input
and output is highly valued and encouraged, also often in educational
systems. Instead of looking for constraints on the process of code-
switching, all of which have been found to make incorrect predictions
for some of the data, it is more fruitful to look for the conditions under
which different types of code-switching appear. As we have seen in this
chapter, code-switching involves more than ‘following the requirements of
both grammars and lexicons’, as it is a creative process in which bilinguals
can be found to flout the rules when they formulate utterances in which
they combine elements two (or more) languages. The available literature
on code-switching in trilinguals shows that they mainly use elements from
two languages in contexts where this is appropriate, even though there are
examples of sentences with words and structures from three. The litera-
ture to date suggests that possessing three languages does not confer
cognitive advantages to trilinguals over and above those associated with
bilinguals, but this could change as more literature on trilinguals and
their code-switching behaviour becomes available. Unfortunately, models
of cognitive control in bilinguals do not currently align themselves well
with linguistic analyses of code-switching, which means there is a need for
further research that brings these two branches of research more closely
together (see Hofweber et al. 2016, 2019, 2020 for further details). In
addition, it is important for researchers working on code-switching to
agree on the terms that are to be used for different phenomena and the
operationalisation of the terms, if we are to move the research agenda in
this field forward.
In recent years, many researchers have developed research into the ways
in which using more than one language can support learning in multilin-
gual classrooms. This is, of course, related to the fact that the number of
bilingual and multilingual children in schools across the world has grown
exponentially, especially with the presence and prominence of English as
an additional language. To cater for the needs of this group of children, in
many countries pedagogical practices are being introduced which allow
for the inclusion of different languages spoken by children, a practice
often referred to as translanguaging (Creese & Blackledge 2010;
Garcia & Li 2014). These pedagogical perspectives on the use of more than
one language in multilingual classrooms constitute an important addition
to the three main research strands on code-switching distinguished by
Bullock and Toribio (2009: 14): the structural, psycholinguistic and socio-
pragmatic research traditions, all of which are complementary. As the

majority of the research has concentrated on structural analyses of code-

switching, the current chapter has mainly focused on this issue. Other
summaries will be able to throw more light on different perspectives and
focus on the similarities and differences between code-switching
and translanguaging.
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9
Children’s Perception
of Their Multilingualism
Brigitta Busch
9.1 Introduction
Over the past decade there has been a growing body of research that promotes
a shift from doing research about children towards doing research with chil-
dren. Coming initially from education and sociology, this reorientation is
increasingly reaching applied linguistics. It implies taking children seriously
as research participants when it comes to exploring their perceptions, acts of
positioning, desires, and concerns. Such approaches combine the traditional
methodology of interviewing and observation with creative practices such as
reflective drawings, map making, photography, or collages. They are under-
stood as participatory (treating children as experts and agents in their own
lives), reflexive (including children in reflecting on meanings and interpret-
ations) and focused on children’s lived experiences (looking at lives lived
rather than at knowledge gained) (Clark & Moss 2011). The development of
such multimodal methodologies coincides with what is often termed as visual
turn in social and cultural studies (for an overview see Rose 2001; Pink 2012).
In multilingualism research, visual or art-based methods with children and
adolescents were first developed in projects and networks in the Francophonie
(e.g., Molinié 2009) and Canada (e.g., Moore 2010; Farmer & Prasad 2014), in
Finland (e.g., Pietikäinen et al. 2008), the German-speaking space (e.g., Krumm
2003; Busch 2010), and South Africa (e.g., Bristowe et al. 2014). Such visual
methods were employed to explore multilingualism in different sites, such as
multilingual classrooms, families, or playgrounds, and in different constella-
tions, such as indigenous and minority languages, displacement, migration,
and mobility, or postcolonial and racialized language regimes. To elicit narra-
tions about multilingual practices and self-representations, children are invited
to produce reflexive drawings or visual narratives, for instance of themselves as
I would like to express my gratitude to Christian Schreger and Gülçin Kɪlɪç for the fruitful cooperation and their ongoing
support (http://ortnergasse.webonaut.com/m2/) as well to all the children who participated enthusiastically in
the workshops.

216 BRIGITTA BUSCH
speakers/learners of particular languages, of their language learning trajectory,

of their linguistic resources, or of their social networks (for an overview see
Kalaja & Pitkänen-Huhta 2018; Kalaja & Melo-Pfeifer 2019). Prasad (2018), one
of the promoters of participatory art base research with children, accompanied
children in different schools for several months to investigate how they make
sense of linguistic diversity in their environments and of their own linguistic
resources. Many works using visual methods with children employ the so-
called language portrait which is at the core of this paper. Common to the
mentioned approaches which can be summarized under the heading ‘reflexive
visualizations’ is the assumption that meaning is created across the visual and
the verbal mode. As Kramsch (2019: xix) observes, “[l]anguage is not replaced
but enriched by these visual representations and other semiotic modalities.
While visuals can provide the basis for a narration of [participants’] experience,
language can offer a common metalanguage to reflect on this narrative.”
In this chapter, I will first discuss theoretical and methodological impli-
cations in multilingualism research employing reflexive visualizations. The
main part is based on language portrait workshops carried out in primary
schools in Vienna with children between 6 and 11 years of age to show how
children reflect upon and represent their multilingualism. In these work-
shops children visualized their linguistic repertoires, making use of the
provided template of a body outline (Figure 9.1), commented on their
drawings, and participated in group discussions.
Figure 9.1 Template for language portraits with children.

(http://heteroglossia.net/Sprachportraet.123.0.html)

Children’s Perception of Their Multilingualism 217
9.2 Reflexive Visualizations: Theoretical

and Methodological Implications
9.2.1 Biographical, Multimodal, Collaborative

Using reflexive visualizations to explore children’s perceptions of their
multilingualism entails specific methodological implications that are
related to the biographical, multimodal, and collaborative character of such
approaches. They can be characterized as biographical insofar as they are
interested in a subject or first-person perspective, in how children experi-
ence, construct, and interpret their own linguistic being in the world as
well as the linguistic environments they are exposed to. When participants
are invited to speak about their multilingualism the focus is on what
Jakobson (1960) called the emotive function of language, i.e., on how we
present ourselves or wish to be perceived. Instead of being ascribed to pre-
given categories (as speaker of such-and-such language belonging to such-
or-such social or racial category), participants can position themselves vis-à-
vis others as well as vis-à-vis (sometimes competing or conflicting)
Discourses about language and language use (Busch 2012). In this sense,
the biographical subject should not be thought of as pre-given but as being
brought into life by Discourses (or ‘interpellations’) that assign to an indi-
vidual certain defined social position it can inhabit (Butler 1993). Equally,
lived experience of language (Busch 2017) is lived and understood only
through the prism of our ideological perceptions of the world (Vološinov
1929/1973).
In reflexive drawings we are typically concerned with what Mitchell
(1987), one of the pioneering figures in visual studies, characterized as
‘image-text’, that is to say, a form of multimodal representation in which
image and language do not appear in their ‘pure’ form, but refer recipro-
cally to each other. Meaning is created in both modes: one mode is neither a
translation nor a simple illustration of the other. The visual and the verbal
can both be understood as embedded in social practices, referring (in their
production and their reception) to other images and discourses that circu-
late in the public sphere (Rose 2001). And both can be understood as being
situationally framed and co-produced in interaction with (present or
imagined) others. But meaning is conferred in different ways: in the verbal
mode, it is through selection and combination of given linguistic elements, in
the visual mode, meaning is created by an assemblage composed of pictorial
components such as lines, contrasts, colors, shapes, proportions. Whereas
verbal narrations are structured in a linear and sequential way and tend to
link single elements in chains of temporality and causality, the visual mode
steers one’s vision toward the whole (the gestalt) and toward the relationality
and the interplay of the parts with regard to each other and the whole.
Whereas the verbal tends to foreground diachronic continuity (or discon-
tinuity), the visual emphasizes synchronic coherence (or fragmentation). As
Langer (1948) developed in her seminal work, which is often referred to in
visual studies, the difference is in essence not one between language and

218 BRIGITTA BUSCH
image but rather between two ways of projection: the discursive projection
“requires us to string out our ideas even though their objects rest one
within the other, as pieces of clothing that are actually worn one over the
other have to be strung side by side on the clothesline” (Langer 1948:
65–66). In contrast, the presentational projection presents the components
simultaneously: the meanings of particular elements that compose a larger,
articulate symbol are understood only through the meaning of the whole,
through their relations within the total structure. According to Langer
(1948: 82–83), the presentational mode that operates by condensation lends
itself in particular for the expression of what tends to defy a linear and logic
projection, such as “the ambivalences and intricacies of inner experience,
the interplay of feelings with thoughts and impressions, memories and
echoes of memories, transient fantasy, or its mere runic traces, all turned
into nameless, emotional stuff.” The advantage of reflexive visualizations is
that they allow the participants to switch back and forth between the two
modes of meaning making: to reflect discursively about the image as well as
to visually present discursive reflections. As we will see later in our
examples, children make use of an ample repertoire of semiotic resources
including written representations in all their possible forms, whether they
are logographic, iconographic, alphabetic, pictographic, or ideographic.
When working with reflexive drawings the focus is less on the accom-
plished picture as an artifact than on the collaborative process of thinking in
and with images involving the research participants. During creative activ-
ities, interactions among children are usually vivid, when commenting,
discussing, and supporting each other’s doings. We do not understand the
language portrait or other reflexive visualizations as a representation of the
individual language repertoire ‘as it is’, but as a situational and context-
bound co-production framed by the inputs introducing and accompanying
the language portrait activity (see Section 9.3.1) as well as by other factors
(setting, available materials for visuals, etc.). The picture is seen as a
moment in a process of reflection and imagination that is not simply a
solitary act but implies an orientation towards an (imagined or physically
present) other. It is produced to be looked at and can serve as a point of
reference in a subsequent presentation of the picture. The meaning of what
is shown is not imposed by an auctorial observer but collaboratively negoti-
ated so that the power of interpretation ultimately remains with the
author, who decides what s/he wants to show without being urged to
impart more than s/he wants.
9.2.2 The Language Portrait

For more than 25 years so-called language portraits (Figure 9.1) – graphic
visualizations of the linguistic repertoire using the outline of a body silhou-
ette – have been employed in schools and other educational institutions, to

initiate processes of language reflection. Furthermore, the language

portrait has become a methodological tool in multilingualism research
(Busch 2018). The idea of the language portrait can be traced back on the
one hand to a group of pedagogues in Hamburg (Neumann 1991) and
linguists in Vienna (Krumm 2003, and Forschungsgruppe Spracherleben,
www.heteroglossia.net). On the other hand, it draws on experiences with
whole-body-mapping (for an overview see de Jager et al. 2016), an art-based
collaborative approach originally developed in critical feminist and post-
colonial studies with the claim to strengthen self-empowerment. In provid-
ing the outline of a body silhouette as a frame, thus avoiding provoking the
fear before the blank page, the language portrait can be considered as an
easily accessible activity. It is left to the participants to use the body outline
as a template for coloring in or as the basis for a schematized diagram, to
complement and elaborate it artistically or even to turn the page and draw
an own-body silhouette. With its reference to the body, the language
portrait offers the possibility of reflecting on one’s communicative
repertoire both from the ‘inner’ perspective of the experiencing subject-body
as well as from an ‘external’ perspective onto the object-body (Merleau-Ponty
1962). It makes it possible to shift between the ‘internal’ view informed by
one’s own emotionally imbued language experiences and linguistic
dispositions (e.g., I love speaking English), and the external ‘outside’ view
on languages and language practices as objects (e.g., English is a useful
language). The possibility of switching between the two perspectives allows
participants to regulate how much of themselves they want to reveal.
The body silhouette also helps to scaffold the structuring of a metaphor-
ical space for reflecting on one’s linguistic repertoire. As Lakoff and
Johnson (1999) formulate, metaphors are rooted ‘in the flesh’, i.e., in the
bodily experience. The body serves as a point of reference for spatial
metaphors that often structure language portraits: internal/external as
metaphors for familiar and unfamiliar; above/below for current and more
remote; large/small for important and less important, etc. The silhouette of
course also suggests a structuring according to common body metaphors:
for example, the head for reason, the belly for emotions, the heart for
intimacy, the hand for social activity (for a metaphor analysis of language
portraits see Coffey 2015). In the language portraits, iconic elements (such
as arrow, lightning, heart, ears), symbols (national flags) or ornaments are
frequently used. Colors, too, or different color shades, are employed partly
in the sense of common connotations (e.g., red for the emotional, blue as a
‘cool’ color, light for what has a positive, dark for what has a negative
connotation), but also because they are associated with personal prefer-
ences (favorite colors) or aversions. It should, however, be noted that there
are no generally valid laws to account for the meaning of a particular color.
As visualizations emphasize the relation of the particular elements to
each other and to the whole, they are particularly suited for initiating

220 BRIGITTA BUSCH
reflections on the multilingual repertoire which, following Gumperz (1964)

forms a whole from which speakers chose situationally adequate ways of
communicating. Jessner (2008: 18) develops: “Due to the dynamics of multi-
lingualism, that is, the changes which usually take place in the course of
time with regard to language proficiency and consequently language domi-
nance in a multilingual repertoire, the use of the terms L1, L2 and L3
becomes even more problematic.” Consequently, following Bakhtin (1981),
I prefer to think of the repertoire as heteroglossic, as even speakers who
consider themselves monolinguals can draw on a large range of linguistic
resources including registers, dialects, sociolects, etc. The repertoire can be
conceived as forming a hypothetical structure or disposition, a space of
constraints and of potentialities that preforms a person’s capacity of acting
in and reacting to different types of communicative events. It can be under-
stood as chronotopically layered in the sense that it reflects the synchronic
coexistence of different social spaces in which we participate as speakers/
signers, as well as that it points diachronically to different levels of time – not
only backward to the past of our language biography, which has left its traces
and scars, but also forward, anticipating and projecting future situations and
events we are preparing to face. In this sense, the repertoire is inherently
dialogic, socially oriented, and intersubjective (Busch 2012, 2017); it does not
‘belong’ to the individual but, in the same manner as Bakhtin (1981: 294)
characterizes language, lies “on the borderline between oneself and the
other.” In order to find a common ground of communication with the other,
there is a need to constantly adjust and expand the repertoire (Rymes 2014).
9.3 Representing Multilingual Repertoires
9.3.1 Using Language Portraits in Schools

The following part is based on empirical data gathered during workshops
on linguistic diversity with children between 6 and 1 years of age in
primary schools in Austria. The main aim of language portrait workshops
is to encourage participants to reflect upon their linguistic life worlds,
practices, and desires and to portray their communicative repertoire. In
this chapter I refer to workshops held in primary schools in Vienna. One is
a public primary school located in a neighborhood in which traditional
labor migration and social housing for refugees coincide with beginning
gentrification. The other workshops were held in private international
schools that propose bi- or multilingual programs and primarily attract
children from mobile international communities. The workshops were
mainly held in German, and all translations into English are by myself.
Although the schools differ greatly in terms of their population, they can all
be considered as language-friendly environments providing a sort of safe
space in which multilingualism is welcomed. This is the case also for the
public primary school, which does not offer a bilingual curriculum but puts

an emphasis on language awareness and offers a space for heritage lan-

guages (Busch 2014). This certainly influenced the way in which the chil-
dren reflected upon their multilingualism. Language portrait workshops in
less language-friendly school environments show that students sometimes
adopt negative evaluations of heteroglossic repertoires and, for instance,
disqualify nonstandard varieties of the medium of teaching and learning as
“untidy” (nicht ordentlich) or “sloppy” (schlampig) (Purkarthofer 2012: 17).
To prepare the children for their role as co-researchers we had a short
discussion about languages in the immediate and larger environment. Then
the language portrait activity was introduced by asking them to think
about their languages: how they speak with whom, which languages they
use, and where, how they feel about them, which languages they hear
around them, and which ones they know or would like to know in their
future life. Then they were asked to choose colors that best represented
their different ways of communicating and to place them with respect to
the body silhouette. For a discussion on how different prompts frame
language portraits, see Kusters and De Meulder (2019) or Busch (2018).
The activity is usually well accepted by the children, most of whom inter-
pret the drawing as a self-portrait and a screen for projection. An indicator
for the appropriation of the image is the frequent occurrence of add-ons
such as faces, hairstyles, or clothes that transform the silhouette into a self-
portrait. Children also use the drawing to position themselves by express-
ing preferences for currently popular lifestyles or affinity to communities.
In our workshops, children presented themselves, for instance, as computer
game warrior, Hello Kitty girl, princess, or with a Sikh turban.
Figure 9.2 shows one of the language portraits drawn during a workshop
in the public school by a 9-year-old girl. I have chosen this portrait not
because it is particularly colorful or richly decorated, or because it contains
an unusually large number of languages, but because the author presents in
it much of what also appears in many other portraits by children of the
same age group.
Avin (all names were changed) structured her portrait (Figure 9.2) top to
bottom: the red in the head stands for Kurdish, which she speaks with her
parents and grandparents; the scarlet stripes in the throat and shoulders
are for Arabic, which she uses with her aunt; German, yellow in the right
arm, is, as she says, important for her not only because it is the main
language at school but also because she speaks it, alongside Kurdish, with
her brothers and sisters. The orange in the right hand is for Turkish, which
she wants to learn because one of her best friends speaks it. She hears
Turkish, like Arabic, on TV too. Pink, a color she particularly likes, in the
raised left hand is for Spanish. While drawing she insists several times how
much she wants to learn Spanish “because of my student.” The school runs
a buddy program in which to-be-teachers support learners who have
recently arrived in Austria. Avin also maps “baby language,” explaining:
“I have got a little brother, I can understand him.” Her portrait displays a

222 BRIGITTA BUSCH
Figure 9.2 Avin’s language portrait
number of further languages in the body and the legs: English, which she
learns at school; Viennese, Serbian, Croatian, and French, which she hears
from children in the neighborhood. Japanese, “Mexican,” and Latin appear
in her portrait, as in many others in the same workshop: Japanese, because
recently an opera singer from Tokyo came to the school and taught the
students songs in Japanese; “Mexican,” because one of the classmates
enthusiastically informed about his holidays in Mexico; Latin, because the
children learned some Latin plant names at school. Avin also inscribes “cat
language” and “animalish” (tierisch) into her portrait. While drawing she
asks, “May I also write music?” She has discovered what she calls the
“language of music” since she has started to play the violin and performed
on stage. Finally, she adds eyes, mouth, and hair, expressing, so to speak,
that she has made the language portrait her own, and concludes the
presentation of the many languages in her portrait by saying, “And I want
to learn exactly all of them.”
The many languages and ways of communicating referred to in language
portraits are not an arbitrary choice but refer to a complex communicative
repertoire that reflects emotionally lived experiences of language and relates
to the biographical trajectory (with its dislocations), to different significant

partners of interaction, and to different social spaces. It points not only to the
past and the present but also, by voicing desires, to the future.
9.3.2 Presenting Oneself

Avin does not declare herself as a ‘so-and-so speaker’ but presents herself as
multilingual – in contrast to the school register, which classifies her as a
Kurdish speaker. In Austria as in many other countries, at the moment of
school enrollment, parents are asked to declare the child’s ‘mother tongue’.
Even if multiple answers with regard to the family language (e.g., Kurdish,
Turkish, and German) are possible, the child is assigned by the school
authorities to a single language category. Only for this language (if not
German) is the student entitled to attend so-called mother tongue education
as far as provided. Thus, through a process of narrowing a multifaceted
repertoire, a reduction of complexity takes place that corresponds to a one-
person-one-language ideology with its language in education policy impli-
cations. This process of ‘monolingualization’ finally results in creating a
binary opposition – as reflected by the official statistics – between a marked
category ‘pupils with first languages other than German’ on the one hand,
and an unmarked category of those who are assumed to be native speakers
of the hegemonic language on the other. This latter category is tacitly
assumed to be the norm, although less than half of the total school popula-
tion in Vienna are reported to be first language speakers of German
(Statistik Austria 2019: 164).
The students in our workshops presented themselves as competent actors
in linguistically diverse environments. As Krumm (2003) already pointed
out when using language portraits for language awareness exercises, cases
in which pupils present themselves as monolingual are rare. This is cer-
tainly also due to the fact that the approach favors the colorful over the
monochrome, the multilingual over the monolingual. Andreas, the only
one who claimed to speak only one language, first regretted that his
portrait was unicolored (for German) but later discovered that he could
add English and Japanese. Most of the portraits display a large range of
colors and a great variety of semiotic resources. However, this does not
mean that language-ideological judgments and linguistic power relations
do not appear in the language portraits.
The fact that national flags, colors, emblems, and symbols are used in
some of the portraits to represent particular languages can, with good
reason, be interpreted as a manifestation of Discourses that link languages
to nations or nation states. But to assume that this is necessarily the case
would be wrong, as the representation of languages by national flags is a
current practice, for instance, in computer applications. The equation of
language and nation is virtually deconstructed when children invent flags
for their fantasy languages or, as Judith did when she designed flags for the

224 BRIGITTA BUSCH
languages in which she communicates with animals, a flag with a bone for
“dogish,” a fish bone for “catish,” or a piece of cheese for “mousish.”
In the workshops in both schools, the ideologically loaded term ‘mother
tongue’, which signals affiliation to a particular (national or ethnical)
language group, was used only very rarely. In one of the group discussions,
Kenan, a student whose family recently arrived from Syria, concluded the
presentation of his portrait in which he had already named a number of
languages relevant to him with an affirming undertone: “Yes, and Kurdish
is my mother tongue.” In the same group, a discussion evolved around
another boy’s linguistic affiliation:
Ali: Kevin speaks KURDISH!

Interviewer: So, what about Kurdish?
Kevin: Yes, I do
Interviewer: And Turkish?
Ali: Is his mother tongue!
Kevin: No.
Kenan: KURDISH is his mother tongue!
Interviewer: Ah. You rather speak Kurdish at home?
Kevin: No. Turkish.
Whereas Ali and Kenan categorically construct Kevin as a mother

tongue speaker either of Turkish or of Kurdish, Kevin refuses to commit
himself and prefers to remain in the ambiguous. In his portrait, he drew
Turkish in the left arm, Kurdish in the right one, both occupying an
approximately equal surface. The precarious position of Kurdish as
a repressed minority language in Turkey with its sometimes violent
repercussions in the diaspora in several cases left noticeable traces in
how children with Turkish-Kurdish backgrounds conceived their reper-
toire. In contrast, students with Syrian-Kurdish backgrounds who
had recently arrived as refugees tended to emphasize their identifica-
tion with Kurdish. In the same way, hierarchies imposed by colonial
language policies manifest themselves in language portraits, among
others, through processes of erasure (Irvine and Gal 2000) that make
indigenous African languages invisible. In his language portrait, Léopold
colored the main part of the body in brown, explaining in the legend
that this stood for ‘African’. Only when asked did he specify that he
spoke Mòoré and Fula as his family was from Burkina Faso, but he did
not want to show them in his portrait because “nobody knows about
them.” In contrast, the former colonial languages French, English, and
Portuguese, and the neocolonial Chinese figure prominently in the
limbs of the body silhouette.
From autobiographical narratives of adults, we know that linguistic
injuries experienced during childhood related to minoritized languages,
colonial language hierarchies, or migration often leave lasting wounds
(Burck 2005). In contrast, it seems that when children represent their

multilingual lives, such negative experiences are rarely addressed openly,

but rather appear in the form of hints or omissions.
9.3.3 Exploring Semiotic Resources

Some children structured the legend for the drawing introducing cat-
egories such as “languages I know well,” “languages I know a little bit,”
and “languages I want to learn.” The third category opens a space to
express desires and projections linked to language. It happens that chil-
dren forget to represent the language(s) they use most frequently.
“Speaking normal” is a term that was used more than once, referring
to the most current language practices. At the same time, the unknown
or less known often fascinates. What it means to know a language
“a little bit” was sometimes expressed in a quantifiable way (counting
up to 10, knowing three, four, or five words, the days of the week,
greetings, songs, etc.), sometimes as not speaking but hearing it on a
daily basis (e.g., from peers in school). The question of knowing was not
only negotiated in terms of (quantifiable) vocabulary and seemingly
objective criteria but also in terms of subjective experience. Explaining
his portrait, Marcello said, “German in the head because I always need to
think. French or Italian come quicker.” In the group discussions, partici-
pants frequently comment on each other’s claims of knowing (or not
knowing) a language, sometimes questioning such claims, sometimes, in
an inclusive move, encouraging others to affirm themselves as know-
ledgeable. Yara invited her friend to learn Kurdish, “then you can speak
with us.” Kaya pointed out to Jovan that there were a number of
common words in Turkish and Serbian, and this meant already knowing
the other’s language a little bit. It seems that knowing a language
“a little” is primarily about what one can do with it (counting, greeting,
signaling alinement or responsiveness); it embodies, in Merleau-Ponty’s
(1962: 171) words, less Descartes’ ‘I think’ than an ‘I can’.
It is striking how many language portraits point to means of commu-
nications beyond set categories and norms, as secret languages, language
games, communication with animals or plants, fantasy languages, or
fantasy writing systems. Answering the question of a schoolmate,
Hannah defines secret language as “a language that nobody other than
you knows and that you speak for instance with your best friend. So that
nobody else understands what you say now.” In her conception, a secret
language creates a space of intimacy among the initiated, thereby
excluding others. In the portraits such languages are often named or
represented by emblems. All kinds of techniques are used: vowels are
replaced, syllables added, fragments from different languages are com-
bined, and for secret writing, encoding systems based on numbers are
imitated. Does not ‘Pantro es dante’, the fantasy name of one of these
languages, sound derived from Latin, which at the time of the workshop

226 BRIGITTA BUSCH
enjoyed high prestige because of the presence of Latin plant names

during lessons? Similarly, parody and comedy are displayed, often
borrowed from popular media characters like ‘Donald Duck speech’,
articulated in the cheek.
The following playful negotiation about language creativity and
language norm developed between Sera, a 6-year-old in her first year,
and Kenan, 10 years old, in his fourth year of schooling. It was video-
recorded by Kenan during a school excursion shortly after our work-
shop. While walking in the forest, Sera engages in the rhythmical and
rhymed recital of the English sounding fantasy words: “peezes, feezes,
freezes.” Kenan interrupts her self-contained play, and a dialogue unfolds
as to whether these words were English or a secret language. Kenan
positions himself in the role of the elder and knowledgeable and chal-
lenges Sera, asserting that English cannot be a secret language because
everybody knows it. Sera opposes that, asserting that even English can
function as a secret language, for instance, in presence of her cousin
in Turkey who does not understand it. Then, Kenan accuses Sera of just
mixing any languages together. She replies by again aligning nonsense
syllables:
Sera: Blablabla, blabla, blabla [in an affirmative tone]

Kenan: Bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, I can do that too, do that too.
[. . .]
Sera: No, this is a, is a secret language, called, uhm, called a
dino language.
Kenan: DINO language? Dino language sounds like this: gsh, gsh, gsh
[with a hissing sound]
Sera: No, dino language goes hrss, hrss, hrss, hrss, hrss eah, hrss eah,
hrss eah, hrss eah, hrss eah, hrss, hrss [rhythmically while
walking]
The scene illustrates the importance of a space in which children can, in a

playful way, explore and negotiate the liminal zone between linguistic/
semiotic creativity and language as socially and culturally normed and
norming. In the scene described above, the elder positions himself as
defender of the normative, while the younger empowers herself through
creativity. The fascination with secret languages and language play, in
other words with the material quality of language as taking shape for
instance in rhythmical intonations, consonances, specific written signs, or
gestures, points to what Jakobson (1960) called the poetic function of
language. Following Langer (1948: 82), poetic language in its material
quality foregrounds the presentational dimension, i.e., “the interplay of
feelings with thoughts and impressions.” Children’s keen interest in this
dimension reminds us that the communicative repertoire is much more
than a toolbox consisting of testable competences, and first of all

constitutes a space of potentialities and affordances that needs to be

explored and tried out intra- and intersubjectively.
The child psychiatrist Winnicott (1971/1991) underlines the importance
in a child’s development of an intermediate area of experience between
inner and outer world, between “the subjective and that which is objec-
tively perceived” (1971/1991: 4). He introduces the term ‘transitional object’
to designate the intermediate that is not fully recognized as belonging to
external reality. As transitional phenomena he explicitly mentions, besides
the famous teddy bear, babbling and, later in child development, a reper-
tory of songs and tunes recited in particular moments, for instance when
preparing for sleep or when fighting anxiety. Transitional objects emerge
by appropriation and transformation of found material into self-created
material. Social and cultural experience is thus acquired in play. This is the
case also for language experience (Leszcynska-Koenen 2016). The child
treats pre-existing symbol systems imparted by relevant others as his
own; in the process of language acquisition it ‘recreates’ the language and
imbues it with own meanings, which, like other ‘self-created’ things in the
found reality, gives it a quality of uniqueness.
When children engage with language portraits, they enjoy discovering
semiotic resources beyond the spoken or written language. Sign language,
as well as fingerspelling and mimetic gestures and the desire to learn
signing, are in the drawings, not surprisingly, mostly located in the hands
or upper arms. As in the portrait of Avin, who mentioned “music lan-
guage,” the fascination for possibilities of meaning making beyond the
verbal is often expressed in syntagmatic compounds or lexical creations
such as “language of painting,” “drawingish” (zeichnerisch), or “eyish”
(augisch, for eye-contact communication).
In a study employing language portraits with signers, Kusters and De
Meulder (2019) rightly argue that this takes the method to a new level as
signers emphasize ways of using language across different modalities (such
as signing, writing, speaking, mouthing, gesturing, pointing) as well as by
establishing a more immediate connection between language and the body.
In their study, Kusters and De Meulder show how several participants
literally mapped their body when signing and gesturing in their narratives,
thus performing and becoming their language portrait. A certain awareness
of the multimodal and embodied character of language can also be found in
portraits made by children in our workshops: Mona, for instance, showed
that French, which she associated with her ballet lessons and drew in the
upper leg, is so to speak in her flesh by demonstrating two ways of doing
the pas de bourrée; Yara explained that the turquoise in her hand was for
German which – in contrast to her family language – she uses for writing;
Kenan added to the body silhouette an ear for Turkish that he only knows
from listening to his peers; Arthur drew an eyebrow for Kurdish because
brû (eyebrow) is the only word he knows in this language; Aharon colored
the head in red for “head speech, speaking in the head” (Kopfreden, im Kopf

228 BRIGITTA BUSCH
reden), explaining, “sometimes I have a language in the head that I just can’t
say,” for instance just before falling asleep. Others mentioned in this
context languages they use with their plush animals and dolls.
9.3.4 Relating to the Other

As developed earlier, children treasure personalized secret languages also
because they allow them to affirm privileged relations. Especially when
referring to ways of communicating in the close family, children often do
not mention named languages (German, English, etc.) but evoke the idea of
a particular type of idiolect. It is possibly the visual mode that favors the
representation of less regimented and more emotionally colored concep-
tualizations of language. Cornelius, for instance, uses the French term
langage familier (familiar, colloquial language), not langue familiale
(family language), to designate the communicative practices within his
close family, where they use both French and German. Marcello choses a
specific color to designate his “language with brothers and sisters.” Jovan
names sestra (Serbian for sister) a way of communicating that he char-
acterizes as a “language mix” that he practices exclusively with his
elder sister. Ways of communicating with baby sisters or brothers are
mentioned with emotional commitment: Lotte drew a golden heart for
her “language of love (with my sweet baby sister).” She explained that
the 2-month-old sister responds when she talks to her, but that talking
in this case is not so much with words as with cuddling, thus pointing to
the bodily-emotional and multisemiotic dimension of communicative
interaction.
Children’s representations of their multilingual repertoires also reflect
the linguistic diversity and the transidiomatic practices (Jacquemet 2005)
that emerge – beyond the dichotomy between the languages of the country
of origin and those of the country of residence – from processes of disloca-
tion and mobility in transnational families. Krishan, who speaks Punjabi
and Viennese German at home, uses “German from Germany” with his
cousin. Tanja drew attention to the importance of two words she knew in
Ukrainian for addressing, as a symbolic gesture, her new sister-in-law, with
whom she otherwise communicates in English. It is not surprising that
local dialects (e.g., Tyrolean, Syrian) and heritage languages (e.g., Kurdish)
figure frequently in connection with grandparents.
The revival of a lost heritage language can emerge as a desire. Milan took
special care in choosing the right color for the Czech that his mother had
recently started to learn with the aim of reviving a lost family language.
Sophie began her portrait with the “Latin of my grandmother; she is dead
already, but it was so beautiful to listen to her speaking Latin,” The desire to
learn a new language (Kramsch 2009) figures prominently in the portraits
and is often associated with particular persons: elder brothers and sisters
who learn these languages at school, peers presented as language brokers

who transmit chunks of language knowledge, or adults with whom chil-

dren identify. In the local public school it was primarily, and particularly
among girls, the assistant teacher, a female Kurdish speaker, who served as
a role model.
9.3.5 Opening up Spaces

In their language portraits and in the discussions the children frequently
linked languages to spaces or places with their respective language regimes.
Whether real or virtual, connected to a biographical past, to present life
worlds, or projected onto the future, such spaces are constituted by particu-
lar spatial (including communicative) practices and perceived as particular
soundscapes that resonate with lived experiences. Besides home, school
figures as a significant space. Edi differentiates the more informal
Viennese (Wienarisch) that he locates in the arms and legs of the body
silhouette from what he calls school German (Schule Doitsch) located in a
bubble outside the body. Similarly, many other children contrast an infor-
mal register at home from the normative aspect of standardized language
with which they are confronted through the school when socialized into
literacy practices. This demonstrates that already young children have an
impressive metalinguistic awareness of language variation. As Ioannidou
(2017) shows, they are not only able to choose registers in a pragmatically
appropriate way but also to perform them in spontaneous play when
enacting different characters. When enumerating languages associated
with school, the participants in our workshops attached almost less impor-
tance to the formal school languages (as the medium of instruction or
foreign language learning) than to practices that underline the role of
school as a safe space in which communication can be explored and
rehearsed, not only in the form of language play and language brokering
among peers but also as organized curricular activities. In our workshops,
children referred to recent language-related experiences brought into
school through projects with enthusiasm: encountering Japanese or
Yiddish through songs, or Chinese through calligraphy. Whereas the sig-
nificance attributed to these languages within the students’ repertoire is of
course situation-related, the readiness to engage in the hitherto unknown
can be developed into a resource that can be accessed regardless of
the situation.
Other significant spaces in the everyday life of children besides play-
grounds in the immediate neighborhood with their linguascapes (as men-
tioned by Avin) are spaces and time slots reserved for leisure time activities,
such as the ballet lesson Mona associates with French or the karate course
Madleine associates with Japanese. Languages that grant access to virtual
spaces are also mentioned, e.g., the Spanish of the telenovelas, Arabic or
English from news programs and popular songs, “computerish” or “game-
sisch” (game language) from computer-related activities.

230 BRIGITTA BUSCH
Rather unexpectedly, another type of space emerged in some of the

portraits: places of longing and desire, simultaneously real and ideal, are
constructed as counter-sites to the regulated everyday life in the urban
context. These sites ‘speak’; they have their own language. Lotte starts her
portrait by drawing a heart that she divides between the golden baby
language that she shares with her little sister and the green Murauerisch, a
local dialect that she declares to be her favorite language. Her family had
only recently acquired a weekend house there, but, as Lotte says, it is the
place where she feels completely at home. Similarly, Kian is eager to
convey the importance of a place outside Vienna with garden, green-
house, outdoor grill, and chicken house. This place where his grandpar-
ents live and the larger family gathers on weekends has become for him
“a real home” (eine richtige Heimat). While conversations among the family
members take place in Turkish, Kurdish, and German, for Kian the space
is associated with a particular language of intimacy that he calls “chick-
enish” (Hühnerisch) and represents in the drawing by rhythmically placing
dots that imitate the staccato of a picking hen. For Kenan it is “animal-
ish” (Tierisch) that best captures the memory of what it was like on the big
farm the family had back in Syria. Almost in every portrait language
figures in connection with such spaces of desire, places where one
spent holidays, would like to travel to, or imagines oneself living in the
future. Similarly, Prasad (2018), working with photo-collages, observes
that children often link plurilingualism with what she calls aspirational
dreamscapes.
9.4 Summary and Outlook
The enthusiasm and perseverance that the children devoted to the language
portrait activity can be read as an indicator for how much language and
communication are invested with affect. If one understands affect with
Merleau-Ponty (1962) as a bodily gesture or stance towards the world, one
can distinguish between affective gestures intended to open oneself up to
the world and those intended to shut oneself off (Busch 2017). Working
with language portraits clearly demonstrated that the children perceived
linguistic and communicative diversity as a means to open themselves up to
the world, to other persons and other spaces, but also illustrated their basic
curiosity in exploring poetic and playful potentialities inherent to language
in its broadest sense. The keen interest children attributed to the new and
unknown, to the experimental and creative proves the importance of safe
‘transitional spaces’ (Winnicott 1971/1991) in which language can be
explored and appropriated and metalinguistic reflection can take place. In
contrast, gestures of shutting oneself off from the world are much less
manifest in the portraits. Negative and painful experiences related to

linguistic hierarchies and dominances become apparent mainly in allusions

or omissions. In our workshops, which took place in primary schools
welcoming linguistic heterogeneity, the participating children used the
visualizations to present themselves as competent language users and
learners, to position themselves with their personal special interests and
their identifications with lifestyles and family habits, and to voice their
desires and ambitions for the future.
The multimodal approach with its focus on the communicative
repertoire helps to gain such insights into how children conceive their
multilingualism. Equally, the language portrait activity can be integrated
into curricular activities of language learning, as it encourages pupils (as
well as their teachers) to think about their own communicative resources
and about language practices in their social environments. Thinking in
and with images offers a low-threshold access, especially for children who
are in the process of acquiring literacy skills, as it allows reflection on
language and communicative practices and project imaginations without
having to phrase one’s thoughts immediately for an audience or to exe-
cute academically driven proficiencies, skills, and abilities. Thinking in
visuals has the potential to challenge the discursively established dichoto-
mies, such as between language of origin and target language, as well as
the idea of languages as separate entities, and stimulate reflection upon
intra-language variation and trans-language differentiation, “to regard one
language (and the verbal world corresponding to it) through the eyes of
another language” (Bakhtin 1981: 296). The language portrait suggests
conceiving the repertoire as a whole. Many of the portraits in our work-
shops revealed a fascination for different semiotic modes (signing, gestur-
ing, drawing, dancing, etc.) that challenges the predominance of
logocentrism. The visuals and the narratives showed that children per-
ceive their multilingual repertoires less in terms of competences that they
‘have’ than in terms of ‘doing’ things with language, on being able to
relate with others and position themselves with regard to established,
sometimes competing language ideologies present in their immediate
environment.
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10
Multilingualism
and Language Play
Xiao-lei Wang
Children have an intuitive predilection to play with language and respond

to language play (Crystal 1998; Cumming 2007). As soon as young children
master basic words and sentence structures, they begin to experiment with
language and subvert conventional linguistic norms, not only to amuse
people but also to convey meaning creatively. Thus, language play (hence-
forth LP) is a regular part of most young children’s early communicative
experience. Indeed, LP is the fourth most frequently occurring verbal event
among young children in the home environment (Holmes 2011); nearly
13 per cent of preschool children’s speech consisted of LP (Esposito 1980).
Moreover, approximately 1 in every 4 of children’s classroom discourse
contains LP (Burrell & Beard 2018). It is no wonder that Crystal (1998)
commented that it is part of the normal human condition to spend a
significant amount of time actively playing with language and responding
with enjoyment to the way others play.
This chapter discusses how multilingual children, namely, those who use
more than one language in the everyday context (e.g., Hoffmann 2001;
Wang 2015), display their linguistic dexterity and creativity in LP. It
attempts to address the important question of whether multilingualism
affords children additional abilities to use language playfully. The chapter
begins with an outline of the importance of play in children’s language
development and follows with the definition of LP, as well as a synopsis of
LP in first language (L1) studies. The chapter then provides an overview of
the characteristics of LP in children who are learning a new language (Ln) or
a second language (L2). To further demonstrate the multilingual effects on
LP, a case study is presented to highlight how simultaneous trilingual
children use LP to negotiate meaning, leverage communicative intent,
develop a unique multilingual identity, and form a distinctive communi-
cation style. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on future direc-
tions of research in multilingual LP.

236 XIAO-LEI WANG
10.1 Importance of Play in Children’s

Language Development
Children spend most of their waking hours playing. Research has consistently
shown the importance of play in children’s language development (e.g.,
G. Cook 1997), in addition to other benefits in cognitive, social, physical, and
emotional development (e.g., Barnett 1990; G. Cook 2000). Language as a
medium is an integral part of a play event (Levy 1984/2006). Studies in child
language development have long suggested that a simple peek-a-boo verbal
play helps sensitize young children to symbolic behavior and rule structures
important in understanding and using language as a semiotic system or tool
(Bruner & Sherwood 1975). Similarly, verbal repetition of oneself or another
with or without modification aids syntactic and pragmatic development as
well as the acquisition of words (Kuczaj 1982; Slobin 1968). Further, research
has also demonstrated that the most complicated grammatical and pragmat-
ical forms of speech are first used by children in play situations (e.g., Bruner
1983). Children are able to use more advanced language in play than in reality,
and practice in play what they will later put into use in other communication
situations (Levy 1984/2006). Levy (1984/2006) summarized four ways how play
facilitates children’s language development: (1) It stimulates innovation in
language; (2) It introduces and clarifies new words and concepts; (3) It motiv-
ates language use and practice; and (4) It encourages verbal thinking.
10.2 Definition of LP
In research literature, play in (or play within) language and play with language
are examined as different topics. The former means that language is used to
engage in play, and the latter indicates that children manipulate the lin-
guistic elements such as sounds, words, and linguistic structures (Bell 2012)
and play with these linguistic parts as they do with objects/toys, with
limitless possibilities (Levy 1984/2006). In this chapter, we will focus on
the phenomenon of playing with language rather than playing in language.
There are many definitions of LP (e.g., Belz & Reinhardt 2004; Crystal
1998). For the purpose of clarity, we opt to describe LP as a deliberate
subversion and manipulation of conventional language forms (structural
elements of a language, such as phonology, lexicon, semantics, morph-
ology, and syntax) and/or functions (use of structural elements of a lan-
guage in communication, such as pragmatics) to amuse people and achieve
various communication purposes in a playful and creative manner.
10.3 LP in L1 Studies
LP is highly prevalent in the everyday discourse. Children as young as 2–3

years of age have been observed to produce novel jokes and word play,

Multilingualism and Language Play 237
especially when supported or encouraged by adults (e.g., Hoicka & Akhtar

2011). Children typically begin with pre-made jokes, such as the knock,
knock; who’s there routine and then move to produce more sophisticated
LP, such as hyperboles (Varga 2000). Children continue to employ a broad
range of expressive means for LP as they further develop their L1, such as
alliterations, parallelisms, word elongations, and onomatopoeia. Older chil-
dren also use linguistic innovations that utilize the entertainment poten-
tials of incongruence and variation within the conventionalized pragmatic
frame (Čekaitė & Aronsson 2005). Around the age of 11, children’s LP begins
to reflect their growing understanding of language as a system (Hoff 2013).
Researchers in monolingual children’s L1 acquisition have proposed a
variety of explanations with regard to why children play with language.
Two views are influential in the literature (Broner & Tarone 2001). The first
view is best articulated by G. Cook (1997, 2000). This view regards LP as self-
amusement and fun. The second opinion is represented by Lantolf (1997),
who states that LP is not meant for a child to have fun, but rather plays a
fundamental role in the child’s development (i.e., transactional and
rehearsal). This theoretical position asserts that children are likely to play
with linguistic elements that they are in the process of acquiring because LP
makes linguistic rules more accessible and helps children notice the under-
lying linguistic structures. The earliest LP is the infant’s crib monologue,
which is considered by many researchers as aiding syntactic and pragmatic
development as well as the acquisition of words in a child’s language
development (Broner & Tarone 2001).
Similar to the view that LP is transactional and rehearsal, some research-
ers see the purpose of early LP as filling a vocabulary gap (e.g., Clark 1975)
when children are in the process of accumulating more words. These
researchers support their claim by citing the evidence that most word
creations seem to occur in 2- to 5-year-olds, and they subside after 5 and 6
(Wolf & Pusch 1985). However, Elbers (1988) disputed the notion that a word
gap solely explains word play. She observed that children do produce some
novel compounds when they could have just as easily used a simpler form.
Likewise, Windsor (1993) shared the same argument by offering a list of
examples of compounds from four children as evidence, such as “birthday-
day” for birthday, “cake-food” for cake, and “kitchen-room” for kitchen.
Finally, some researchers suggest that children play with language in
order to develop an understanding of the features of social organization
(e.g., Heath 1983; Sawyer 1996) and to increase social communicative
competence (Saville-Troike 1989).
10.4 LP in Multilingual Children
Compared with their monolingual counterparts, multilingual children

have more cognitive (Bialystok 2009) , metalinguistic (Bialystok & Martin
2004), and creative (Kharkhurin 2012) advantages. As a result, multilingual

238 XIAO-LEI WANG
children may also have more advantages in LP than monolingual children.

In other words, when a monolingual child plays with language, he/she can
only play within one linguistic system, as in sun-face (Clark et al. 1985).
However, when a multilingual child (e.g., a French Chinese-speaking child)
carries out the same LP, he/she has more linguistic and cultural resources
available to him/her; thus his/her LP is more enriched, as in soleil (sun) 的脸
(face). Compared with sun-face, soleil 的脸 combines more than one language,
and is thus potentially more complex. Wittgenstein (1922) once said that
“the words that we have at our disposal affect what we see, and the more
words there are, the better our perception. When we learn to speak a
different language, we learn to see a larger world.”
In the following sections, we will discuss the characteristics of LP in
multilingual children. We will first discuss Ln learners and then turn to
simultaneous multilinguals.
10.4.1 Language Play in Ln learners

In the last two decades, a growing body of research has focused on the LP of
Ln learners in the classroom environment. The findings in general suggest
that the LP produced by L2 learners contains various distinctive functions.
The major characteristics are summarized below:
Affective Filter
Studies have consistently shown that LP produced by L2 learners forms a
positive affective state for Ln learning. The cathartic effect of humor
involved in LP mitigates the anxiety related to Ln learning and heightens
the affective climate, thus allowing linguistic data to pass through the
affective filter (Tarone 2000) and creating opportunities for practice.
Because LP is a non-threatening and low-risk activity, L2 learners can enjoy
a context where mistakes and creative experiments with language incur no
serious consequences (Oxford 1997).
Face-Saving Device
LP also serves as a face-saving device which allows Ln learners to commit
face-threatening acts (i.e., speech acts that threaten either a speaker or an
interlocutor’s face wants) while effectively avoiding social repercussions by
remaining “off-record” in the context of play (Cekaite & Aronsson 2005).
Mnemonic Effects
Moreover, LP increases the memorability of the Ln elements under learn-
ing. In other words, the emotional excitement associated with LP may
simply make the Ln discourse more noticeable, and thus more memorable.
LP might produce a lasting impression on the memories of learners and
help them recall information (G. Cook 2001).

Interlanguage Destabilization
Additionally, LP can destabilize the learner’s interlanguage (IL) system and
promote both its maintenance and its evolution (e.g., Tarone 2000; Broner &
Tarone 2001; Kim & Kellogg 2007). G. Cook (2001) argued that playing with
the meaning or form of a L2 in ways that do not conform to a learner’s
current knowledge of the linguistic system “may serve to destabilise the
system, making possible its growth and change.” Tarone (2000) also sug-
gests that Ln development requires both centripetal and centrifugal forces
(the push of the demand for accuracy and the pull of creativity and innov-
ation, respectively). LP creates just such a situation for learners as they
engage in the act of noticing linguistic forms in the course of LP agnd
gradually replace incorrect productions with correct L2 forms. For example,
a study by Ohta (2001) shows that language-related teasing and laughter
resulted in an increased focus on pronunciation that raised Ln learners’
awareness of their own production in a positive way. Similarly, Pomerantz
and Bell (2007) found that LP can expand L2 learners’ communicative
repertoire by allowing for “new and more varied forms of participation.”
Intrinsic Motivation
LP may also contribute to Ln learning by virtue of its close ties with intrinsic
motivation (Waring 2012). Play is intrinsically motivating (Abuhandeh &
Csikszentmihalyi 2012), and LP is the same. In LP activities, children are
fully engaged and self-motivated, thus, they can stretch the limits of their
ordinary experience. For instance, a well-known and frequently quoted
study by Peck (1980) suggests that Spanish-English speaking children spon-
taneously compared, through LP, the pronunciations of the word darn with
that of a classmate’s name, Dong, and the enunciations of pizza and pieces.
Multiparty Interaction
Furthermore, LP serves as a venue for extended multiparty interaction and
helps Ln acquisition. For instance, the mistakes by L2 learners may provide
an opportunity for L2 learners to engage in LP, which can help shift the focus
of the interaction from conveying a message to attending to the linguistic
form of the message itself (Swain 2000). LP may thus contribute to the
creation of a space for continued collaborative attention to form. Cekaite
and Aronsson (2005), for example, examined children’s use of form-focused
language play in an immersion classroom for refugee and immigrant chil-
dren in a Swedish school and found that LP can trigger extended multiparty
interaction that sustains collaborative attention to language forms.
Multilingual Identity
L2 learning children not only use LP for their Ln acquisition as discussed
above; they also use it to help them create a unique identity, such as
presenting themselves, through LP, as “a funny guy” or “a good-natured

240 XIAO-LEI WANG
class clown” in order to score popularity points among peers (Garland 2010;
Pomerantz & Bell 2007). Identity appears to be a critical resource for L2
learners to achieve playful talk in the L2 classroom (Lytra 2007). It is
through LP that Ln learners experiment with and negotiate their multilin-
gual, multicultural, and multicompetent identity. For instance, in a study
by Bell (2005), a Ln learner with “low” proficiency attempted to enter a
conversation between a group of target language speakers by teasing one of
the interlocutors about his attraction to animated characters, essentially
trying to penetrate a social network through humor. Similarly, the
youngest child in Bongartz and Schneider’s study (2003) joined an enthusi-
astic dialogue between his older brother and a target language speaker by
contributing insults about Barbie dolls. These examples show that even Ln
learners, who do not have all the linguistic abilities to participate in a
“normal” conversation in a target language, are able to patriciate through
LP in interactions with their peers and pull together their resources (lin-
guistic, cultural, and identity) to “showcase” themselves as speakers with
more than one language.
Multicompetence
Germane to multilingual identity, LP also provides an opportunity for Ln
leaners to form an authentic relationship to the Ln and thus enable them to
demonstrate their multicompetence (Belz 2002) while they are developing
proficiency in the Ln (G. Cook 2000; Tarone 2000; Talmy 2010).
The first area of multicompetence is reflected in L2 learners’
experimentation with linguistic elements in their LPs (G. Cook 2000). As
shown in the study by Bongartz and Schneider (2003), the children were
able to sustain interactions through LP when their vocabulary was lacking
and still enjoyed exploration with their Ln (German). Additionally, LP
allowed the children in the study to digest routinized phrases through
repetition and practise morphological competency by creating words using
German affixes.
Second, Ln Learners can explore a wider range of voices in LP (e.g., as a
teacher, parent, and doctor), thereby stretching their sociolinguistic and
pragmatic competence (Tarone 2000).
Third, L2 learners can also practice in LP a broader scope of subversive
language functions such as assessing, complaining, critiquing, or chastis-
ing, thus expanding their communicative repertoire (Pomerantz & Bell
2007).
Fourth, Ln learners are able to use LP to carry out meaningful communi-
cation in a Ln (Bushnell 2009).
Fifth, L2 learners can develop their sociocultural competence through PL.
In fact, LP helps bootstrap L2 learners’ social and linguistic competence
(Bushnell 2009; Torone 2000).
Indeed, according to V. Cook (1992), multicompetent language users are
those who know more than one language and might think differently from

those who only know a single one. Similarly, Broner and Tarone (2001)
found in their studies that Ln learning children demonstrated their multi-
competence by creating fictional worlds in their LPs during which they
employed both their L1s and L2s in varying registers.
Expression of Ln Learners’ Own Voices

Finally, LP gives Ln learners an opportunity to test their voices without
concern for adverse social consequences. This process enables Ln leaners to
gain ownership of their voices, construct their own complex identity, and
participate in their speech communities with a greater range of resources
and freedom of self-expression (Tarone 2000).
LP allows L2 learners to express their resistance to certain classroom
practices with which they are unhappy (Pomerantz & Bell 2011). For
example, Blackledge and Creese (2009) documented strong resistance from
a group of heritage language learners of Cantonese, who used LP to disrupt
the teacher’s dictation activity. These children, through LP, transformed
the nature of classroom conversational interactions and liberated them-
selves from the “dominant conversations.”
In sum, the research evidence presented above suggest that Ln learning
children are able to employ their different linguistic registers and cultural
knowledge to widen the functions of LP.
10.4.2 Language Play in Simultaneous Multilinguals

Although we now have a substantial understanding of LP among L2
learners as discussed above, little is known about the LP of children who
grow up with more than two language simultaneously. To the best of our
knowledge, no literature is currently available about LP in simultaneous
multilingual children. Thus, to further illustrate the effects of multilingual-
ism on LP, we are compelled to turn to a longitudinal case study of two
simultaneous trilingual siblings. Examples used in this chapter were drawn
from the 36 hours (18 hours for each child) of video-recorded naturalistic
data from a large corpus of longitudinal data (from age 1 to age 10).
Approximately two-hour video recordings for each child were selected for
each year, using random sampling (Lavrakas 2008).
It is important to note that we are acutely aware of the risk of using a
case study to discuss multilingual LP. However, in the absence of research
on the LP of simultaneous multilingual children, it is worth presenting the
case study to give us a glimpse into the human capacity as related to
multilingualism and to stimulate future research on the topic.
10.4.2.1 Participant Information

The participants were two male siblings, Léandre (older brother) and
Dominique (younger brother), who grew up simultaneously from birth
with three first languages: French, Chinese, and English. The two siblings

242 XIAO-LEI WANG
are about two years apart. The brothers were raised in an OPOL (one-person-
one-language) household where the father spoke only French to the chil-
dren and the mother spoke only Chinese to them from birth. The siblings
only spoke French to each other. The lingua franca between the parents was
English. This language constellation was consistent throughout the devel-
opmental period of the siblings. The family lived in an English-dominant
environment (the United States), and the siblings went to English-only
schools. They also went to weekend Chinese school from ages 7 to 11.
They spent most summer vacations and some winter vacations in the
French-speaking part of Switzerland, including many trips to France. They
also spent some summer vacations in China (2–4 weeks each time). The
brothers were proficient in the three languages. Both siblings were typically
developed with no cognitive disabilities. (Wang 2008, 2015).
In the sections that follow, the multilingual siblings’ LP in the first
10 years will be discussed in terms of the characteristics of linguistic forms
(phonological, lexical-semantical, morphological, and syntactical elements)
and functions (pragmatics). We will also address how the siblings used LP in
their everyday interactions to synthesize a wide variety of new meanings
from their ambient languages to negotiate meaning, leverage their commu-
nicative intents, and develop their unique multilingual identity.
10.4.2.2 Characteristics of Linguistic Forms in LP

Like monolingual children, the two trilingual siblings began LP as early as
2 years of age. The earliest form of their LP was also pre-made jokes such as
the Le Chasseur routine (Léandre, 2 years, 11 months, and 20 days; hereafter,
2;11;20), where he used the conventional children’s rhyme Le Chasseur (The
Hunter) as a base and replaced the rhyme with his own words to make
himself and others laugh. Below are some characteristics of the trilingual
siblings’ LP.
Phonological Play
The first prominent area of phonological play for the two siblings was
playing with accent. Earlier on, Léandre and Dominique developed excep-
tional awareness, knowledge and sensitivity to the accents in different
languages. In fact, since early childhood (around age 3), a large proportion
of their verbal plays included imitating and playing with accents. During
their many long road trips in Europe each summer, Léandre and
Dominique frequently entertained themselves and their parents by mim-
icking different accents. Initially, the siblings’ accent play was short and
usually immediately after they heard the accent on the radio or by a person
(here and now). As time went on (around age 7), their accent imitation in LP
began to reflect their sentiment and judgement. For instance, Dominique
(8;0;10) imitated George Bush’s accent during a road trip to Granada (Spain).
He deliberately pronounced meters as [mitreis]. Likewise, Léandre (8;11;0)
played with the Chinese fruit seller’s accent, 哈蜜瓜,一块一块 (honeydew,

one piece, one piece), by exaggerating the seller’s northern Chinese accent
during a trip in Shanghai (China). In both cases, the children revealed their
dislike of or bias against either the person or the accent in their play
of accent.
Second, the two siblings also frequently manipulated and played with
phonemes of their ambient languages. For example, while going to
Besançon [be zan son] (a town in France), Léandre (9;11;26) would say,
“Now, we are in Besancon[be zan kon]!” (con is a vulgar word in French). In
this case, Léandre deliberately played with the phonemes ç [s] and c [k] to
create a laughable moment. This deliberate mispronunciation later became
a fossilized joke of the family.
Third, the siblings also played with homophones and tones. The siblings
realized that with different Chinese tones, they were able to make jokes by
manipulating the sounds and meaning to create amusement. For example,
when Léandre’s mother asked him to pass her a 杯子[bēizi] (cup), he
(9:00;00) joked, you want me to give you a 被子[bèizi] (quilt). In this case,
Léandre deliberately manipulated the first tone in bēizi (cup) and the fourth
tone bèizi (quilt).
Lexical-Semantic Play
Inventing words and playing with their meanings across languages was a
regular routine for the two boys. For instance, during a snack time, Léandre
(4;11;2) jokingly called cream cheese fromage criminel (criminal cheese). In
this word play, Léandre cleverly intertwined the sound and word meaning
in English and French; that is, English cream [krim], when mispronounced
with a French accent, sounds like French crime [krim], which means the
same as its English cognate crime but sounds closer to the English pronunci-
ation of cream. Thus, cream cheese pronounced with a French accent led to
crime cheese (fromage criminel) and fromage criminel, in allusion to the crim-
inal amount of fat in cream cheese. This trend continued as the children got
older. For example, Dominique (10; 4;10) called himself violonisateur to
indicate that he thought he was a bad violinist and that the sound played
by him violated (hurt) people’s ears. In this word play, he intertwined the
English word violate, the French word violon (violin) and the French work
ending -teur (indicating a doer of something).
Morphological Play
Furthermore, the two siblings manipulated the morphological rules of their
ambient languages to create amusement. For example, Léandre (6;6;3) was
in the bathroom when his mother called him for a snack. He said, “I am
大便 [dàbiàn] -ing” (I am having a bowel movement). In this LP, Léandre
combined the Chinese verb 大便 (bowel movement) with the English -ing form
to joke about the action that was happening. Adding the English-ing form
to Chinese verbs sounded astoundingly funny to a Chinese ear.

244 XIAO-LEI WANG
Syntactic Play
Growing up in an OPOL environment, the two siblings consistently followed
this family communication practice. However, beginning around age 7 (for
Léandre) and age 6 (for Dominique), the siblings started to mix syntactic
elements in their three languages, not because they did not know how to
express the syntactic elements in one of their languages, but to play with
mixed syntax to achieve two major purposes: first, expressing their resent-
ment to their parents and second, quoting someone to preserve the vivid-
ness and humor of what they wanted to convey. For example, when
Dominique’s mother pushed him to practice a piano piece which he
hated, Dominique (8;2;11), answered with a heavy Chinese accent that his
mother did not have, “Ok, Ok, Mother, you are my Boss. 我知道了, 我已经说
过我会弹! (I know, I have already said that I will play!)” Dominique was
capable of expressing this whole sentence in Chinese. However, by playfully
mixing an English sentence with a heavy Chinese accent to the exchange in
Chinese, he subtly expressed his dislike of piano practice. In another
example, Léandre was preparing a story for his class presentation about
an Italian baker. He (7;1;23) said to his mother in a very strong Italian
accent (this is a direct quote from the story), “The bread is so heavy. 我就这
样讲给同学听, 让他们笑 (I will tell my classmates like this to make them
laugh).” In this instance, Léandre attempted to convey the funniness by
inserting the English sentence (with heavy Italian accent) when speaking to
his mother.
Pragmatic Play
Two distinct pragmatic practices were observed when the two trilingual
siblings used LP in the context.
The first pragmatic practice is from role-voicing to double-voicing. Role-
voicing refers to a child’s enactment in a role play (Sawyer 1996). Role-voicing
in LP means the way in which a child imitates the speech and mannerism of
another speaker for fun. As opposed to role-voicing, which is a single-voiced
(i.e., the speaker’s intention is expressed in a straightforward way),
speakers who use double-voicing speak with a dual agenda: to express a
particular opinion and adjust the way they speak to take into account their
interlocutor’s degree of acceptance (Bakhtin 1984).
Both monolinguals and multilinguals use double-voicing. However, mul-
tilinguals have more of an advantage in using double-voicing than mono-
linguals because they can incorporate more than one language in double-
voicing, creating optimal circumstances for extensive and more complex
language use.
Before age 8, Léandre and Dominique tended to carry out LP through role-
voicing by simply imitating others’ voices and enacting others’ roles. For
instance, Dominique (7;11;12) pretended to be our Brazilian neighbour
by imitating her accent to make fun of her. This type of LP through

role-voicing was used often simply for the sake of imitation for amusement.
When the siblings got older (around age 8), they began to increase their use
of double-voicing for purposes other than simple amusement. For example,
they blended an out-of-play voice with the play character’s voice and used
this as a strategy for negotiation or lessening confrontation. The example
quoted before about Dominique’s response to his mother’s request for
piano practice is a case in point (“Ok, Ok, Mother, you are my Boss [with a
heavy Chinese accent that his mother did not have]. 我知道了, 我已经说过我
会弹! I know, I have already said that I will play!”). In this example, one
voice seemed to indicate his compliance to his mother’s request “我知道了,
我已经说过我会弹! (I know, I have already said that I will play!)” The other
“playful” voice with heavy Chinese accent, “Ok, Ok, Mother, you are my
Boss,” indicated his resentment of practicing piano. If Dominique said the
same thing in completely Chinese or English, the effect would not have
been the same. This example corroborates the research that double-voicing
is one of the means by which (often unequal) relationships, such as teacher–
student, parent–child, male–female, and majority–minority, are routinely
negotiated and sustained (e.g., Baxter 2014). Dominique discreetly added
the “power” dimension in his LP as a pragmatic strategy of multilingual use
to resist what he was asked to do in a playful way.
The second pragmatic practice in LP includes playing with their own
language mistakes in order to achieve a communicative intent. In the
OPOL home environment, the siblings were often corrected by their parents
in their home language mistakes both in French and Chinese. Starting
around age 9, the two children began to use their own home language
mistakes as a “weapon” in their LPs to make a point, such as expressing
annoyance, resentment, resistance, and protest or making a request.
For example, Léandre and Dominique often made mistakes in using the
Chinese classifiers or measure words when they were young children. In
Chinese, one must add a measure word or classifier before a quantifiable
noun. For instance, in English a book is correct, whereas in Chinese is 一书
(a book) is wrong. A classifier 本 must be added before a book, as in 一本书.
The two siblings were often corrected by their mother in using the correct
classifiers. To express their annoyance at being constantly corrected, Léandre
(9;11;10), for example, poked fun at his mother by deliberately using the
wrong classifier when his mother corrected his choice of wrong classifiers,
“我有一匹狗” (I have a dog) instead of using the right classifier to say “我有一
条狗.” Also, Dominique (10;11;29) deliberately used a mistake of his early
childhood (overextending the French gender word rules), pointute to replace
the correct word pointue, (pointed or sharp) to indicate to his father that it was
time for him to visit the French part of Switzerland to “refresh” his French.
It seems that the two distinctive pragmatic strategies that the two children
employed in LP: “double voice” and “using their own mistakes to achieve a
communicative intent” are two hallmarks of how multilingual children
position themselves as multilingual users and exercise their agency.

246 XIAO-LEI WANG
10.5 Discussion
Taken as a whole, this chapter has shown that multilingual children

(whether they are learning an Ln or developing more than two languages
simultaneously) have demonstrated additional talents and characteristics
in using LP as compared to monolingual children. LP opens up a creative
space in which multilinguals, immersed in more than one language and
culture, are able to freely explore their multilingual world as they experi-
ence it. Most importantly, the transformative potential of LP allows multi-
lingual children to use LP as a communicative medium to transcend the
linguistic norms of their ambient languages for negotiating meaning, lever-
aging their communicative intents, and developing their unique multilin-
gual identity. Several important points need to be highlighted.
10.5.1 Discourse Strategies

Freire (1983) suggested that understanding language in any useful way
requires understanding the speaker’s world. Thus, to understand what is
being said in any deep way we need to know what speakers are trying to do.
In the same vein, Gee (2018) proposed using the “Big D’’ concept to analyze
a speaker’s Discourse that incorporates the speaker’s cultural and linguistic
knowledge. When the ‘d’ in Discourse is capitalised, it captures the ways in
which language is in use by a speaker. Gee (2018) suggests that language is a
tool for three things: saying, doing, and being. When we speak, we simul-
taneously say something (“inform”), do something (act), and are something
(be). When we listen to a speaker, we have to know what the speaker is
saying, doing, and being in order to fully understand his/her intention.
Thus, examining the LP produced by multilingual children through
the lens of the “big D” concept, helps us see their LP beyond just a
linguistic event.
Thus, using the Discourse concept to analyze multilingual children’s LP
has enabled us to recognize their Discourse strategies in at least three
major ways.
10.5.2 LP as a Resignifying Practice

The first Discourse strategy used by multilingual children in LP is the
resignifying practice (Laursen & Kolstrup 2018). Resignifying practice is
derived from the signifying practice (meaning-making process).
Resignifying means that multilingual children, as the examples in this
chapter revealed, move between imagined and real worlds in LP to position
themselves symbolically while engaging in signifying practice. In other
words, multilingual children signify themselves by employing the conven-
tional language norms (language as a semiotic system) and resignify

themselves by using their funds of knowledge (Moll et al. 1992) of their

ambient languages and cultures to explore possibilities of creating new
meanings and novel functions of language to achieve their intended
communication purposes.
10.5.3 Syncretism
The second Discourse strategy shown by multilingual children in LP is
syncretism. As revealed in the examples before, multilingual children are
able to syncretize hybrid elements from respective languages and cultures to
render a wide variety of new meanings. In doing so, multilingual children
are able to develop nuanced and creative manners of Discourse that mono-
lingual children are not able to regale in a single linguistic system. This
practice is similar to how multilingual children practice syncretic literacy,
where they merge different cultural practices within the same literacy
activity (Duranti & Ochs 1986; Gutiérrez 2014).
10.5.4 Code-Switching
The third Discourse strategy employed by multilingual children in LP is code-
switching (CS). In LP, multilingual children mixed various linguistic elem-
ents (e.g., phonological, lexical-semantic, morphological, and syntactic) to
optimize their chances of making their points. In the case of Ln learners,
they maximize their communicative effectiveness in LP by using CS to
remedy their linguistic limitations or compensate for their linguistic gaps
(Hoffmann & Stavans 2007). In the case of more proficient multilinguals
(such as Léandre and Dominique), CS is used in LP to enhance the effects of
LP to achieve nuanced communicative purposes.
By using these above-mentioned Discourse strategies, multilingual chil-
dren can challenge the authority (e.g., their parents and teachers), leverage
their intent, negotiate their identity, and give new meaning to their mul-
tiple language use. By having more than one language available to them,
multilingual children have more possibilities in communicating their com-
plaints, annoyances, criticisms, and requests in tactful and humorous ways.
LP certainly made their communication far less confrontational and far
more acceptable. In essence, multilingual LP removes the children from the
limitations of a single language and allows them to move into “a freer
realm of subjective perceptions and meanings” (Kramsch 2009). The multi-
lingual Discourse strategies through LP provide us with a valuable resource
for their multilingual identity.
10.5.5 Multicompetence
Being able to play with more than one language requires not only children’s
cleverness but also their competences in multiple areas.

248 XIAO-LEI WANG
Linguistic Competence
A good language player needs to have a solid understanding of the linguistic
rules in his/her respective languages. The examples discussed previously in
the chapter have indicated that multilingual children are capable of stretch-
ing and manipulating various linguistic elements across languages in a cre-
ative way to make a successful LP.
Metalinguistic Competence
A successful multilingual LP requires that speakers to have an advanced
level of metalinguistic abilities. Indeed, multilingual experience certainly
enhances children’s metalinguistic abilities (Bialystok 1988). The examples
described in the chapter are the testaments of multilingual children’s
metalinguistic abilities.
Cultural Competence
According to Martin and Vaughn (2007), cultural competence is the
ability to communicate effectively with people from different cultures.
Cultural competence consists of four elements: attitudes, awareness,
knowledge, and skills. To successfully carry out LP, multilingual children
must have the four foundations, because humor differs culturally. They
must be able to syncretize the cultural differences and use them appro-
priately in LP.
Theory of Mind Competence

A successful LP also requires that a speaker have a good theory of mind.
Theory of mind is the ability to understand and interpret others’ mental
and emotional state to use LP with the right person, in the right language,
and at the right moment. Multilingual children must understand whether
their interlocutors would understand and appreciate their LP in order to
carry out a successful LP. Research has confirmed that that multilingual
children in general tend to have a more advanced theory of mind ability
than their counterpart peers (e.g., Rubio-Fernández 2016).
Further, multilingual children’s theory of mind competence is also
reflected in their ability to lessen conflicts and ease tension when express-
ing negative emotions, such as dislikes, resentment, and protest. The
example of Dominique’s “soft” resentment of his mother’s request for
piano practice through LP helped make his communication funny and less
offensive to his mother. It is clear that by having more than one language
available to them, multilingual children have an advantage in communi-
cating their complaints, annoyances, and criticisms in socially intelligent
ways. Even when they challenged the authority (such as parents), the
messages expressed through LP were tactful, making them far less confron-
tational and far more acceptable.

10.6 Thoughts on Future Research Directions
Understanding LP in the multilingual population not only has significance

in the effects of multilingualism on human potential, but also implications
in education. In the remainder of this chapter, I will share some thoughts
on future research directions.
10.6.1 Parental Language Socialization and LP

Research in language acquisition and development has long suggested that
parental socioeconomic status, culture, and linguistic input influence how
children develop their L1 language acquisition (Hurt & Betancourt 2016), L2
development (Hol & Yavuz 2017), and home language maintenance (Wang
2008, 2015). Future research may need to determine whether these factors
also influence multilingual children’s LP development, especially whether
the family context and parental language socialisation practices influence
how LP is supported.
10.6.2 Language Types and LP

Future research may also want to examine how multilingual children with
different types of language combinations carry out LP. Researchers may
want to investigate whether there is a relationship between the aspect of
language with which one plays and the types of language in which the play
occurs (e.g., alphabetical vs. logographic and alphabetic vs. Semitic).
Questions such as “Is it possible that the type of language affords the
emergence of a particular kind of LP?” may need to be explored.
10.6.3 Multilingual LP Development

Moreover, researchers may want to study the characteristics of LP of multi-
lingual children longitudinally as related to the following areas:
• Developmental characteristics. It is useful to explore how LP in multilingual

children develops over the developmental stages in comparison to
monolingual children.
• Gender differences. Research in monolingual children’s humour found
evidence of gender differences. Boys tend to demonstrate higher levels
of linguistic humour expertness and humour orientation (Booth-
Butterfield & Booth-Butterfield 1991) than girls (Socha & Kelly 1994).
However, little research is available as to whether multilingual children
exhibit gender differences in their LP. Future research in this area may
be needed.

250 XIAO-LEI WANG
10.6.4 Bidirectionality
Future research may also want to determine the language use directionality
in multilingual children’s LP. In the case study, LP of the two siblings often
occurred in two languages rather than in all three languages. Is this a
commonality of multilingual LP or an exception?
10.7 Educational Implications
Finally, it is well-documented that LP helps children acquire and develop a

Ln (e.g., Broner & Tarone 2001). Future research may want to explore
whether LP can also be used to help multilingual children develop their
academic language (languages used in school content areas) and literacy
development. It is likely that the creative process in LP can help multilin-
gual children develop enriched writing and thinking abilities.
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Part Three
Family Language
Policy

11
Establishing and
Maintaining a Multilingual
Family Language Policy
Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen & Baoqi Sun
11.1 Introduction
Globalisation and superdiversity (Vertovec 2007) have led to transnational-

ism and bi- and multilingualism (King & Lanza 2019; Zhu & Li 2016).
Determining which languages to learn, maintain and use is one of the key
issues encountered by bi- and multilingual families on an ongoing basis
(Hirsch & Lee 2018). In response to these changes, Family Language Policy
(FLP) as a relatively new research domain has received increasing attention
as it focuses on how family members make sense of the multiple languages
they use in their everyday lives and the decisions they have to make
regarding which languages to keep and which ones to let go (Wang &
Curdt-Christiansen 2019). Drawing on two distinct fields of research,
namely child language acquisition and language policy, FLP refers to expli-
cit and overt, as well as implicit and covert, language planning by family
members in relation to language choice and literacy practices within home
domains and between family members (Curdt-Christiansen 2009; King,
Fogle & Logan-Terry 2008; Spolsky 2012).
Traditionally, language policy focuses on language planning and manage-
ment at the macro level (i.e., state and education); however, little attention
has been given to how decisions about language choice are made at the
meso (i.e., family) or micro (i.e., individual) level (King et al. 2008).
Consequently, answering intriguing questions posed by researchers
(Curdt-Christiansen 2013b; De Houwer 2007) as to why and how certain
members of multilingual families maintain their language while others
lose it remains challenging. It has yet to be clarified why some children
growing up in a largely monolingual society become bilingual, while others
remain monolingual; why certain languages are prestigious; which policies
and practices are implemented by parents to promote or discourage the use
and practice of particular languages; how language policies and practices

258 X I AO L A N C U R DT - C H R I ST I A N S E N & B AOQ I S U N
are negotiated in the private domain and, concomitantly, how they relate to
broader language and language education policy ideologies.
In this chapter, we start with a brief introduction to FLP and outline its
development in the past decades. In Section 11.3, we provide a discussion of
the major research contributions in the field. In discussing these major
research contributions, we pay particular attention to the macro and micro
factors influencing parental decisions. Following that, in Section 11.4, we
present a critical review of the recent FLP work with a focus on multilingual
families and how factors, such as emotions, identity, cultural practices and
child agency, shape family language decisions. In Section 11.5, we outline
the implications of FLP study and provide a few suggestions for
future research.
11.2 Development of the Field
According to King (2016), FLP research is divided into four phases. The first
phase of FLP research dates back more than 100 years; it consisted of
classical diary studies where authors described their own children’s lan-
guage development in two languages (e.g., Leopold 1939–49; Ronjat 1913).
These studies recorded particularly the discourse strategies (such as one-
parent-one-language) that parents used in child bilingual development.
These initial studies suggested for the first time the association between
bilingualism and metalinguistic awareness.
The second phase was featured by psycholinguistic approaches to exam-
ining the differences between bi- and monolingual language development
trajectories. Studies in this phase were concerned about whether language
input, linguistic environment and parental discourse strategy have effects
on raising bilingual children (e.g., Caldas 2006; De Houwer 1990; King et al.
2008; Lanza 1997; Piller 2002; Schüpbach 2009). De Houwer’s (1990) study
of a bilingual Dutch-English child illustrated the importance of language
input on achieving balanced child bilingualism. Piller’s (2002) study showed
different types of parental approach to raising élite bilingual children in
German and English. Lanza’s (1997/2004) research provided detailed dis-
course strategies in English-Norwegian families in which interactions
between parent and children were analysed. She found five types of dis-
course strategy used by parents to socialise their children into a particular
linguistic behaviour: minimal grasp, expressed guess, repetition, move on and
code-switching.
While these early phases of FLP studies changed the general perception of
bilingualism from negative to positive, they tended to focus on Western
middle-class families where children were learning two high-status
European languages. In recent years, the field has moved away from
Western middle-class families to include diverse transnational and non-
transnational families in multilingual societies and endangered linguistic

Establishing a Multilingual Family Language Policy 259
communities (Curdt-Christiansen 2013a; Curdt-Christiansen & Lanza 2018;

Lanza & Curdt-Christiansen 2018; Lanza & Li Wei 2016). The focus of the
recent studies has also moved away from élite bilingualism to bilingual
heritage language and mainstream language development as well as multi-
lingualism. In the subsequent years, researchers began to pay more atten-
tion to transnational and immigrant families and issues beyond language
outcomes to understand why some languages enjoyed privileges and were
ascribed higher value (e.g., Canagarajah 2008; Curdt-Christiansen 2009,
2013a; Tuominen 1999).
In the third phase, FLP scholars not only looked into non-traditional types
of families, such as adoptive, extended and single-parent families, they also
studied families in endangered linguistic communities (Fogle 2012; Ó
hlfearnáin 2013; Smith-Christmas 2016). The duality of minority vs. major-
ity, heritage language vs. societal language, and monolingual vs. multilin-
gual has become the focus of the field. Scholars have not only explored the
underpinning driving forces for FLP decisions, but also examined the pro-
cesses of language maintenance and language shift in multilingual families
(e.g., Curdt-Christiansen 2013a, 2016; Gafaranga 2010; King 2013). This
phase of studies began to locate FLP as an emerging field of enquiry guided
by Spolsky’s tripartite language policy framework, which comprises of
three interrelated components: language ideology, language practice and
language management (Spolsky 2004, 2009). Language ideology refers to
people’s deeply ingrained beliefs regarding certain languages, language
learning and language development. Language practice refers to the actual
use of language(s) or what people do with it/them in their everyday life.
Language management refers to the plans and approaches taken to support
or suppress certain language(s) (i.e., what people try to do to language)
(Fogle & King 2017).
In the fourth phase, FLP research continues to build on Spolsky’s lan-
guage policy model to study families in transnational and non-
transnational contexts. Research in this phase is characterised by the
experiences of family members when making sense of the languages in
their life. Scholars are now beginning to highlight the different factors that
influence family language practices and decisions (e.g., Curdt-Christiansen
2016; Curdt-Christiansen & Huang 2019; Curdt-Christiansen & Wang 2018;
Zhu & Li 2016; Said & Zhu 2019). Because of the social nature of families,
the study of FLP is expanding its domain from families to encompass other
domains ‘related to family decisions, such as education, religion, and public
linguistic space as well as many different aspects in individual family
members’ everyday life, including emotions, identity, and cultural and
political allegiances (Curdt-Christiansen 2018: 423). The influencing factors
have been identified as external and internal forces (Curdt-Christiansen &
Huang 2019; Spolsky 2012), and FLP has been recognised as dynamic socio-
cultural practices. Theoretically, the field has been established as an inter-
disciplinary study that bridges theories of language policy, language

socialisation, literacy studies and child language development.

Methodologically, this interdisciplinary field has generated diverse research
approaches to the study of multilingualism, heritage language development
and bilingual education. In the following section, we provide a discussion of
the major contributions to the field.
11.3 Major Contributions
The family is a dynamic sociolinguistic and ecological unit, which reflects

the complex interactions between families and the surrounding sociolin-
guistic and sociocultural contexts (Curdt-Christiansen 2018). Although each
family has its own norms and rules for language use and practice, decisions
about which languages to practice and encourage, or to discourage and
abandon, are largely shaped by the ideologies and attitudes held by family
members (Curdt-Christiansen 2013a; Lanza 2007). In addition, decision-
making is influenced by the parents’ socioeconomic background, their
expectations of child bi/multilingual outcomes, their knowledge of multi-
lingualism, and their language management through provisions of home
language/literacy environment (Curdt-Christiansen 2013b; De Houwer
2009; Smith-Christmas 2014). Given the social nature of families, studying
FLP contributes uniquely to research in areas such as child language devel-
opment and interactions between broader social contexts and FLP.
11.3.1 Child Language Acquisition

FLP studies contribute to the field of research on child language acquisition
by elucidating the important role that FLP plays in predicting children’s
bilingual development (De Houwer 1999, 2017; Dekeyser & Stevens 2019;
Eversteijn 2011; Kang 2015; Schwartz 2008). For example, in a study of 70
second-generation Russian-Jewish immigrant children in Israel, Schwartz
(2008) examined how parents’ language ideology, management and prac-
tices (obtained from a parental survey) influenced the children’s L1
(Russian) vocabulary and literacy knowledge. She found that there was a
significant and positive relationship between parents’ language manage-
ment and the children’s L1 vocabulary knowledge. Language management
was measured by whether parents taught their children to read in L1. She
also found that parental ideologies had weak and insignificant relationships
to children’s literacy skills in their L1. Interestingly, the study showed that
parental language ideology was not correlated with their management and
language practices, nor with children’s attitudes towards L1. While the
study provided important findings about children’s L1 proficiency, it did
not include how FLP influenced these children’s bilingual development in
Russian and Hebrew.

Using a similar design, Dekeyser and Stevens (2019) found that the
heritage language (HL) proficiency of more than 300 children (10–12 years
old) with a Moroccan HL in Belgium was strongly affected by whether or not
their parents used and valued HL, whether the mother was proficient in the
HL and by opportunities to use it outside of the household. The children’s
proficiency in Dutch was affected by their mother’s proficiency in the
language and by the languages used by other children in the household.
De Houwer’s (2007) classic study of bilingual families showed that paren-
tal language input had a strong influence on their children’s bilingual
development. Employing a questionnaire, she collected data from 1,899
families in which at least one of the parents spoke a language other than
Dutch, the dominant language in Flanders. Her study showed that although
all children spoke Dutch, they did not necessarily speak the minority
language. The children’s ability to use their minority language varied
according to the parental language input patterns used in those homes.
One of the most interesting findings from this study was that the one-
parent-one-language strategy did not necessarily provide sufficient input
for children to develop their two languages. This phenomenon has been
evidenced in many bilingual families (De Houwer 1999; Yamamoto 2001)
and is, according to De Houwer, caused by insufficient engagement
between parents and children in the minority language. While the study
has made important contributions to our understanding of patterns of
parental language input in relation to their children’s bilingual develop-
ment, the children’s bilingual ability was not measured by their linguistic
knowledge and outputs in the two languages.
While these studies have shed much light on the linguistic conditions
that parents provide for their children’s bi/multilingual development,
scholars argue that there are non-linguistic forces that are simultaneously
influencing family language decisions. The following section, thus, moves
into the discussion of how various non-linguistic forces exert influence on
language choices made by family members.
11.3.2 FLP and Social Forces

Because of the social nature of families, the ‘linguistic lives’ of family
members are not isolated from the different social contexts in which families
are situated (Curdt-Christiansen 2018; Shohamy 2006; Spolsky 2009, 2012).
According to Spolsky (2004), there are four broadly defined and interrelated
forces at play: sociolinguistic, sociocultural, socioeconomic and sociopoliti-
cal forces. Sociolinguistic forces provide sources for beliefs about what
language is (no) good or (non) useful; sociocultural forces provide references
for the symbolic values associated with different languages; socioeconomic
forces are linked to the instrumental values that a particular language can
provide; and sociopolitical forces are related to the educational and political
access provided by certain languages in a given society.

Among these forces, the sociopolitical forces via national language policy
or language-in-education policy have been the most powerful. Studies have
shown that macro-level language policy is perpetuated in family language
decisions via implicit language socialisation and explicit language interven-
tions (e.g., Curdt-Christiansen 2014, 2016; Lane 2010; Smith-Christmas
2016; Stavans 2012, 2015).
Lane (2010), for example, has studied a group of Kven (a Finnic language)
speakers in northern Norway. Lasting 11 years, the longitudinal project
explored how a massive language shift took place in this ethnic minority
group under the official Norwegianisation Policy in the 1970s. Using socio-
linguistic interviews, participant observation, and feedback discussion with
participants as the tools of inquiry, the study shed important light on the
macro–micro connections of family language policy. Lane showed that the
government policy had ‘coerced’ the Kven speakers to cease using Kven
with their children because of the Norwegian-only language policy in all
schools. The process of Norwegianisation had led to a sense of inferiority
and shame in the Kven speakers, who stated that ‘We did what we thought
was best for our children’ (Lane 2010: 63).
Situated in Singapore, Curdt-Christiansen (2014, 2016) has also demon-
strated that state language policy and language-in-education policy have
affected FLP. While the state language policy recognises four official languages
(English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil, designated as official mother tongues),
the language-in-education policy has established English as the medium of
instruction in all schools at all levels. This political decision has resulted in
much less curriculum time allocated to the teaching of mother tongue as a
subject. Curdt-Christiansen (2014, 2016) studied a group of Singaporean multi-
lingual families and found that there were competing and conflicting ideolo-
gies within the same family regarding how to develop the participating
children’s mother tongues and English simultaneously. Concerned about
‘losing out to English in a competitive society and a meritocratic educational
system’, the parents tended to place higher value on English than on other
languages they used in their life, such as Mandarin, Malay and Tamil (Curdt-
Christiansen 2014: 48). The macro-level policy caused conflicting language
choices and led to contradicting practices between family members. While
multilingualism with English is observed in Singapore, language shift to
English has been increasing rapidly in the past decades.
Stavans (2015) has also studied the interconnections between meso-
educational policy and micro-family language policy. Her study focused
on language and literacy practices of Ethiopian immigrant families in
Israel, a country whose official languages is Hebrew but where Arabic and
English are also used, at least to a degree. The families lived in a neighbour-
hood community that was at least quadrilingual, but were themselves
bilingual, and their children attended a monolingual educational system.
By profiling 67 families and studying the home literacy provisions, she
examined the language use and attitudes towards maintenance of their L1

(Amharic), bilingualism and acquisition of L2 (Hebrew). The findings indi-

cated that Ethiopian parents were actively engaged in their children’s early
educational and social life until grade one. When children moved into
upper grades of their education, the parents placed more emphasis on
L2 – the school language – by relinquishing the maintenance of L1. The
findings showed that the more the parents used Amharic at home, the less
they thought that bilingualism was positive, and the less they thought that
the use of Amharic was of importance. Stavans (2015: 193) argued that ‘the
institutionalised language education policy’ should be made available for
these families’ language policy with regard to cultural and linguistic affor-
dances so that resources could be drawn on when making informative
decisions about their language practices at home.
The above cases clearly demonstrate that external forces are closely
related to the internal forces that underpin the language ideologies of
family members. De Houwer (2017) observed that parents might feel pres-
sured to use a language that they do not know well but value highly, at
societal level, in an effort to increase their children’s competency in it.
Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with 14 Spanish-speaking mothers
of pre-schoolers in the USA, Surrain (2018) found that the mothers viewed
the ability to maintain Spanish alongside the acquisition of English as
essential for economic opportunities and family communication, yet they
differed in their perceptions of how bilingualism was best supported.
Bezcioglu-Goktolga and Yagmur (2018) investigated the FLP of second-
generation Turkish immigrant families in the Netherlands and found that
even though maintaining the Turkish language was of paramount import-
ance in the parents’ linguistic ideologies, the language practices and man-
agement approaches to bilingual development varied drastically.
Nonetheless, all the parents based their language planning activities around
the educational achievements of their children, suggesting that educational
institutions have an important role in shaping FLP.
In this section, we focus our discussion mainly on sociopolitical forces
that influence FLP. The above-mentioned studies illustrate that the process
of language practice and choice is not a simple family matter, but a
dynamic process influenced by other forces and factors. The field has not
only deepened our understanding of the complexity of FLP, but also
enriched our understanding of the different types of family configurations
in transnational and non-transnational contexts. In what follows, we pro-
vide a critical review of recent developments in FLP with a focus on
multilingual families.
11.4 Family Language Policy in Multilingual Families
We define multilingual families as those who deal with more than one
language in their everyday life. These include families in transnational and

migration context in which dominant societal language/s and non-

dominant home language/s coexist (Hirsch & Lee 2018; Zhu & Li 2016).
They also include intermarriage families, which can be transnational or
non-transnational, involving two dominant societal languages (such as
French and Dutch in Belgium) or majority and minority language (Lanza
2007: Van Mensel 2016). In discussing recent development in FLP studies,
Curdt-Christiansen & Huang (2019) summarised the factors influencing
FLP. While there are both external and internal factors shaping FLP, we
focus on the internal factors, especially on how languages are used and
negotiated in the lives of families as critical elements in the process of
family language decision.
In both transnational (migration) and non-transnational (endangered and
intermarriage) families, different languages have different symbolic mean-
ings for family members when they make sense of their life experiences in
various contexts such as homeland and hostland. The symbolic meanings are
reflected in different languages’ emotional expressions, identity projection
and cultural practices. In the following section, we illustrate these symbolic
representations in FLP by reviewing empirical findings in recent studies.
11.4.1 Emotion and FLP

In multilingual families, it is often observed that communication is made
through language choice, language play, language mixing, meshing and
translanguaging (Pavlenko 2004; Smith-Christmas 2014, 2018). Although
family members may have multiple languages at their disposal, they tend
to use one of these languages to express specific emotions. For example,
Luykx (2003) studied bilingual Aymara-Spanish households in Bolivia,
where she found that Spanish was used by parents for tender ‘baby talk’
and showing affection for family members, whereas Aymara was used for
scolding, disciplining and issuing commands. As a result, children were
socialised into the use of Spanish as a positive emotional experience. The
use of Aymara, on the other hand, was related to a less pleasant experience,
which affected the language development in Aymara. Similar studies have
also been found by Curdt-Christiansen (2016) in Malay-English bilingual
families in Singapore, where parents felt closer to their children when
using Malay. In conversations between family members, parents were
observed using ‘sayang’ (darling in Malay) to address their children, while
using English for other functions in home domains. When asking why
Malay was used occasionally in their English-dominated language practices,
one of the parents stated that Malay provided an emotional attachment
with the children allowing them to express endearment.
In a study conducted by Pavlenko (2004) on emotions and language
choice, many parents pointed out that ‘creat[ing] an emotional connection
in a second language feels “fake” and “unnatural”, as if one were “acting”’
(p. 190). The study illustrates that language emotionality may affect the

language choice in parent–child interactions. Although most parents in the

study confirmed that they used L1 for emotional expressions, it might
oversimplify the reality of multilingual existence. The study points out
the critical engagement of L1 in migration context where a strong convic-
tion of FLP may lead to an emotional connection between parents, grand-
parents and children. The emotional engagement through language choice
can be regarded as unarticulated language management efforts that pro-
vide insight into the process of language maintenance and language shift in
the everyday social life within families.
Smith-Christmas (2016, 2018) conducted a longitudinal (9-year) ethno-
graphic study, focusing on the role of input management in a Scottish family
concerned with the maintenance of the Gaelic language. The study centres on
how the grandmother, Nana, transforms everyday events into affective lan-
guage engagement with child-centred interactions. Using recordings col-
lected over the years, Smith-Christmas explored the detailed interactional
patterns that lead to positive Gaelic learning experiences of the granddaugh-
ter, Maggie. The author’s analysis demonstrates that the ‘high involvement’
(cf. Chevalier 2012; Tannen 2006) and affective interactional style used by
Nana created an active and stimulating learning environment for encour-
aging Gaelic development and maintenance, which is illustrated in the dia-
logue below. Nana was arranging flowers that Maggie had brought her. In the
conversational exchanges, Nana incorporated Maggie’s Gaelic knowledge
into an affective language game. Because the flowers had no stems, Nana
played on the word cas meaning ‘stem’ and also ‘leg’ in the conversation.
Maggie = they got they just got face and a

Nana face. aodannan, nach eil?=
faces, isn’t it?
Maggie and two legs
Nana face and two leg- face and one leg=

Maggie no
Nana =aon chas a th’orra, nach e?=
one leg on them, isn’t it?
Maggie =no
Nana /’s e (.) siud an t-aodann (.) agus (.) aon chas (.)
it is. here’s the face and one leg
tha aodann ‘s dà chas ortsa
you have a face and two legs
Maggie one cas two cas
leg leg(s)
Nana aon chas (.) /dà chas (.) aon chas air a’ flùire3 (.) mmm-hmm (.)
one leg two legs one leg on the flower
sin facal math airson ‘cas’ (.) cas na flùr (.)
that’s a good word for ‘stem’ leg of the flower
(data from Smith-Christmas 2018: 141)

It is clear, in this excerpt, that Nana embedded affect and language learning
into the task of putting the flowers in water. She was able to capitalise on
Maggie’s characterisation of the stem part of the flowers as having ‘legs’
into a creative way of learning Gaelic. While such an interactional style
allows children to engage in affective, playful and implicit language learn-
ing that not only encourages language development but also builds emo-
tional attachments between two generations, not all children would react
to the same style of interaction, which could be caused by different social-
isation patterns employed by other caregivers in the same family.
11.4.2 FLP, Identity and Cultural Practices

Research into FLP in recent years has shown that migration experiences
have a crucial effect on family members’ identity and cultural allegiance.
As migration trajectories and settlement patterns differ from generation to
generation, family members have different encounters and experiences,
which may lead to conflicts of identity and language practices (e.g.,
Chevalier 2012; Meyer-Pitton 2013; Zhu & Li 2016).
Zhu Hua (2008) studied bilingual intergenerational trajectories of diaspo-
ric Chinese families in the UK with regard to identity and language prac-
tices. Using a detailed analysis of sequential movement in conversations,
she demonstrated that ‘conflicts in values and identities are negotiated,
mediated and managed’ (p. 1799). FLP in these participating families is thus
negotiated through intergenerational conflict talk as a result of different
life experiences, sociocultural values and linguistic practices between
members of different generations.
Also looking into how transnational families negotiate language
practices, Zhu Hua and Li Wei (2016) studied bilingualism and multilin-
gualism in different generations and individuals in three multilingual
Chinese families in the UK. They revealed that family members’ experi-
ences affected the way in which individual family members perceived social
relations and structures, as well as the ways they constructed and presented
their own identities.
In a similar vein, Curdt-Christiansen (2016) studied a bilingual Malay and
English family in Singapore. She found that parents and children attached
different values to English and Malay. In mundane family conversations,
such symbolic attachments were displayed through language choice and
use. The excerpt below shows the language exchanges between daughter
(A), mother (M), and son (Mi) when A had a nosebleed.
A: There’s something in my nose.

M: Oh. Having nose problem?
M: (to domestic helper) Bikkkk, kasi dia deir purple medicine (give her
the purple medicine).
Mi: gasik deir purple medicine. [mimicking his mother]

M: Full of nonsense ah.

Mi: Ah. Give deir purple medicine al.
A: er you Malay or what?
M: Why don’t you speak Malay? See whether she understands.
Mi: saya ayam di katak (my chicken at frog) [sounds out different words
in Malay]
M: ayam gorent! (fried chicken) [correcting Mikki].
(data from Curdt-Christiansen 2016: 704)
In this conversation, it is noticeable that English is the preferred lan-

guage between the mother and her children, indicating a habitual and de
facto language practice. In this translanguaging mode of communication
(Garcia & Li 2014), Mrs M used Malay with the domestic helper and English
with her children. For Mrs M, Malay had a social and cultural role in her
upbringing as her generation went through the initial bilingual education
phase where Malay was used in home domains and English was used only in
schools. As the bilingual language policy evolved in Singapore, a forceful
linguistic shift had taken place in recent decades. English has begun not
only to dominate public/school domains, but also to penetrate home and
private domains. As a consequence, Mi did not view Malay as a language of
identity and cultural allegiance. In line 4, Mi tried to mimic his mother, but
failed to produce the correct words. Annoyed by her little brother’s behav-
iour, A challenged Mi by saying, ‘er you Malay or what?’ Subsequently, Mi
produced a meaningless sentence by stringing some randomly chosen
Malay words together: saya ayam di katak (my chicken at frog). Although
A associated speaking Malay with Malay identity, it was clear that Mi failed
to make the association.
Language practices in FLP are not only reflected in identity projections.
They are also instantiated in cultural practices through language socialisa-
tion (Canagarajah 2008; Curdt-Christiansen 2009; Garrett 2011; Garrett &
Baquedano-López 2002; Wang & Curdt-Christiansen 2019). Such culture-
related language practices are part of the implicit language planning in
families (King et al. 2008; Mu & Dooley 2015). Meyer-Pitton (2013), for
example, studied Russian-French speaking families in Switzerland, observ-
ing dinner table talks between parents and children. The study showed that
family members’ negotiating talks in relation to language choice focused on
cultural behaviour at the dinner table. Van Mensel’s (2018) study of multi-
lingual families in Belgium also illustrated that multilingual family reper-
toire denoted a joint cultural practice that was shared by all family
members. Using familylect as a conceptual framework, Van Mensel demon-
strated that family language practices in multiple languages, such as Dutch,
French and Spanish or Dutch, Mandarin and Qingtian Hua, were not
random linguistic reproduction but associated with shared cultural prac-
tices brought about by parents from their primary socialisation and chil-
dren from culture outside of home.

These interactional studies provide evidence indicating that attitudes,

identity, relationship and cultural practices can be revealed and negotiated,
accepted and rejected, all in the process of interaction. It is particularly
important to note that these family language practices are results of the
agentive roles that parents and children play in the construction and
implantation of language policy. To understand in what ways cultural and
linguistic practices are transmitted, accepted or rejected by family
members, we focus our discussion in the next section on child agency.
11.4.3 Child Agency in FLP

In most FLP studies, children are regarded as recipients of FLP although
parents are not the only socialisation agents for child language develop-
ment. Given the interactional nature of parent–child socialisation
(Kuczynski 2002), researchers are beginning to pay more attention to the
fact that children are active socialising agents within families (Danjo 2018;
Luykx 2005; Parada 2013). At the same time, a growing body of literature is
examining the active role of children in socialising their parents to adopt
particular language practices (Fogle & King 2013; Luykx 2005).
It is vital to note that the agency of children is not a neutral phenomenon.
On the contrary, it is entwined with broader political, educational, cultural
and ideological factors (Curdt-Christiansen 2013a; Curdt-Christiansen &
Lanza 2018; Fogle 2012; Gyogi 2015; King 2013; Little 2017). As societies
are constantly changing, family dynamics and family values are also
changing. Along with these changes, children often exercise their agency
through investment in language learning strategies to overcome difficulties
in their multiple language development (Flowerdew & Miller 2008; King
2013). They can also act on their agency to resist learning certain languages,
which has been observed in migration contexts where parents insist on
their children’s learning the heritage language and children reject or chal-
lenge such socialisation (e.g., Fogle 2012; Kheirkhah & Cekaite 2015).
In multilingual families, parents and their children have divergent access
to linguistic resources in more than one language. Very often, their lan-
guage proficiency, language ideology and language resources differ greatly,
and having to negotiate such differences (often in their favour at the micro-
social level) provides an avenue and opportunity for their children to
establish their agency in shaping FLP. Negotiations over cultural norms,
language practices and language policies between children and other family
members are part of everyday interactions (Fogle & King 2013). Revis (2019)
identified five types of socialisation practices used by children: (1) medium
requests, (2) metalinguistic comments, (3) language brokering, (4) sociocul-
tural socialisation, and (5) majority language teaching (Revis 2019).
A ‘medium request’ refers to children’s opposition to their parents’
language of choice through the use of resistance strategies as a means to
use their own preferred language, especially if their parents are trying to

shift them to use a different language. Children have been reported to

repeatedly switch to the language used at school when discussing school
assignments with their parents (Curdt-Christiansen 2013b) or to resort to
the use of code-switching as a linguistic resource to take control of inter-
actions with their parents (Zhu 2008). In her case study of a bilingual
Japanese-English family living in the UK, Danjo (2018) showed how the
parents’ strong monolingual ideology at the level of perception was cre-
atively and strategically negotiated and exercised by the two bilingual
children. For example, the children tried, through the use of
translanguaging and bending the rules of English pronunciation, to avoid
correction by the mother who insisted on speaking Japanese.
Gafaranga (2010) studied Rwandan migrant families in Belgium and
observed how young members of the community initiated medium
requests, which allowed them to speak French. As the children had greater
access to French at school and through regular interactions with their
siblings, they acquired French more effectively than their parents and,
consequently, persisted in using French at home, even though their parents
preferred otherwise. Eventually, this became the driving force for a ‘talked
into being’ language shift from Kinyarwanda to French.
As shown in the study by Kheirkhah and Cekaite (2015) of a Persian and
Kurdish family living in Sweden, when parents positioned themselves as
‘experts’ and insisted on the active participation in their child’s heritage
language learning, the child was frequently seen to blatantly refuse and
resist their ‘expertise’. When the refusals were affectively aggravated, the
parents repeatedly accommodated their child by terminating the language
instruction. Thus, the development of informal language instruction was
dependent on the child’s willingness to collaborate and participate.
Children’s agentive power to appropriate or resist their parents’ language
beliefs and practices can also be a driving force for language shifts
(Gafaranga 2010; Luykx 2005; Said & Zhu 2019).
The use of ‘metalinguistic comments’ by children refers to their explicit
evaluation of language choice at the metalinguistic level, for example,
which language or what words to use. Fogle and King (2013) provide
examples of children who overtly set rules about which languages should
be used for interactions and who correct one another in their preferred
language. Smith-Christmas (2016) provides an example of a 4-year-old child
insisting, in his requests to family members, that certain words should be
in English rather than Gaelic.
In a recent study, Said and Zhu (2019) evaluated how children in Arabic-
speaking families in the UK creatively mobilised their developing linguistic
repertoires to negotiate and take up their agency in language use and
socialisation. Drawing on close qualitative analysis of mealtime conversa-
tions involving multiple family members over an 8-month period, Said and
Zhu (2019) found evidence of a cultural attachment to Arabic by the
parents. They also showed how the children were fully aware of this

preference and were capable of manipulating that knowledge and asserting

their agency through their linguistic choices to achieve interactional goals,
as well as a shift in language.
Children in multilingual families tend to be more proficient than their
parents in the majority language; hence, they often act as powerful ‘lin-
guistic brokers’ for their families, engaging in different types of language
practices in various social domains, such as homes, schools and public
spaces (Morales & Hanson 2005; Orellana 2009). A number of studies have
documented the importance of the role of children in helping adult family
members, usually migrants, in their daily undertakings, to negotiate inter-
actions with dominant-language individuals, for example, by answering the
phone, translating and interpreting official documents and carrying out
bank-related business (Parada 2013; Revis 2019; Valdés 2002). Such prac-
tices certainly help to hone children’s language abilities; however, they
simultaneously disempower their parents and reverse the usual parent–
child authority in terms of linguistic capital (Revis 2019).
In some cases, when children have greater access to a new language than
their parents do, they socialise their parents into an increased understand-
ing of the linguistic and sociocultural facets of their country of settlement
through sociocultural socialisation (Guo 2014; Luykx 2005; Revis 2019).
They serve as cultural mediators who open numerous channels through
which parents can connect with the majority of the population, and they
help their parents to get to know the society into which they have just
moved. In her study of young Chinese children in England, Guo (2014)
noted the mediating efforts of children, on behalf of their parents, which
included teaching them sociocultural concepts, such as ‘poppy day’ and the
provision of pocket money, introducing them to English food terminology
and usage, as well as providing them with factual knowledge.
‘Majority language teaching’ occurs when children act as language
teachers and socialise their parents into learning the linguistic components
of the language that is spoken by the majority of the population; they may,
for example, teach their parents the correct use of vocabulary and sentence
structure (Luykx 2005; Revis 2019). Children correct their parents’ choice of
words and teach them how to use sentence structures appropriately (Guo
2014; Kheirkhah & Cekaite 2015; Parada 2013; Revis 2019), and parents seek
their children’s expertise and ask for assistance (Luykx 2005; Revis 2019).
The ability of children to exercise their agency is inseparable from exter-
nal socio-contextual factors, such as language ideology or exposure to the
majority language at school, because broader language ideologies and lan-
guage exposure shape the language practices of both parents and their
children (Canagarajah 2008; Zhu 2008; Revis 2019). In a study of a group
of Tamil diaspora families, Canagarajah (2008) demonstrated that parents’
efforts to maintain Tamil as the dominant language were appropriated and
resisted by their children because of their positive perceptions of English.
Elsewhere, it was shown that entry to the school system by children in New

Zealand constituted a major turning point and resulted in the children

questioning, resisting, mediating and transforming their parents’ manage-
ment and practices, constituting a marked deviation from their language
use pattern during preschool years (Revis 2019).
The family is not merely the source of language reproduction; it is also a
milieu of language transformation and change. Members of multilingual
families, both adults and children, influence one another’s socialisation.
Thus, they can both be considered agents (Garrett & Baquedano-López
2002). Family members actively shape language management together
(Hornberger & Johnson 2007). In summary, children act as agents of change
as they negotiate, challenge, resist or transform established language prac-
tices in the home domain (Danjo 2018; Gyogi 2015; Gafaranga 2010; Fogle
2012; Fogle & King 2013).
11.5 Implications and Future Directions
The field of family language policy has enhanced our understanding of the
processes of children’s multilingual development, especially when it comes
to how family language decisions are influenced and shaped by linguistic
and non-linguistic forces. While the last decades of empirical research have
enriched the field of FLP, we would like to point out a few areas, which have
been given relatively less attention in the past.
Much research has focused on migrant/transnational families. Although
some of the families may well be considered economically lower-income
families, many of the parents have, nonetheless, obtained higher education.
Consequently, the parental impact beliefs (parent agency) are strong in that
they provide linguistic and academic resources in their children’s language
development (Curdt-Christiansen & LaMorgia 2018). However, global move-
ment is not limited to highly educated, mobile professionals; there is also a
need to understand how lower-SES families engage in their children’s
multilingual development. FLP studies should not be confined to migrant
families only; non-transnational families should also be included in the
future of FLP research.
Secondly, there has been over-reliance on qualitative studies in recent
years. While qualitative research design may reveal how FLP is established
in families and what decision processes are made, these research projects
rely largely on parents’ self-reported data. In order to understand what
language policies are effective in raising multilingual children, quantitative
studies are necessary to determine the children’s attainments in multiple
languages in relation to mechanisms, measures and patterns of practices in
family language policy.
Thirdly, more studies are needed to examine how FLPs operate in
response to policy changes, such as national language movement or com-
munity interventions. For example, in the US, Head Start programmes

(Hines 2017) have been initiated in communities and schools, but little is
known about how parents make decisions regarding multiple languages
and literacy environments at home, how parents engage in children’s
language activities at home, and what effects these programmes have on
children’s multiple language development.
Lastly, we would like to call for more attention to be given to longitudinal
studies, as it is critical to track changes of FLP over time. This allows
families as well as researchers to identify the factors that have influence
on children’s language behaviour and social development and during what
period this influence is most important. These different strategies can over
time become valuable resources for parents, educators, researchers and
policy makers to make relevant decisions to facilitate children’s multilin-
gual development.
Research on family language policy is a fast-growing field. Researchers,
educators, community leaders, family members and policy makers have
seen the need for transforming conditions and environments for developing
multilingualism. In order to respond to the rapid changes in sociolinguistic,
sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts across the globe, meaningful and
rigorous studies should be continually developed. New studies should take
into consideration the aforementioned points and attempt to meet the
needs of multilingual families.
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12
Parental Input
in the Development of
Children’s Multilingualism
Andrea C. Schalley & Susana A. Eisenchlas
12.1 Introduction
This chapter discusses parental input, which has long been seen as crucial
for children’s language acquisition and socialisation. Interaction with their
parents is one of the first and most immediate linguistic contexts children
experience during early childhood. Researchers maintain that the input
children receive from their parents is different from that received from
other community members (Zhu & Li 2005; cf. also Section 12.2). At the
centre of our attention are multilingual families with children up to 10 years
of age, where the children (i) receive input in two home languages that are
different from a third (or more) environment language(s); or (ii) grow up in
a bilingual community and have at least one home language that is different
from the environment languages. In short, we focus on groups (i) and (ii) in
Hoffmann’s (2001) typology, and do not include cases of second or foreign
language instruction (e.g., as a result of migration), but aim our discussion
on the home context as the naturalistic setting of language acquisition.
Before we delve further into matters of parental input in multilingual
contexts, a brief terminological comment is in order. Barnes (2011: 44)
observes that ‘Whilst all of these studies discuss input, it is considered
from the point of view of being one of several language systems to which
the child is exposed by various interlocutors and in different contexts, and
the focus is largely on how the child becomes sociolinguistically competent
at language separation (or not) in different contexts with different inter-
locutors.’ Important in this definition is that input is not just seen as
‘speech forms’ (as in Goodluck 1991: 142, for first language acquisition),
but as including aspects of language socialisation and context. Parental
input then refers to such language exposure, with the parents as a special
kind of interlocutors. At the same time, Barnes goes on to criticise the focus
on a strict separation of languages, which, however, has proven to be a
major topic in the literature and hence cannot be ignored for the purposes

Parental Input in the Development of Multilingualism 279
of this overview chapter. Whether there is a difference between exposure

and input remains open to discussion, yet is hardly taken up in the litera-
ture (but cf., e.g., Carroll 2015 for a distinction between these notions for
bilingual contexts). Due to length considerations, we can only point to this
issue but will not explore it further in this chapter.
The chapter starts with a discussion of the linguistic aspects of parental
input in Section 12.2, in particular focusing on input quantity and quality and
briefly addressing challenges in measuring these variables. It then moves from
this rather linguistic-cognitive lens to a socio-linguistic perspective in Section
12.3, which centres around parents’ motivations to raise multilingual chil-
dren, and related to this their goal-setting and input planning as well as their
observable interactional behaviours. The section is scaffolded along the lines
of Spolsky’s (2009) interrelated components of family language policy (FLP) –
language ideologies, language management, and language practices – which
also provide the theoretical frame in this discussion. Finally, issues such as
input consistency and children’s reactions and at times resistance to parents’
input are discussed, before the chapter concludes in Section 12.4 with a call to
rethink many of the issues raised in light of cultural diversity.
12.2 Quantity and Quality of Input
In the previous section it was established that input is important for

language acquisition to occur. How much input children need and what
kind of input is required to facilitate language acquisition are still matters
of debate. This section addresses these two questions and discusses the
difficulties involved in measuring input quality and quantity.
12.2.1 Quantity of Input

Parents of multilingual children frequently worry about not providing
enough input to optimise their children’s linguistic development. This
preoccupation is attested by the high number of advice-seeking posts on
online parenting sites. The following are just two typical answers found on
such sites:
If you are a multilingual family and want your children to master more
than two languages, you need to plan as much as possible for balanced
input. A common number from research is that children need a
minimum of 20% total input in each language. This means about 2.5
hours a day of quality input in each language you want them to be able
to use. In my experience, this number is on the low side – I find that
many children who get only 20% in a language are reluctant to use the
language, although they may understand it well.
(Chrisfield 2012)

280 ANDREA C. SCHALLEY & SUSANA A. EISENCHLAS
There is a general recommendation (there is, however, no scientific

proof for this) that children should be exposed to a language at least
thirty percent of their waking time to naturally become bilingual. This
should however only be taken as a guidance – depending on the type of
exposure, children might need more or less time to acquire a language.
(Singh 2019)
The recommendations found on these sites differ greatly, ranging from a

minimum of 20 per cent to 50 per cent of children’s waking time in the
minority language, if the aim is to develop bilingual fluency. Although the
sites do not delve into this issue, the meaning of ‘bilingual fluency’, degrees
and types of bilingualism (e.g., productive, receptive), and even the concept
of bilingualism itself are open to interpretation and debate (see Eisenchlas &
Schalley 2020). It is clear that in the case of multilingual acquisition these
figures cannot hold, as parents would struggle to provide these high levels
of exposure in all their languages.
From a theoretical perspective, this question has been central to debates
on language acquisition, where opinions range from postulating a ‘maximal’
to a ‘minimal’ role for input. Grossly oversimplifying the issue, at one end of
the spectrum we find ‘bottom-up’ perspectives, such as usage-based or con-
structivist approaches (e.g., Tomasello 2003), which argue that language
acquisition proceeds in a piecemeal fashion, and crucially depends on the
availability of large amounts of input that lead the child to compute the basic
principles of their grammar. At the other end, ‘top-down’ perspectives, such
as generativist approaches (Chomsky 1959), propose that child language
acquisition requires just enough input to set the value of parameters in place
(see Chomsky 1988 for a thorough discussion), after which acquisition
follows its own path guided by internal mechanisms dedicated exclusively
to language. While we cannot do justice here to a discussion of these pro-
posals, it seems obvious that input has an important role to play, although
the quantity required differs greatly across theoretical perspectives.
While the role of input is still hotly contested in the area of first language
acquisition, multilingual acquirers could be the ones well placed to settle
this debate. As Paradis and Genesee (1996) suggest, assuming that monolin-
gual and multilingual children are awake for similar amounts of time, the
total input they are exposed to should be comparable. However, the input
multilingual children receive will be distributed across their different lan-
guages and thus be reduced, at least in one of their languages. Moreover,
the input will be heterogeneous, considering the many linguistic constella-
tions in which children participate. Yet, many children reach high levels of
proficiency in more than one language, while others do not. These different
outcomes have been attributed partly to the quantity and quality of paren-
tal input.
Research findings largely corroborate this assumption. There is
ample evidence attesting that the input which parents provide to their

children – regardless of whether it is a monolingual or multilingual set-

ting – impacts on children’s linguistic development of all aspects of lan-
guage, including but not limited to vocabulary acquisition (Hoff 2003;
Hurtado et al. 2008; Rowe 2012), morphosyntactic competence, particularly
verbal morphology and gender agreement (Blom 2010; Paradis et al. 2011),
and phonetic and phonological discrimination and production, among
others (Stoehr et al. 2019). Unsworth (2013) offers a comprehensive over-
view of linguistic research published between 2008 and 2013 on multilin-
gual acquisition. Even if the input in one of the languages is reduced, these
findings show that the reduction does not necessarily prevent acquisition,
although it may explain initial delays in the development of specific struc-
tures reported in the literature (e.g., Montanari 2009; Yang & Zhu 2010).
Gathercole (2007) proposes that once children ‘gain a “critical mass” of
linguistic information on which to base generalisations’ (p. 238), initial
differences are neutralised. This again points to the importance of exposing
children to large amounts of input. Carroll (2015), however, critiques this
type of research. She argues against using grouped data to reach conclu-
sions about the causal role attributed to the quantity and quality of input,
given the wide variability that environmental factors can have on individ-
ual mental grammars and lexica. Bilinguals, she correctly notes, ‘are not a
single population of learners’ (p. 7). The same applies to multilinguals.
Needless to say, children receive input from a wide range of sources (e.g.,
peers, grandparents, caretakers). However, at least in the early years, par-
ental input is crucial to language acquisition. As Zhu and Li (2005) state,
‘there is a difference in the quantity and quality between the input the child
receives from the parents and that from the community; the input from the
parents tends to be more active and dominant in the first couple of years of
the child’s life before his or her social network expands to include signifi-
cant numbers of peers and non-family adults’ (p. 178). Similar findings are
reported by Döpke (1992) and Lanza (2007), based on observed discourse
strategies used by parents to encourage the child’s contribution in conver-
sations, thus stimulating an input-proficiency-use cycle known to be con-
ducive to further language acquisition. The input-proficiency-use cycle
refers to the proposal that a ‘greater amount of input leads to greater
proficiency, which leads to more use, which invites more input and the
cycle starts again’ (Zurer-Pearson 2007: 400). Lanza (2007) concludes that
there is a positive correlation between the degree of child-centredness
evidenced in parents’ interactional strategies and the chance of children
becoming active bilinguals, a claim we assume to extend to multilingual
acquisition. Maternal input in particular appears to be crucial in young
children’s language development (Stoehr et al. 2019; Hoff 2003), based on
the claim that interactions with mothers are more intensive and child-
centred than with fathers (Zhu & Li 2005). This claim, however, may be
contingent on culture and gender roles, such as assuming mothers to be
primary caretakers, and deserves further investigation.

12.2.2 Quality of Input

Advice on online parenting sites frequently addresses a second issue,
namely the importance of input quality:
To become bilingual, children need the sort of input in their second

language that they receive in their first language. That is, they need to
hear input by people who have native proficiency in that language. Non-
native speakers with good proficiency can help to support the use of the
second language, but the primary source of input should come from a
speaker with native proficiency. Also, children who receive second
language input from a larger variety of speakers do better than those
who only receive input from one speaker.
(Singh 2019)
A number of scholars have proposed that input quality trumps input

quantity (e.g., Döpke 2001). Although defining ‘quality’ is even more prob-
lematic than quantifying input, the assumption is that ‘chattiness’ per se
does not facilitate acquisition (Carroll 2015) but the richness of the linguis-
tic environment afforded to the child does. Input quality is usually taken to
refer to environmental or distal factors such as the variety of lexical items
and grammatical structures the child is exposed to, the variety of activities
and media presented to the child, the diversity of interlocutors, parents’
socio-economic status (SES), education and proficiency levels across lan-
guages, parents’ interactional styles and discursive strategies (as proposed
by Döpke 1992 and Lanza 2007 above), language status, access to literacy,
and others. A brief overview of a few select studies illustrates the effects of
some of these factors.
The correlation between parental SES and child-directed speech has
received ample attention both in monolingual and multilingual acquisition.
Examining the quantity and quality of speech in monolingual children,
Hoff and Tian (2005) concluded that ‘[l]ower SES mothers have consistently
been found to talk less, to use a smaller vocabulary, to be more directive,
and to ask fewer questions of their children than higher SES mothers’
(p. 272). The same effects were found by this team in a study conducted
in China, correlating mothers’ level of education, their ‘language teaching
practices’ (i.e., discourse strategies), and their 2- to 4-year-old children’s
vocabulary and grammatical development. Similarly, Hoff (2003) found
that lower-class children are exposed to fewer words per hour and receive
less child-directed speech than middle- or higher-class children, which
impacts on their lexical development. Similar findings have been reported
by Oller and Eilers (2002) for Spanish-English bilinguals in Miami, although
the availability of two languages yielded different results across the lan-
guages: in this study, children with the higher SES had the advantage for
English, while children from the lower SES had the advantage for Spanish.
A factor found to impact on the success in maintaining multilingualism
is parents’ linguistic practices (see Section 12.3). A large scale survey

(n = 1,899) of family language use in Flanders, Belgium, was administered

by De Houwer (2007) to investigate the relation between bilingual input
data and children’s proficiency. In the families investigated, De Houwer
found that children were most likely to speak both the minority and
majority languages when both parents spoke the minority language, and
at most one parent spoke the majority language at home. Similarly, in a
study of the vocabulary development of bilingual kindergarten children in
the multilingual context of Singapore, where English is the language of
schooling, Dixon (2011) found that children whose primary caregiver at
home spoke English only, or English plus the home language (Mandarin,
Malay, or Tamil) scored significantly higher than those children whose
primary caregiver spoke the home language only.
12.2.3 How Is Input Measured?

This seemingly straightforward question is in fact not easily answered,
given the number of factors to be considered. With regards to input quan-
tity, these factors include, but are not limited to, the amount of child-
directed speech in each language, which exhibits great variability across
families (Weisleder & Fernald 2013) and cultures (Crago 1992), the diverse
settings, interlocutors and interactional styles, as well as cumulative
(e.g., length of time; onset of speech) or relative (e.g., 70 per cent English,
30 per cent German) approaches to reporting frequency of language input
(De Houwer 2018). Each of these factors raises methodological challenges.
A wide variety of methods have been used to try to measure the amount
of parental input. These methods typically include indirect measures, such
as using parental reports and questionnaires on language exposure to
estimate language input in each language, or asking parents to keep a
language exposure or language input diary (e.g., Place & Hoff 2011). Some
scholars, however, cast doubt on the accuracy of these approaches. Liu and
Kager (2017), for instance, consider that ‘the complex multilingual environ-
ment may create difficulty for parents to estimate the language exposure’
(p. 368) their infants receive, as language experience involves both direct
(e.g., child-directed speech) and indirect (e.g., background conversations,
media) experience, with the latter being harder to control and quantify.
Similarly, Carroll (2015) raises serious doubts about quantifying input
through questionnaire or survey data, arguing that parents may lack a
realistic view of how much speech they actually produce in each language
as well as be unaware of their own mixed languages production.
Furthermore, as noted above, there are great individual differences in the
amount of speech parents produce, and thus the number of hours parents
spend with children may not be a ‘good measure of exposure’ (p. 5). A final
challenge is that what parents report doing is often not the best reflection
of reality. Recordings on families reporting to use the one-parent-one-lan-
guage (OPOL) approach show that, despite claims to the contrary, parents

very infrequently adhere to the strict separation of languages across

parents (Goodz 1989; De Houwer 2007).
Measuring input quality proves even more challenging. While some
aspects of input quality can be easily quantified (e.g., number of distinct
interlocutors, parents’ socio-economic status), the linguistic features to
which a multilingual child is exposed to are not likely to be adequately
captured in surveys, questionnaires, or interviews, because speakers are
usually unaware of the language they produce and they may also lack full
awareness of the language input from other sources to which the child
is exposed.
For these reasons some scholars propose replacing or supplementing
indirect measures such as parental reports with direct measures, such as
observations, video-taping, or using recording and automated analysis
technology such as the Language Environment Analysis System (LENA™,
Gilkerson & Richards 2008) to provide objective measures of input.
A convincing case study illustrating how parents’ reports need to be
supplemented by objective measure is provided by Quay’s (2001) study of
‘Freddy’, an infant trilingual exposed to German and English from birth
and to Japanese since age 0;11 when he started attending day care.
Parental questionnaires reported an initial exposure pattern of 70 per cent
English and 30 per cent German. When the child started attending day
care, these proportions of language heard by the child changed to 50 per
cent English, 20 per cent German, and 30 per cent Japanese. Subsequent
changes were regularly documented by Freddy’s parents, who also used
other data collection instruments (e.g., interviews; the MacArthur
Communicative Development Inventories, including a Japanese version
completed by the day care staff; diary records; and weekly video record-
ings). Despite the abundant exposure to English documented by his
parents, the video recordings left no doubt about Freddy’s predilection
for Japanese over the home language, showing no language deficit due to
his later exposure to Japanese, as well as a lack of contextual sensitivity in
his choice of language at home. These results are unexpected, and could
have been lost without the video data. Direct measures are also essential
in the identification of interactional strategies, reported to be conducive to
language acquisition (Döpke 1992; Lanza 2007). Unlike parents’ reports
and surveys, however, this type of data collection is time- and labour-
intensive, as well as intrusive, which may explain why it is not as
frequently employed.
To summarise, there seems to be clear consensus that both quantity and
quality of parental input strongly correlate with children’s linguistic com-
petence in their languages, even though the measurement and character-
isation of these features are not straightforward. We should be mindful,
however, that the majority of this research has been conducted in the
WEIRD contexts (Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic;
Henrich et al. 2010), and thus we can anticipate different cross-cultural

conversational practices. Child-directed speech is culturally determined.

Crago (1992), for instance, illustrates how Inuit children are not socialised
into language by adults. Videotaped data showed that children are not
expected to behave like conversational partners in adult–child interactions.
Instead, the data demonstrate that the large majority of the children’s
vocalisations were ignored and ‘[m]any times their parents did not respond,
not even looking up at the children’ (p. 493). Rather, Inuit children are
‘raised in a society where sibling caregiving is still a norm and peer-oriented
talk, in the absence of adults, is recognized as an appropriate and very
necessary part of language learning’ (p. 500).
12.3 Family Language Policy and Input
Naturally, a discussion of parental input for multilingual children is incom-

plete without taking its agents into account. In this section, we move from
viewing input as an abstract concept correlating with linguistic competence
to focusing on the providers of such input, the parents, and how their
sociolinguistic environment might impact on their decisions and actions
(Curdt-Christiansen & Huang 2020). Parental input is hence viewed through
the lens of family language policy (FLP), which entails the ‘explicit and overt
planning in relation to language use within the home’ (King et al. 2008: 907)
as well as the ‘implicitly and covertly’ implemented practices (Curdt-
Christiansen 2009: 352). Accordingly, we scaffold our discussion along the
lines of Spolsky’s (2009) interrelated components of family language policy
(FLP) – language ideologies, language management, and language practices.
Parents’ attitudes and beliefs, and language ideologies more generally,
impact on parental motivation and goal-setting in relation to the input they
offer to their children. Language management is addressed through the
examination of models of multilingual upbringing and parental input
strategies. The implementation of family language policy is reflected in
the actual language practices operating within the family, and addressed
last in this section.
12.3.1 Language Ideologies: Parental Attitudes and Beliefs

This subsection deals with the ‘why?’ of parents’ approaches to raising – or
not raising – children multilingually. It aims to uncover language attitudes
and beliefs that underpin parents’ motivation and goal-setting in relation to
the linguistic input they provide to their children. As Slavkov (2017)
maintains, ‘FLP is also interested in broader issues of culture, identity,
and parental attitudes and beliefs; these factors influence the quality and
quantity of language input that bilingual and multilingual children receive
and ultimately relate to their language outcomes’ (p. 381). This was already
observed by, e.g., De Houwer (1999), who suggested in her three-tier model

that parental attitudes and beliefs entertain a complex relationship with

parents’ linguistic choices and interaction strategies, which in turn are
related to multilingual children’s language development.
Over the past decades, research has identified a number of attitudes and
beliefs that are relevant in this context. For bilingual children, the
following can be found in the literature (drawn mainly from De Houwer
1999, and Schwartz 2020):
(1) parental attitudes towards

(a) a particular language (including the value and status parents
attach to that language, and whether the language is seen as a
resource, problem or right; Ruiz 1984);
(b) (early child) bi-/multilingualism in general (e.g., positive vs. nega-
tive perspectives on bi-/multilingualism); and
(c) language choices (including, e.g., whether mixed utterances and
inter-sentential code-switching are seen as acceptable);
(2) parental beliefs in relation to
(a) processes in language acquisition (e.g., whether bi-/multilingualism
is viewed as additive or subtractive);
(b) impact (i.e., whether parents believe they can exercise some con-
trol over their children’s linguistic functioning);
(c) their own linguistic proficiencies;
(d) emotional relations (e.g., recognising language maintenance as
important for promoting family ties and/or emotional attachment
and display);
(e) culture and acculturation;
(f ) identity; and
(g) economic factors and perceived future benefits (e.g., in terms of
job opportunities and mobility).
Research on multilingualism has been somewhat sparser, but a number of

studies have been published that show that the same attitudes and beliefs
that are relevant for bilingual upbringing appear to also play a role in
multilingual upbringing. Li (2006), for instance, describes for Chinese-
Canadian families (with Mandarin and Cantonese as home languages and
English as environment language) that parents’ perceptions of their minor-
ity status in the host society and hence about their acculturation status (2e,
see above), as well as their attitudes towards the languages (1a), and their
own proficiencies (2c) in the languages can ‘play significant roles in shaping
their supporting efforts and use of resources at home’ (p. 378) and hence
the input they provide. Part of this input is the trilingual family’s joint
language of communication, which, according to Barron-Hauwaert (2000),
is influenced by the different levels of prestige assigned to the languages
available in the family (1a). As Chevalier (2012: 440) notes, ‘a language with
high world status is more likely to be the one chosen’. Moreover, Chevalier
(2012, 2013) investigates caregiver responses to the language mixing of a

young trilingual, and her findings attest to the importance of interactional

style and hence language choice (1c).
Dagenais and Day (1999) report that the three children in their study (of
Vietnamese, Costa Rican, and Polish background in a Canadian French
immersion context) have developed a positive view of themselves as trilin-
guals, which the authors consider as an outcome of the parents’ positive
attitudes towards trilingualism (1b) and triculturalism (2e), with one father
emphasising that the home language provides children with access to a
cultural capital that would not otherwise be available. Gogonas and Kirsch
(2018) also highlight that parents believe that multilingualism is related to
culture (2e) and identity (2f ), and that it should be seen as an asset, e.g., for
future job opportunities (2g). In their study of multilingual children of
Greek migrant families in Luxembourg, parents ‘are acutely aware of the
value that languages hold for integration, for the development of a cultural
identity and for a career’ (p. 431). Similar results as those presented so far
are also reported by Curdt-Christiansen (2009). However, Braun (2006)
cautions against generalisations about the relation between culture and
identity on the one hand and language practices on the other in a trilingual
family context, as in his study it became clear that language as a cultural
marker depends on the language constellations found in the family. Of
particular relevance appears to be whether a parent spoke only one native
language and felt related to one cultural background, or whether they had
native proficiency in several languages and felt related to several cultural
backgrounds. ‘Although there are similarities, the relationship between the
parents’ cultural background and their language practices with their chil-
dren seems more complex’ (Braun 2006: 235) in trilingual compared to
bilingual families, and further research is needed. For example, tensions
such as the ones between parental desires to maintain heritage languages
for cultural (2e) and emotional (2d) purposes and the practical reality of
linguistic capital of particular languages in a given society (1a, 2g) impact
on the linguistic input parents provide. In their study of Chinese middle-
class parents, Curdt-Christiansen and Wang (2018) observe that the ‘cul-
tural/emotional attachment to the minority language, fangyan, was absent
in parental discourse’ (p. 250), in contrast to the results from other studies
reported above and below, and hence the tensions appear to be resolved in
favour of economic factors in that particular case.
Braun (2006, 2012) takes up the issue of emotional relations (2d), pointing
out the importance of family ties. Again, though, he does so with some
caution. One of the main motivations for parents to pass on their native
languages to their children is the maintenance of family ties, in particular
those to the grandparents. However, according to Braun, this depends on
whether the parents spoke only a minority language natively, and whether
the grandparents were monolingual in a minority language (due to them,
e.g., residing abroad), which generates a need to speak the minority language
with their grandchildren. If this was not the case, parents in the trilingual

families who participated in Braun’s study were content with dropping at

least one of their home languages, and this was, according to his analysis, at
least partially related to the grandparents’ ability to ‘speak the highly
regarded CL [community language] with their young grandchildren, rather
than a minority language’ (Braun 2012: 423). Braun’s study indicates clearly
that multilingualism, with its increased complexity due to different linguistic
constellations and an increased number of background variables, is different
from bilingualism. While the same parental attitudes and beliefs are relevant
to parents’ decision on the input they provide, much more research is needed
to disentangle the complexities found in these families’ realities.
Parental beliefs about language acquisition processes (2a) and impact beliefs
(2b) (De Houwer 1999) are of importance as well. Li (2006: 374–75) reports on
beliefs of subtractive vs. additive trilingualism: parents believing in subtract-
ive multilingualism decided to either speak the environment language at
home or took a non-proactive stance, allowing the child to choose the home
language(s), thereby shifting away from input in the minority language(s).
Parents believing in additive multilingualism, on the other hand, actively and
successfully promoted the home language(s). Pérez Báez (2013) is a unique
study in relation to parental beliefs and parents’ input decisions, reporting on
Zapotec speakers from San Lucas, Mexico, about half of whom moved to Los
Angeles in the US. These parents all held strong beliefs about the relationship
between children’s place of birth and multilingual acquisition:
Throughout all years of research and fieldwork, and in different contexts,

community members in San Lucas and Los Angeles expressed a belief that
children are ‘born speaking’ the language associated with their place of
birth. In San Lucas, community members often expressed a lack of concern
over language endangerment on the grounds that children ‘are born
speaking Zapotec’, a phenomenon that would ensure the continuity of the
language. In Los Angeles, parents consistently consider Spanish and English
to be the languages that Los Angeles-born children should acquire. . . . Some
parents consider that Los Angeles-born babies are in fact unable to
understand Zapotec and must therefore be addressed only in Spanish.
(Pérez Báez 2013: 37)
Parents thus do not exhibit an impact belief, as they do not see themselves
(or their language input) as having the power to alter their children’s
language acquisition process. This deterministic view accounts for a dimin-
ished role of parents as implementers of language intervention (Pérez Báez
2013: 31), and hence severely restricts parents’ input decisions.
12.3.2 Language Management: Input Planning, Input Patterns,

and Input Strategies
In this subsection, we move on to the ‘how?’ of parental input provision.
How can parents achieve the appropriate quantity and quality of input for

their children to become multilinguals? We thus direct our attention to the

‘explicit and overt planning in relation to language use within the home’
(King et al. 2008: 907).
Parents who plan their input are trying to maximise their children’s
chances of becoming multilingual, by facilitating and managing their chil-
dren’s language learning opportunities. Parents deliberately involve them-
selves and invest in providing their children with ‘linguistic conditions and
context for language learning’ (Curdt-Christiansen 2012: 57), within the
confines of their familial and societal situation. This may result in them
choosing one of the typically promoted patterns of bi-/multilingual upbring-
ing, and specific input strategies. This subsection will hence comprise two
main discussion areas, (i) input patterns (also called methods or approaches,
see Slavkov 2017) used across multilingual families, and (ii) additional input
strategies that parents make use of. We adopt Slavkov’s (2017) description
of input patterns for trilingual children in the following (for a study on
input patterns for bilingual children, see De Houwer 2007). While the
principle is the same for bilingual input patterns, adding a third language
to the language constellations naturally results in more complexity and
hence a clear difference between bi- and multilingualism.
Input Patterns
The most notable input pattern type, which has been extensively studied
for bilingual children (cf., amongst many others, Ronjat 1913; Döpke 1992;
Venables et al. 2014), is the one-person-one-language (OPOL) pattern, where
each parent strictly adheres to providing input in a language that is differ-
ent from the other parent’s language (Slavkov 2017). In the context of
multilingualism, this is overwhelmingly the case for children who are
brought up with two home languages, both of which are different from a
third environment language spoken in the wider community. Each parent
speaks her or his language with their child, and does so consistently. This
pattern may also come to fruition in cases where children grow up in a
bilingual community, with one additional minority home language; in that
case, one parent speaks the minority language to the child, while the other
parent provides input in one of the environment languages. Slavkov (2017:
387) distinguishes these two OPOL patterns, and refers to them as
OPOL:2min and OPOL:1maj+1min. The third input pattern, Minority
Language at Home (ML@H, Slavkov 2017), sees both parents speak the same
minority language to the child. This is only possible in cases where both
parents are speakers of this minority language. This can be applied by
families living in a bilingual community, where parents either share one
minority language as their joint native language, or where parents decide to
maintain only one of their native languages. The fourth and fifth input
patterns are the ‘Mixed Approach where one or both parents mix the
languages in addressing the children; and Majority Language at Home
(MajL@H) where both parents use the majority language exclusively and

rely on other resources or strategies to raise bi/multilingual children’

(Slavkov 2017: 380). For trilingual children, the latter entails that they have
to be provided with input from two further languages (other than the
environment language spoken at home), outside of the home. This is likely
to be the case in school contexts and hence probably better seen as second
or foreign language learning, which is beyond the scope of this chapter.
A number of studies have addressed input patterns for multilingual
children (e.g., Braun 2006; Braun & Cline 2010; Chevalier 2015; Curdt-
Christiansen & Wang 2018; Hoffmann 1985; Maneva 2004; Quay 2001,
2008; Slavkov 2017), yet most of these are of a qualitative nature. This
makes it very difficult to provide any general statements as to the preva-
lence of these patterns. To the best of our knowledge, exact figures about
the frequency of use of the input patterns outlined above are only provided
in Slavkov’s (2017) study conducted in Ontario, Canada. Here, the mixed
approach was by far the one chosen most often: 43 per cent of the families
reported using the mixed approach, followed by 32 per cent using ML@H,
15 per cent OPOL:1maj+1min, 5 per cent OPOL:2min, and 5 per cent
MajL@H. As we have seen above, the language constellations in the family
(which languages are available and spoken by which parent) play an essen-
tial role in the availability of patterns to the families. At the same time,
some of the patterns are only available if the community is bilingual. In
other words, in the Canadian context, all patterns are possible and were in
fact encountered in families raising multilingual children, as there were
two environment languages. This would, however, not be likely or even
possible in other contexts: purely monolingual community contexts will
generally exclude ML@H, OPOL:1maj+1min and MajL@H (as can be
observed for De Houwer 2004), unless parents specifically arrange for
language input in a further language that is neither a parental language
nor an environment language.
Questions of availability and frequency, however, do not address the
question of the language development outcomes that we can expect as a
result of these patterns. In other words, which of these parental input
patterns is most likely to lead to active multilingualism in children and
hence is the one that is most effective in a multilingual context? Results
appear inconclusive: a number of authors (e.g., Braun & Cline 2010;
Chevalier 2012; De Houwer 2004) agree that, for active trilingualism, it is
important that the environment language is not being spoken in the home.
Parents who included the environment language as one of the home lan-
guages struggled with maintaining trilingualism with their children (De
Houwer 2004). Along similar lines, Maneva (2004) argues strongly in favour
of maintaining OPOL in the child’s two minority home languages: in her
longitudinal study on the language development of a quadrilingual child in
Canada (acquiring two minority home languages and two environment
languages), she discusses the role of the linguistic input provided by the
parents and maintains that OPOL is necessary ‘in order to equalise exposure

and guarantee some minimum exposure to each language’ (Maneva 2004:

119). On the other hand, Quay (2001: 151) maintains that an OPOL pattern is
not only not absolutely necessary but might moreover at times be imprac-
tical from a social and pragmatic point of view. Barron-Hauwaert (2000) also
points to a perceived unnaturalness of OPOL in daily life, and argues that it
might frustrate children at an older age. These perspectives are echoed by
Braun (2006: 236), who reports in his study that trilingual families in which
each parent spoke one native language were advantaged in using OPOL,
while parents who themselves where bi- or multilingual found it imprac-
tical, as it restricted them to only one of their languages. Slavkov (2017: 391),
as one of the few statistical studies, observes that ‘no significant differences
were found for the Mixed, ML@H and OPOL groups; however, holding all
other variables constant, families who used the MajL@H strategy had lower
odds of having a multilingual child than families using a Mixed, ML@H or
OPOL strategy’. So while MajL@H was clearly the least successful input
pattern for raising a multilingual child, his data did not support any signifi-
cant difference between the other patterns. This, however, could be a result
of the rather small sample size, as he himself suggests, or of the specifics of
the Canadian context in which the study was conducted.
Recent work (Slavkov 2017; Hiratsuka & Pennycook 2019) suggests
widening the lens with which we look at the choice of language and input
patterns in multilingual families, and considering not only parental input
directed at the children, as earlier studies often have. One of the important
findings in Slavkov’s (2017: 392–93) study is a ‘significant association
between the extent to which parents use a minority language with each
other and the likelihood of a child being multilingual’, where an increased
use of the environment language between the parents has ‘a limiting effect
on multilingual outcomes for the children’. He argues that while direct
input may have a more direct impact on children, we should not underesti-
mate the additional input modelled by parents when communicating with
one another, the different quality this input may display (in terms of more
complex vocabulary and sentence structure), and its function as a model in
language socialisation, potentially setting language use expectations in the
home. Along similar lines, Hiratsuka and Pennycook (2019) point out that
interactions are rarely dyadic and focused, with family members being
involved in multiple tasks and forms of talk at the same time.
The one-person-one-language idea has often seemed rather out of place

in many families, presenting an unlikely vision of regulated middle-
class lives, where decisions can be made and maintained in relation to
language use. In three-language families this already becomes more
difficult to conceptualise but we would argue further that it is not so
much the extra language but rather the complex family dynamics that
make such policies hard to imagine.
(Hiratsuka & Pennycook 2019: 12)

In summary, these authors argue that the way the input patterns have
traditionally been defined is too narrow (and too impractical), as they focus
exclusively on the language(s) parents speak to their children. In the
following, we will thus also consider some strategies that extend beyond
the basic ‘which language(s)?’ question in relation to how parents can plan
and manage multilingual language input to their children.
Input Strategies
A number of input strategies are implemented by parents to support their
children’s multilingual development (for an overview of some strategies in
bilingual contexts see, amongst others, Schwartz 2020). These can generally
be seen as increasing the quantity and/or quality of language input to the
children. They can be divided into strategies that parents themselves
employ in their own input (type 1), and strategies parents apply to create
more language learning opportunities (type 2). The latter include, e.g.,
arranging for trips to the countries where the home language(s) are spoken
(Braun 2006), enrolment in community language schools (Slavkov 2017) or
bilingual programmes that support one or more of the children’s languages
(Braun 2006), and arranging for language input by additional speakers
of the home language(s), such as au pairs, or relatives and friends
who regularly visit the family (Hoffmann 1985; cf. also Chevalier 2012;
Stavans 1992).
Braun (2006) also reports on a strategy straddling across the two strategy
types, where parents who chose OPOL as their input pattern created a
language environment for their children which was conducive to the use
of OPOL in a trilingual context: these parents built networks to other
trilingual or bilingual families in similar language situations, which
afforded them not only a safe space in which they themselves felt supported
in employing the OPOL pattern (type 1 strategy), but also provided their
children with an opportunity for further input by the other network
members (type 2 strategy).
As the topic of this chapter is parental input, we now focus on type 1
strategies, i.e., strategies parents employ in interactions with their chil-
dren. Working with bilingual families, Lanza (2004) identified five dis-
course strategies parents use to guide their children’s language use and to
set expectations about language use in the home (a similar classification of
discourse strategies, adapting Lanza’s work, is also presented in Mishina-
Mori 2011). As set out in Figure 12.1, Lanza’s strategies can be seen as being
situated on a continuum ranging from those conducive to bilingual devel-
opment by creating a monolingual interactional context to those seen
as less supportive, by allowing for a bilingual interactional context
(Lanza 2004).
In multilingual contexts, the same discourse strategies are used.
Chevalier’s study (2013) on caregiver responses uses an extended version
of Lanza’s (2004) framework and demonstrates how each of the strategies is

● minimal grasp monolingual

parent indicates lack of comprehension if child chooses a non- context
target interacon language, such as an environment language
● expressed guess
parent confirms with a polar question in the target (i.e. typically
minority) language whether they understood correctly, a simple
answer from the child is accepted
● repetition
parent repeats and hence models the child’s utterance in the
target language
● move on
parent indicates comprehension and acceptance of the child’s
utterance; the interaction is not disrupted in any way
● code-switch bilingual
parent switches to the non-target language context
Figure 12.1 Continuum of discourse strategies

(adapted from Lanza 2004: 262; cf. also Chevalier 2013)
also used by parents of multilingual children. Results from studies in

bilingual contexts are corroborated by her study in that the use of strategies
creating monolingual contexts (minimal grasp, expressed guess) are more
conducive to active trilingual language acquisition. Quay (2001) further
supports these results: the child reported on in her study, aged 1;10 at the
completion of the data collection and growing up with German and English
using an OPOL pattern at home as well as Japanese as the environment
language, showed a strong preference for Japanese in parent–child inter-
actions. Quay (2001: 182) notes that ‘the first two strategies, minimal grasp
and expressed guess . . . were never used by Freddy’s parents in response to
Freddy’s inappropriate language choice’. On the basis of these studies, it
could be concluded that not using the discourse strategies on the
monolingual-context end of the continuum while instead accepting chil-
dren’s language choice are thus potentially detrimental to trilingual lan-
guage acquisition. This is in line with results from bilingualism research.
In addition to discourse strategies which are a reaction to the child’s
linguistic output – but not proactively fostering multilingualism – other
strategies have been reported in the literature. Venables et al. (2014), for
instance, focus on strategies used by the majority-language-speaking parent
to support children’s minority language acquisition in a bilingual OPOL
context. Through these strategies, the majority-language-speaking parents
were found to
• elicit production
• check comprehension and identify or prevent communication
breakdowns
• request reformulation in order to repair a misunderstanding

• provide more context information through a ‘clue’ designed to enhance

the child’s comprehension
• increase engagement by directing the child back into the conversation
with the minority language partner
• provide a translation (as a ‘last resort’)
• foster positive attitudes and self-esteem by praising minority language
use and promoting cultural awareness.
In a multilingual context, it would be interesting to see what role these

strategies may play, in particular in an OPOL context, where each parent
needs to provide input in their nominated languages in addition to support-
ing the acquisition of their partner’s language. Such studies, however, have
not been conducted to date, and there is generally a considerable need for
more studies on the characteristics of child–parent interactions in multi-
lingual families, as the peculiarities of these interactions are not adequately
covered by research on bilingual practices.
So far, the strategies discussed have focused on parent–child interactions.
Beyond those, parents supplement the direct conversational input in the
home, as the input might otherwise be perceived by them as not rich
enough. These supplements include the use of devices (TV, video games),
joint book reading, singing of songs, story-telling activities, and literacy
development in the home language(s) (see, e.g., Döpke 1992; Schwartz 2020,
for bilingual children, and Slavkov 2017; Wang 2008, for multilingual
children). In terms of effectiveness of these strategies, results for multilin-
gual children are still rather sketchy. Yet, Slavkov (2017) reports that the
‘presence of some reading or writing skills in a minority language strongly
increased the probability (91%) of a child being multilingual, as compared
to a child acquiring literacy only in the majority language’ (p. 391), and also
of becoming an active multilingual.
A systematic comparison of bilingual and multilingual families’ language
management in relation to input planning would be a much-needed contri-
bution to the field. One wonders, for instance, if the added complexity in
multilingualism has an effect on the degree of explicitness in parents’
planning. Do parents of multilingual children have to plan more explicitly,
especially if two or more minority languages are spoken in the home? How
effective are the different input patterns? Research has mainly focused on
OPOL to date, with other input patterns not receiving the attention they
deserve. In general, input strategies used by parents appear to be very
similar across bi- and multilingualism, but there are different requirements
on how these can be implemented in a multilingual family, and their
effectiveness remains under-researched. This takes us back to the question
of input quality and quantity, which is partially influenced by the strategies
discussed here.
Finally, it is important to note that while this subsection deals with input
planning and management, it is not entirely clear how and how explicit and

deliberate the planning and usage of patterns and strategies is actually

carried out by parents. In interviews and elicited recall tasks (cf., e.g.,
Venables et al. 2014), parents demonstrated deep introspection and reflect-
iveness. However, this could partially be an effect of parents with an
interest in the topic self-selecting to participate in such studies, which
potentially skews the data.
12.3.3 Language Practices: Language Behaviour and Child Agency

Not all parents may plan their input consciously and overtly. Moreover, a
question that has been raised many times is whether parents who plan to
follow particular input patterns and apply specific input strategies are
actually successful in doing so, or whether there is a discrepancy between
parents’ planning and parents’ actual practices. This subsection hence
focuses on the ‘what?’ question: what are parents actually doing? Which
behaviours and choices can be observed (cf. Spolsky 2009: 4) in relation to
the ‘actual routine use of languages in the family, regardless of the beliefs
or management strategies explicitly or implicitly designed by the parents’
(Schwartz 2020: 196–97)?
In bilingual contexts, it has been suggested that parents may choose and
report to follow one input pattern, but that this might not correspond to
what can be observed in their input practices (e.g., Goodz 1989, cf. also De
Houwer & Bornstein 2016). Schwartz (2020) notes that often parents declar-
ing that they follow OPOL do not implement this consistently, which is of
significance for the multilingual environments under discussion in this
chapter, as OPOL is a rather prominent pattern in these contexts. Quay
(2008) corroborates this finding for a multilingual family in Japan with
Chinese and English as home languages. In particular, she found that the
parents code-mix, although they report not code-mixing at all. In line with
what Goodz (1989) found for parents of bilingual children, the parents in
Quay’s (2008) study thus appear not to be aware that they code-mix when
addressing their child. However, as outlined above, Slavkov (2017) indicates
that the most common pattern found in the multilingual Canadian context
of his study is the mixing of languages in the home, with apparently no
drawback as to the effectiveness of the input.
A related issue in this discussion is that parents tend to follow their
children’s lead when it comes to the choice of language (Faingold 1999).
Similarly, the father reported on in Maneva (2004) eventually stopped
adhering to the OPOL pattern and spoke Arabic intermittently with his
child after she started childcare, where she was exposed to her third
language at the age of 1;10. This change was driven by the child, who at
some point stopped speaking the home languages with her parents, what
Maneva (2004) describes as ‘her “monolingual crises”’ (p. 115).
We can see how child agency, as evident in the child’s refusal to speak
Arabic and Bulgarian in Maneva (2004), can derail parents’ best-laid plans

and affect the implementation of parents’ input planning and language

management efforts. Along similar lines, Kheirkhah and Cekaite (2015)
report on a child’s resistance to her parents’ input planning. Their study
explores the language practices of a Persian-Kurdish family residing in
Sweden and examines how an OPOL pattern is implemented and negotiated
in parent–child interactions. The study focuses on how the parents aim to
implement a number of the discourse strategies discussed in the previous
subsection, in order to enforce a monolingual context conducive to lan-
guage acquisition, and how the child reacts with non-compliant responses
and refusals (e.g., to translation requests). As the authors observe, the effect
of these behaviours is that the parents struggled with what the authors
refer to as ‘language instruction’, hence being derailed in their plans.
Another example of a child agency study in a trilingual context is discussed
in Cruz-Ferreira (2006), who studied three siblings with Portuguese-
Swedish background acquiring English as language of schooling in a
number of different countries. While the children did not actively resist
their parents’ OPOL approach, they report feelings of ‘discomfort’ and
‘oddness’ (p. 242) in relation to some of their parents’ language practices
in specific situations (e.g., in homework discussions).
It is hence of importance that we do not consider parental input as
unidirectional. As these examples clearly show, the bidirectionality in
child–parent interactions is strong, with parents reacting to their children’s
language choices and adapting their input, which results in adjustments in
the families’ language practices, or even the abandonment of their plans.
Child agency thus plays a substantial role in the eventual success of paren-
tal input patterns and strategies. This is one of the topics that emerges quite
strongly in studies on multilingual families (for a further example, see Li
2006), which may be a result of the dynamic nature of multilingualism
(Herdina & Jessner 2002) and the families’ ever-changing language environ-
ments, as more than two languages, cultural capitals, and identities have to
be negotiated.
12.4 Conclusion
‘Trilingualism is a relatively new field of research with many fundamental

and practical questions yet to be answered’ (Hoffmann & Ytsma 2004: 6).
While this statement is more than 15 years old, it describes a situation that
still exists today. Research on multilingualism more generally is a patchy
but growing field, and this applies to the study of parental input in multi-
lingual contexts as well. In this chapter, we have first addressed the linguis-
tic aspects of parental input, taking into account aspects of quantity and
quality in relation to linguistic competence as well as how parental input
might be measured. This was followed by a shift of focus to the providers of
this input, the parents, and in particular their attitudes, beliefs, language

management decisions and strategies, and resulting language practices.

Throughout the discussion, we have shown that research findings on bilin-
gualism are not necessarily transferable to the study of multilingualism
(and parental input, for that matter), as a third language (and the cultural
capital and identity issues that come with it) adds a different level of
complexity. The studies presented in this chapter indicate that multilingual
families appear to experience a great diversity of contexts and changing
conditions over time, resulting in continuously shifting environments these
families find themselves in, which challenge them to react to and aim at
taking proactive actions. What De Houwer (2017) points out for bilingual-
ism is even more true for multilingualism: ‘The challenge is to connect the
ever-changing features of input in each language with bilingual children’s
maturing development, and to map their language intake along the way’
(p. 19). Multilingualism thus should be studied from a dynamic perspective
instead of a static one (Herdina & Jessner 2002; cf. also Braun 2006). The
challenge is also to disentangle the factors and contexts that impact on
multilingualism and on parental input. These challenges are yet to be met
in a systematic way, although first steps have clearly been taken.
Additional research on parental input in multilingual contexts is needed
in regard to a number of issues. One of these issues is the question of how
parental input changes over time as children grow older (cf. Faingold 1999).
Other issues concern the long-term effects of parental input, and how
successful strategies and practices for intergenerational home language
transmission are. A systematic investigation of input patterns and strat-
egies as well as an assessment of their impact and effects on both language
competence and social-affective outcomes would be needed, as it would
enable scholars to support parents in their journey of raising multilingual
children.
Last but not least, research to date has focused on industrialised envir-
onments, with mainly highly educated migrant parents with Western or
Asian backgrounds as participants. The input patterns and strategies dis-
cussed in this chapter are, however, not likely to be easily transferable to
other contexts, such as the one from Arnhem Land in northern Australia,
as reported in Morales et al. (2018). The context in that case is one of a
multilingual community, where a strict kinship system is in place which
distributes community members across ‘clans’ and restricts who can
marry whom and which languages a child acquires. ‘Tradition dictates
that children should learn their mother’s and maternal grandmother’s
languages at a young age. As they become young adults, they begin
learning their father’s language – their own clan language. Learning one’s
esoteric clan lect is a crucial step in becoming strong in Yoləu identity’
(Morales et al. 2018: 77). This is supplemented by a lingua franca used in
the community, Dhuwaya, which all children acquire among their main
languages, and by the language of schooling, English. That is, children
grow up speaking at least five languages. Yet, it is unclear which input

parents provide to their children. Crucially, though, whether the concept

of parental input plays as important a role as it does in the other contexts
reported in this chapter is questionable. And even if it did, it might be
harder to determine what counts as ‘parental input’, as children do not
grow up in a nuclear family. Such cases question the foundation of what
has been discussed in this chapter, but as yet, little is known and much is
awaiting discovery.
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13
Multilingualism, Emotion,
and Affect
Ana Christina DaSilva Iddings, Eliza D. Butler, & Tori K. Flint
Language is at the heart, literally and metaphorically, of who we

are, how we present ourselves, and how others see us.
(González 2001: xix)
Although the relationships between language, affect, and emotion have

long been acknowledged, research on the process of language learning
has been focused, to a considerable extent, on cognitive processes.
Traditionally, much of the second language acquisition research has been
aligned with psycholinguistics, and more specifically, with information
processing theory and with dominant varieties of formal linguistics
inspired by Chomskyan traditions. Chomskyan formal linguistics, as a field
of inquiry, envisions the development of language as facilitated by an
innate biological endowment (i.e., Language Acquisition Device) located in
the human brain. In addition, it postulates that a general underlying
linguistic structure shared by all languages (i.e., Universal Grammar)
governs language acquisition processes. Similarly, from the point of view
of information processing theory, language development is most often
understood as an internally driven phenomenon, largely independent from
the social, historical, and cultural context(s) in which it takes place. This
theoretical stance treats the human mind as an apparatus analogous to a
computer and generally regards language as a code that enables the pro-
cessing of information. From these perspectives, second language acquisi-
tion is often associated with discreet grammatical parameters (e.g., whether
or not linguistic production approximates native speaker norms), with
measurable behaviors (e.g., quality and quantity of linguistic input/output),
or with fixed traits (e.g., personality, linguistic aptitude).
A shift from psycholinguistic models for studying second language acqui-
sition began to occur in the mid-1980s when researchers in applied linguis-
tics (e.g., Frawley & Lantolf 1984) began to explore the potential
applications of sociocultural theory to the study of second and foreign

Multilingualism, Emotion, and Affect 305
language acquisition and use. Herein, the inextricable connections between

language, the development of mental concepts, and the social, cultural, and
historical context(s) of human activity are wholly considered. Thus, within
a sociocultural framework, learning another language is not understood as
an individual’s process of acquisition and assimilation of linguistic struc-
tures as a result of proper stimuli. Rather, from this perspective, second
language learning is seen as a goal-directed activity involving dynamic
social, cultural, historical, and ontological processes, as well as complex
kinds of reorganization of ways of thinking, feeling, and being in the world.
From this perspective, the language learner is regarded fully as a social and
cultural being and is understood in interaction with others, materials,
and contexts.
Consider, for a moment, a commonplace yet highly complex literacy
event as a point of departure: a young child – a second language learner –
engages with a photograph. Sociocultural theory helps us to make two
critically important shifts in our analysis from more traditional psycholin-
guistic perspectives. Firstly, the child’s interaction with the photograph, as
a form of semiotic mediation, is not seen as radically different or set apart
from interactions as mediated by linguistic signs. Multiple modalities and
their sign systems are studied relationally, with respect to their uses in
functional systems, rather than as discrete sets of codes. Secondly, the
child’s interaction with the photograph is not considered as purely concep-
tual or cognitive. Although sociocultural theory is conceived as a theory of
mind often concerned with the nature of meaning making (Lantolf &
Thorne 2006), cognition and emotions are not seen as separate processes
(John-Steiner 2000; Swain 2013). In this chapter, we explore, broadly, the
radical potential of these two shifts in theory and analysis of second lan-
guage acquisition: the multimodal shift and the emotional/affective shift.
As the multimodal shift has been more deeply and systematically
researched, we emphasize the emotional/affective shift; however, we are
committed to centering our analysis within this expansive intersection.
In an interview from 2003, the Cuban poet Pérez Firmat asserted,
“languages not only inspire loyalty, they also provoke fear, hatred, resent-
ment, jealousy, love, euphoria, and the entire gamut of human emotion”
(2003: 3). With respect to emotion in the sociocultural tradition of studying
linguistic mediation, Vygotsky referred to “the existence of a dynamic
system of meaning in which the affective and intellectual unite” (2000:
10). Along those lines, Vygotsky (1997) advanced that the structure of
thought flows through phases or stages. In the early stages, thought origin-
ates as sense or direct embodied impressions of what things are or might
be, assuming an imagistic form. In posterior stages, systems of signs or
codes (e.g., language) take the key role. In these ways, Vygotsky explicitly
countered Cartesian dualisms, stating, “It is absurd to separate the heat
from the sun, to ascribe it independent meaning and to ask what meaning
this heat may have and what action it can perform” (1997: 13). By the end of

306 A N A C H R I S T I N A D A S I LV A , E L I Z A B U T L E R , & T O R I F L I N T
his life, Vygotsky had begun to theorize emotions as experience and moved a
step further, suggesting that “complex emotions emerge only historically.
They are combinations of relationships that develop under the conditions of
historical life” (1997: 103). With respect to language and its relationships to
sense and meaning, Vygotsky (2000: 277) understood there to be a predom-
inance of sense over meaning. He suggested that inner sense can sometimes
be incommensurable with the word’s common meaning (p. 279). For
example, when individuals think of the word home they often don’t think
only of the physical building and the materials that were used to build it.
Instead, the word offers a sense of one’s experiences in and emotional
connections with a particular home, in the past and in the present.
While the sociocultural theoretical turn in the study of language learning
has considerably broadened our understanding about second language
acquisition processes, including a non-dualistic understanding of emotion
and mind, we expand its concept of emotion (as historically, culturally, and
socially produced) with recent work on affect in language and literacy.
Recent scholarship advancing theories of affect in relationship to language
and literacy research (Burnett & Merchant 2020; Ehret & Hollett 2016;
Leander & Boldt 2013, Niccolini 2019) draws on the teachings of French
social theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, among others, and the
process philosophy of those such as Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza
(Boldt & Leander 2020; Robinson & Kutner 2019). This research departs
from Vygotsky’s ideas of mediation, meaning making, and historical under-
standing. Instead, the study of affect is viewed as nonrepresentational and
pre-semiotic, and focuses on the embodied, visceral dimensions of being, as
bodies (human and nonhuman) affect and are affected by one another in
the ever-emerging present. Returning to our young child with the photo-
graph, affect theory prompts us to ask not only how that child has
developed emotional responses to the photograph over historical and cul-
tural time, but also, how she may be moved in the moment, in ways that
are emergent and embodied, and in ways that exceed her own (or
others’) analysis.
With these theoretical developments in mind, we wonder how the study
of emotion (Pavlenko 2004; Swain 2013) and affect (Boldt & Leander 2020;
Massumi 2002) could expand our understanding of how one develops
multilingualism and bi-/multiliteracy. Theorizing that the development of
bi-/multiliteracy also needs to be understood with respect to what it might
feel like to express oneself in a new language, one of our goals in this
chapter is to explore the notion that we may have limited our understand-
ing of multilingual learning and development by failing to take into
account the roles played by emotion and affect as individuals experience
themselves in a new language.
Since the early 1960s the scholarly work in early childhood literacy
education has highlighted the language experience approach (LEA)
(Ashton-Warner 1963; Brügelmann & Brinkmann 2013; Freire 1970) as a

way to promote literacy development (especially reading and writing) by

eliciting authentic emotional engagements with one’s experiences and the
language that conveys them. Through this approach, students produce
narrations of their lived experiences and teachers document, in writing,
exactly what students contribute. The literature related to LEA, however,
doesn’t often refer to the experience of language and what that experience
feels like or the ways that it conveys a kind of meaning that is registered on
the body. For example, the Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca (1991), who
spent six and a half years in prison, three of them in isolation, taught
himself to read and write during that time, and speaks movingly about
his emotionally charged experience of language through writing:
I wrote to sublimate my rage, from a place where all hope is gone, from
the madness of having been damaged too much, from a silence of killing
rage. I wrote to avenge the betrayals of a lifetime, to purge the bitterness
in my blood, bewildered and dumbstruck, from an indestructible love of
life, to affirm breath and laughter and the abiding innocence of things.
I wrote the way I wept, and danced, and made love.
(1991: 11)
Baca’s words speak powerfully of the ways one experiences language as

emotionally charged and embodied. Not only poets and philosophers, but
also scientists, psychologists, educators, anthropologists, and sociocultural
theorists have acknowledged the potential of emotional and affective
experiences for learning and development. In the section below, we
expound upon these relationships from different disciplinary perspectives.
13.1 Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Emotions and Affect
The Chilean biologist turned philosopher Humberto Maturana (2009) pro-

poses that experiencing and knowing are vital mechanisms for human
development, where the emotions associated with these mechanisms pro-
vide opportunities for the creation and re-creation of relationships and have
implications on individuals’ most fundamental attachments: the other,
society, and culture.
Gestalt psychologists suggest that cognition and emotion are both organ-
izers of experience. Psychologists such as Fischer and colleagues theorize
that emotions are relational, adaptive reactions: “Emotions play a basic,
adaptive part in human functioning by organizing action tendencies that
mold, constrain, or structure human activity and thought” (Fischer &
Tangney 1995: 6). It is worth noting that in the field of psychology, emotion
and affect are often terms used interchangeably and, put simply, refer
largely to an internal state (Boldt & Leander 2020). In language and literacy
studies, however, affect and emotion are distinct. Boldt et al. (2015)

conceptualize affect as “the registration on the body of being affected by

something, whether consciously or unconsciously,” and emotions as “the
meaning we attribute to affect” (p. 432).
Educational theorists consider the categories of thought, feeling, commu-
nication, and experience as determined and mediated by our culture via
interactions with caregivers and others (Bruner 1983; González 2001; John-
Steiner 2000). Cultural anthropologists such as Kitayama et al. (1995)
acknowledge that emotion results from an individual’s socialization and
their continuing experience in a particular sociocultural context. Further,
they posit that, once individuals experience a certain emotion, they auto-
matically recognize the social orientation this emotion entails and antici-
pate the likely state of relationship between themselves and the other
person.
In related interpretations, Bechara et al.’s (1994) neuroscientific theory
asserts that emotions bridge the rational and nonrational parts of a person;
forging creative linkages and expanding cognition and communicating
meaning to self and others. In his book, The Feeling of What Happens (1999),
the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio posits that primary emotional
responses stem from the relationships established in childhood within
one’s originating family and culture. The primary structure and flexibility
for emotional and affective responses to develop are grounded in the his-
tory of specific interactions within an immediate context (e.g., home).
These interactions and subsequent responses have the potential to consti-
tute emotional references: the feeling of being ‘real’. Secondary emotional
responses are those acquired through sociocultural accommodation, which
may or may not be relative to one’s own social, cultural, and emotional
history, and can be of a simulated kind. These responses can still provide an
embodied experience of emotion without one having had the actual experi-
ences. Damasio (1999) termed these simulations ‘the theatre of emotions’,
as they provide possibilities for feeling ‘as if’. However, without the actual
experience, an emotional engagement does not have the same potential to
produce growth. Drawing from Damasio’s theoretical assertions, we can
assume that emotional experiences, as related to family and home, play a
key role in learning and development. In the absence of real possibilities of
being in place, there could be sociocultural accommodations (e.g., langua-
ging, place-making) that might elicit a kind of emotional and affective
response.
13.2 Language and Literacy Pedagogies
As teacher educators, we set out to translate these theoretical understand-

ings about the implications of affect and emotion for language and literacy
learning into possible pedagogical applications, especially as related to first
generation American children who may not have access to their homeland

(s) and/or the linguistic, sociocultural, and historical experiences of their

families. To this end, we were particularly curious about the affordances of
literacy multimodalities (i.e., photographs, digital picture books) as tools to
evoke emotional and affective affinities of how young children experience
language as connected to place and their families’ sociocultural histories.
However, before we engage with the pedagogical applications of such
frameworks, we explore the concept of multimodality and then turn our
attention to the scholarly literature on children’s multilingualism and
multiliteracies in the US educational context and we examine the poten-
tial(s) of multimodalities, and specifically of photography, as a means for
children to engage affectively.
13.2.1 Multimodality
Multimodality can be defined as the “use of several semiotic modes in the
design of a semiotic product or event” and suggests that meaning is com-
municated through multiple modes and/or combinations of modes (Kress &
Van Leeuwen 2001: 20). The concept of multimodality has recently been
expanded to include the improvisational aspects of learning (Leander &
Boldt 2013), especially in relation to art and other facets of culture, includ-
ing digital technologies (Merchant 2007). Through the study of multimodal
language and literacy practices, scholars are able to critically examine
storytelling (Lenters 2016) and the construction of identity and agentive
selves (Hull & Katz 2006).
While scholarship in multimodality has explored its expansive potentials
for literacy pedagogy (Pandya et al. 2015), developing new literacies
(Rowsell 2013), and expanding identity possibilities (Leander & Frank
2006), less research has focused on the affective dimensions of multimod-
ality in relation to language development. In this chapter, we focus on
photography and book making and highlight the ways that these multi-
modal engagements affected young immigrant children’s development of
multilingualism.
13.2.2 Children’s Multilingualism and Multiliteracies

in the US Educational Context
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, schooling in the United States
focused on Americanizing immigrants (Goodwin et al. 2008). Education
actively sought to erase children’s and families’ home languages, literacies,
and cultures and to replace them with the discourses of those in power
(Delpit 1988), emphasizing the English language and the American way
(Souto-Manning 2016). Immigrant children and families in the process of
learning English have historically been viewed from a deficit perspective
which highlights what they are perceived to be missing in regard to lan-
guage, literacy, and culture. This deficit perspective frames immigrant

children as not smart and/or as lacking in language and literacy, leading to

the devaluation of their rich cultural experiences and knowledge (Stires &
Genishi 2008). Correspondingly, in recent history, children who speak
languages other than English have been labeled by American schools as
Limited English Proficient (LEP), English as Second Language learners (ESL),
and/or English Language Learners (ELL), all of which, to varying degrees,
situate English as the most valued language and position children as having
language and/or learning deficits. Consequently, these perceptions create
an overarchingly biased attitude toward bi-/multilingual children which
disadvantages them in both school and societal contexts.
To counter this deficit perspective, which is still prevalent today,
Ladson-Billings (1995) suggests that ‘good teaching’ must attend to three
tenants. First, teachers must have high expectations of all students. This
means believing in children authentically and providing the support they
need in order to be successful. Second, teachers must attend to cultural
competence. Teachers should honor the culture(s) of the children’s homes
in order to connect their home discourses and experiences, sociocultural
resources, and their languages and literacies, their funds of knowledge, to
their classroom learning experiences (Flint 2020; González et al. 2005).
Third, good teaching requires critical consciousness, which entails troub-
ling and asking questions about ‘what is,’ for example, questioning why
immigrant children are often labeled as lacking and as less than and why
these terms continue to be used in school contexts (Souto-Manning 2016).
Ladson-Billings (1995) and Souto-Manning (2016) invite us to view chil-
dren learning English as bi-/multilingual, eliminating the deficit perspective
that suggests these children are inferior and instead repositioning them
as having promise to develop bi-/multilingually. This asks us to think
about what children know and to value their language and literacy
repertoires.
Due to pervasive deficit perspectives which privilege the learning of
English over sustaining and developing the home language, bi-/multilingual
children in America currently face serious challenges in relation to lan-
guage and literacy learning and risk losing their home language(s)
altogether (Cummins 2000, Ntelioglou et al. 2014). Research suggests that
educators and policy-makers should “recognize the multiple language prac-
tices that heterogeneous populations increasingly bring, and which inte-
grated schooling, more than any other context, has the potential to
liberate” (García 2009: 157). Research on the intersections of language and
literacy further suggest that the development of children’s multiliteracies
(in all modalities), drawing from two or more languages (instead of empha-
sizing only English), provides myriad linguistic, cognitive, social, and
emotional advantages for bi-/multilingual children (Cummins 2001;
Hornberger 1990, 2003, 2013; García et al. 2007; Cummins & Early 2011;
Stavans & Hoffman 2015). Unfortunately, American schools and policy-
makers do not always recognize the strengths and assets that

bi-/multilingual children bring to the classroom nor the learning potentials

provided by their languages and literacies.
There are multiple pathways to language and literacy learning (Goodman
1997; Martin-Jones & Jones 2001) whereby children and families connect to
broader emotional, social, cultural, and global contexts, through multiple
modes (Kress 2009; New London Group 2000). In this chapter we highlight
these pathways and contexts, using a multilingual lens (Cummins & Persad
2014). Before we analyze the affordances of digital picture books as tools for
evoking emotional and affective affinities in relation to language and liter-
acy use, a closer examination of the extant literature regarding the myriad
potential(s) and use(s) of multimodalities, and more specifically of photo-
graphs, is needed.
13.2.3 The Potential of Photographs

Photography has been utilized in various capacities in instructional and
research designs, with respect to early childhood environments (Cook &
Hess 2007; DeMarie & Ethridge 2006; Einarsdottir 2005; Entz 2009; Fasoli
2003; Luttrell 2010; Pyle 2012; Stacey 2015). Critical studies that examine
the use of photography as a research tool for working with young children
and findings that highlight children’s photographs and picture books as
valuable multilingual and multimodal literacy tools inform our exploration
and analyses of the ways that photographs, languages, literacies, and
affect intersect.
One of the appealing attributes of photography is that it offers flexibility
and agency and can take individuals back into other spaces, environments,
situations, and times beyond those that are directly observable, making it a
powerful research tool (Barker & Smith 2012; Butler et al. 2016;
Merewether & Fleet 2014; Templeton 2018). For example, recent research
which explored the classroom and schoolyard from the perspectives of
young Australian children’s photography, found that photographs created
a sense of being there that was stronger than what most readers could derive
from simply reading or listening to interviews (Schiller & Tillett 2004).
Similarly, Rowsell’s (2011) research findings suggest that artifacts, such as
photographs, can open up worlds and that these objects can “signal essen-
tial dimensions of lived realities – the properties of life and communities
ethnographers document when they become insiders to communities to
chronicle a culture or social process” (p. 334), making them valuable
research tools in relation to children’s languages, literacies, and cultures.
Photography has long been identified as a tool for extending
children’s language and literacy potentials as well as gaining insight
into children’s cultural practices. In the aforementioned research on
Australian children’s photography, children used the photographs they
took to create and share personal digital stories. The findings of this study
suggest that the children prepared, talked, and wrote about the visual

images at levels of complexity beyond what is generally expected of young

children (Schiller & Tillett 2004). Furthering this research, Zapata (2013)
focused on multimodality as a resource for repositioning multilingual
learners within American schools. In her study, Zapata (2013) highlighted
third grade Latino students’ multilingual and multimodal composition pro-
cesses as they pushed up against deficit perspectives in relation to their
language use and development. Through multimodal composing and the
construction of picture books, the students in this study were able to remix
“varied semiotic and material composition resources in intellectually sophis-
ticated and creative ways that challenged the primacy of English-only and
alphabetic monomodal ideologies” (p. 247). Utilizing photography as a multi-
modal literacy tool in this capacity is a shift away from viewing literacy as a
text-based practice, which provides the potential to reposition emergent bi-/
multilingual students as knowledgeable, within their classroom context(s).
Grounded in the frameworks related to the use of photography as a
research tool for working with young children and research findings that
highlight children’s photographs as valuable language and literacy tools,
this chapter illuminates the emotional and affective dimensions expressed
through children’s multilingual and multimodal literacy practices. More
specifically, in this chapter we explore the ways that digital photographs
depicting immigrant families’ homeland(s) can be utilized to create picture
books that provide children’s perspectives of their families’ native language
and sociocultural histories, through affective experiences. We also explore
the ways that preservice teachers can leverage children’s photography to
co-construct digital picture books in order to support children’s emergent
languages and literacies and to simultaneously develop understandings of
the emotional and affective experiences of immigrant families and their US-
born children.
Highlighting the potentials of coauthored, multimodal picture books as a
way to evoke affective and emotional connections, we propose that chil-
dren, families, and preservice teachers were afforded opportunities to
share, learn about, and explore language and sociocultural worlds, across
generations, time, and space.
13.3 Working with Immigrant Mothers to Coauthor Digital

Picture Books with Their American-Born Children
Grounded in the theoretical assumptions of new materialism (Deleuze &

Guattari 1987), I (DaSilva Iddings) set out to explore the question of how
immigrant families can evoke emotional and affective engagement with the
heritage language for young children who are being raised at a distance
from the native sociocultural worlds of their family members (Da Silva
Iddings & Leander 2019). It is worth noting that I, the researcher, am a

Brazilian native speaker of Portuguese who immigrated to the US as an

adult two decades ago.
In this research, Brazilian immigrant mothers and their children collab-
orated on composing a digital picture book with the purpose of familiariz-
ing the children with the mother’s pre-immigration life history. The
mothers used old photographs of their extended family and native land,
to tell and write their narratives bilingually (English and Portuguese) to
their respective children.
The study aimed at recording the ways that the mothers and children were
languaging together as they composed digital storybooks. The term langua-
ging, as used here, refers to the process of shaping knowledge and experience
through the use of language, in this case Portuguese, while remembering,
attending, narrating, and so on (Swain & Watanabe 2012). Here, the affective
field of sense-making is played out in the between spaces of language-to-
language, in the between spaces of mother-to-child or person-to-person, in
the between spaces of language-to-materiality, and in the between spaces of
language-to-place (Da Silva Iddings & Leander 2019: 126).
For this study, the Brazilian mothers were selected based on the length of
time since emigration (5 years or less), the age of their children (3 or 4 years
old), and because they were married to a US-born citizen. The 10 mothers
selected for the study expressed willingness to engage in bilingual storytell-
ing interactions with their child as the dyad looked through old family
photo albums belonging to the mothers, which depicted photographs from
their native land and extended family from different times in the mothers’
lives. The stories were based upon their own histories prior to emigration
and were told orally first and then composed into a digital storybook. All
10 mothers in the study received the same instructions for their inter-
actions with their children. The children looked through their family
albums together with their mothers. Speaking in Portuguese, the mothers
described the various photographs, talking about individual relatives, tell-
ing pertinent stories, and sharing memories about the different contexts
and people included in the pictures. In all cases, the children attended to
the mother, asked frequent questions (in both English and Portuguese) as
they worked together throughout the process of creating the storybook,
and selecting the photographs they wanted to include. The mothers helped
the children compose a simple storyline for the book by engaging in
languaging practices. Following, we provide a transcript excerpt of an
interaction between Neide and her daughter June:
Neide (excitedly pointing to the faces of each of individuals on the

picture): Olha essa foto aqui! Vovó Zeca. Vovô Zezico.
[Look at this photo right here! Grandma Zeca. Grandpa Zezico.]
June: (pointing to the respective face in the picture): Esse é o vovô
Zezico? Onde ele mora?
[This is grandpa Zezico? Where does he live?]

Neide: Ele mora no céu.

[He lives in heaven.]
June: No céu?
[In heaven?]
Neide: Sim, é, por que ele já morreu. Quando uma pessoa morre ela vai
morar no céu.
[That’s right, because he died. When someone dies, they go live
in heaven.]
June: E a vovó Zeca?
[And grandma Zeca?]
Neide: Ela também mora no céu.
[She also lives in heaven.]
Neide: Vamos pôr essa foto no nosso livrinho?
[Let’s include this photo in our picture book?]
June: (signals “yes” with her head)
Neide: E o que agente escreve embaixo da foto?
[And what should we write under the picture?]
June (pointing to their respective faces).: Essa é a vovó Zeca . . . e esse é
o vovô Zezico . . . O vovô Zezico já morreu.
Neide: (Repeating some of June’s words while typing the sentence on
the bottom of the photograph and saying the words out loud)
Essa . . . é . . . a vovó . . . Zeca e . . . esse . . . é . . . o . . . vovô Zezico . . .
(em . . . memória).
[This . . . is . . . grandma Zeca and . . . this . . . is . . . grandpa
Zezico . . . (in . . . memory).]
June: O que é “em memória”?
[What does “em memoria” mean?”]
Neide (sadly): Quer dizer que eles moram no céu.
[It means that they live in heaven.]
June (turning her eyes to her mom’s face): Mommy, why are you sad?
After writing the script for the story storybook page, the mother read the
words to the child, while pointing to each word (in Portuguese). She then
took the child’s hand and held her daughter’s fingers to the page over each
word as she read the story out loud. June joined her in a chorus. The
conversation proceeded for each page as the dyad created the digital picture
book together. Once the book was completed, the mother read the book for
the child, who repeated the words on the page after her. Sometimes the
child repeated her mother’s words verbatim in Portuguese and sometimes
she reverted to English to describe the pictures. In this way, both English
and Portuguese were used intermittently.
In the digital picture books, the texts were written in Portuguese. The
image below (Figure 13.1) is excerpted from one of the digital storybooks,
featuring the mother’s deceased parents, whom the child had met only
once while she was still an infant during a visit to Brazil.

Figure 13.1 “This is Grandma Zeca and Grandpa Zezico (in memory)”
Throughout the process of creating the digital picture book, the child and
mother talked about their mother’s native history and identified sociocul-
tural elements and material objects relative to Brazilian daily practices, and
the child listened to stories that were pertinent to their extended family
and places the mother felt were special.
During the visits to the 10 participating dyads’ homes, it was noticeable
to the researcher that all mothers made significant efforts to reproduce, to
some degree, the sociocultural context of the native culture and country of
origin. In addition, they all seemed to have a particular preoccupation in
providing opportunities for affective experiences in the form of material
artifacts, foods, clothing, home décor, radio and TV programs, and even
plants from the native lands. In these ways, the mothers intended to foster
and enhance emotional ties with the mother’s remote family and home-
land. Moreover, we observed the home-scapes (Blommaert 2013) containing
Brazilian symbols and emblems, such as national flags hung in and outside
of the home, and many photographs of the extended family. Overall, it was
amply evident through this study that creating digital picture books
afforded unique opportunities for sociocultural connections, languaging,
and place-making practices to occur, which were ripe with affective inten-
sities and that ultimately aided the development of bi-literacy and
multilingualism for the children.
In a related 5-year qualitative study on multimodalities with immigrant
families and their US-born children (CREATE 2011–16), two of the co-authors
of this chapter (Da Silva Iddings and Butler) examined the pedagogical
potentials of collaborative picture book making and the development of
multilingualism and multiliteracy and its relationship to affect and emotion
(Butler et al. 2016). This study is further described in the following section.

13.4 Creating Pedagogical Opportunities for Linguistic,

Sociocultural, and Affective Connections
To closely understand the pedagogical implications for the relationships

between affect and emotion and the development of multilingualism and
multiliteracy in young children, we set out to examine how preservice
teachers enrolled in a university-based early childhood teacher education
program in the US worked with kindergarteners and first-graders (approxi-
mately 5–6 years old) and their respective bi-/multilingual, immigrant
families, to collaboratively create digital picture books using the language
experience approach (LEA). In this project, a strong emphasis was placed on
learning about the families’ home language and literacy practices and the
children’s lived experiences, through children’s photographs and through
the collaborative authoring (children and preservice teachers) of digital
picture books. This differs from the previous study of immigrant mothers
sharing photographs and stories with their children, in that the children in
this study took the photographs and provided the content and context
about the images, thus facilitating their own language and literacy devel-
opment as they created and narrated their own stories.
This study was guided, broadly, by the concept of funds of knowledge, the
knowledge and expertise that students and their family members have
because of their various roles within their families, communities, and
culture (González et al. 2005). Guided by this approach, a key component
of this study was the integral role of home engagements, wherein preser-
vice teachers visited children and their families in their home and commu-
nity spaces, to learn about their lives and to build relationships of confianza
(trust). This practice differs from general educational family visits, as the
intention is to seek an understanding of family practices and values, from
an assets-based perspective, in order to inform classroom instruction.
The preservice teachers participating in this study were enrolled in a
course on emergent literacy in which they learned about developing literacy
instruction based upon children’s funds of knowledge. Each preservice
teacher was matched with an emerging bi-/multilingual child. The preservice
teachers created a personal literacy memoir picture book (before the first
visit) based upon their own funds of knowledge, to share with the children
and families. During the first engagement, the preservice teachers shared
their stories, introduced the digital camera to the children and their family,
and conducted funds of knowledge interviews. In the following home
engagements, the children shared the photographs that they took with the
preservice teachers. During these audio-recorded, photo-elicited interviews,
the children narrated their memories, emotions, feelings, and stories in
relation to each chosen photograph (children could only select 20 photo-
graphs for the final picture book). These processes afforded the children
opportunities to engage as agentive participants as they took pictures on
their own and shared their feelings and thoughts about each photograph.

Figure 13.2 Selected pages from a child’s picture book
The conversations, mediated by the photos and the photo-taking pro-

cesses, provided opportunities for the preservice teachers to gain a sense
of the children’s affective narratives and to participate in emotional and
affective exchanges with the children. These dialogues were produced bi-/
multilingually and were transcribed by the preservice teachers, either on
their own or with the assistance of bilingual preservice teachers/commu-
nity partners/instructors. One bilingual preservice teacher suggested,
“I guess that, me being bilingual, it’s actually a plus, because I’m able to
reach more of the families because of that second language,” noting that
her own bilingualism helped her to connect with the children and families
who also spoke Spanish, as they constructed the picture books together.
Next, the preservice teachers constructed the picture books for the chil-
dren (based upon the photo-elicited interviews), including the images and
dictations. The preservice teachers then developed and implemented read-
aloud lessons connected to the completed picture books. These lessons built
upon the information they had gathered about the children’s funds of
knowledge and information from their classroom teachers about the chil-
dren’s language and literacy goals and development. In the produced pic-
ture books, the written text was directly informed by the children’s
reflections of their selected photographs, creating particularly emotional
and affective significance for the children (see Figure 13.2).
The combination of home language, meaningful image use, and the
design of the texts invited the children to express their emotional relation-
ships and their bonds with their family members, who were often included
in the photographs. These emotional and affective ties also supported the
children’s language use and literacy learning. Correspondingly, one preser-
vice teacher noted:
The books used for her reading lessons in class usually are pretty generic
and really have nothing to do with anything she has done before . . . they
are out of context. But by putting the reading into context I was seeing
her use [many] more strategies to read the pages than she had before.
Our reading lessons in school are really geared toward letter sounds and

sounding out words, but when reading our picture book, I saw her
repeating sentences for meaning and using the pictures to understand
the text. They were all things she recognized so she knew what it
was about.
This particular preservice teacher suggested that the child she worked with
seemed to engage and learn more from a book that included her home
language and meaningful photographs than from a classroom text that
held less personal meaning.
This study was informative in that it presented opportunities for expres-
sions of affective connections through multimodal means, highlighting the
children’s languages, literacies, and funds of knowledge. One preservice
teacher suggested that:
the picture books have the power to give students a voice that they may
not have been aware they possessed, and they tell our students
indirectly that we value them and we want to know them on the most
personal level possible. Picture books have power, [for] families,
educators, curriculum, and [for] our students.
The picture books potentialized the children’s agency as they took the
photographs, told their stories about the images, and read the texts. The
creation of the multimodal picture books incorporated the voices and
perspectives of the children and was used as a tool to support their emer-
gent language and literacy development. It was through the act of photo-
taking and photo-narrating that children included their experiences, their
family histories and knowledge, and their own sense of their
sociocultural worlds.
Throughout these engagements, the preservice teachers were able to peer
into the child’s emotional connections with the subjects/objects they photo-
graphed, into their home language and literacy practices, and into their
affective memories, which they used as a base for the children’s picture
books. This research implies that, by using multimodal tools to teach
emergent literacy and by valuing and drawing from children’s language(s)
and funds of knowledge, teachers can develop deep understandings about
the experiences of immigrant families and children that reach beyond
geopolitical spaces and local communities.
13.5 Discussion
Much of the scholarly literature in language acquisition relates language

and literacy development with different cognitive, sociocultural, and lin-
guistic factors, but little research in the field relates language acquisition to
affect (Da Silva Iddings & Leander 2019) or emotion (Pavlenko 2004; Swain
2013). In this chapter, we aimed to highlight the interconnections between

affect, emotions, and the development of multilingualism and multilitera-

cies in young children who are first generation Americans by means of the
collaborative production of digital picture books to evoke affect and emo-
tion relative to the remote eco-social environments of their immigrant
family background.
Our rationale for this work was based on the premise that the children of
immigrant families may not have ready access to their families’ histories
prior to the time of emigration, and therefore can feel alienated from their
families’ primary emotional bases (e.g., their native land, heritage culture,
and language) (Maturana 2009). Furthermore, they could lose reference to
important sources of identities, as well as affective and emotional bonds. As
these young children enter schools, they are sometimes forced to operate in
entirely new linguacultural environments (Agar 1994) that could further
disconnect them from their families’ linguistic, cultural, historical, and –
we argue – emotional ties, making it difficult for them to form similar
bonds of their own.
Poets, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, neuroscientists, and
educators alike recognize the importance for individuals to develop emo-
tional and affective connections with language and sociocultural histories.
Therefore, we contend that the relationships of affect, emotion, and
embodied sense-making to the development of multilingualism and
multiliteracy, especially in immigrant families, are focal arenas for
research and pedagogical practices. However, we recognize that research
in language acquisition and/or literacy education doesn’t often take into
consideration affect and emotions as inalienable to being.
In this chapter, we demonstrate, based on some of our own work, that
the use of literacy multimodalities (e.g., digital photography), in conjunc-
tion with different forms of experiences with and in the heritage language
(e.g., picture books), can provide unique opportunities for affective and
emotional bonds to develop in young children. Through our work here we
call for new pathways of research to open up, especially research yielding
new pedagogies to further integrate affect and emotion with the develop-
ment of multilingualism and bi-/multiliteracy, and ultimately, to enable
first generation immigrant children to make strong affective and emotional
connections to their heritage language(s), families, and histories.
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14
Siblings’ Multilingual
Discourse
Vicky Macleroy
14.1 Introduction
Siblings’ multilingual discourse is messy and vibrant and child-to-child

language use has proven hard to capture by researchers in the field, and
thus ‘we know very little about the dynamics of bilingual children’s speech
and how they communicate away from the influence of parents’ (Barron-
Hauwaert 2011: 1). This chapter will explore the integral role that siblings’
multilingual discourse plays in children’s multilingual childhood and
examine these language practices across diverse family lives and sites of
learning. In discussing key concepts in the field of family studies, young
children are viewed as spending as much if not more time with siblings
than their parents (McCarthy & Edwards 2011). This chapter reflects on
more recent research in the area of sibling language use and builds on the
author’s previous research into how siblings shape the language environ-
ment in bilingual families (Obied/Macleroy 2002, 2009, 2010).
Barron-Hauwaert (2011) believed that sibling language use was an under-
researched area and ‘one of the most interesting factors of the bilingual
family is the question of which language the siblings choose to communicate
in’ (2011: 54). A distinctive feature of sibling relationships is their seriality
and the place or ‘niche’ of each child in a family will be looked at in relation
to a child’s emerging multilingualism. Siblings’ multilingual discourse is
viewed as dynamic and siblings’ language practices as in flux as the family
grows, moves or separates. There is now growing evidence that some flexi-
bility in language use or ‘translanguaging’ (García 2009; García & Kleyn
2016) can support development of the less developed language and ‘artificial
separation may feel like a denial of a natural way of being within family and
I would like to express my gratitude to all the children involved in this research, the schools for supporting the Critical
Connections project, the project teachers (Dominika, Marc and Mirela) and the Media Educator, Joana van de Meer
(British Film Institute). I would also like to thank the Paul Hamlyn Foundation for funding our work.

326 VICKY MACLEROY
community’ (Anderson & Macleroy 2017: 496). Siblings’ decision to speak in

a given language is also about an investment in their identity (Norton 2000).
Siblings can and should be viewed as agentive within family language
policy and recent research into bilingual families shows how siblings can
act as ‘significant language socialization agents’ (Kheirkhah & Cekaite
2017: 16). There is still limited research on siblings’ discourse in bilingual
families (Baker 1995; Barron-Hauwaert 2011; Caldas 2006; Ćatibušicˊ 2019;
Gregory & Williams 2000; Kenner 2000; Kheirkhah & Cekaite 2017; de Leon
2018; Obied/Macleroy 2009; Shin 2005; Yamamoto 2001) and a gap in
research that investigates siblings’ multilingual discourse across sites of
learning (home, community, school, offline and online). In recent research,
Johnsen (2020) investigated sibling interactions through the lens of ‘teasing
and policing’, noting that ‘research on how children employ and use lin-
guistic resources creatively and playfully in family contexts is rather scarce,
especially within multilingual families’ (Johnsen 2020: 2). There is also
limited research on how siblings collaborate together in bi- and multilin-
gual educational settings to develop their language skills. This chapter will
also show how digital technology is transforming the way that children use
their languages and research that demonstrates how siblings work together
in bi- and multilingual contexts through the process of filmmaking
(Macleroy 2019). Digital storytelling (3- to 5-minute films) is a powerful
medium for affirming languages and identities for migrant children who
‘traverse transnational spaces and ways of thinking’ (Darvin & Norton
2014: 61). This chapter will present two multilingual digital stories that
illustrate how multilingual siblings can work together across their lan-
guages to present their stories on culture and identity. The Lost Boy and
Girl is an Estonian-English bilingual animation created by a brother (8 years
old) and sister (6 years old); and The B.A.D. Robot is a trilingual Hungarian-
Portuguese-English animation created by two Hungarian brothers (10 and
14 years old) in collaboration with three Brazilian peers.
14.2 Siblings’ Language Practices
Siblings’ language practices within bi- and multilingual families is still an

under-researched and neglected area. In addressing language development
questions in relation to bilingual families, Baker viewed this as an area of
research that was likely to develop in the next two decades as ‘how siblings
affect the language environment of the home, particularly in bilingual
families, is almost unexplored territory’ (Baker 1995: 63). Barron-
Hauwaert (2011) addressed this gap in the field with Bilingual Siblings but
recognised that ‘the influence of siblings on each other has hardly been
studied at all and it is time to hear about the language development of
all children and the sibling dynamics that are created within the family’

Siblings’ Multilingual Discourse 327
(2011: 6). Siblings’ multilingual discourse is also seen as ‘rather messier and
complicated’ (2011: 51) than researching a one-child scenario.
Siblings’ multilingual discourse in its messiness and complexity fits in
well with the concept of translanguaging (Baker 2001; García 2009; Li 2010).
Siblings move across boundaries and borders in their experience of lan-
guages and are often in the liminal spaces and in-between-ness of speakers
of their languages. Siblings’ discourse is seen as a challenge to untangle for
analysis due to the ‘fast-paced chat, playground slang, jokes and expres-
sions that only they understand’ (Barron-Hauwaert 2011: 16).
Translanguaging spaces are viewed as creative and experimental, moving
beyond the official standard uses of language and creating an expanded
linguistic mode outside the boundaries of the conventional and appropri-
ate. Translanguaging emphasises the multiple ways of transferring mean-
ings through words and highlights the importance of experience, feelings
and culture (Li 2018) and human beings’ ability to ‘deliberately break the
boundaries of named languages to create novel ways of expression and
communication’ (Li 2019: 71).
Researchers have noted the agency that siblings exert over language
usage and parents raising their children multilingually recognised it was
‘harder to control the language the siblings choose to use together, espe-
cially when they played together, away from parents, and created their own
mixes and interlanguage translations’ (Barron-Hauwaert 2011: 44). Inter-
sibling language use highlights the creativity and vibrancy of their
exchanges and sibling bonding, but also language friction when children
use language to criticise, insult, or make fun of other siblings. In reflecting
on multilingual childhoods, Thomas (2012) draws together recollections on
sisters and brothers’ multilingual interactions and uses phrases such as
‘bring them closer together; convey intimacy; emotional closeness; more
informal or humorous conversations’ (pp. 181–84). Research into inter-
sibling language use has also shown how siblings may incorporate a minor-
ity language into their games and role plays giving the minority language
‘an important place in their imagination’ (Barron-Hauwaert 2011: 163).
My in-depth ethnographic research into how siblings shape the language
environment in bilingual families (Obied/Macleroy 2002, 2009, 2010)
uncovered new ground on inter-sibling language use and how siblings shift
the language balance in the home and build bridges or barriers between
their languages and cultures. There is still a scarcity of research into the
way multilingual siblings negotiate cultural identity through interaction in
the home and why particular cultural traits are reinforced or discarded in
the process of achieving a multilingual identity. My investigation of the role
of siblings in shaping discourses and literacy events was framed by the
concept of ‘in and out of sync with bilingual family practices’ (Obied/
Macleroy 2002). Gee (1999) analyses the processes involved in establishing
cultural competence: ‘in fact, to be a particular who and to pull off a
particular what requires that we act, value, and interact, and use language

328 VICKY MACLEROY
in sync with or in coordination with other people and with various objects
(“props”) in appropriate locations and at appropriate times’ (Gee 1999: 14).
This notion supported my research into the complex and messy processes of
negotiation and struggle in siblings’ multilingual discourse.
Cultural bridges are being continuously crossed and broken and
redefined by siblings and Dunn in her study of sibling relationships argues
that children learn to understand the social rules and relationships of their
cultural world in order to function effectively in family relationships (Dunn
1988). Multilingual siblings interact and express emotions across their
languages and in understanding multilingual discourse ‘it is becoming
increasingly important to understand ways in which different cultures
conceptualize and verbalize emotions’ (Dewaele 2002: 3). In my ethno-
graphic study of six bilingual families living in Portugal (Obied/Macleroy
2002), a sibling aged 16 reflected on her language usage with her mother,
who is a single-parent: ‘If I want to say something in Portuguese, something
nasty for her not to understand, in Portuguese, really quick’ and ‘slang in
Portuguese’. Sibling discourse in this bilingual family (Martin, 11; Janet, 16;
Justin, 17) tends to be in the minority language when the single-mother is
present, but the mother uses the majority language, Portuguese to interject,
discipline or reprimand her three children. The mother also argues that
language use gives them choices and opportunities in life and the siblings
should be sensitive towards language register: ‘If they are not able to be
bidialectal not just bilingual, sensitive to situations, then is that the image
they want to reflect of themselves?’ Conflicts occur in family discourse
when siblings use Portuguese language practices which are ‘out of sync’
with the mother’s language practice, and there is a cultural mismatch of
speech forms between the two languages: ‘I have conflicts with my oldest
son [aged 17] about communication, because he works in the imperative a
lot, which is a cultural thing.’ These mismatches in forms of expression and
communication are deeply rooted in culture and were apparent in sibling
interaction with parents in the other multilingual families in my research
(Obied/Macleroy 2009).
In recent research on teasing and policing in multilingual families,
Johnsen (2020) reveals how these mismatches can be used by older siblings
to claim competence and authority over younger siblings, but that
these ‘local hierarchies are by no means stable or static structures’ (p. 6).
The research shows how authority positions and power in multilingual
families are continuously ‘negotiated, reconstructed and subverted in
interactions’ (p. 9).
14.3 Siblings as Agentive in Bi- and Multilingual Families
Research on siblings’ influence on the language ecology of bi- and multilin-

gual families is limited, although there is a ‘wide range of ways in which
siblings influence family language practices, and these are related to

siblings’ interactions, activities, and social worlds’ (Kheirkhah & Cekaite

2017). Yamamoto’s study (2001) of Japanese-English bilinguals in Japan
revealed how having sibling/s has an inhibiting influence on minority lan-
guage use in the home from younger children to the oldest child. The
analysis of language use to the English-speaking parent revealed that the
most influential factors over the bilingual children’s use of English were ‘the
medium of instruction in school and the presence of siblings’ (Yamamoto
2001: 103). A further study on Korean children in America developing two
languages (Shin 2005) showed that the language shift is initiated when
bilingual children start to attend mainstream school and begin to use the
school language at home. In researching siblings as language socialising
agents, Kheirkhah and Cekaite (2017) found that the language of schooling
dominates children’s peer and sibling interactions and ‘children become a
major factor, contributing to language shift’ (p. 3). These researchers argue
that societal language is an ‘inherent part of peer culture and siblings’
intimate relationships’ (p. 16). Siblings are seen as opening up ground and
space for use of the societal language in the family domain.
In recent research into multilingual communication, Fashanu et al.
(2020) build on research that reveals how young children create their own
cultures and use multiple strategies to assert agency through sociodramatic
play, silence and negotiation (p. 97). These researchers also uncover chil-
dren’s use of space as ‘a key theme that is frequently found within the
literature on children’s agency and resistance to discipline’ (p. 97).
My research study showed the strategies siblings used to assert agency
within bilingual family practices. In a Portuguese-Irish family with two
siblings (Patrick, 11; Alison, 6), the Portuguese mother reflects on the
younger sibling’s use of the minority language.
She understands everything, she just refuses to speak, but she speaks
much more than she wants to show. Sometimes I find her speaking to
her dolls in English when she’s happy.
(Obied/Macleroy 2009: 714)
In a Portuguese-English divorced family (Susana, 10; Ruben, 17, step-

brother), Susana interacted with Ruben in Portuguese, but engaged in
imaginative play in both languages.
I was playing on the balcony of my mother’s house alone and I was

talking to my toys in Portuguese and English. A young Portuguese boy
walked past and asked me who I was talking to. I said I was talking to
myself in both languages, as I had no friends to play with. The boy said
that he would talk to me and be my friend. We became friends. He
thought that I was mad talking to myself in Portuguese and English.
In recent research in Mexico focusing on talk-in-interaction between bilin-

gual siblings in their everyday family life (de Leon 2018), the researcher was
surprised to discover that ‘the children created parallel bilingual structures

330 VICKY MACLEROY
using both languages in the same imaginary play spaces’ (p. 5). These bilin-
gual siblings contested the bounded nature of distinct language domains
and showed how the ‘two worlds can overlap in pretend play, in spite of
their linguistic and cultural distance’ (p. 8).
14.4 Siblings’ Language Choices, Humour and Intimacy

in Bi- and Multilingual Families
Siblings give languages vibrancy and immediacy and Barron-Hauwaert

(2011) notes that one of the most interesting factors of the bilingual family
is the question of which language the siblings choose to communicate in:
‘the preferred sibling language’ (p. 55). She found that multilingual siblings
make this language choice ‘independent of their parents’ language strategy’
(p. 160) and parents are often ‘unaware of how this language preference
could possibly undermine their carefully planned language strategies’
(p. 160). In researching his three bilingual children, Caldas (2006) became
acutely aware of how ‘our influence was rapidly waning into insignificance’
(p. 126) and how ‘we (the parents) were still speaking more French than
English around the table during the fall of 1999, but it was apparently not
increasing our children’s preference for French – not even a miniscule
amount’ (p. 138).
This points to the importance of thinking of creative and engaging ways
to support siblings’ minority language use in the home as ‘with no or little
inter-sibling language use, a minority language will become passive or
underused over time, and the whole family could even slip into using the
majority language together’ (Barron-Hauwaert 2011: 68). It is seen as vital
that siblings use the minority language in some form and ‘ideally when the
parents are not around or listening in’ (p. 68). Multilingual siblings’ dis-
course may be enriched by what researchers have called the four ‘great
untranslatables’: ‘jokes, poetry, menus and swearing, where the interplay
between culture and language is often unique’ (Harding & Riley 1986: 141).
The bilingual siblings in my research study (Obied/Macleroy 2002) tended to
use the majority language, Portuguese, in everyday exchanges, but in
imaginative role play, oral storytelling, jokes and computer games they
moved into the minority language, English, or used both.
Research into monolingual family relationships found that humour is a
fundamental part of language acquisition in the home and of developing
social understanding: ‘Discovering how to share a sense of absurdity and
pleasure in the comic incidents of life is an important step towards intim-
acy’ (Dunn 1988: 168). Research conducted by Heath into ways families use
language uncovered the imaginative versatility and linguistic value of oral
narratives in the Trackton community: ‘Trackton’s “stories” . . . are
intended to intensify social interactions and to give all the parties an
opportunity to share not only the unity of the common experience on

which the story may be based, but also in the humor of the wide-ranging
language play and imagination which embellish the narrative’ (Heath
1983: 166).
My research study showed the powerful role of jokes, absurdity and
humour in siblings’ discourse in bilingual families. Siblings engaged in
humorous interactions across their languages and had a ‘large repertoire
of jokes and anecdotes which play on words’ and heightens their ‘aware-
ness of cultural traditions’ and ‘sense of shared pleasure’ (Obied/Macleroy
2010: 233–34). This shared pleasure creates intimacy between siblings and
research shows how ‘understanding each other in both languages can bond
siblings’ (Barron-Hauwaert 2011: 163). In siblings’ discourse they move
between their languages for meaning making, and this ties in with the
notion of translanguaging where multilingual children draw on the full
range of their available linguistic repertoire to enhance their communi-
cation (García et al. 2012).
In recent research in multilingual families, Johnsen (2020) uncovered
how siblings can use teasing and humour to question, disrupt and subvert
social hierarchies, but at the same time how these ‘fleeting, conversational
“power struggles” also work as a way to produce and affirm family
bonds’ (p. 9).
Siblings’ discourse is seen as playing an active role in revitalising lan-
guages. De Leon (2018) in her research on bilingual siblings’ talk-in-inter-
action in everyday family life found it remarkable that siblings creatively
manipulated the available codes and ‘carved out a space in which two
languages coexist as a result of the creative bilingual performance of new
genres’ (p. 14). Sibling interactions can prove to be a rich site of experimen-
tation, humour and language learning as they recognise the value of
inhabiting these in-between spaces and dwelling in the borders of their
multilingualism: ‘whether we can let ourselves be open to just being in the
borderlands, inclusive borderlands, without being forced to cross borders.
Only then will we be able as human beings to experience liberation and
creativity, as we bring down the walls that separate us’ (García 2017: 19).
14.5 Seriality in Siblings’ Multilingual Discourse
In reflecting upon the shifts and changing dynamics in multilingual siblings’

discourse it is important to look at the distinctive feature of seriality in the
relationship between siblings. Barron-Hauwaert (2011) notes that there has
been ‘very little research done on the connection between birth order and
language skills, and even less on birth order and bilingualism’ (p. 109).
The language balance is seen to change in the family with the arrival of the
second-born, as the older sibling provides a language model for younger
siblings and the language histories of bilingual families seldom ‘show a parallel
bilingual development in first-borns and later-borns’ (Baker 1995: 64).

332 VICKY MACLEROY
Typically, perhaps to avoid the messiness and idiosyncratic nature of multilin-

gual siblings’ interaction, biographical or case studies of bilingual families have
tended to focus on a ‘first-born or only child, usually under the age of five’
(Barron-Hauwaert 2011: 16) or block siblings together in their interactions in
the home (Harding and Riley 1986).
Researchers have noted the strong school-effect on sibling language use
and peer-defined boundaries outside the home. Barron-Hauwaert (2011)
describes the older sibling as ‘inadvertently’ tipping the language balance
towards the school language, whereas Caldas (2006) views this as a deliber-
ate act of sabotage by the first-born on sibling interaction in their home and
uses terms such as ‘negative influence’ and ‘infect’: ‘Moreover, not only was
he not speaking French, he was quite possibly infecting his sisters with his
negative sentiment towards French speaking in the monolingual Louisiana
context’ (p. 119). Caldas recorded large disparities between the language
preferences of the twins in comparison with their older brother.
In looking more closely at siblings’ niche in the family, research shows
that multilingual siblings’ discourse is also affected by the age gap between
siblings. A close-in-age sibling relationship is viewed as easier for parents to
support the minority language as siblings ‘share similar lives, activities,
cultural backgrounds and early language patterns’ (Barron-Hauwaert 2011:
76). In contrast, a wider gap between siblings can lead to the older sibling
controlling or influencing the language patterns of younger siblings and
show an ‘alternative to parental language models’ (p. 79). However, the role
of older siblings as ‘excellent brokers’ or mediators of a new language and
culture can be valued in the home as the older bilingual sibling may help the
younger sibling to successfully blend together different language strategies
and develop a syncretic literacy (Gregory & Williams 2000; Kenner 2000).
My ethnographic research study (Obied/Macleroy 2002) investigated the
question of whether younger siblings reject or conform to the language
environment of the older siblings. First-borns or only children have to
negotiate language use and cultural practices with the parents, whereas
younger siblings may identify closely with older siblings in their language
choices, or conflicts may arise between siblings. Recent research in bilin-
gual families reveals how siblings actively ‘contribute to families’ language
shift’ (Kheirkhah & Cekaite 2017: 16). This research also showed how
parents in these bilingual families were adopting a more child-centred
approach and interest in allowing the ‘children to use the societal language
(Swedish) because it was the language the children felt more “comfortable”
with’ (p. 15).
14.6 Sibling Rivalry in Bi- and Multilingual Families
Sibling rivalry is an under-researched area in multilingualism and power

imbalances in the family can lead to language friction in siblings’ discourse.

Language friction is seen when ‘children use language to upset, annoy

or insult each other. It can potentially lead to one language being under-
used or dropped’ (Barron-Hauwaert 2011: 138). Research indicates that
first-borns’ speech is generally more correct and they appear to have a
broader vocabulary in both languages than younger siblings (Barron-
Hauwaert 2011).
The close-in-age siblings (Alexandre, 9; Marco, 13) in a Portuguese-English
bilingual family in my research study (Obied/Macleroy 2009) exhibited signs
of sibling rivalry and language friction in their discourse. The siblings
usually interacted at home in Portuguese, and Marco, the older sibling,
reflected on the language use of his younger sibling.
He understands more Portuguese than English. Mum says – speak in

English – I speak in English, but he speaks in Portuguese.
The younger sibling, Alexandre, experienced problems of feeling halfway

between two cultures and resented being singled out by Portuguese peers
on the basis of the home languages he speaks. When the siblings were with
Portuguese peers they preferred to be addressed in Portuguese by their
mother in the home, community and school. This ties in with previous
research findings that show: ‘Some parents report their offspring do not
address them in the usual language when they pick them up from school,
for example or when a monolingual peer is present’ (Hoffmann 1991: 92).
Sibling discourse shifted the language balance in this Portuguese-English
bilingual family to the majority language, Portuguese (Obied/Macleroy
2009). The older sibling used both languages in the home, but switched
into Portuguese with his younger brother. The discourse interaction
between the siblings was often aggressive and competitive and the younger
sibling swore and showed his emotions in Portuguese. The younger sibling
tended to borrow Portuguese words when he was speaking in English, and
his mother reflected, ‘He’ll try, but if he knows he can’t, he’ll just say – no,
I don’t know it in English – and continue in Portuguese.’ The younger
sibling reported feelings of frustration and annoyance with his bilingual
identity and identified more strongly with Portuguese culture. This is
reflected in other research on bilingual siblings which found that ‘even
siblings living in the same home, with the parents speaking the same
languages, may have very different language orders, depending on their
personal experiences of languages in their lives’ (Barron-Hauwaert
2011: 88).
Research with siblings and bilingual peers (Obied/Macleroy 2009) shows
how the older sibling was often in a more powerful position due to his
broader vocabulary and greater fluency across languages. He fuelled sibling
rivalry by laughing at the mistakes of his younger brother in the minority
language (2009: 711). This frustration and miscommunication can be exas-
perated through sibling rivalry and is apparent in other research into

334 VICKY MACLEROY
language shifts in pre- and early adolescent bilingualism where ‘on a deeper
level, the children were socially constructing identities for themselves, at
times quite aggressively’ (Caldas 2006: 127). The close-in-age siblings use
‘language tricks’ (Barron-Hauwaert 2011: 135), diversion and annoyance to
not allow the minority parent to talk in one language. Siblings’ discourse
can be highly volatile and subject to powerful peer influences and Caldas
(2006) argues that if the minority language is not valued by the adolescent’s
peer group ‘he or she will likely not speak the language – even in the home’
(Caldas 2006: 163).
Johnsen (2020) in his research into multilingual families in Norway
found the older siblings corrected and teased the younger ones and
Spanish was not the preferred language choice between siblings as the older
brother discredited ‘his younger brother’s attempt at speaking Spanish’
(p. 5). Johnsen uncovered a ‘social (age-scaled) hierarchy’ in multilingual
families (Spanish, English, Norwegian) in how older siblings used language-
directed teasing, but he also found that younger siblings could question and
discredit these hierarchies (p. 9). These power struggles, teasing and rivalry
were often seen as short-lived, and both older and younger siblings learn to
‘exert their agencies in negotiating authority and competence’ (Johnsen
2020: 6).
14.7 Siblings as Literacy Mediators in Diverse

Bi- and Multilingual Families
In a bi- and multilingual homes, children are in contact with two or more
literate traditions, and in interpreting a text they have to achieve a new
synthesis of literacies. Kenner (2000) investigated literacy links for bilingual
children and demonstrated how for children to become confident writers,
educators needed to learn more about children’s home literacy experiences
in different languages. Her research focused on young children becoming
biliterate across different writing systems (Kenner 2004).
Research into developing literacy in bi- and multilingual families
identified siblings as excellent brokers of a new language (Gregory 1996)
and recognised the value of older siblings as mediators of language and
culture (Gregory & Williams 2000). According to Gregory and Williams, in
supportive sibling relationships the older bilingual sibling helps the
younger bilingual sibling to successfully blend together different cultural
reading strategies and develop a ‘syncretic literacy’ (2000: 176). A study into
sibling interactions found that sisters were, on average, more effective
teachers than brothers, especially if they were older (Azmita & Hesser
1993). Rashid and Gregory (1997), in their research into bilingual siblings,
cite a case study that explores literacy support in an ‘older-sister; younger-
brother’ combination (a 9-year gap between siblings). The older sister
effectively uses the family’s home language, Sylheti, to help her younger

brother access texts in English and make sense of his reading, as ‘part of her
responsibility is to sit with Maruf and read with him books he brings from
school’ (Rashid & Gregory 1997: 112). This research shows how support for
school literacy is viewed as a responsibility for the older sister as she
is bilingual.
Similarly, in my research (Obied/Macleroy 2009) in the single-parent
bilingual family (Justin, 17; Janet, 16; Martin, 11), the older sister sup-
ported the literacy development of her younger brother whilst her mother
was at work. The older sister was given the responsibility of scaffolding
her younger brother’s academic literacy in the home. The mother negoti-
ated with her daughter and provided monetary motivation to ensure the
older sister supported her younger brother whilst she was working. The
older sister complained that her younger brother was easily distracted and
had problems developing writing in both languages: ‘It’s difficult because
he doesn’t know what he needs to study, what he needs help with, but it’s
been okay.’ However, it is hard for children to achieve literacy across their
languages and in her model of the Continua of Biliteracy, Hornberger
(1989) sets out the complexity and multi-layered nature of these inter-
actions. The youngest sibling in the single-parent bilingual family in my
research was confident and versatile in non-formal home literacy and
read for pleasure about 8 hours a week in both languages (Obied/
Macleroy 2009).
I’ve read this story. It’s the scariest one. They didn’t let it come to
Portugal at first. In the book it’s O Fantasma Decapitado (The Beheaded
Ghost). I used to take about a day to read a Goosebumps book, but now
it’s a few hours.
Recent research clearly demonstrates the value of reading for pleasure

(Cremin et al. 2014) and Claxton, researching children’s cognition, claims
that ‘children’s success in life depends not on whether they can read, but on
whether they do – and derive enjoyment from doing so’ (Claxton 2008: 19).
A recent comparative study of two siblings (the eldest and youngest of
three sisters) acquiring Bosnian and English in Ireland (Ćatibušicˊ 2019) built
on the work of Kenner and Ruby (2012) in recognising the important role
that complementary schools can play in maintaining home languages and
connections to home language communities. This research found that
using Bosnian as the family language had a positive impact on the bilingual
development of the siblings. The parents encouraged sibling interaction in
Bosnian and supported the children’s biliteracy development by encour-
aging them to read Bosnian books together and write in Bosnian. The study
found attending the complementary school in Dublin had a positive impact
on all three siblings’ literacy development in Bosnian as ‘interacting with
other Bosnian-speaking children enabled them to further value their multi-
lingual identities’ (Ćatibušicˊ 2019: 155).

336 VICKY MACLEROY
14.8 Siblings’ Bi- and Multilingualism

in Educational Settings
An under-researched area in childhood multilingualism is how siblings

could be encouraged to support each other’s multilingualism in the main-
stream school setting. Multilingual siblings’ discourse can be vibrant and
creative in the playful and intimate spaces of everyday family life, but what
happens when this playfulness and creativity seeps into the borders and
spaces of school life? How can siblings’ multilingualism be valued in
schools?
Hornberger (2009) talks about her deep conviction that ‘multilingual
education constitutes a wide and welcoming educational doorway’
(p. 198). The recent ‘multilingual turn in languages education’ (Conteh &
Meier 2014) is concerned with how multilingual identities can be valued in
schools, and Young (2014) views teachers as key actors in this process who
‘can and should play a key role in bridging the gap between home and
school, be these linguistic and/or cultural bridges’ (p. 106).
Research into supporting migrant children in mainstream schools reveals
the importance of bilingual peers acting as buddies and interpreters for
children who are learning the school language. These bilingual peers share
the same minority language as the new arrivals and act as ‘young interpret-
ers’ for them across the school. Teachers also tend to pair up students who
speak the ‘same language so that they could help each other in lessons’
(Arnot et al. 2014: 49). Viewing bilingual peers as young interpreters and
translators in schools allows these young people to use their minority
language in more formal settings and for others to recognise the value of
their multilingualism.
Recent research into doing research on multilingualism as lived and
visualising multilingual lives (Kalaja & Melo-Pfeifer 2019) has recognised a
new methodological turn, the ‘visual turn’ (Kalaja & Pitkänen-Huta 2018).
These researchers argue that when ‘addressing aspects of multilingualism
as subjectively experienced, which as a rule involves emotionally charged
events, visual methodologies can be beneficial’ (Kalaja & Melo-Pfeifer
2019: 4) particularly with children.
14.8.1 Digital Technology and Siblings’

Bi- and Multilingual Literacies
Research studies on childhood now recognise the key role that digital
technology plays in children’s literacy, language and culture and how
digital literacy blurs the boundaries between sites of learning and leisure:
‘these new literacies give students a great deal of pleasure – the kind of
pleasure that fosters literacy (Gennrich & Janks 2013: 463). Craft (2011)
investigates creativity in digital learning and believes the digital revolution

is having a deep effect on childhood and youth in terms of: ‘the plurality of
identities (people, places, activities, literacies); possibility awareness (of
what might be invented, of access options, of learning by doing and active
engagement); playfulness of engagement (the exploratory drive); and par-
ticipation (all welcome through democratic, dialogic voice)’ (p. 33). Gee and
Hayes (2011) also note the transformative effect that digital media can have
on the way young people learn new languages and their deep engagement
with more flexible, dialogic and interactive forms of language learning.
Siblings’ multilingual discourse will be examined in these new digital
spaces and research findings presented from an international project,
‘Critical Connections: Multilingual Digital Storytelling’ (2012–present)
which included siblings working together on the filmmaking process. We
defined multilingual digital storytelling in our project as a short multilin-
gual story (3–5 minutes) made using photographs, moving images, artwork,
sculpture, objects, shadow puppetry, stop-motion animation, green screen,
poetry, dance and drama. (Anderson & Macleroy 2016). The project has
involved over 1,500 young people, across primary and secondary age ranges
(6–18 years old), in creating and sharing digital stories in over 15 languages
(Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Croatian, English, Estonian, French, German,
Greek, Hungarian, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Tamil and
Turkish) and usually with English subtitles.
This chapter presents two digital stories that illustrate how siblings can
work together in a school setting and be given space to draw on their full
linguistic repertoire to make meaning in complex and creative ways. The
research draws on interviews with the siblings; video footage of their
discourse whilst creating the digital stories; siblings presenting their digital
stories to an international audience at the BFI; siblings’ reflections on the
stories; teachers’ reflections on the process; and the digital stories. The Lost
Boy and Girl is an Estonian-English bilingual animation created by a brother
(8 years old) and sister (6 years old); and The B.A.D. Robot is a trilingual
Hungarian-Portuguese-English animation created by two Hungarian broth-
ers (10 and 14 years old) in collaboration with three Brazilian peers.
14.8.2 Siblings’ Creative Multilingualism

The Lost Boy and Girl (https://vimeo.com/220341659)
Teachers are key to fostering children’s multilingualism in schools and
Dominika, the English as an Additional Language (EAL) teacher in a
London primary school, had completed her MA in Education at
Goldsmiths including a module on ‘Teaching Languages in Multilingual
Contexts’ where she had learnt about the multilingual digital storytelling
project. Dominika was keen to implement the project in her primary school
and selected her EAL classes with these young Estonian siblings, Säde and
Uku. Working with these siblings in the EAL classes was an opportunity to

338 VICKY MACLEROY
work across age groups in the school, and Säde (6 years old) was in Year
2 and Uku (8 years old) was in Year 4. Säde was the youngest child that we
had worked with on the project, and we were worried about the media and
language skills required, but the bonding between these siblings was strong
and mutually supportive.
These close-in-age siblings collaborated together to create a bilingual
digital story about belonging with the voice-over in Estonian and the sub-
titles in English. The EAL teacher fostered collaboration between the sib-
lings and created a workshop environment where the siblings were
encouraged to imagine, experiment and come up with their own ideas.
Dominika set up the circle of digital storytelling with a hypothetical idea:
what if things could talk? The siblings explored where objects could be
from, the languages they could speak, and what they could say, and then
moved to their own lives and discussed journeys, family, memories, coun-
try, languages, school environment, how to fit in and belonging. The
Estonian word for belonging, Kuulumine, was written on a post-it note and
stuck on the classroom wall, and the siblings added their own post-it notes
to the wall. The siblings discussed the rewards and difficulties of belonging
to particular groups and thought about the message they wanted to com-
municate in their own digital story. It has already been argued that reading
for pleasure is vital in developing literacy across languages and the EAL
teacher used picture books with the siblings (Lost and Found by Oliver
Jeffers, The Colour of Home by Mary Hoffman, and Where the Wild Things Are
by Maurice Sendak) to explore sadness, anger, loss and friendship and how
together the words and images convey a state of mind and powerful feelings
(Reynolds 2007).
After watching a selection of digital stories the siblings discussed the
production process including storyboarding, scriptwriting, translation and
setting. The bilingual siblings had their own workshop at the BFI to develop
their knowledge about camera shots and angles and how to make a film
using stop-motion animation (Figure 14.1).
Storyboarding was a vital part of the process for these young bilingual
siblings as they were learning to interact in and across their languages and
across different modes of communication (transmediation) and choose
from ‘multimodal semiotic resources that do not have direct equivalence,
thus inviting creativity and transformation (Mills 2016: 68). Storyboarding
is seen as providing a creative multi-voiced space which is dialogic and
interdiscursive (Mills 2011). Säde and Uku worked collaboratively on their
storyboard for The Lost Boy and Girl, discussing the script in both languages,
sound effects and mood, camera shots and different emotions, and images
and sequencing. The siblings created a sequence of 22 frames in their
storyboard and shared the scripting and design of different frames. Uku
captures the feelings of frustration as the siblings are told they are moving
from Estonia to London in the emotive question: Miks ema? / Why Mum?
(Figure 14.2).

Figure 14.1 Bilingual siblings engaging in a media workshop at the BFI

340 VICKY MACLEROY
Figure 14.1 (cont.)
Figure 14.2 Storyboard frame no. 4, The Lost Boy and Girl
Säde draws an image to depict the power of the other children in the
London school and the high-angle shot to denote the siblings’ vulnerability
to their harsh words: Mine siit ära! / Get out of my way! (Figure 14.3).
As well as storyboarding, the siblings wrote a script and included stage
directions, dialogue and emotions. These bilingual siblings then made the

Figure 14.3 Storyboard frame no. 8, The Lost Boy and Girl
decision to use stop-motion animation for their digital story and work with
Lego bricks to bring their story about belonging to life. Facial expressions
are vital in comic art to communicate emotions (McCloud 1993) and the
siblings show a complex and creative understanding of visual communi-
cation. Stop-motion animation required patience, negotiation and discus-
sion between the siblings as each shot was framed and the Lego characters,
props and buildings constructed.
The Estonian-English digital story The Lost Boy and Girl opens with upbeat
music in the family home in Estonia. The siblings are in the corner of the
family home together with smiles on their faces, and the mother moves
across towards them. The music stops and the voice-over is in Estonian with
English subtitles. The mother announces, ‘We are moving to a new country.
You need to pack your bags’ (the siblings have covered over the smiles on
their Lego faces with plasticine to show their sadness). The older sibling’s
response is framed in anger as the subtitles are in capitals: ‘I DON’T WANT
TO PACK MY STUFF!’ (and sadness as each sibling has a blue plasticine tear
on their faces). The sadness intensifies (the siblings’ faces now have two
tears), and the father reiterates in Estonian, ‘You have to pack your clothes
and toys.’ Slow music plays to show the passing of time as a Lego aeroplane
flies from Estonia to London.
The next scene opens in their London school, and the siblings have smiles
on their faces as other children approach, and the younger sibling whispers
quietly in Estonian to the older sibling, ‘Don’t worry, Tom!’ The mood
changes abruptly as the music creates tension and the voice-over and
subtitles switch into English (Estonian is silenced as the siblings have
plasticine over their mouths and they appear afraid to speak). The other
children are intimidating, and the siblings depict this through large mono-
brows, angry facial expressions, increasing height, and shouting and

342 VICKY MACLEROY
laughing at them in English: ‘Go back to your country! Yeah, you don’t
belong here! Ha ha ha!’ (sinister laughing as the other children increase in
size and the tension builds). The siblings are left alone together.
In the next scene the siblings are alone and smiling when two new
friends enter with smiles on their faces. The mood changes as these new
friends reassure the siblings: ‘Don’t worry guys! Yeah! Let’s be friends.’ The
older sibling now has the courage to talk: ‘Let’s tell the teacher’. The
following scene is upbeat with the four children on a slide in the play-
ground. The scene switches to the Estonian family home in London and the
voice-over reverts to Estonian with English subtitles as the mother tells the
siblings, ‘We’re going back to Estonia!’ The siblings respond happily in
Estonian: ‘Hooraaaaay!!!’ The next school scene is now framed with the
two siblings and their two new friends in a semicircle with smiles on their
faces and the younger sibling speaks: ‘Goodbye guys!’ Then the older sibling
ends with this message of friendship: ‘Thank you guys. We know where we
belong now. It’s not only our country, but you became our family.’ Slow
music plays again as the Lego aeroplane is depicted en route back to Estonia
and a scene in the family home in Estonia. These young siblings use comic
graphics at the end of their animation to depict the power and confidence
they now feel: Yeah! Pow! Smash!
These young bilingual siblings surprised their parents, teachers and peers
with their complex and imaginative understanding of multilingualism and
the emotions and experiences of living in different languages. Säde and Uku
presented The Lost Boy and Girl at the BFI and described their Estonian-
English animation in this way: ‘Two Estonian children are moving to
London with their parents. After a difficult beginning, they realise what
belonging means to them.’ The siblings stood together to present their film
to a public audience, and the younger sibling opened with these words:
‘I would like to talk about our film that I made with my brother.’
The B.A.D. Robot (https://vimeo.com/220581681)

In this digital story, the interdisciplinary collaboration between the
Language and Art teacher was key to fostering an experimental and creative
space for multilingualism in the secondary school in London. The Language
teacher, Mirela, had been part of an active self-help group of parents raising
children bilingually and part of their interview team for research on multi-
lingual childhoods (Thomas 2012). She completed a postgraduate certificate
in Education on ‘Teaching Multilingual Learners’ and became interested in
the multilingual digital storytelling project as she was keen to engage with
innovative pedagogies to support multilingual children learning English as
an additional language. The Art teacher, Marc, was interested in opening up
creative and digital spaces in the school for language learning. He has been
studying and engaged in improvisation workshops for the past few years,
and he is fascinated by the creative power of improvisation. He is also
intrigued BY the process of animation and how it allows children to ‘play

with stuff, problem solve, talk to each other, focus, and that is what I want
from a classroom’.
The multilingual digital storytelling project was set up in an Art classroom
in the secondary school as an after-school film club for multilingual children
learning English as an additional language. The focus for the series of
workshops was on older children and the three Brazilian students involved
in the project were in Year 9 and Year 10 (aged 14–15 years old). However, the
two Hungarian siblings had arrived in England at the start of the school year,
and the parents were keen for the younger sibling to participate. The
younger sibling had only a few words of English, and this project allowed
him to work alongside his older brother in a school setting and be supported
by teachers. Lázlo (14 years old) was in Year 9 and Bálint (10 years old) was in
Year 5, and this wider age gap between the siblings created a strong bond
(rather than rivalry) where the siblings could use Hungarian together to
develop ideas and interpret and translate the dialogue.
These Hungarian siblings collaborated with their bilingual peers to create
a trilingual digital story on belonging. The teachers created the digital
storytelling circle through initial experimentation with animation and
exploring the effects of bringing objects to life in imaginative ways. The
siblings drew a short animation and showed sophistication in representing
upward movement, sound effects and comic graphics (crash, boom, pow).
The older sibling was technically savvy and quickly developed media skills
in editing stop-motion animation, and the younger sibling was skilled in
music and became adept at adding sound effects. The siblings became
immersed in experiential learning with their bilingual peers and explored
how objects could tell stories engaging with objects as ‘vibrant matter’
(Bennett 2010). This experimentation phase of the project was not bounded
by the children’s different languages, and the siblings were learning to
make meaning in and beyond language.
The siblings with their bilingual peers explored the concept of belonging
and came up with the idea of robots and artificial intelligence and the
disturbing and difficult question – what would happen if robots could feel
emotions? The young people created a mind map with their ideas, including
a robot family, not belonging to a time period, and a build-up or crescendo
with a change. A Hungarian mother tongue teacher in the school supported
the siblings at different stages of the project, interpreting for the younger
sibling at the start and listening and checking the siblings’ Hungarian in
the voice-over for the final film animation. The younger sibling found it
hard to contribute to the initial exploration of ideas for the digital story, but
he listened attentively, and slowly constructed a robot as the others were
talking. The Art teacher reflected on this as a ‘big breakthrough’ in the
process when the youngest sibling created this ‘fantastic robot out of some
wooden stuff I’d left lying around’. This wooden robot became the main
focus for the project and Bálint, the youngest sibling, was credited as the
chief robot designer (Figure 14.4).

344 VICKY MACLEROY
Figure 14.4 Bilingual siblings engaging in a pre-production workshop

Lázlo, the older sibling, researched online for pictures and photographs
to create a mood board and support their ideas for a storyline: ‘The making
is just a process, but the ideas are much harder.’ The Art teacher created an
environment where the students learnt through engaging with materials,
and he filled the classroom space with robotic materials, electronic junk
and computer parts. However, the siblings and bilingual peers were finding
it hard to develop a collaborative storyline around the robots until a drama
teacher suggested writing a back story for their robot character (name,
voice, experience, age, story). This was a key decision, and the youngest
sibling moved from speaking only a few words in English at the start of the
project to being able to write a detailed back story in English for his robot
(Figure 14.5). It was also the moment when the children began experiment-
ing with the voices of the robots in Hungarian, Portuguese and English, and
the Art teacher commented that there was a ‘wind of energy and fun’.
The young people were working across three languages and had the
challenge of creating a trilingual script. Instead of traditional storyboard-
ing, they created a digital storyboard with digital sketches of each scene,
and the narrative script came out of this improvisation. The young people
experimented with different voices and accents in their languages and
made the decision that the central robot character, B.A.D., would speak in
Hungarian. The Hungarian siblings collaborated closely on the Hungarian
script for the oldest robot, whilst the Brazilian students developed the
Portuguese script for the newer robots, and they then worked together
across languages and the narration in English. Their linguistic sophistica-
tion was striking, and the teacher noted, ‘These skills would not have
happened in any other part of the curriculum.’
The Hungarian siblings played a key role in framing the digital story and
understanding how languages include and exclude others. The opening
narration of The B.A.D. Robot is in English (without subtitles), as the young
people wanted to convey a sophisticated and complex backstory and focus
the visual communication on the robot. Bálint, the younger sibling, created
the electronic sound effects as the B.A.D. robot is slowly reactivated by the
sun’s rays and its systems come to life. The older sibling, Lázlo, experi-
mented with the younger sibling with voices and accents in Hungarian for
the B.A.D. robot, and they decided on a monotone metallic-sounding voice.
The first words spoken in Hungarian with English subtitles, ‘I have to find a
life . . . I must find the city’, capture the dilemma for the old robot as he
walks slowly towards a completely changed world.
The B.A.D. Robot was scripted, animated and narrated by all five students,
and the next part, where the old robot encounters the new robot models,
shows their deep understanding of the notion of belonging and also the
inventiveness and versatility of their multilingual discourse. The old B.A.D.
robot sees three androids that are ‘uncatalogued in his data base’ and
‘speaking a language he identifies as Portuguese’. A circle of friendship is
created between these three androids interacting in a shared language,

346 VICKY MACLEROY
Figure 14.5 Bilingual siblings’ back story, mood board and stage set for their digital story

Portuguese, about robotic things such as dosages of oil and its temperature
and taste. This dialogue is cleverly constructed, and the old robot is isolated
from their discourse and made to feel unwelcome. The B.A.D. robot states
his identity in Hungarian and the androids respond in Portuguese with
some of the following comments: ‘By my program, you’re horrible . . . all of
us have a human shape, but you’re so rectangular.’ The Portuguese-
Hungarian dialogue shows how language can be used as a powerful tool
to isolate as well as bring characters together, and the B.A.D. robot created
by the youngest Hungarian sibling is mocked and ridiculed: ‘Come back.
We just want to put you in your place. Yeah . . . the museum . . . ha ha.’ The
next part of the story (in English) narrates the inner thoughts and emotions
of the B.A.D. robot and his sadness. The oldest Hungarian sibling, Lázlo, was
the main editor, and he skilfully ends the dialogue with these powerful
words spoken in Hungarian as the robot deactivates itself: ‘In today’s world,
nobody cares about someone who is different. They look down on them.
They only care about my look. I’m going to shut myself down. I DON’T
BELONG HERE!!’
The Hungarian siblings collaborated closely on the digital story, and the
younger sibling surprised his older brother, teachers and parents with the
rapid development of his bilingualism. The project provided spaces for him
to take risks and practise his Hungarian and English, engaging in complex
acts of translation and imaginative discourse with his older brother. The
older sibling interpreted, translated and framed the digital story in collab-
oration with his younger sibling and bilingual peers. Siblings’ multilingual
discourse, experience, and creativity played a pivotal role in this
trilingual animation.
14.9 Concluding Factors on Siblings’ Multilingual Discourse
Research into siblings’ multilingual discourse reveals its vibrancy and

messiness. Siblings’ interactions are invested with emotions that foster
sibling bonding and intimacy, but also sibling rivalry and language friction.
The role of siblings in childhood multilingualism is seen as conflicting and
contradictory as siblings give ‘languages life and vitality’ (Barron-Hauwaert
2011: 164), but they may also disrupt family multilingualism by creating a
‘social space separate from adults’ (Caldas 2006: 118) who want them to
speak the minority language in the home. Multilingual siblings’ niche in
the family affects their language experiences and their confidence and
versatility to draw on their full linguistic repertoire to communicate.
Translanguaging is a useful concept to capture the creative and experi-
mental nature of multilingual siblings’ discourse and the novel ways of
expression and communication (Li 2019) they uncover and invent. Research
into siblings’ multilingual discourse shows how important it is to create
multilingual spaces that are fun and pleasurable. Multilingual siblings are

348 VICKY MACLEROY
seen as adept and sophisticated in their language play, humour and sense of
the absurd. Multilingual siblings become very aware of how they can
manipulate their languages to include or exclude others.
The Critical Connections Multilingual Digital Storytelling project
(Anderson & Macleroy 2016) demonstrated the role that schools and
teachers can and should play in supporting and extending siblings’ multi-
lingualism and bridging the gap between home, school and community.
The project also worked with community-based complementary schools
that play a crucial role in supporting childhood multilingualism. This
chapter concludes with the views of bilingual peers on siblings’ discourse
and interaction (rivalry and bonding) in their Bulgarian-English digital
story on fairness, The Toy Helicopter (https://vimeo.com/168812249).
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Part Four
Language(s) and
Literacy of
Multilingual Children
through Schooling

15
Being Plurilingual in the
Language Classroom
Andrea S. Young
In this chapter some of the complex issues relating to the teaching and
learning of (emergent) plurilingual children (García 2009a) within the con-
text of formal education will be presented. While endeavouring to focus on
the learner, the challenges presented to both learners and teachers will be
discussed, defining some of the key concepts and referring to the body of
research which informs us on this subject.
15.1 Introduction and Definitions of Key Terms
By way of an introduction, let us begin by defining the key terms in the title
of this chapter and around which it is constructed: ‘plurilingual’ and
‘language classroom’. Plurilingual is a term used by many language profes-
sionals and researchers working within the framework of research and
policy documents published by the Council of Europe (www.coe.int/en/
web/platform-plurilingual-intercultural-language-education/home) when
referring to a person, or persons, whose language repertoire is composed
of a variety of linguistic skills (speaking, understanding, interacting, read-
ing, writing), varying in degrees of competence, in several languages. In
Council of Europe terminology, ‘multilingual’ differs from ‘plurilingual’, as
it is used to refer to the geographical, territorial or political rather than the
personal. Following this line of thought, the city of Strasbourg may be
described as multilingual and many of its inhabitants will be plurilingual;
or a school may develop a multilingual policy for its plurilingual pupils.
Although Grosjean’s definition of bilingualism refers to ‘the regular use of
two or more languages (or dialects)’ and bilinguals as ‘people who use two
or more languages (or dialects) in their everyday lives’ (Grosjean 2008: 10),
the term plurilingual will henceforth be used to describe learners who
Thank you to Sefa Demir (Master in Education student at the University of Strasbourg) for his personal testimony.

356 ANDREA S. YOUNG
function in two or more languages on a regular basis, thereby intentionally

placing the emphasis on the personal, composite and evolving nature of the
linguistic repertoire of each individual.
Turning our attention to the term ‘language classroom’, Beacco et al. (2016)
state that ‘Language requirements such as reading and understanding exposi-
tory texts, listening to explanations, summarising or answering questions
orally and presenting results are present in all classrooms, in connection with
content work’ (Beacco et al. 2016: 21). It may therefore be argued that all
classrooms are language classrooms, given that teaching and learning are
negotiated through the medium of language(s). The language(s) may be the
dominant language(s) of the country or region in which the school/establish-
ment of learning is situated, or a foreign or second language in an immersion
or Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) context for example.
Language and the teacher’s and learners’ use of it is central to meaning
making. Language shapes and structures our thought processes. It provides
us with the tools to organise knowledge, analyse problems, explain, reason
and justify theories and claims. However, this type of language differs from
the everyday language of communication which is context embedded, bene-
fits from all the non-verbal communication cues and involves the activation
of Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills or BICS (Cummins 2017). As a
former newly arrived primary school pupil put it (Jaehn 2015: 37), ‘dire à
quelqu’un “salut, on peut jouer” ou comme ça, je savais dire ça, mais j’avais
peur que parce que je savais pas bien parler’ (saying “hello, do you want to
play” or something like that to someone, I knew how to say that, but I was
afraid [in the classroom] because I didn’t know how to speak well). ‘Speaking
well’ can be interpreted as using the educational register appropriate for the
classroom and for academic work. The language used in the teaching/learn-
ing process is predominantly academic and often subject specific, frequently
abstract and usually decontextualised. This type of language is typically used
for higher order thinking skills and has been referred to as Cognitive
Academic Language Proficiency or CALP (Cummins 2017). Even for learners
whose first language is perceived as the same as the language of schooling,
this academic language may be far removed from the language heard and
used on a daily basis within some informal settings. It can therefore some-
times (especially when the formal written form of the language differs radic-
ally from the vernacular) be considered as an additional language, or at least
an additional register of language which must be acquired in order to succeed
in academic studies. The wider the gap between the variety of language with
which the learner is familiar and the academic language required by the
education system, the more effort the learner will have to invest in order to
succeed at school. For a learner whose language repertoire does not include (a
variety of ) the language of the school (often due to migration or mobility
factors), s/he needs to acquire both BICS and CALP as quickly as possible. The
first in order to be able to interact socially and function in the new environ-
ment, the second in order to progress academically.

Being Plurilingual in the Language Classroom 357
15.2 Making Sense in a New World: The Multiple

Challenges Facing the Emergent Plurilingual Learner
Transitioning from one learning environment to another can be both

stimulating and challenging for any learner. For a learner for whom the
language and/or culture of the home differs from that/those of the school,
as well as for the teacher and possibly the majority of the other learners in
the classroom, the challenges are frequently compounded by the absence of
shared linguistic skills and cultural knowledge.
For young (emergent) plurilingual children, the transition from home to
formal education can be particularly bewildering. Children need to adapt to
the new environment, understand its organisation and rules (both explicit
and implicit), meet and form relationships with unfamiliar people and
endeavour to meet their expectations, often with very little or no language
support whatsoever. Children who are supported by their home environ-
ments and/or their teachers, may thrive on the additional or alternative
forms of stimulation presented to them at school. This is often the case for
children who attend bilingual or international schools where staff are
experienced, trained and often bilingual themselves. Children whose
parents are highly educated and/or aware of school expectations and values
also benefit from their families’ support. However, for the vast majority of
children whose families have migrated to a new country and/or who belong
to a marginalised minority and who rely on the state sector for their
education, this can be an extremely stressful situation. As an example, here
is a snippet from an interview with Sefa, a university student who arrived in
France from Turkey aged four, recalling his experience:
Je suis arrivé en France à l’âge de 4 ans, je suis né en Turquie . . . je me

souviens que quand j’étais en classe la maîtresse m’interdisait de
parler le turc et elle m’obligeait à parler le français alors que je n’avais
pas de lexique, de vocabulaire, donc je ne savais pas trop comment
faire et je le vivais mal, intérieurement c’était très difficile à vivre je
pense pour un élève de cet âge.
I arrived in France at the age of 4, I was born in Turkey . . . I remember

when I was in class the teacher didn’t allow me to speak Turkish and she
forced me to speak French when I didn’t have the lexicon, the
vocabulary, so I didn’t really know what to do and it was hard, on the
inside it was a very difficult experience I think for a pupil of that age.
(Sefa’s response to the question “Can you tell us about your
experience in pre-school when you arrived in France?
Do you have any memories?”, interviewed 16 March 2016, our translation)
Not knowing what to do, being unfamiliar with both the language used at
school and the cultural codes and expectations are common leitmotifs in
discussions recorded with learners who have experience as new arrivals

358 ANDREA S. YOUNG
and/or as emergent plurilinguals (see Jaehn 2015; Kádas 2017 for further
examples). From identifying the function of the music played to indicate
the start/end of break times to knowing how to call the teacher, constantly
attempting to decode implicit rules requires these children to develop and
rely on a keen sense of observation. They consequently become very sensi-
tive to non-verbal cues such as facial expressions, gestures, etc. which they
interpret (not always matching the intentions of their interlocutor) in an
effort to make sense of their surroundings. The mismatch between expect-
ations and behaviours may sometimes be due to differences in cultural
codes. For example, rules of conduct concerning what is polite and impol-
ite, behaviours deemed as respectful or disrespectful between men and
women, between the older and the younger generations, vary from culture
to culture. In some cultures, children are encouraged to ask questions and
engage in debate, whereas in others this kind of behaviour is viewed as
inappropriate as it challenges the authority of the adult. In the educational
setting, asking the teacher direct questions may be viewed as an indication
of engagement and motivation to learn in some contexts, whereas this may
be construed as insolence in others. The learner avoiding direct eye contact
when the teacher is talking to her/him, is another example which is fre-
quently interpreted by professionals as a lack of respect, yet the intention
may be the exact opposite, as in some cultures such behaviour denotes
humility.
What all these learners seek to establish as a priority is social interaction,
acceptance and inclusion. Not sharing a common language in which to
establish basic interpersonal communication hampers the establishment
of this vital social support network, but should not be allowed to halt
communication through other forms. These alternative forms of communi-
cation such as gesture, facial expression, learning a few words in the
language of the Other, etc. need to be modelled and normalised by the
teachers and other adults in the school (classroom assistants, secretaries,
caretakers, etc.) in order for the classroom to become a more welcoming,
inclusive and supportive learning environment. If a child like Sefa, who is
not yet in a position to be able to use the language of the school, is
prevented from using the language in which he usually communicates, he
is effectively both silenced and disempowered. This already demanding
situation, such as the one Sefa was in, necessitates a good deal of effort on
the part of the child in order to decode what he is expected to do and how
he should behave, as well as learning a new language and learning through
a new language, especially when the language he already knows is banned.
In Sefa’s words: ‘c’était très difficile à vivre’ (it was a very difficult experi-
ence), ‘je le vivais mal’ – literally ‘I lived it badly’, meaning “I was having a
hard time with it” – clearly indicates that this was both an uncomfortable
situation and non-conducive to the learning of the school language.
Needless to say, such a language policy is discriminatory (Blanchet 2019;
Skutnabb-Kangas & May 2017) and violates the linguistic rights of the child

as laid out in Article 30 of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC)
United Nations treaty:
In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities or

persons of indigenous origin exist, a child belonging to such a minority
or who is indigenous shall not be denied the right, in community with
other members of his or her group, to enjoy his or her own culture, to
profess and practise his or her own religion, or to use his or her
own language.
(United Nations 1989, Article 30 of CRC)
15.3 Legitimate Linguistic Resources: A Paradox
The opportunities afforded by plurilingualism in our globalised, intercon-

nected world are manifest to the socially and economically privileged.
However, with preference frequently awarded to the prestigious and eco-
nomically valued languages of the learning context, some languages may be
perceived as lacking in legitimacy. For example, it is more likely in the
European context for plurilingual competence in dominant European lan-
guages to be revered, rather than in minoritised languages such as the
languages of migration. The plurilingualism of the elite, as catered for in
international schools for example, lies unquestioned. These children will
acquire a second, third or fourth language through schooling in multiple
languages, often in addition to the language spoken at home. They will
become plurilingual, able to navigate through complex intercultural
encounters with relative ease. Their plurilingualism will be regarded as
an asset, a distinctive additional skill to the other skills and knowledge
acquired through education. It will open doors for them, allow them
to study and or to work in other countries. It will expand their minds,
help them to develop additional cognitive, metalinguistic and literacy
skills. Above all else, it will prepare them to become empowered citizens
in an ever increasingly interconnected, international, multicultural and
multilingual world.
Such positive attitudes and beliefs about languages and their use have a
positive impact on what has been termed the ‘image of the child’
(Malaguzzi 1994). At the heart of Malaguzzi’s vision lies the idea that
teachers need to view children as intelligent, strong and beautiful, rather
than lacking in skills and knowledge. He also believed that they should
strive to draw on the wealth of resources and assets available to the child
(the hundred languages of children) and encourage and nurture develop-
ment. At the heart of the teacher’s image of the child lies its power to shape
the learner’s own self-image with possible repercussions on learner self-
esteem, identity construction and well-being. In addition, the teacher’s
image of the child impacts teacher expectations, influencing teaching

360 ANDREA S. YOUNG
practices and resulting in an educational self-fulfilling prophecy known as

the Pygmalion effect (Good 1987; Rosenthal & Jakobson 1968). Referring to
research with Navajo speaking school children in Arizona, McCarty writes,
‘In classrooms, curriculum and pedagogy are the mirrors in which children
see themselves reflected and through which they construct images of
themselves as thinkers, learners, and users of language’ (McCarty 1993:
191). When attitudes, images and practices are positive, multiple benefits
are reaped by all concerned. On the contrary, negative, deficit orientations
lead to the delegitimisation of languages and feelings of disempowerment
and loss.
Present day research overwhelmingly points to the cognitive, social and
emotional benefits of plurilingualism (August & Shanahan 2006; Cummins
2019a; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2017).
Yet, for children who do not belong to the elite and who speak a language at
home which is different from the language of education, their (emergent)
plurilingualism is rarely seen through a positive lens in the classroom. Be
their plurilingualism home-grown or due to a recent migration, the mes-
sage these children all too often receive is far removed from the realm of
opportunity and empowerment. Instead of being encouraged to develop
social and academic identities of competence (Manyak 2004), they are
frequently viewed as deficient or lacking in language (the language of
education), possessing only limited vocabulary, handicapped by their poor
communication skills in this language and also, by inference, their poor
cognitive skills. In their 2014 study, Ağırdağ et al. found teachers to hold
very negative views about the use of the Turkish language, believing speak-
ing the mother tongue to be detrimental to academic achievement. The lens
through which such professionals view these children is a distinctly mono-
lingual one. Only the children’s abilities in the language of schooling are
taken into consideration, their linguistic skills in any other languages being
considered as peripheral and of little consequence within the context of
the school.
The consequences of such deficit views are multiple and powerful. The
teacher’s image of the child as incapable and limited manifests itself
through (in)action, attitudes and words, or lack of words, directed towards
the child and/or his/her family. Families are sensitive to teachers’ attitudes
towards their home languages and cultures, be they explicit or implicit.
Negative attitudes towards family languages and cultures may result in
families not feeling welcome at school, alienating them from participation
in school activities and possibly undermining their confidence in the
school’s purported objectives regarding the education of their children.
The powerful effect of teachers’ language beliefs and attitudes can even
extend beyond the walls of the school to the home. Studies have revealed
teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about the use of home languages to be
powerful agents in the maintenance or attrition of home language compe-
tences and practices (Bezcioglu-Göktolga & Yagmur 2018).

Children are not impervious to the reactions and attitudes of the signifi-
cant adults who surround them either. They are remarkably quick to sense
whether their languages and cultures are valued or ignored, judged to be
acceptable or unacceptable, within the context of the school. Numerous
studies have revealed that even from a very early age, children integrate
the value attributed to their languages by their teachers (Gkaintartzi &
Tsokalidou 2011; Moons 2010; Thomauske 2011), sometimes leading to
what has been termed the ‘silencing’ of individuals (Thomauske 2015).
Other studies have recorded the interdiction of home language use at
school and the punishment of children who flout this rule, both in the past
(Broudic 2013) and the present (Pulinx et al. 2017; Young 2014a). In some
cases, these measures can lead to what has been termed selective mutism
(Di Meo et al. 2015), when a child refuses to speak at school. Deprived of
their most important social and cognitive tool, their language, children
struggle to make sense of the situations in which they find themselves at
school. They may experience feelings of isolation and of not belonging to
the class, their peer group and/or the school. Their self-esteem, confidence
and well-being may all bear the scars of such draconian measures as
detailed above (Rezzoug De Plaën et al. 2007). School can become a trial, a
world full of misunderstandings, confusion and, worse still, of rejection and
isolation, as expressed by Sefa below:
Je ne comprenais pas à ce moment-là pourquoi c’était comme ça,

pourquoi l’enseignante faisait ça et pourquoi le turc était interdit etc. . . .
Je, au niveau de mon estime de soi, j’ai vécu quand même, un moment je
me sentais quasiment inutile dans la classe puisque la langue que je
savais bien parler était interdite donc le français je ne savais pas parler,
moi j’étais toujours dans un coin tout seul, isolé et enfin je ne me sentais
pas comme quelqu’un qui faisait partie de la classe, je me sentais exclu.
I didn’t understand at that time why it was like that, why the teacher did
that and why Turkish was forbidden etc. I, from the point of view of my
self-esteem, I still experienced, at times I felt virtually useless in class
since the language that I knew how to speak well was forbidden so I didn’t
know how to speak French, I was always in a corner all alone, isolated and
well I didn’t feel like someone who was part of the class, I felt excluded.
(Sefa, interviewed 16 March 2016, our translation)
15.4 Filling the Void: Misguided Practiced Language

Policies Based on Misconceptions about
(Emergent) Plurilingualism
Teachers, too, struggle in these complex and often uncomfortable situ-

ations, and for many teachers of (emergent) plurilingual learners the

362 ANDREA S. YOUNG
teaching/learning experience is also perceived as a challenge. Their ques-

tions include ‘How do you communicate with these children?’, ‘How do you
include them when you yourself do not speak their languages?’ and
‘Comment tenir compte de toute cette diversité dans son enseignement,
comment s’adapter aux nouveaux venus, tout en évitant de pénaliser le
reste du groupe classe?’ (How can you take into account all this diversity in
your teaching, how can you adapt to the new arrivals while avoiding
penalising the rest of the group?) (Young & Mary 2010: 358). Teachers are
often unsettled by the presence of learners with whom they do not share a
language and overwhelmed by what seems to be the impossible task with
which they have been entrusted: getting these children up to speed and on a
par with the other learners in the classroom. They may, often uncon-
sciously, avoid interaction with the child altogether, unwittingly exacer-
bating the situation, as it is precisely through interaction that the child will
acquire the new language.
Some teachers deal with this challenge by labelling the language of the
learner as a problem: ‘Here, the language is the big problem, the language
plays an important role. That is, they [the pupils] go outside and they
immediately start speaking Turkish. In the hall, again Turkish, with their
friends, again in Turkish, when they quickly have to tell something, again
Turkish. So we are like constantly, all day long: “Speak Dutch with each
other, say it in Dutch”’ (Ağırdağ et al. 2014: 16). The idea of language as a
problem, rather than a right or a resource (Ruiz 1984) is clearly articulated
here, as in other studies (Gkaintartzi et al. 2014; Safford & Drury 2013;
Young 2014b). The solution to this problem, as in the case of Sefa, is often
sought in the prohibition of home languages at school (Ağırdağ et al. 2014,
Jaspers & Rosiers 2019; Young 2014b, 2017). The teacher’s role is conse-
quently reduced to enforcing a restrictive monolingual language policy,
deftly transferring the responsibility for acquiring and developing the
school language from the professionals to the speakers of the home lan-
guages themselves and shifting the language ‘problem’ out of the classroom
into the informal environment, outside the control of the teacher. Seeking
to attribute accountability for the learning and development of the lan-
guage of the school, to the speakers of minority languages is a way of
shirking professional responsibilities and metaphorically washing one’s
hands of the language ‘problem’.
Whilst some teachers actively ban the use of home languages in the
classroom, many more professionals take a more passive stance, simply
ignoring the (emergent) bilingualism (Hélot 2007) of their learners.
Cummins refers to this failure to include learners’ languages and cultures
as a resource for learning as ‘benign neglect’ (Cummins 2019a: 3). Such
policies are in contradiction with the plentiful evidence-based research
pointing to the importance of including learners’ languages and cultures
in the education process (see National Academies of Sciences, Engineering
and Medicine 2017 for a recent review). Yet practiced language policies

(Bonacina-Pugh 2020), which include the learners’ languages as resources,

although documented by researchers (Beiler 2020; Cummins 2019b;
Jordens et al. 2018; Mary & Young 2017), remain rare in mainstream
classrooms where the language of the school is still frequently regarded
as the only legitimate language for learning.
The reasons why teachers forbid, ignore or neglect the use of home
languages in learning are complex and composite. A lack of training in
and knowledge about the plurilingual child’s language development and
insufficient language awareness or, more precisely, critical multilingual
awareness (García 2017; Mary & Young 2018a; Putjata 2018) on the part of
professionals is frequently cited as a major underlying cause of such mis-
guided practiced language policies. When questioned about their experi-
ences with emergent plurilingual learners, educators in a variety of
contexts, from pre-schools in Europe (Michel & Kuiken 2014) to higher
education institutions in Australia (Moloney & Saltmarsh 2016), still confess
to being uncomfortable, unprepared and/or unaware concerning issues of
language development (Cajkler & Hall 2012; Conteh & Riasat 2014; Mary &
Young 2020; OECD 2019; Paulsrud 2020).
In addition to the dearth of professional development proposed to meet
these needs, ideological and contextual factors also undoubtedly play a
significant role in teacher cognition: what teachers think, know and believe
(Borg 2003). In France, as in many other contexts, the monolingual habitus
(Gogolin 2008) of schools, with its roots firmly intertwined with the history
of nation-building and political control (Kremnitz 2013; Safran & Laponce
2014), manifesting itself in uniform linguistic landscapes or schoolscapes
(Menken et al. 2018) and in sink-or-swim, so-called bain de langue (lan-
guage bath), direct methods and submersion approaches to acquiring the
language of education, is still very prevalent (Young 2014a). The exclusive
use of the language of the school, the language in which the teacher is most
comfortable, may create an illusion of control, linguistic homogeneity and
equality from the perspective of the latter. However, for the emergent
plurilingual, prevented from using her/his whole linguistic repertoire the
experience is often one of linguistic insecurity and impoverished learning
opportunities. Many professionals believe such exclusive practices to be
legitimate, confusing the necessity to learn the language of schooling with
its blanket imposition. The analogy of teaching someone how to swim by
throwing them into the water (with no floats for support) is often used to
highlight the dramatic and inappropriate nature of such an approach.
Remarks such as ‘Je pense qu’il ne faut que s’exprimer en français avec
lui, même si on connaît sa langue. Il faut que l’enfant baigne complètement
dans cette langue (le français)’ (I think you should only speak to him in
French, even if you know his language. The child has to be completely
immersed in this language [French]; Young & Mary 2010: 357) reveal the
uninformed nature of beliefs about language learning which are more akin
to submersion than immersion.

364 ANDREA S. YOUNG
Such convictions about how children acquire language are often firmly
entrenched, the products of deep-rooted, persistent language ideologies
situated in specific social, historic and political contexts (Blommaert 2011;
Blackledge & Pavlenko 2001) and closely related to questions of identity
construction and relations of power (Kroskrity 2010; Pavlenko 2002). For a
more in-depth discussion of beliefs, attitudes and ideologies, see Mary &
Young (2020). Let it suffice to say here that language ideologies not only
concern the beliefs and attitudes that individuals hold about language but
also the practices through which these beliefs are enacted (Gal 1998, cited
in Razfar 2012). Teachers’ beliefs, knowledge and attitudes towards their
pupils’ plurilingualism are not only complex, multi-factorial and often
ambiguous (Hall & Cunningham 2020; Jaspers & Rosiers 2019), but they
are also extremely powerful. The power to accept or reject home languages,
to recognise the linguistic and cultural resources of (emergent) plurilingual
learners and encourage the use of them or to disempower and deprive
learners of the support of a more familiar language, engendering frustra-
tion, confusion and linguistic insecurity and effectively impeding the learn-
ing process, as Sefa articulates below:
. . . il fallait parler français absolument donc je me forçais à prononcer

certains mots en français, et le turc n’était pas accepté alors que c’était ma
langue maternelle donc le turc était mis dehors, n’était pas accepté, était
interdit et rentré à la maison c’était la langue qui dominait et cette fois-ci
c’était le français qui n’était pas trop parlé parce que ma mère ne parlait
pas le français. Mon père parle le français, il a fait des études en France,
mais il rentrait tard le soir donc je ne parlais pas trop le français à la
maison. Donc c’était un va-et-vient qui était incompréhensible pour moi.
. . . It was absolutely necessary to speak French so I forced myself to

pronounce certain words in French, and Turkish was not accepted even
though it was my mother tongue so Turkish was kicked out, was not
accepted, was forbidden and back home it was the dominant language
and this time it was French which wasn’t spoken very much because my
mother didn’t speak French, my father speaks French, he studied in
France, but he would come home late in the evening so I didn’t speak
much French at home, so I was moving back and forth and it was
incomprehensible for me.
15.5 (Dis)Empowering (Dis)Connections: The Construction

of Identities of (In)Competence
The disempowering practiced language policies enforced by Sefa’s teacher

not only deprived him of his most powerful cognitive tool, his home

language, undoubtedly doing little to help him make sense of his new
environment, but they also drove a division between his home and his
school life, negating the knowledge and skills gained in the family setting
and disrupting the construction of an enriched, harmonious identity of
competence (Manyak 2004). If a learner’s home language is not at the very
least acknowledged by the school, by the teachers, by the learner’s peers,
and preferably named (correctly), if the learner’s competences in this lan-
guage are not recognised and respected, how can the learner feel a sense of
belonging at school (Dusi & Steinbach 2016) without negating a fundamen-
tal part of her/himself? Research conducted in Belgium (Van Der Wildt et al.
2017) has revealed that many dual heritage, plurilingual children do not
feel that they belong at school. In our increasingly complex, multilingual
and multicultural contexts, allowing ALL children to live their multiple,
congruent identities in safe and welcoming spaces is vital for the
development and well-being of these children. In addition, a feeling of
belonging is a vital component for the development of a socially just,
democratic society to which each individual feels empowered to contribute
legitimately.
Experienced, informed teachers seek to better know the children in their
classrooms and to put them at the centre of their learning, building on the
knowledge, skills and aptitudes specific to each individual child, including
their linguistic and cultural knowledge and skills. Prior learning acts as
both an anchor and a springboard towards further learning (see Jessner
2006). The funds of knowledge (González et al. 2005) acquired in the home
are both fundamental to who the child is and essential components of the
education process, acting as the foundations on which new skills and
knowledge (Vygotsky 1997) can be securely constructed. When a child
comes to school speaking a home language which is different from the
language of the school, it is therefore vital that the professionals present in
the school environment take this essential element into account, as it is
through this language that the child’s skills and knowledge have been
constructed and nurtured and in which they are firmly embedded.
Unfortunately, this prior learning is not always taken into account by
teachers and teaching assistants, who may be well-meaning but are not
always informed and experienced in how to help children to transfer their
knowledge from one language to another. This appears to have been the
case for Sefa; his funds of knowledge, his competences in the Turkish
language, were ignored, worse ‘kicked out’. The force of the words used
by this young man, almost 20 years later, bear witness to the perceived
violence of this prohibition of his mother tongue, the language used with
him by his mother and other family members.
The home language is closely associated with the family members who
speak it and consequently is intrinsically bound up with identity construc-
tion and loaded with affect, as is poignantly expressed by Jason, a learner of
Chinese as a heritage language: ‘My home language is Chinese. My parents

366 ANDREA S. YOUNG
are from China. They praised me, scolded me, all in Chinese. . . . My Chinese
is really bad. I can’t read and I can only write my name. But when I think of
Chinese, I think of my mom, dad, and home. It is the language of my home,
and my heart’ (He 2010: 66). Having the language of your heart kicked out
of the classroom is certainly not a pleasant experience and can be a painful
one for some learners.
However, such strong feelings of attachment, when harnessed, can prove
to be powerful sources of motivation for not only language learning, but
also for academic and literacy engagement (see Cummins & Early 2011 for
their work on multilingual identity texts, for example). When learners are
encouraged to use their entire linguistic repertoires to support their learn-
ing (see Beiler 2020; Jordens et al. 2018; Mary & Young 2017 for examples of
translanguaging used as a pedagogical tool) they become empowered
instead of silenced. Simple language awareness activities such as drawing
or writing about personal language biographies, conducting a school lan-
guage survey or mapping the linguistic landscape of the local area (see the
LoCALL European project for examples) can provide an opportunity for
learners and teachers to discover, share and appreciate the wealth of lin-
guistic experiences and skills of a school population. Such activities can
change a school’s relationship with learners’ languages, (Simon & Maire
Sandoz 2015), allowing plurilingual children to take pride in their linguistic
competences rather than feeling ashamed and insecure about them. When
the learner becomes the teacher and the expert (see, for example, the
excellent webpages entitled ‘Language of the Month’ produced by
Newbury Park Primary School (n.d.), where individual pupils showcase
their language skills in short video clips), these languages are no longer
viewed as a problem but become valuable resources for learning for the
whole learning community.
All the aforementioned examples illustrate how challenges can be trans-
formed into opportunities. Teachers who realise the importance of making
these connections between languages, between cultures and between home
and school strive actively to co-create overlapping spaces, with the help of
families, which connect home and school, where both the children and
their family members feel valued, accepted and empowered (see for
example Audras & Leclaire 2016; Cummins 2019b; Faneca et al. 2016;
Hélot & Young 2006; Mary & Young, 2018b). This ‘collaborative creation of
power . . . amplifies rather than silences minoritised students’ power of self-
expression regardless of their current level of proficiency in the dominant
school language’ (Cummins 2021). Instead of allowing the mismatch
between the resources, skills and experiences of the learner and her/his
family and those of the teacher and school to spread fear, panic and
sometimes even shame amongst those involved, these skills and knowledge
can be shared, admired and acknowledged amongst the whole school com-
munity (learners, teachers and parents) as a source of learning and of pride.
Instead of teachers feeling destabilised and unsupported faced with silent,

confused and sometimes distressed learners, simply by taking an interest in

the languages and cultures of the families they work with and inviting the
linguistic and cultural wealth of the local community into the classroom,
professionals can become agents of change, making a huge impact on the
well-being and learning of all the learners in their classrooms. Families
hitherto excluded from the education process, due to linguistic and/or
cultural insecurity can also feel included and empowered to contribute to
the learning of all the learners and the teachers, as in the language and
cultural awareness project which was so successful in the primary school in
Didenheim, Alsace (Hélot & Young 2006).
15.6 The Power of Language Mediation: Joining

Forces and Pooling Resources for Mutual
Support and Benefit
The language of the classroom may be considered as the most valuable

commodity in the school context (Bourdieu 1991). It commands undeni-
able power, the power to access further learning, to acquire knowledge
and skills, to obtain qualifications and ultimately for a learner to more
fully realise her/his potential in the socio-economic context in which s/he
lives and works. ‘[T]he ability of students to gather linguistic capital is
dependent mostly on the education they receive, and thus schools play a
major role in regulating language as capital and mediating access to it’
(García 2009b: 12, our italics). In the case of (emergent) plurilingual
learners, this mediation requires bridges between the home language
and the language of formal education to be built. Bridges which are co-
constructed by teachers (with their pedagogical know-how and knowledge
of the school language) and families (with their home language skills) are
built more rapidly, with greater ease and are more likely to stand the test
of time.
Families cannot, however, initiate and organise school projects such as
the ones mentioned in the previous section, it is neither their role nor their
responsibility. Yet, if they are invited by education professionals to partici-
pate in projects to which they can contribute their linguistic and cultural
knowledge and skills, they are often delighted to do so. Nevertheless, some
families, for a variety of reasons (linguistic, cultural, personal experience of
school) may not feel comfortable in the classroom and most feel they lack
the professional competences and institutional legitimacy to propose learn-
ing activities within the school context. They could also be too busy to
spend time at school or struggling to make a living. Teachers need to be
aware of their own agency in the initiation of this process and to take steps
towards multilingual families by reassuring and engaging with them.
This is not always an easy step for teachers to take, given the lack of
common ground shared by teachers and multilingual families. Most

368 ANDREA S. YOUNG
teachers do not have a migrant background, are not bilingual and do not
belong to a minority group. In addition to raising linguistic and cultural
awareness, teacher education should also address issues relating to home–
school relations, sensitise teachers to the diversity of family contexts with
which they are often unfamiliar and share examples of successful home–
school educational partnerships with them (see Hélot & Young 2006;
Mary & Young 2017, for example). Professional development which seeks
to nurture confidence and a sense of duty to engage with families with
whom teachers may feel less comfortable is vital to supporting such
actions. The initiative to build supportive home–school relations lies firmly
within the remit of those entrusted with the responsibility for teaching and
learning and viewed as the legitimate guardians of education. If teachers
can be supported and encouraged to take steps towards linguistically and
culturally diverse families and to make connections between the familiar
and the new, the languages of the home and of the school, learners will
benefit from living a more interconnected, meaningful formal learning
experience and both their families and the teaching staff will find mutual
support and reassurance.
The use and consequent legitimisation of the (emergent) plurilingual’s
language in classroom activities by family members (singing a song, telling/
reading a story) and endorsed by the participation of the classroom teacher
can legitimise the learner’s language and present him/her in a different,
more powerful, light in the classroom. Through authorising the use of
home languages in the classroom, emergent plurilingual learners are
placed on a more equal footing with their peers and linguistic capital is
redistributed in the classroom, thereby encouraging greater acceptance and
understanding of diversity. Menken & García (2010) have referred to
teachers as language arbiters due to their strategic position as interpreters
and negotiators of language policies in situ or practiced language policies
(Bonacina-Pugh 2020).
It is incumbent upon the classroom teacher to assume the role of lan-
guage arbiter. The teacher wields the power to recognise or ignore, to
endorse or to exclude the plurilingual learner’s linguistic repertoire.
Returning to Sefa’s situation, we note how not only his first pre-school
teacher, but also his subsequent teachers, all failed to assume their roles as
language arbiters.
Quand je venais à la maison c’était, le turc était prédominant et j’ai vécu

ça pendant plusieurs années jusqu’à peut-être au CE1, l’année de CE CP
c’était encore difficile jusqu’au CE1 j’ai vécu ça et c’est très difficile à
vivre je pense pour des élèves qui sont encore
fragiles psychologiquement.
When I went home it was, Turkish was predominant and that’s how
I lived for several years until perhaps the second year of primary school,
the second, first year of primary school it was still difficult until the

second year I lived like that and it’s a very difficult situation I think for
pupils who are still fragile psychologically.
Sefa reiterates the difficulty of the situation for the young child, but we
also learn that this situation was not just an uncomfortable, but temporary,
short lived passage of his life; it actually lasted for several years (two years
of pre-school and two years of primary school). Sefa is unfortunately not
alone in this situation. Many emergent plurilinguals, in spite of attending
public pre-schools for a three-year period, still struggle to communicate in
the language of education (French) upon entering primary school.
Furthermore, many professionals working in multicultural, multilingual
settings feel unable to respond effectively to this challenge.
A recent OECD report (OECD 2019) confirms that only 35 per cent of
teachers across the OECD countries are prepared during teacher education
programmes for working in such contexts, with France scoring the lowest
(12 per cent). Yet, in our interconnected, highly mobile world, teachers and
support staff are working in increasingly multilingual and multicultural
contexts for which they require specific training. Situations like the one
described by Sefa call for professional soft skills and attitudes which
teacher education programmes all too often neglect (Cajkler & Hall 2012;
Jensen 2010; Schwartz et al. 2010). All classrooms are language classrooms,
given that language is the vehicle for communicating our thoughts, ideas,
instructions and explanations, and therefore all teachers need to develop
language and intercultural awareness, to be familiar with linguistically
appropriate practices (Chumak-Horbatsch 2019) and to become language
arbiters.
Admittedly, no two children and no two teachers are alike. There is a
myriad of factors which combine to influence any given learning situation.
From the learner’s perspective, the focus of this chapter, the family’s socio-
economic status, both actual and previous (as it must be born in mind that
members of families who have migrated do not always secure jobs of equal
socio-economic status in the new country due to varying qualifications, lost
or unrecognised documentation and lower competency in the new lan-
guage), their educational experience, the family project (to stay in the
country of current residence or to move on to another country) and
the language repertoires of the family members will all play a role in the
learner’s adaptation to formal learning in the new context. A learner’s
individual character, previous experience of formal learning, own language
repertoire and level of literacy or pre-literacy will also enter into the
equation. However, it is the attitude, vision and approach of the teaching
professional, within the constraints of any national or regional language
education policies, which will play a decisive role in whether the learner’s
(emergent) plurilingualism will be stifled or supported. If the teacher’s
knowledge about language acquisition, plurilingualism and multiliteracy

370 ANDREA S. YOUNG
is limited, how can s/he take on the role of language arbiter? If teacher
education providers continue to ignore the central role of teacher language
awareness in classrooms, plurilingual learners will continue to struggle to
make meaning, just as Sefa did. Without classroom based activities which
seek to make connections between home and school languages, cultures
and people, the full linguistic, academic and personal potential of learners
will sadly remain untapped.
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16
Literacy Development
in the Multilingual Child:
From Speaking to Writing
Iliana Reyes
In many communities around the world, speakers learn and speak several
languages, so multilingualism and multiliteracy are normative. In fact, it is
well documented that bilingualism and multilingualism are more common
than monolingualism, despite conditions that might be predominant in a
particular country (Baker 2011). Consequently, there has been increasing
awareness of and advocacy for the value of multiculturalism in socioeco-
nomic advancement for societies (UNESCO 2007).
Although research on multilingualism has been increasing, the focus has
been on the acquisition of second and third spoken languages, followed by
the acquisition of literacy in a second language of a foreign language among
adults (Blackledge & Creese 2010; Li 2000). There is still a great need for
research on the writing development of multilingual children and on how they
develop various competencies in the multiple languages they speak. In
consequence, this chapter reviews and expands on recent studies of emer-
gent writing development in young children learning two or more lan-
guages. It also contributes to understanding the conceptual and theoretical
foundation of the development of multilingual writing and the impact of the
print environment on the child’s development of multiliteracies.
This chapter explores on the process by which the multilingual child
becomes an emergent writer. Previous studies (e.g., Baker 2011; Kabuto
2011; Kenner & Gregory 2003) have shown that, given the opportunity,
speakers can develop fluency in their native language as well a second
and third language, or as is the case in Europe, develop multilingual
competencies in thinking, speaking, reading, and writing due to daily
exposure. Using a psycholinguistic and sociocultural perspective, we focus
on the complex dynamics of how children develop emergent writing
competencies and how these skills mold the foundation for their
multiple literacies.
As part of the complexity surrounding the topic and definitions, we must
consider and understand the multilingual context, specifically how

Literacy Development in the Multilingual Child 377
children engage in literacy practices as part of their daily experiences and

immediate contexts at home, at school, and in their communities.
Although no correlation between societal multilingualism and individual
multiliteracy development has been identified, we can explore how expos-
ure to and interaction with multiple linguistic systems and environments
support emergent writing in young children. Some questions that emerge
from this body of research follow: Are young children able to become fluent
writers in several languages? What determines the development of this
ability? How do children utilize literacy resources from their various lan-
guages? How are these multiliteracy resources reflected in the writing of
the multilingual child?
The chapter begins with a review of foundational studies on how monolin-
gual children develop emergent literacy, then moves to explore how they
develop multiliteracy by learning to interpret symbols and icons in their
immediate contexts. Next is an exploration of what it means for children to
develop literacy in multiple languages. The research shows children find
ways to experience and construct meaning from their local scripts in each of
their multiple languages. Studies presented in this chapter show children
can interpret symbols in several different scripts, and they find strategies to
navigate multiple languages in their daily activities (Herdina & Jessner 2002;
Kabuto 2011; Kenner & Gregory 2003). Last comes a discussion on how young
children’s multilingualism and multiliteracy development prepares them to
situate themselves as competent speakers in their communities.
In recent studies, “multilingualism” has referred to the acquisition of
two or more than two languages (Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester 2000;
Stavans & Hoffmann 2015). Hornberger (2003) has argued that bilingual
competence is best understood when situated in a social, educational, or
linguistic context and as a set of continua in which an individual’s language
ability changes constantly depending on the educational and sociolinguistic
environment. Sociolinguistic environments encompass the language and
literacies learned and used within a family and community and, in some
cases, supported in the educational system (Gregory et al. 2004). Here,
childhood multilingualism is defined as exposure to more than two lan-
guages in a continuum from speaking and thinking to reading and writing
(Stavans & Hoffmann 2015).
16.1 From Speaking to Literacy
Sociocultural and socio-constructivist studies of preschool children have

repeatedly shown that children develop environmental print awareness and
knowledge about their immediate writing system even before they enter
school (Ferreiro & Teberosky 1982). Children integrate their existing know-
ledge with environmental cues to interpret and make sense of print in signs,
logos, product labels, and other similar venues (Clay 1975; Ferreiro &

378 ILIANA REYES
Teberosky 1982; Goodman & Altwerger 1981; Teale & Sulzby 1986). In addition
to developing environmental print awareness through natural interactions
and spontaneous literacy events, children are exposed to multilingual print
and digital information that aid their print knowledge development.
Specifically in regard to books, young children develop concepts of print and
literacy through these multiple experiences. They also learn a variety of
conventions about books, such as how a book is held, directionality of print,
and one-to-one correspondence between letter and sound (Clay 2001).
From a Piagetian perspective, research on emergent literacy has con-
firmed that children learn at a very young age about the characteristics of
print and writing in their immediate environment (Ferreiro 2003; Goodman
1990). Goodman (1990) argued that even though reading and writing are
complex processes, children demonstrate an incredibly organic approach to
engaging in these processes and becoming competent readers and writers.
Through exposure to print, literacy experiences, and stories they share with
their families, children begin making sense of words and of their world
(Freire 1985).
Seminal work has shown that from an early age children can distinguish
written texts from non-textual images by focusing on certain characteris-
tics of print, such the quantity concept or nominal realism (Ferreiro &
Teberosky 1979; Tolchinsky 2003). With increased exposure to print and
literacy events, children move to what Ferreiro and Teberosky (1982) have
called levels (niveles in the original Spanish) of emergent writing. Level
1 begins with children making no distinction between writing and drawing;
in level 2, children make a distinction between writing and drawing, and
can write a fixed number and variety of characters (often using the letters
of their own names). By level 3, they use a letter to stand for a syllable, and
for Spanish speakers, vowels are stable and conventional. When children
begin to move from syllabic to alphabetic representations, adding more
consonants to their proto-words, they reach level 4. Finally, in level 5,
children notice and begin recognizing characters within syllables, segment-
ing words and phrases (including subject and predicate), making ortho-
graphic distinctions between letters, and decoding successfully the
phonology of their language (see Ferreiro & Teberosky 1982 for details).
Thus, young children begin making meaning of writing and drawing cor-
respondences from print to sound to meaning. Moreover, children develop
oracy, and writing literacies corresponding to the linguistic landscapes they
are exposed to (Blommaert 2013), and assign social utility and sociolinguis-
tic function to each specific writing system during communication with
those around them (Dyson 2003).
This foundational research with monolingual children supports the
inquiry of how multilingual children learn and develop writing across
several languages. However, such research opens up another universe of
questions with regard to what and how findings from monolinguals apply
and can be transferred theoretically and methodologically to bilinguals and

multilinguals. Researchers have already identified significant differences

between the ways bilinguals versus multilinguals function in the acquisi-
tion process (Olshtain & Nissim-Amitai 2004).
As this chapter and others in this volume show, a trilingual is neither the
sum of three monolinguals (Herdina & Jessner 2002) nor of a bilingual plus
a monolingual (Stavans & Hoffmann 2015). Following this logic,
multilingual literacy is not the same as three emergent writers in one;
instead, we must analyze the various literacy skills that are present in
writing one language and how those skills are influenced, and often
enriched, by writing skills in the other languages through translanguaging
practices. In a diverse linguistic context, Bloch and Alexander (2003), whose
work is situated in multilingual South Africa, caution that we cannot
assume “most children will have come across written language in person-
ally and socially meaningful ways as they enter primary school” (p. 101).
Even in urban contexts around the world, there are children whose family
interactions and literacy development focus on the dominant language.
A definition of literacy is key to understanding the theoretical stance that
guides this review. Literacy includes not only the concept and ability to code
and decode during reading and writing, but in the broader sense and from a
new literacies studies (NLS) perspective, it encompasses the local and com-
munity literacy knowledge and practices connected to social, cultural, reli-
gious, political, and economic circumstances that speakers deploy to
construct meaning from print and text (Street 2001). For multilingual
children who are developing multiliteracy, we expand this definition to
include the literacy knowledge the children have in their multiple lan-
guages. This literacy knowledge, to read and write in each of the languages,
is what allows children to participate and become critical thinkers in our
societies, providing access to opportunities they otherwise would not have
(Bloch & Alexander 2003; Kalman & Reyes 2016).
On one end of the multilingual/multiliterate spectrum are children who
experience simultaneous multilingualism, or what some have called multi-
lingualism as a first language (Barnes 2006). On the other end are children
with sequential multilingualism, often immigrants or refugees required to
learn the hegemonic language in the country where they settle. Their
experiences are very different from those of children who grow up with
multiple languages from birth and are privileged to attend educational
environments where multiliteracy is encouraged (de Mejía 2002; Hélot &
de Mejía 2008). A child at any point on this linguistic continuum has a
unique trajectory of multiliteracy development (Hornberger 2003). The
spread of multilingualism worldwide has generated a new reality of literacy
in many communities. As Street states, “There might be, in any one society,
many varieties of literacy, including uses of literacy ‘for storytelling and
reading . . . for immediate functions and purposes in the home and work,
and for leisure and pleasure purposes and for personal exploration as in
diaries and private books’” (Street 1988b, as cited in Hornberger 2003: 12).

380 ILIANA REYES
16.2 The Intersection of Language and Writing
Studies have confirmed that children who are exposed to two or more
languages are able to coordinate and calibrate their language competence
(Gort & Sembiante 2015; Kenner 2000; Reyes 2012). As they navigate their
local landscape, children learn, at a young age, rules of where and with
whom to use each of their languages (Hymes 1972). In order to understand
multiliteracy better, we must consider its various forms as revealed in
multilingual children within unique multilingual contexts.
The development of multiliteracy is grounded in the fact that when
multiple languages coexist, each has specific social functions at the com-
munity, regional, and national levels. Code-switching is one language-
contact phenomenon that exemplifies the linguistic and cognitive inter-
actions between languages. For young multilingual children, code-switch-
ing is a unique and critical skill that they use consciously to achieve
particular conversational goals (Ervin-Tripp & Reyes 2005; Martínez-
Roldán & Sayer 2006). Competent multilinguals switch between linguistic
codes, in both spoken and written modalities. They can switch languages
with ease at different points between and within their conversations.
Recent research on writing development has identified translanguaging as
a phenomenon that involves interconnections between and across languages.
The concept of translanguaging is a step beyond code-switching, which
conceptualizes the two languages as separate systems (or codes) that are
“switched,” as the term indicates, for communicative purposes. According
to Velasco and García (2014: 7), translanguaging “stresses the flexible and
meaningful actions through which bilinguals select features in their lin-
guistic repertoire in order to communicate appropriately.” Within the
writing modality, translanguaging, happens for children by incorporating
their various linguistic systems, negotiating between languages and writing
“rules” to become efficient writers.
Gort (2006) and colleagues (Gort & Sembiante 2015) have identified how
young children in the classroom use their native language as a resource to
structure new sentences in their second language. For example, Jennifer, a
Spanish-dominant first-grader who attends a Spanish-English two-way
bilingual program, applies Spanish syntax and structure when writing
English sentences in a journal exercise (from Gort 2006: 339).
Jennifer’s sentence Standard English orthography

(1) We salovoraete the bordae of my We celebrated the birthday of my
mom. mom.
(2) We whata to the housu of my We went to the house of my
ands. aunts.
In this example of translanguaging, Jennifer invents English spellings

based on the sound–symbol associations she has developed in her native

language. Other instances are Frayday for “Friday,” lucat for “look out,” and
tu for “too” (Gort 2006: 339). Jennifer invents spellings using a phonological
transliteration of the way she pronounces the words in English. Her pro-
ductions illustrate how multilingual emergent writers draw on the
resources in their linguistic repertoires to process and structure their
developing multiliteracy abilities.
Another context where such complex linguistic interactions occur is in
South Africa, where there are 11 official languages, including English,
Afrikaans, and the indigenous languages Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Pedi,
Sotho, Tsonga, Swati, Ndebele, and Venda. In some schools, students learn
the most prevalent local language in the classroom, but English continues
to be the hegemonic language for all official functions outside the school.
So, even when the government has made the effort to support all official
languages, in most places “parity of esteem and equitable usage” in
the public domain grants a higher status to English as a lingua franca
(Bloch & Alexander 2003: 92). Thus, South African children who speak an
official language other than English as their native language (e.g., Zulu,
Xhosa, Tswana) face challenges in learning and maintaining their native
language.
Bloch and Alexander conducted a qualitative research study in one of the
few South African elementary schools that promoted multilingualism.
They illustrated how the languages shifted dynamically for each speaker,
depending on his or her individual multiliteracy continuum. For example,
teachers reported that in many ways English seemed like it permeated “the
air we breathe” in the classroom (Bloch & Alexander 2003: 99). So, even
when the government afforded public space for all official languages,
English prevailed in the classroom as the hegemonic, high-status language.
In this study, the teachers designed a series of literacy projects, including
journal and letter exchanges, but they were challenged by a lack of mater-
ials in non-English languages. For example, when they asked their elemen-
tary students to use local community newspapers or advertisements, they
soon realized that most of this material was printed in English.
Consequently, the children had to shift their writing to English only.
Alternative assignments, include one where children use their various
languages as part of journal writing. In another exercise the lead teacher
invited the children to write and exchange letters with researchers and
other community members who, the children were told were multilingual.
This activity allowed the children to make intentional choices to use non-
English languages. Zindi, an 8-year-old girl who was bilingual in Xhosa and
English, selected when and how to use each language, writing the letter in
Figure 16.1.
In the letter exchange activity, native Xhosa speakers showed more
advanced competence in speaking, understanding, and writing their stories
compared to English or Afrikaans native speakers. The authors describe and
attribute these children’s multilingualism as “a developing fluency and

382 ILIANA REYES
Figure 16.1 Zindi’s bilingual letter in Xhosa and English (originally published Bloch &
Alexander 2003)
willingness to engage in written communication” in two or more languages

over a period of time (Bloch & Alexander 2003: 105).
For complex linguistic situations, the bilingual and biliteracy continua
framework (Hornberger 2003) could be a way to explain and integrate the
challenges, opportunities, and level of access to resources children face in
fostering and maintaining their multilingualism. Similarly, Kalman and Reyes
(2016) described the conditions at school and in the community in Mexico and
other Latin American countries, documenting that children’s literature and
even examples of print are scarce in the minoritized and marginalized lan-
guages. In other multilingual communities, such as Kenya (Lisanza 2016)
and Mexico (Rodríguez-Cruz in press; Reyes 2016), where there is very limited
access to print in certain of the local indigenous languages, it is very difficult
for a child to achieve balanced multiliteracy across children’s languages.
The South Africa project is exemplary in that despite negative political
attitudes and limited print resources in Xhosa, both English and Xhosa
speakers developed concepts about print that related to both languages

through classroom activities. Similarly, Valencia and Reyes (2014) observed

that although Spanish was more widely available in print, Náhuatl/Spanish
emergent bilinguals were able to develop print concepts in both languages.
Náhuatl is the second most widely spoken indigenous language in Mexico, after
Mayan. Despite support for indigenous bilingual education in Mexico, speakers
rarely achieve literacy competence in indigenous languages. Equally important
in this context, teachers perceived an ideological shift among teachers, fam-
ilies, and children whereby bilingual instruction introduced democracy and
the struggle to achieve democracy into these children’s classrooms.
16.3 Multilingualism, Translanguaging,

and Metalinguistic Awareness
In an influential study, Reyes and colleagues (Reyes & Azuara 2008; Reyes
et al. 2006) confirmed that children learning two or more languages
develop knowledge and metalinguistic awareness about print in all of their
languages. They examined the emergent biliteracy of 12 Spanish-English
bilingual preschoolers in the United States. Using quantitative data from
formal assessments of environmental print awareness, book handling, and
concepts of print, they explored the relationship between the young chil-
dren’s emergent biliteracy and experience in a multilingual community.
From emergent literacy tasks (reading and writing) and spontaneous inter-
actions, the researchers learned that young bilingual children begin to
understand that Spanish and English (and other languages around them)
are written and represented in distinct ways. However, young children (4-
and 5-year-olds) do not necessarily come up with the same hypothesis to a
particular problem, such as identifying the language in which a specific
sample of print is written.
In one case study (Reyes & Azuara 2008), one of the researchers interacted
with Sercan, a 4-year-old simultaneous Spanish-English bilingual. As part of
the qualitative documentation for the study, the boy was invited to draw
and write a note for the researcher. When he finished drawing and labeling
some figures, he turned to the researcher, pointed to “HMLO” on his
drawing, and spoke a popular phrase in Spanish “chango marrano” (dirty
monkey) to explain and “read” his writing. This phrase is often spoken to
young children in playful and to share rhyming patterns in Mexico.
When Sercan was asked what language the phrase was “written” in, he
replied “en español” (in Spanish), and when prompted to write the same phrase
in English, he proceeded to write the same phrase as “hmlo” in small lower-
case letters (see Figure 16.2). Sercan knew that in order to write the same
content in two different languages, he needed to differentiate it in some way.
Sercan has developed a hypothesis by which he marks his two languages
by using uppercase letters to write in Spanish and lowercase letters to write
in English, displaying a metalinguistic awareness that languages are

384 ILIANA REYES
CHANGO MARRANO (Sp)
chango marrano (english)
Figure 16.2 Sercan’s bilingual representation of Chango-Marano
Figure 16.3 Sercan’s multilingual representation of A-B-C song in English and Spanish
represented differently (Reyes & Azuara 2008). During a later home visit,
when invited to draw and write, Sercan shared his emergent multilingual
writing of the popular children’s A-B-C song in English, demonstrating his
knowledge about words, songs, and music (see Figure 16.3).

Figure 16.3 shows that Sercan uses a string of letters with other multi-
modal symbols (music notes) to represent his thinking. In speaking,
Sercan switches between English and Spanish depending on his listener
and, in this case, his writing corresponds to the song he is representing.
When asked if he wrote in English or Spanish, he replied his writing (in
capital letters) was in Spanish. Then, the researcher invited him to “write
the same thing” in English. He said, “Así, con las chiquitas” (“Like this, with
the little ones”), and wrote the same letters in lowercase (as he did in
Figure 16.2). In addition to recognizing that languages are different,
Sercan also knows that the notations in the writing systems (even if based
on the same alphabet) are also different, in the sense that they represent
different sound-print connection. Explicitly, he knows and uses different
symbol systems to represent “written” songs in different languages, as
illustrated in Figure 16.3. His use of several linguistic and notational
systems together make up the repertoire of not only linguistic but also
procedural, semantic, and multimodal knowledge required to represent
and bridge the oral and the written forms he is developing. This case study
demonstrates the complex and unique evolution of young children’s mul-
timodal and multilingual literacy as they actively construct a valid form of
meaning-making and interpretation of their understanding of their
multiliteracy knowledge and practices.
Similarly, Moore (2010) followed multilingual Mandarin-speaking chil-
dren growing up in Canada. She documented how 6- and 7-year-olds
enrolled in a local early French immersion program learned to write
Mandarin (heritage language), English, and French as part of their family
and school multilingual interactions. These families, who self-identified as
Chinese, shared a strong commitment to develop their children’s multilin-
gualism and multiliteracy.
In an emergent literacy activity, the children were asked to draw the
Chinese characters for animals (e.g., horse) and were asked to label each of
the animal images (nouns) in their second and third languages as part of a
journal activity. Mirroring the findings of Reyes and Azuara, Moore (2010)
found that these multilingual children had a high metalinguistic awareness
of their emerging writing and an ability to transfer lexical knowledge from
one language to another. Specifically, their writing showed linguistic trans-
ference from French to English (given that these languages share same
writing system), and when asked, the children could explain the strategy
they used and their reasons for using it providing evidence for their meta-
linguistic awareness of the differences and the similarities between the
different scripts. A 6-year-old participant described his experience with
various scripts as follows (Moore, 2010: 332):
. . . when you write in English there is no sound. you just break the word.
they are pretty different. but this and this [shows his writing of mother
and mama] is pretty similar [. . .] because [Chinese] it’s not like/ it’s just

386 ILIANA REYES
like a drawing but instead it’s words. it looks like it’s a drawing but no/
and these [English] are just letters so [. . .]
(Adr. [C096, m, henan, e, f])
Children’s drawings and visual images provided unique scaffolding for

their expression and hypotheses on emergent writing and labeling objects
and nouns. These particular multilingual Canadian children went on to
explain “that a lot of effort was needed to master enough Chinese charac-
ters to be able to read, while they considered English and French easy to
learn” (Moore 2010: 333). Furthermore, each of the ways participant chil-
dren expressed their language and literacy competences in writing allowed
them to connect to the language they used with relatives at home or
teachers at school. Although the topic of literacy and cultural identity is
beyond the scope of this chapter, it is important to establish that the
children in Moore’s study displayed strong awareness of their multilingual
practices with their families and with their friends at school.
Research by Stavans and colleagues further illuminates children’s multi-
lingual emergent writing. From a socio-constructive perspective, Stavans
(2014) observed how emergent multilingual and monolingual children
make hypothesis about writing and discriminate between writing systems.
The participants in this study were kindergarteners from Ethiopian immi-
grant families, growing up in Israel. The children were exposed to Hebrew
in the community and school, to Amharic in the community and at home,
and to Arabic and English indirectly in print and occasional spoken modal-
ities at the national level and in the media. Due to the national language
policy, the linguistic landscape primarily consists of Hebrew, Arabic, and
Roman scripts, while Amharic script appears mostly in the homes, commu-
nity, and neighborhood shops.
Following a Piagetian approach, Amharic-Hebrew multilingual and mono-
lingual Hebrew-speaking children (exposed only to Hebrew at home) were
interviewed to explore the various ways they made judgments about alpha-
betic and nonalphabetic representations and how they did or did not pay
attention to concepts of quantity and quality in recognizing a string of symbols
as being readable or not (Ferreiro & Teberosky 1982). Through a series of
cognitive tasks, the multilingual Ethiopian children judged and were more
receptive to the various writing systems as having a function for reading.
Moreover, compared to the monolingual Hebrew-speaking children, they also
were more likely to perceive strings of mixed signs as readable. These findings,
among others, show that, compared to monolingual peers, multilingual-
multiliterate children have greater sensitivity to different writing systems
and develop theories to “detect” them as readable (Stavans 2014). They develop
this ability because their multiliterate experiences have directed their atten-
tion to particular writing systems immersed in their visual print landscapes.
Parents are key agents in supporting multiliteracy, through commitment
to both their children’s initial literacy development and their later

maintenance of reading and writing ability in multiple languages. This

commitment is reflected in the literacy events they engage in with their
children and the kind of linguistic landscape they work to provide. For
example, Moore (2010) demonstrated that Chinese parents strongly and
actively supported their children’s use and learning of Mandarin at home
and in Saturday Chinese school. At the same time, they encouraged activ-
ities to support their children’s multilingual proficiency in English and
French – the two languages that facilitate participation in the majority
community. It is this interaction between the local print input and what
children as active seekers of emergent writing and print knowledge develop
that enables multilingual children to thrive.
16.4 Conclusion
The theoretical model of emergent literacy stresses a continuum, from

speaking to emergent writing and multiliteracy development (Reyes
2012). As the research review in this chapter indicates, multilingual and
multiliterate children follow more than one trajectory in developing speak-
ing, comprehension, reading, and writing competencies (Blackledge &
Creese 2010; Stavans & Hoffmann 2015). It appears, however, that children
experience many similar characteristics and phenomena as they develop
their second and third languages, allowing them to use multiliteracy tools.
From thinking to speaking (Slobin 1996) to emergent reading and writing,
the linguistic competencies children develop with support, tools, and
experiences shape their multiliteracy knowledge and environments.
Multilingual children deploy various multiliteracy phenomena as they
develop their emergent writing competencies. First, they draw from a
variety of resources to advance their emergent writing strategies. At one
level they are able to distinguish between characters, notations, and strings
that belong to one of their languages, and begin to construct a multilingual
relationship between print, sound, and meaning. Second, translanguaging
as an emergent writing strategy demonstrates that multilingual children
integrate hybrid literacy practices as part of their linguistic competence.
Third, multilingual children demonstrate high metalinguistic awareness
about their emerging writing through representing script from their vari-
ous languages differently, and expressing their theories about these distinct
representations. For Koda, “literacy and metalinguistic awareness are devel-
opmentally interdependent” (2005: 333), and children’s examples across
these studies certainly demonstrate that their development of multiliteracy
goes hand-in-hand with their development of cognitive linguistic
competencies (e.g., recognition of oral language and sounds in L2 and L3,
making of connections between units and symbols), and their ability to
decode the particularities of each language.

388 ILIANA REYES
Furthermore, these children live in translingual contexts (Canagarajah

2015) in which there are “spaces where teachers and their students redefine
understandings, norms, and practices of monolingual writing” (Zapata &
Tropp Laman 2016: 366). As studies have documented, children are able to
move between and within languages, such as reading and interacting with a
text in one language and writing a summary in another language; or
engaging in travels across languages via hybrid and mixed linguistic
writing strategies (Reyes & Azuara 2008; Zapata & Tropp Laman 2016).
I invite readers to continue to frame multilingualism and multiliteracy as
dynamic and constantly evolving, and to consider the myriad complex factors
that surround the immediate learner, such as migration and educational
opportunities, prestige or stigmatization of multilingualism that make the
local community supportive or dismissive of multilingualism. These factors,
which vary from one multilingual society to another, will inevitably strongly
influence the way children and families are able to optimally take advantage
of these sources and their interactions (Reyes & Hornberger 2016).
Finally, as children develop their multilingualism through exposure to
various ways of “doing and being” bilingual and multilingual (Gort &
Sembiante 2015), they also develop their metalinguistic awareness, finding
different and unique ways to express in their own words how one language
is represented one way or another. Sophisticated metalinguistic awareness
and translanguaging are among the linguistic assets a young multilingual
child develops. Because of these competencies, young children begin their
literacy journey by recognizing associations between spoken language
elements and units of graphic symbols, and eventually learn to use written
language in specific contexts. Some children are able to indicate and recon-
cile similarities and differences between languages by providing hypotheses
about the unique ways they represent each of their languages.
It is clear that when children are provided with spaces to create and use
their linguistic toolkit (Orellana & García 2014), they demonstrate strong
competencies and agency as emergent writers. As they explore words
through a range of expressive modes and in their various languages, it is
imperative that educators and the research community take a broad view of
multiliteracies as modes of communication and help children explore these
as an organic asset they can develop. Furthermore, scholars, teachers, and
parents need to collaborate to translate research findings into applied
activities in classrooms, educational programs, and communities in order
to support and enhance children’s unique ability to develop rich multilin-
gual and multiliterate competencies. We call on scholars, educators, and
policy makers to recognize and honor the literacies that exist within chil-
dren and in local communities around the globe. Part of honoring these
multiliteracies is uncovering children’s daily practices and finding oppor-
tunities to foster their literacy knowledge through linguistic interactions
with peers and adults in their diverse multilingual and literacy landscapes
at school, in the community, and in their homes.

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17
Attitudes, Motivations,
and Enjoyment
of Reading in Multiple
Languages
Sara A. Smith and Victoria A. Murphy
17.1 Introduction
Psychosocial factors such as motivation, beliefs about learning, and attitudes

play a crucial role in achievement for both reading (Guthrie et al. 2007; Katzir
et al. 2009; Taboada et al. 2009) and learning a language (for a meta-analysis,
see Masgoret & Gardner 2003). Language learning and reading are both
dynamic processes that require that the individual is motivated to learn and
applies corresponding effort; both are highly influenced by the learner’s goals,
values, and beliefs about outcomes and the learning process. For children
learning to read, enjoyment of reading, self-concept as a good or poor reader,
and interest in reading material topic are particularly impactful. Motivation to
learn a language is influenced by diverse personal, social, and practical factors
related to context, learner enjoyment, and features of the target language.
Psychosocial factors related to reading achievement in multiple lan-
guages among children are multifaceted, with dimensions related to the
individual, the broader context, and the target languages. This topic has
been examined among adult populations and children learning an add-
itional language in a formal, explicit language instruction setting (i.e., a
‘foreign language’). Comparatively little research has addressed psycho-
social factors relevant to children developing as readers in multiple lan-
guages in multilingual contexts. Consequently, further research exploring
psychosocial factors related to reading in multiple languages and possible
influences on reading outcomes is needed. Reading is essential for academic
success and many children struggle with literacy. Even in developed coun-
tries, estimates suggest that approximately 20 percent of 15-year-olds fail to
reach a minimum threshold in reading to enable them to effectively engage
within society (OECD 2016). Understanding factors predicting reading

394 SARA A. SMITH & VICTORIA A. MURPHY
achievement is equally (if not more) important in settings in which minor-

ity language children are expected to achieve language and literacy compe-
tence in a majority (additional/second) language (Appel & Muysken 2005).
Such findings could inform policy and practice for countries with historic-
ally persistent literacy achievement inequities between monolingual and
multilingual children, such as the UK (Strand et al. 2015) and US (August &
Shanahan 2007). Additionally, we believe that greater knowledge regarding
psychosocial factors and multilingual reading achievement can inform
efforts to support heritage and indigenous language maintenance.
In this chapter, we first present definitions for frequently used terms. We
then review influential theoretical models that have been applied in lan-
guage learning research. We next provide an overview of previous research
and theoretical models of psychosocial factors specific to reading among
monolingual children. We then detail findings addressing psychosocial
factors and reading in multiple languages. We briefly address prior studies
among adults, particularly adults in multilingual settings and heritage
bilinguals. Given the paucity of research directly addressing this topic
among children, findings from adult samples offer potential insights and
can inform future research by providing a profile of an end-state of the
trajectory needed to achieve reading abilities in multiple languages. Next,
we present research among child samples, with a focus on studies from
multilingual contexts and evidence supporting the role of specific theoret-
ical constructs. We then present our own hypotheses regarding potential
dimensions of diversity among multilingual child readers and suggest
future directions for research. Finally, we briefly discuss the pedagogical
implications of the research reviewed, followed by general conclusions.
17.2 Definitions
L1/L2/L3. The initial language an individual is exposed to in
early infancy is typically referred to as a first
language, or L1. Whereas a child can have more than
one first language, as in the case of Bilingual First
Language Acquisition (Murphy 2014), a second
language is acquired sequentially after the L1 is
established. So too is a third language (L3) learned
sequentially after the second, and so on.
A simultaneous bilingual child with more than one
L1 may have a dominant L1 (i.e., higher ability in
this language as opposed to others) with
subsequently weaker ability in their other
languages. Similarly, sequential bilinguals are likely
to have differential skills across the languages they
know. However, language dominance does not

Attitudes, Motivations, and Enjoyment of Reading 395
always align with order of acquisition and/or a single

dominant language may not always be evident.
Dominance varies over time, modalities, and varies
depending on communication objective. For
example, some bilinguals live in L2 contexts where
they exclusively or predominantly use the L2 and
thus, may be more dominant in a non-L1 language.
This is often the case with minority language
children who grow up with a language in the home
that is not the language of the wider society, and
importantly, the language of education.
Additionally, “dominant” does not need to be
exclusive to one language, a person who actively
uses multiple languages from birth may have
multiple so-called “dominant” languages (see for
example, Stavans & Hoffmann 2015).
Minority/majority Minority language learners are children who are
language. exposed to a different language in the home
environment than used by the majority of society,
i.e. the majority language (Murphy 2014).
Importantly, children in this context often come to
formal schooling with less well-developed language
skills (particularly vocabulary) in the majority
language, which has been shown to lead to
difficulties for many minority language learners as
they learn to read the majority language (Murphy
2018). This population is also sometimes referred to
as heritage language learners, particularly when the
focus is on their learning of their home or heritage
language. Heritage bilinguals speak a language due to
a personal or historical connection to that language,
for example, indigenous and immigrant languages
(Valdés 2001). Heritage language skills emerge as a
result of usage within a speech community (Wiley
2001). Because the majority language is often the
language of school instruction, many heritage
bilinguals have more developed skills in the spoken
modality than in the written modality of their
heritage language. Montrul (2012) notes that the
heritage language is often therefore the weaker
language by adulthood. In many contexts, these
children are also referred to as dual language learners,
which emphasizes the importance of developing
both languages to a high level of proficiency, with
competent literacy skills in both (Murphy 2014).

Foreign language. Foreign language learning refers to language

development in (typically educational) contexts
where the foreign language (FL) is a taught subject in
school and where exposure to the FL is limited, in
time space and amount as well as content and
modalities. Indeed, FL learning is typically
characterized as being an input-limited context and
in comparison to other contexts in which children
learn another language, tends to be the least
effective (see Murphy 2014 for a wider discussion).
To illustrate, learning German in a UK primary
school is an example of a foreign language, since
German is not an official language of the UK, and it
is not found in the society. For most children in the
UK, their sole exposure to German would be when it
is taught in the classroom. French in Canada for the
Canadian child, however, is not a case of a foreign
language, because French is one of Canada’s two
official languages and, depending on where the child
is living, can be found in the ambient linguistic
environment (Murphy 2014).
Literacy. In the current chapter, literacy will refer to the
information processing skills required to
understand and produce written language as is
commonly encountered in the environment,
referred to as reading and writing, respectively.
Multilingual literacy refers to being able to meet the
above definition in two or more languages; these
languages may or may not share a writing system, or
orthography. Literacy in the context of the current
chapter will not refer to having competency related
to a general process by which some form of
culturally salient information is coded (i.e., “digital
literacy” or “media literacy”).
Now that we have defined some of the most common terms that we will
be referencing in our chapter, we can begin to examine the research investi-
gating how psychosocial factors impact language and literacy development.
17.3 Psychosocial Factors That Influence

Language Learning
There are many psychosocial theories and constructs, both domain-general

and specific to language learning, that are relevant to success in learning a

language. A full review of all these theories is beyond the scope of the
current chapter. Nonetheless, the following section presents a brief over-
view of influential theories that have been applied to language learning
research and, where appropriate, insights from empirical research.
Gardner and Lambert (1959, 1972) proposed the notion of integrative
motivation, a construct that refers to general positivity toward and desire
to integrate into the target language community (Gardner & Lambert 1972).
Instrumental motivation is the desire to achieve an external, value-oriented
goal (Gardner & Lambert 1959, 1972). Gardner et al. (1976) subsequently
demonstrated that both integrative and instrumental motivation signifi-
cantly predict L2 outcomes.
Deci and Ryan proposed (1985a, 1985b) self-determination theory, which
describes: (1) intrinsic motivation, referring to the motivation to engage in
an activity out of interest or enjoyment for the activity itself; and (2) extrinsic
motivation, referring to the motivation to engage in an activity to accom-
plish or receive a separate external reward or goal (comparable to instru-
mental motivation, as described by Gardner and Lambert (1972)).
Eccles et al.’s (1983) Expectancy-value theory posits that learning achieve-
ment is the result of the learner’s perceptions regarding specific learning
activities and activity-specific self-concept. Achievement is driven by the
learner’s expectations of activity success, perceived activity difficulty, and
the perceived value of the activity. Eccles et al. (1983) describe four distinct
activity-specific value components relevant to achievement; particularly
influential is utility value, the learner’s perception of the value of the activity
for achieving goals. Expectancy-value theory has been extensively applied to
language learning research (for examples, see El-Khechen et al. 2016; Smith
et al. 2017).
The learner’s beliefs about their own competencies as a learner are also
highly influential. Ability beliefs are the learner’s present perceptions of their
abilities regarding a specific activity or task. Expectancies for success refers to
the learner’s beliefs regarding how well they expect to do on a task in the
future, immediate or long term (Eccles et al. 1983). Self-efficacy refers to the
individual’s perception of how good they are at different activities and the
belief that they can accomplish a task.
Dörnyei’s (2005) L2 Motivational Self System frames L2 learning motivation as
a system of “selves,” motivation is derived from a recognized gap between
how the learner presently sees themselves as an L2 user, the current L2 self, and
who they would like to become, the ideal L2 self. Learners develop goals based
on these identities, exerting effort to reduce the gap between the current and
ideal self. Many subsequent studies have applied Dörnyei’s model (Csizér &
Lukács 2010; Dörnyei & Chan 2013; Kim & Kim 2014; Papi 2010; Ryan 2009),
and the explanatory power of the ideal L2 self for L2 achievement has been
validated in hundreds of studies (Dörnyei & Ryan 2015).
This section presented a brief overview of some theoretical frameworks
frequently investigated in language learning research. These frameworks

highlight the fact that motivation for language learning is multifaceted,

dynamic, and influenced by individual and context-level factors. For a multi-
lingual child reader, psychosocial factors related to reading in a particular
language are likely influenced by attitudes and motivations related to lan-
guage learning and reading as a specific activity. The following section will
review influential psychosocial theories and frameworks that have been
applied to reading research among children in general, including monolin-
guals, that may inform understanding of multilingual child readers.
17.4 Psychosocial Factors That Influence Reading

and Reading Development in Monolinguals
In this section we review some key research findings illustrating the rela-
tionship between psychosocial factors and reading in typically developing L1
children. Many of the theoretical frameworks previously discussed have
been adjusted and applied to the process of becoming a successful reader,
adapted for the specific domain of reading. Additionally, reading researchers
have developed reading-specific motivational theories. These reading
motivation theories are further distinct because they reflect children’s
broader maturational and developmental trajectories. Although the main
focus of the current chapter is multilingual learners, we provide here an
overview of theories and findings demonstrating associations between read-
ing motivation and achievement among monolingual children, as this litera-
ture provides valuable insight and a strong foundation upon which to
investigate the nature of reading motivation and achievement among multi-
lingual children. For a more complete review of the literature demonstrating
strong relationships between reading-related attitudes and reading achieve-
ment among monolingual children, see Petscher’s (2010) meta-analysis.
17.4.1 Motivational-Cognitive Model of Reading

Wigfield and Guthrie (1997) describe reading motivation as the individual’s
goals and beliefs as they relate to reading. They differentiate between two
sets of processes crucial for text comprehension: (1) cognitive processes such
as activating and integrating prior information; and (2) motivational processes,
constituting (i) task-mastery goals (i.e., the reader’s goal for reader-text inter-
action – whether they seek to fully understand text or not), and (ii) intrinsic
motivation (i.e., reading because the task itself is enjoyable); (3) self-efficacy
(i.e., the reader’s perception that he or she has the ability to read effect-
ively); (4) personal interest (i.e., the value of the text topics to the reader
in terms of interest and/or positive opinions); and (5) transactional beliefs
(i.e., whether they believe their knowledge is relevant to understanding).
Many of these constructs align or overlap with constructs related to
language learning motivation, for example intrinsic, extrinsic motivation.

Per Wigfield (1997), while many constructs relevant to reading motivation

are similar to other aspects of learning, reading has unique motivational
features. There are domain-specific enjoyable experiential influences (i.e.,
being engrossed in a good book) and social aspects (i.e., sharing books) and
domain-specific environmental influences (i.e., schooling and instruction
for reading), suggesting that motivation for learning and performance are
domain-specific and thus motivation should be conceptualized and meas-
ured specifically to the domain of interest.
Intrinsic motivation, the enjoyment of reading itself, plays an essential
role in reading development. For children, the understanding that reading is
an enjoyable experience is related to more frequent reading activity, which
in turn supports reading achievement (Baker & Wigfield 1999; Wigfield &
Guthrie 1997). Intrinsic motivation for reading has been described as the
child’s curiosity, involvement, and preference regarding challenge level the
reading material, while extrinsic motivation is driven by desires regarding
grades and/or competition (Guthrie et al. 2005). The construct of reading
enjoyment describes this activity-specific intrinsic motivation for reading.
Among children, personal interest in the topics presented in reading
materials about is crucial (Guthrie et al. 2005). Personal interest has a direct
causal relationship with comprehension and motivation (for a review, see
Schiefele et al. 2012; Torppa et al. 2019). Taboada et al. (2009) found that
intrinsic reading motivation explained unique variance for reading out-
comes, after controlling for previous reading performance and background
knowledge. Guthrie et al. (2007) similarly found that reading involvement
and interest significantly predicted development and achievement.
Research among secondary school students similarly confirms the import-
ance of intrinsic motivation and enjoyment of reading for reading perform-
ance (Retelsdorf et al. 2011).
Reading comprehension also shows a relationship with extrinsic (i.e.,
instrumental) motivation, a negative one (Becker et al. 2010). Wang and
Guthrie (2004) argue that extrinsically motivated readers focus on external
rewards rather than on the text itself, negatively impacting reading per-
formance. This in turn can lead to a reading failure loop: poor readers
experience failure, are only motivated to read when they have to (extrinsic),
and in turn have poorer reading skills (Morgan & Fuchs 2007). This body of
research establishing relationships between intrinsic and extrinsic motiv-
ation and reading outcomes aligns with the literature among language
learners (see previous section).
17.4.2 Reading Self-efficacy and Self-concept

Reading self-efficacy, also referred to as reading competence beliefs, refers to the
reader’s own perceptions regarding their ability or competence to complete
a reading activity (i.e., being able to finish a particular book or passage).
Among children, these constructs are highly influenced by past

performance, including past successes and prior feedback (Bandura 1997).

Children with higher self-efficacy will attempt more difficult tasks and
persist at these tasks even when struggling (Bandura 1997). Relatedly,
reading self-concept refers to the reader’s perception of their own reading
abilities and attitudes toward reading (Chapman & Tunmer 1995). Prior
research demonstrates significant direct positive relationships between
reading self-concept and reading achievement and positive associations
between reading self-concept and reading attitudes (Chapman & Tunmer
1995; Conlon et al. 2006; Katzir et al. 2009).
17.5 Research Addressing Psychosocial Factors

and Reading Achievement among Multilinguals
We have thus far described some of the psychosocial factors that have
theoretical and empirically demonstrated relationships to (1) language
learning and (2) reading development. Given that young multilingual
readers are both learning languages and developing literacy, we believe
that the factors previously established as highly relevant for language and
literacy outcomes likely exert influence on reading achievement among
multilinguals. In addition, we predict that there are vectors of influence
that are uniquely related to multilingual reading development.
A robust body of literature demonstrates that academic achievement (and
thus reading) in a second or third language is influenced by multiple factors,
including: timing and age of acquisition (Garnett & Ungerleider 2008); amount
of language exposure; educational context (Carhill et al. 2008); social context
(Seville-Troike 2000); and shared linguistic features and potential for cross-
language transfer. The Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis posits that reading
ability in the L1 should transfer to reading in the L2 reading, thus there should
be an association between the two (Cummins 2000) only when a minimum
threshold of ability has been achieved in the L1 (Cummins 2000). As such,
individual background characteristics (i.e., L1 reading ability) and language-
specific features (i.e., possible positive transfer from L1 phonological aware-
ness, cognates, orthographic system) likely influence relationships between
reading-specific psychosocial factors and reading outcomes in multiple lan-
guages. All of these factors have the potential to exert influence on psychosocial
variables, resulting in highly diverse combinations of individual and context-
level characteristics. There is enormous potential for within-population vari-
ation among multilinguals, thus, equally as much potential for variation in
motivations and attitudes toward reading in their multiple languages.
17.5.1 Adults
A substantially larger body of research has examined psychosocial factors
and reading outcomes among multilingual adults than among multilingual

children. Domain-specific measurement tools (for example, FLRAMS; Erten

et al. 2010) have allowed for comparisons across languages and cultural
contexts. This literature has established that, in some circumstances, sig-
nificant relationships exist between attitudes and motivation toward read-
ing in multiple languages and achievement. While not the focus of the
current chapter, we briefly present some selected findings that may provide
insights for interpreting research findings among multilingual children.
Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are relevant to adult multilingual
reading outcomes. Intrinsic reading motivation is highly associated with
L2 reading achievement (Dhanapala 2006; Dhanapala & Hirakawa 2016) and
amount of effort exerted (Kondo-Brown 2006). Higher reading self-concept
is positively associated with learning a new script (Kondo-Brown 2006).
Unlike the findings among children, many studies indicate extrinsic (or
instrumental, or utility value, depending on the constructs used in the
study) motivation also has a positive relationship with achievement for
adults (Bush 2015; El-Khechen et al. 2016; Kim 2011). We hypothesize that
this difference is due to age, specifically, the maturational trajectories for
delayed gratification, goal-setting, metacognition, and emotional regulation
(for example, sustaining effort to achieve an abstract incentive in the
distant future). Findings are not unanimous; other studies have found that
extrinsic motivation shows a negative relationship with L2 reading compre-
hension (Dhanapala & Hirakawa 2016).
Research among biliterate adults indicates that reading attitudes
between two languages can have reciprocal, potentially bidirectional rela-
tionships – both positive and negative. Strong multilingual readers who
receive positive reading feedback for one of their languages may have more
positive attitudes toward reading, across languages. Prior research demon-
strates that positive L1 reading attitudes predicts more positive L2 reading
attitudes for shared orthographies (Camiciottoli 2001) and different ortho-
graphies (Yamashita 2004); possible evidence of transfer of abilities and
strategies from the L1 to the L2. Smith et al. (2017) found positive associ-
ations between L1 and L2 reading attitudes and evidence of non-language-
specific attitudes toward the value of reading in general.
Much like findings on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, positive associ-
ations between reading attitudes across multiple languages are not unani-
mous. El-Khechen et al. (2016) found that the general utility value of the L1
(Turkish) negatively predicted L2 (German) reading comprehension among
immigrants learning a majority language. Research addressing L3 reading
attitudes similarly yielded mixed results. Modirkhamene’s (2006) study of
L1 Turkish immigrants in Iran (L2 Persian) learning L3 English did not find
any significant relationships between motivation and L3 reading profi-
ciency. In both studies, authors emphasize the broader linguistic context
and pressures on immigrants.
Ambiguity in the literature among adults underscores the importance of
diversity and context. Language learning is highly influenced by social

setting and the specific languages being learned (see for example, Bourdieu
1994; 1998). Taken as a whole, the existing literature addressing psycho-
social factors and reading in multiple languages among adults has shown
mostly consistently that psychosocial factors are relevant and influential
multiliteracy achievement.
17.5.2 Children
Comparatively less research has examined relationships between psycho-
social factors and reading outcomes in multiple languages among multilin-
gual children. This is surprising because children are developing literacy
skills in all their languages and as indicated, there is clear evidence that
psychosocial factors impact on reading outcomes in monolingual children
and in L2/3 learning adults. The attitudes and motivations of parents raising
multilingual children can be varied and likely highly influential for learn-
ing outcomes (see for example, Hancock 2006; Sharpe 1997); however, the
focus of the current chapter is the psychosocial standpoint of the learner
and, correspondingly, research directly measuring learner attitudes and
motivations. Among the existing research, more attention has been
directed to older children learning an L2 as a foreign language and the
reading outcomes of minority language children learning to read in the
majority language (for a review, see Lesaux & Geva 2006). There are fewer
studies considering the child’s psychosocial standpoint specifically and its
relevance to reading achievement in a second or third (or fourth) language.
Many studies have explored the positive impact of bilingualism, including
considerations for L1 and L2 knowledge and characteristics, on L3 achieve-
ment (for a review, see Cenoz 2003). However, fewer studies have examined
relationships between reading-specific psychosocial factors and L3 reading
achievement. We provide an overview of selected research below. Taken as
a whole, these findings underscore the importance of the broader social
context and specific languages being learned.
17.5.3 Reading Attitudes among Multilinguals

A large body of literature has examined majority language reading achieve-
ment among minority language children, with an emphasis on the roles of
L1 and L2 oral language proficiency, vocabulary knowledge, home environ-
ment factors, socio-economic status, and features of cognition such as
verbal working memory. Less work has considered L1/L2 reading attitudes
among developing bilingual readers. Of the work that does exist, more
focus has been directed toward psychosocial factors related to the L2, L2
reading attitudes, and L2 reading achievement.
Hvistendahl and Roe (2004) analyzed data from the Programme for
International Student Assessment (PISA) to examine correlations between
Norwegian reading achievement and reading engagement (measured via

responses to questions addressing interest in and attitude towards reading,

content of reading, and time spent reading) among minority students, who
were categorized as such based on parents’ and child’s country of birth
and language spoken at home most of the time. It is important to note
that of the 218 students in the minority student group (i.e., children born
in the country of assessment with foreign-born parents or not born in the
country of assessment with foreign-born parents), 37 spoke Norwegian in
the home “most of the time” and thus may or may not be bilingual
children. Results revealed a significant correlation between positive atti-
tudes towards reading and Norwegian reading achievement (0.2);
Norwegian reading achievement also significantly correlated with general
academic self-concept (0.19), self-efficacy (.32), and interest in reading
(.195). Minority and majority language children differed in the correl-
ational relationships between reading materials and reading achievement;
notably, there were no significant relationships between reading fiction
and reading achievement among minority students (unlike among major-
ity language students). Time spent reading more significantly correlated
with achievement for scientific literacy (0.34) than for general reading
literacy (0.26). Interestingly, when compared with majority language
peers, minority language children had higher reading engagement and
showed different reading practices (more reading of fiction, less reading
of comics). These finding related to between group differences suggest that
reading teaching should incorporate relevant and motivating materials for
aimed at both majority language children (i.e., comics) and minority
language children (i.e., fiction).
Netten et al. (2011) investigated predictors of Dutch reading longitudin-
ally (grades 4 through 6) among both monolingual and bilingual children.
General reading motivation (not specific to L1 or L2) significantly predicted
L2 Dutch reading in grade 4, and academic self-confidence significantly
predicted L2 Dutch reading achievement in grade 6.
Merisuo-Storm and Soininen (2014) compared reading and writing
achievement and attitudes among children enrolled in Finnish-English
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) bilingual programs
(20–25 percent curriculum instruction in L2 English) and children receiving
typical English as a foreign language instruction in Finland. Attitudes
towards reading, writing, and language learning were assessed in fourth
grade. Children in the CLIL program had significantly more positive atti-
tudes toward language learning in general and toward learning English.
Additionally, male students in CLIL classes had significantly more positive
attitudes toward reading than male peers in conventional English as a
foreign language classes; CLIL seemed to narrow the reading attitude
gender gap found in conventional classes. The authors posit that male
children in particular benefited from the bilingual program; they had more
positive reading attitudes, subsequently read more, and ultimately demon-
strated higher L2 reading and writing achievement after 6 years of

instruction than male peers receiving conventional English foreign lan-

guage instruction. Findings indicate that CLIL classes are not only associ-
ated with positive attitudes toward reading and thus, relatedly, L2 reading
achievement, but also have implications for achieving gender parity in L2
achievement. It is not known from the study if the narrowed gender
achievement gap is due to CLIL directly or if CLIL positively impacts psy-
chosocial factors that in turn support L2 achievement. Findings do provide
directionality for future work addressing fostering positive language learn-
ing and reading attitudes through CLIL settings and related interventions
focusing on improving psychosocial features to support gender parity in
multilingual reading achievement.
Given the increasing proportions of multilingual children in primary
school settings it is really important that researchers pursue this line of
enquiry more thoroughly and systematically within multilingual settings.
We know from decades’ worth of research that attitudes matter in relation
to how learners learn, both in terms of process and outcomes. However,
multilingual settings present their own unique set of variables that interact
with the kinds of psychosocial variables under scrutiny in this chapter.
Hence we cannot just assume that relationships between attitudes and
reading outcomes will be the same for all populations of learners, all
languages, all formal educational systems, curricular and assessment tools,
background and trajectory into multilingualism. We would urge research-
ers to develop more focused research agendas investigating the interrela-
tionships between these variables in the multilingual classrooms, homes,
and even playgrounds. Children who hate reading are less likely to do it,
and consequently this will have an impact on their developing linguistic
skills and on their professional choices and opportunities, socialization
practices and membership of society. We need to understand better the
underlying causes for children’s disinterest in reading (when it is relevant)
and attempt to find ways to counter this in classroom contexts. The Torppa
et al. study (2019) is a great example of a rigorous and systematic study
investigating leisure reading (which is associated with children’s attitudes
towards reading) and their reading outcomes. If L1 children who read more
books for pleasure have higher reading outcomes then it is entirely likely
that L2 or L3 children will do the same, given the opportunity. We know too
from research that reading skills in L1 (L2) impact reading skills in L2 (L3).
Hence, we need to get it right where children enjoy reading across all their
languages so they increase their own exposure to different and rich texts to
support their language and literacy development. This would involve
developing a detailed research agenda that taps into the many different
psychosocial variables that are brought to bear on children’s developing
reading skill. We suggest, for example, “Funds of Knowledge” approaches
that explicitly value and incorporate the background knowledge that cul-
turally and linguistically diverse children bring to a majority language
classroom.

17.5.4 Relationships between Languages

Catto (2017) conducted a small scale intervention study of three
elementary-aged L1 Spanish L2 English heritage bilingual children living
in the US. Participants received, in a 12- to 20-week literacy intervention
program, encouragement for greater use of the L1, by means of instructor-
modeled positive attitudes toward the L1 and inclusion of home-language
cultural topics. Results demonstrated that overall reading motivation and
confidence (similar to reading self-concept, self-efficacy) increased and both
L1 and L2 reading and L1 and L2 writing improved. Additionally, children
were better able to recognize features of similarity between the two lan-
guages and demonstrated better use of reading strategies. Findings from
this study, albeit limited in sample size, indicated there may be potential
for positive L1 reading attitudes to confer benefits to L2 reading attitudes
and to reading achievement in the L1 and L2, at least within the context of
the two languages presented, which share an orthography. This finding is
in line with prior work demonstrating direct positive relationships between
Spanish and English reading skills (see for example, Phillips Galloway et al.
2020). Jiménez et al. (1996) studied eight middle school readers, and found
that the Spanish-English bilingual child readers had greater awareness of
relationships between the two languages, which allowed them to use bilin-
gual reading strategies such as identifying cognates and translating (p. 106).
Smith and Li (2020) investigated attitudes toward L1 Chinese and L2
English among US bilinguals aged 10–18 attending weekday schooling in
English and Chinese weekend school (language and math classes in
Chinese). Findings revealed that higher motivation for learning Chinese
had a positive relationship with intended overall effort in Chinese weekend
school, such that children who were more motivated also reported trying
harder in Chinese lessons. Additionally, attitudes toward reading in
Chinese did not predict intended effort in Chinese school, nor did strong
desire to speak Chinese in the future, as measured by a questionnaire
addressing ideal self (adapted from Dörnyei & Chan 2013). Smith and Li
hypothesize that the absence of relationships between L2MSS constructs
and effort in Chinese school is related to the abundant opportunities for
Chinese language learning outside of school, such as in the home, commu-
nity, digital settings. As a result, children may not view effort in Chinese
school as essential to achievement. The study did not examine cultural
differences toward reading or studying.
Children had significantly more negative attitudes toward reading in
Chinese than reading in English. These differences may be related to fea-
tures of reading in Chinese, such as a lack of cognates and/or lack of skill
transfer for reading in different orthographies. Furthermore, findings
revealed negative relationships between attitudes toward reading in
Chinese and reading in English, such that the more children agreed with
statements regarding the intrinsic value of reading in English, the less they
agreed with statements regarding the intrinsic value of reading in Chinese.
This may reflect aspects of the child’s identity and social context. Prior

work among Chinese-Canadian college students found that the more the
individual identified with “Canadian” culture, the less they valued and
desired to improve Chinese language abilities (Young & Gardner 1990).
Children’s identity as a user of a minority language and/or as a multilingual
is likely dynamic and influenced by surrounding context, as well as matur-
ational processes related to identity.
Alkhateeb (2014) examined relationships between Arabic proficiency
(teacher-reported score) and reading-related attitudes (anxiety, self-
perception) and Arabic language learning motivation (integrative, instru-
mental, and parent-level factors) among older children (approximately
13 years old) enrolled in an Arabic dual language immersion program in
the US. Arabic language learning motivation and self-perception of L2
reading abilities significantly predicted L2 achievement as reported by the
teacher. Alkhateeb’s (2014) findings also revealed that specific parental
motivators related to Muslim identity highly predicted achievement (i.e.,
greater agreement with the statements “My parents have stressed the
importance Arabic will have on understanding the Quran” and “My parents
feel that since I am a Muslim, I should learn Arabic”).
Valencia and Cenoz (1992) explored relationships between psychosocial
factors and toward L3 English general achievement (assessed across four
modalities: speaking, listening, reading, writing) among Basque-Spanish
bilingual secondary school children and found that social motivation,
including attitude towards learning English, was a mediating variable for
influence of the L1 and L2 on L3 academic achievement. Findings indicated
that the positive relationship between bilingualism and subsequent L3
learning, established in prior research (see Cenoz 2003 for a review), may
differ depending on context-related motivations.
These varied and diverse findings across studies of multilingual child
readers and the importance of psychosocial factors, including drastically
different findings regarding relationships between factors and multiple
languages (L2, L3) further underscore the complex nature of multilingual
reading and psychosocial influences. Given the paucity of empirical
research, to our knowledge, particularly in the case of psychosocial factors
related to reading in an L3, we hope that the current chapter will act as a
springboard to future work. In particular, more work is needed that empha-
sizes multilingual child readers in language teaching and dual language
education settings. In the following sections, we detail some suggested
directions for future research and discuss related pedagogical implications
of both the existing body of knowledge and the gaps within it.
17.6 Suggested Future Directions for Research
The current chapter has described the multifaceted nature of psychosocial

influences on reading. Associations between psychosocial factors and both
language learning and reading development are complex and context-

specific. Yet, in our review of the research, we identified gaps in the extant
literature. This is particularly troubling given (1) the essential role of
reading for academic success, (2) high rates of reading failure (OECD
2016), and (3) educational inequities between monolingual and multilin-
gual children in some countries. Additionally, further research in this area
could shed light on within-population multilingual diversity and inform
policy and practice for heritage and indigenous language maintenance. In
the following section, we suggest some directions for future research.
In general, greater investigation of relationships between reading-specific
motivations and attitudes in multiple languages and impacts on ultimate
reading achievement is needed, given theories regarding linguistic interde-
pendence and corresponding empirical research demonstrating potential
for positive transfer of reading skills between multiple languages, including
features of phonological awareness, vocabulary and cognate strategies, and
orthographic systems. Future research should focus on establishing if
direct associations exist between the presence or absence of cross-linguistic
similarity and psychosocial factors relevant to reading achievement in
multiple languages. Additionally, the relationships between language-
specific reading attitudes and attitudes toward reading in general should
be examined with fine-grained consideration of specific languages and
broader social context. Further research on different heritage languages
and associated psychosocial factors is very much needed, particularly across
different social and minority language contexts.
Longitudinal studies are difficult to develop as they are expensive not just
in terms of financial considerations but also other resources like time and
personnel. Families/children and teachers who participate in longitudinal
studies need to be able to commit to the time frame of the study for it to
work. However, it is well worth the effort in developing such studies
because without a solid understanding of how these variables develop over
time, and in relation to what other variables, we will be largely guessing
about the best ways to support children in classrooms to change their
attitudes and motivation towards reading, their reading achievement or
both. Therefore, we need more longitudinal, large-scale studies which
investigate attitudes and motivation for both L1 and L2/L3 and reading
achievement in all the child’s languages.
We also suggest classroom-based research and innovation. A substantial
body of research demonstrating the role of reading interest, enjoyment, and
intrinsic motivation for children’s reading achievement. Practitioners may
want to focus on providing differentiated reading materials in multiple
languages and emphasizing self-directed reading activities (i.e., activities
selected and managed by the learner). Self-directed activities are driven by
intrinsic enjoyment and increase motivation (Ushioda 2011). Research indi-
cates that technology-based reading materials are the most frequently
read materials for children (Clark et al. 2009). Digital environments in
particular therefore may present venues for increasing motivation among

multilingual children. Allowing children to pursue self-directed learning by

reading in digital environments could increase interest, motivation, and
reading self-efficacy. Teachers could designate time for interest-based read-
ing in digital environments as a supplement to, not a substitute for, reading
physical texts.
Future research could also examine potential interventions to ensure
teachers support positive attitudes toward reading in all of a multilingual
child’s languages, as reading motivation may be language-specific (per Smith
& Li 2020) or general to multiple languages (Smith et al. 2017). This would
require cultivating inclusive environments that value knowledge and capital
from multiple languages. Doing so would pave the way for potential inter-
ventions to improve L1 and L2 reading attitudes among children, supporting
L1 reading attitudes as a way to impact L1 and L2 achievement.
Another relevant issue here that we have not discussed, and which we can
only touch upon here, is teacher education and support. Multilingualism is
often not very prominent in teacher education programs. In the UK, for
example, teacher education only includes sessions on EAL as a separate topic
if at all. Many teachers report feeling underprepared when it comes to
teaching pupils from multilingual backgrounds. Indeed, the proportion of
newly qualified teachers (NQTs) in England who feel their initial teacher
training has prepared them for teaching multilingual pupils has never
exceeded 50 percent (Starbuck 2018). This means that teachers are less likely
to have much awareness of multilingual pupils’ learning needs and likely
won’t have a good understanding of how children’s attitudes and motiv-
ations in their L1, L2, and L3 might impact on achievement. In part this is no
doubt due to the lack of research, but it is also in part because teacher
education programs do not tend to focus on the development of a multilin-
gual pedagogy. Teachers can complete their teacher education programs
without having much understanding of the needs and challenges of multi-
lingual pupils and how best to incorporate effective pedagogical strategies to
support all their pupils. This will no doubt impact on their ability to support
positive perceptions towards reading, which in turn will impact on chil-
dren’s reading outcomes in their languages.
17.7 Conclusion
In this chapter, we considered the role of psychosocial factors for reading

achievement among multilingual children, as language learning and read-
ing are two constructs strongly influenced by attitudes and motivation. We
reviewed relevant theoretical frameworks of motivation that have been
applied in language learning research and outlined theoretical models of
psychosocial factors specific to reading development among children, as we
believe multilingual children are unlikely to be wholly developmentally
distinct from monolingual children with regard to cognitive and emotional

maturation. We then presented an overview of research on psychosocial

factors related to language learning and reading. Given the limited research
among multilingual children, we reviewed studies among multilingual
adults for potential insights; specifically, we highlighted heterogeneity
associated with the specific languages and broader social context. We
predict that previously identified vectors of difference related to language
and context likely contribute to variation and diversity among younger
multilingual readers, as well. Multiple studies among multilingual child
readers in both elementary and secondary school demonstrated positive
relationships between intrinsic motivation/enjoyment of reading and ultim-
ate achievement. Overall, evidence from research among multilingual
readers demonstrated positive associations between attitudes toward read-
ing in the first (L1) and second or third languages (L2/L3) and subsequent
reading achievement; yet some studies among multilingual children
showed differential, language-specific associations between various psycho-
social factors and reading outcomes in multiple languages. Some children
simultaneously held positive attitudes toward reading in one language and
negative attitudes toward the other.
The extraordinary variation in findings further underscored our two
overarching conclusions: context is highly relevant, and more research
among different populations of young multilinguals is needed before any
generalizable, consensus can be reached – if generalizability is indeed even
a goal. Certainly, some research insights that can be generalized beyond a
singular phenomenological study are needed for evidence-based instruc-
tion. The comparatively small body of research points to a lack of relevant
knowledge on the topic, therefore, teachers are likely under prepared and
under supported. Multilingualism rarely receives focused attention in
teacher education programs, even less preparation related to fine-grained
topics such as psychosocial factors related to reading in multiple languages.
Research in these areas has the potential to impact achievement, particu-
larly if widely disseminated to practitioners.
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18
Growing Up with
Multilingual Literacies and
Implications for Spelling
Constanze Weth & Christoph Schroeder
Growing up multilingually and in a multilingual social environment affects

the acquisition of literacy. Many multilingual children learn to read and
write in the language required by the institutional context. This is often a
second, sometimes unfamiliar, language for them and it is the dominant
language of the society they live in. However, these children might also
learn, or be in contact, with other written languages used in their families
and communities. The practices in all written languages vary, and family or
community languages and literacies might be typologically close to or
distant from the language and literacy practices expected at school, which
is the main institution for literacy acquisition (Heath 1983; New London
Group 1996). Unfolding the resources and needs of multilingual children’s
literacy acquisition is at the center of this chapter.
We present the contexts of literacy acquisition in multilingual societies
on three different levels: by defining literacy and literacies, by presenting
different multilingual and multiliterate contexts, and by zooming into one
aspect of literacy, that is, spelling. The chapter is organized in four main
sections. The first section unfolds the terms literacy and literacies and
provides the basis for the following considerations. Section 18.2 presents
challenges of becoming literate in general, for mono- and multilingual
children. On the level of written language production, it provides bigger
landmarks of becoming literate and illustrates two crucial aspects for liter-
acy acquisition with two examples: motor-cognitive requirements for spell-
ing and linguistic requirements of writing. While Sections 18.1 and 18.2
provide more general aspects of literacy acquisition, Sections 18.3 and 18.4
focus on multilingual contexts and learners. Section 18.3 displays four
multilingual and multiliterate contexts, which are characterized, firstly,
by the fact that the functions of the (written) languages practiced in fam-
ilies/communities and school differ to a greater or lesser extent, and,
secondly, by whether or not a given written language is commonly used
or practiced relatively seldom. Each of the four scenarios depicts a different

416 CONSTANZE WETH & CHRISTOPH SCHROEDER
picture of what it means to grow up multilingual and become literate in

more than one language. Section 18.4 presents the influence of the first
language in which somebody has learned to read and write (WL1) on
spelling in another language. This section presents four scenarios of the
relation between a child’s first or second spoken language (L1 or L2) with its
written language (WL), which can be ordered in the same way (WL1 or
WL2). Note, that “second language” is defined very broadly in this contri-
bution as a language that is not the first language, be it the second, third, or
fourth one. Note that this accounts indiscriminately for spoken (L) and for
written (WL) languages. Section 18.4 also presents detailed examples of
spelling of children with Turkish as a heritage language and growing up
in German with German as the language of schooling. The chapter closes
with a summary of the presented topics.
18.1 Definition of Literacy and Literacies
The term literacy was introduced to study the use of the written word in a
broad sense, integrating the production and reception of texts, the cognitive
aspects of reading and writing without neglecting the social dimensions of
interaction. One reading of the term is that of “functional literacy”
(Verhoeven et al. 2002; Verhoeven 1994). Literacy refers here to skills
considered important for the integration of an individual into the “know-
ledge-based society” as well as for the development of societies themselves
(Crawford 1983; Snyder 2002). National and international studies measure
individuals’ literacy levels and amplify this research line. Among the cen-
tral studies conducted are the comparative global perspectives embedded
and motivated by the UNESCO and the OECD, as these provide a broad
perspective on the development and state of literacy in the world.
The term functional literacy has been criticized to take a monolingual
viewpoint on literacy, one which is embedded in the economic constraints
of the knowledge-based society. In opposition to this perspective, another
reading of the term literacy, in its plural, evolves into the “literacies”
approach, where researchers analyze the diversity of reading and writing
practices as well as communication around texts and text production. This
perspective pays particular attention to emphasizing the individual inter-
pretation of participants concerning their language and literacy practices in
a given local context (Heath 1983; Martin-Jones & Jones 2000; New London
Group 1996; Street 1995).
The conceptualization of literacy, textual genres, the practices and
expectation of writing and reading are historically and ideologically deeply
entrenched in the ideology of a standard language as well as in the percep-
tion of language in general (Maas 2008; Olson 1994; van der Horst 2018).
Such perception espouses the idea that writing is a cultural achievement
fundamentally interwoven in the social structures we live in, including

Growing Up with Multilingual Literacies 417
seemingly self-evident facts such as the existence of nations, standard

languages, linguistic and textual norms. In contrast to the spoken language,
the written language distances from the writer, as it remains present in a
written text, object-like, and can be called up constantly. A specification we
have to add is inherent in the topic of literacy: Although multilingual
literacies exist (Böhm et al. 2020; Bunčicˊ 2016; Sebba et al. 2012), literacy
is essentially a monolingual phenomenon, in the sense that written prod-
ucts (at least in the formal register) are monolingual per se. This close
relation between written norms and language norms is a result of the
institutional contexts that have been producing and reproducing monolin-
gual norms for more than 100 years (Bourdieu 1966; Weth & Juffermans
2018). Moreover, the acquisition of literacy is always the acquisition of
literacy in a particular language, as each writing system is a particular
system of reference to a particular named language, or, more specifically,
a particular linguistic variety (Coulmas 2003).
In addressing the broad topic of literacy, we pick out a very specific
subtopic for this contribution in order to give precise examples of how
multilingual children become literate. This subtopic is spelling. Although
spelling is not a crucial topic of apparent difficulties in multilingual versus
monolingual learners (Bahr et al. 2015; Steinig et al. 2009), it lies at the
center of becoming literate. First, spelling is embedded in the orthographic
norm of a language. Beyond this, spelling is crucial for literacy develop-
ment, as it relies heavily on motoric, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and
ideological aspects of letter, word, and text production. Furthermore, learn-
ing to spell goes hand in hand with a change of perspective on language.
Indeed, preschool children and nonliterate adults have different metalin-
guistic skills than literate children and adults (Kurvers et al. 2009).
Becoming literate includes the ability to analyze the units of written lan-
guage, consisting of words, letters, and sentences, and to interpret spoken
utterances in relation to these written language units. In multilingual
contexts, the ability to spell in one given language influences the perception
of a second written language, and may result in transfer effects in spelling
(Cook & Bassetti 2005; Genesee et al. 2008; Weth & Wollschläger 2020) and
pronunciation (Bassetti et al. 2015; Nimz & Khattab 2019).
18.2 Challenges of Becoming Literate
For monolingual and multilingual children, the acquisition of literacy

constitutes (among other things) the acquisition of the communicative
and cognitive functions of writing and written texts in a social context.
While acquiring literacy, children are confronted with three new aspects
of language use and structures (Fayol 2017): The first is the acquisition of
writing and reading as being associated with a completely new form of
communication, which is monologically oriented. Although each text

addresses a reader, writer and reader are both alone with the text during
the process of its composition and reception. Secondly, the learner is con-
fronted with a new mode of communication. Each visual mode of a lan-
guage, acoustic, visual (or gesture) highlights different language units.
While the acoustic mode of oral language emphasizes units such as
phonemes, syllables, prosodic phrases and stress, the written language
defines letters and the word as main visual units. As for the written mode,
spelling and reading requires to learn a new notational system and the
mastering of the relation between the visual symbols of a writing system
and the sounds they represent in the spoken language, and consequently
building up a mental orthographic lexicon (Carrillo et al. 2013; Tamura
et al. 2017). In order to read and write texts, children must recognize the
function of the written symbols, retain the information they have already
processed and mobilize their previous knowledge to interpret what they
have read. This simultaneous processing of different information only
succeeds if our working memory does not have to concentrate on all
processes at the same time. And third, children must become familiar with
the condensed information structure and highly conventionalized presen-
tation of information in texts (Biber 2006; Chafe 1985; Schleppegrell 2004).
The dense information structure of formal and school-related texts slows
down the communication process and renders the acquisition of reading
and writing very labor-intensive.
Two examples will highlight two crucial challenges in the early years of
literacy acquisition that apply to all learners, monolinguals and multilin-
guals alike. The first examples focus on the cognitive load of letter writing,
while the second deals with the structural requirements of language pro-
duction. Both examples show to which great extend even pre-schoolers
adopt the form and function of written language. The children we present
here both produce a text for a reader that is absent at the moment of text
production and develop language structures they would not use in the same
way in a face-to-face interaction.
18.2.1 Motor-Cognitive Requirements for Spelling

The first example (Figure 18.1) demonstrates the laborious activity of put-
ting the graphic signs on paper. The 5-year-old English-German bilingual
girl Merle was asked to tell the story of Hansel and Gretel in a letter for a
German friend. Merle is growing up bilingually in a middle-class family in
Germany with an anglophone mother. German and English are both used
in the household and Merle frequently has experiences with writing in both
languages. Nothing in Merle’s text indicates that she is bilingual. She uses
formal requirements of written languages such as fully-fledged sentences
and connectors (und dann ‘and then’) to connect the sentences. She also
explicitly introduces the main actors of the story (Hansel, Gretel, the witch)
and refers to them later by means of pronouns. All in all, she develops the

Transcription of Merle’s story English translation
Eine Geschichte von Merle A story of Merle

geschrieben und diktiert für written and dictated for
Constanze: Constance:
@LIEBE-CONSTANCE@ DEAR CONSTANCE
AINESCHÖNE-GESCHICHTE A NICE STORY
HÄNSEL UNDGRETELSIND MAL IN- HANSEL AND GRETEL WENT IN THE
IDENWALD FOREST,THEN THEY CAME AT A HOUSE
GEGANGENIEKAMENDANNANEIN HA.U@S OF FINE GINGERBREAD FROM WHICH A
VONPFEFFERKUCHEN-FEIN.DASCUTEEINE WITCH LOOKED OUT OF THE WINDOW,
HEXERAUS und dann wurde der Hänsel and then Hänsel was roasted. And then, the
gebraten. Und dann hat die Hexe in den Ofen witch looked into the oven. And then, she
geschaut. Und dann wurde sie gestoßen von was pushed by Hänsel and Gretel. Then
Hänsel und Gretel. Dann musste sie braten. she had to roast. And then, they went back
Und dann sind sie wieder durch den […] through the […]
Figure 18.1 Example of the motor-cognitive requirements for spelling in

an emergent writer by means of a story that is written and dictated by 5-year-old Merle in
cooperation with her mother. Reprinted text is completed by the transcription, which
imitates the written form, and an English translation. Presentation in capital letters refers to
Merle’s spelling. The sign @ refers to unidentifiable characters in the text.
story so it can be read by a reader who is not present in the situation

of storytelling.
Although this example shows only Merle’s writing in one language,
German, it also illustrates the cognitive load of letter writing for all
learners, mono- and multilinguals. The product of the story shows two
handwritings: the beginning of the story is produced by Merle, the end by
her mother. The product also shows that Merle writes the story orthograph-
ically almost correctly. However, at the time when the letter was written,
Merle was still gaining experience with letters and had not yet acquired

word spelling. Still, sitting close to her mother, she tells the story orally and
writes down letter after letter. During this activity, she interrupts her
storytelling and letter writing every now and then in order to ask her
mother about the spelling of a particular word or the shape of a particular
letter and copies the mother’s models of letters and single words. This
activity of writing is so tedious and exhausting that eventually Merle asks
her mother to switch roles after the first sentences. So, in the first part of
the story, Merle writes and the mother assists with the writing process,
helping with letter forms and the writing of words while keeping track of
the story. In the second part, Merle dictates the story to her mother. Now,
she has the cognitive resources to concentrate on her story and to
develop it.
18.2.2 Linguistic Requirements of Written Language Production

The following example demonstrates the challenges of the linguistic require-
ments of written language and its high potential for revision compared to
spoken language. The 6-year old Osman is the child of a middle-class family
of Turkish descent. The family lives in a neighborhood where Turkish is also
used informally in public. In Osman’s home, reading and writing mostly
takes place in Turkish. Osman entered the German-speaking Kindergarten
when he was 3. He is now in his first year of school in a German primary state
school, which is situated in the neighborhood where he lives. In his second
month at school, like almost all of his classmates, Osman cannot read or
write yet. At this time, he is shown a short (3-minute) silent film, The Lost
Envelope. The film tells a story about how a young woman loses an envelope
with money, someone else finds it, and finally the owner gets her money
back. After watching the film, Osman is first asked to retell the story orally.
Following that, he is asked to dictate what he has just narrated to an adult, so
his story can be read by others (Figure 18.2). The practice of dictation allows
Narration of the story Dictation of the story to an adult

21 dann habm sie zu krankenhaus gefahrn 83 und dann sind sie nach Krankenhaus
gefahrn
then have-3PL they to hospital and then be (3PL) they to hospital
drive (PPTCP) drive (PPTCP)
‘then they drove to the hospital‘ ‘and then they drove to the hospital’
23 und sagte so [?] in den in Krankenhaus 87 dann hat sie mit dem Krankenhausfrau
so Krankenhausfrau sagten sie was gesprechen
and say so in the (ACC.M) in hospital then have (3SG) she with the (DAT.M)
so hospital.woman say (PST.3PL) they hospital.woman speak (PPTCP)
something
‘and say so in the hospital ‘and then she talked to the hospital
so hospital woman they said something’ woman’
Figure 18.2 Excerpt from 6-year-old Osman’s narrated version (lines 21, 23) vs. the dictated
version (lines 83, 87) of The Lost Envelope. The excerpt presents the German narration
(in italics), the English transliteration with glossing of grammatical morphology, and the
English translation. See the list of abbreviations at the end of the chapter.

Osman to revise some language forms and to implement some features of

literacy at a stage where he hasn’t yet acquired the medial aspect of literacy,
that is, letter writing and spelling (cf. Merklinger 2011).
The excerpt shows that Osman is in the progress of building up his early
second language German, as he shows certain grammatical (morphological)
insecurities in the more unplanned spoken narration. He uses the wrong
auxiliary (*habm instead of sind in line 21), the wrong preposition (*zu
instead of in in line 21), the wrong case-marking on the definite article
(*den instead of dem in line 23), and he doesn’t employ the vowel change in
the stem of the participle *gesprechen (instead of gesprochen) in line 87.
However, Osman already seems to be aware of the linguistic requirements
of written text production. This becomes clear as he makes use of the
planning options which the dictation offers him: the wrong auxiliary is
corrected and becomes sind in line 83, and the wrong preposition is changed
into *nach (which is again incorrect). Also, Osman eliminates self-corrections
and discourse markers (see line 23, where in den in Krankenhaus is subse-
quently specified with so Krankenhausfrau, and the discourse marker so is used
twice, vs. 87, where so is eliminated and Osman opts for Krankenhausfrau).
Furthermore, Osman is more eager to perform full sentences in the word
order of written German standard in the dictated version (see line 23 vs. line
87; line 23 contains two utterances, the first with an afterthought in den in
krankenhaus, the second with a left dislocation so Krankenhausfrau; in the
dictated version, line 87 contains the standard German word order with
the finite auxiliary verb in second position and the nonfinite participle verb
in final position). Thus, Osman already shows an implicit knowledge con-
cerning the functions and requirements of literacy in his L2, in his second
month of school. He uses the planning and editing option of the written text;
he strives for a stronger context-independence by way of doing without
“anchoring” elements like discourse markers, and he performs a stronger
orientation towards the formal requirements of a written text by way of
construing full-fledged “sentences.”
The examples of Merle and Osman both display general efforts of early
literacy acquisition and written language production. They show that a
distinction has to be made between the medial and motoric practice of
writing and the conceptual aspect of literacy. The conceptual aspect
includes the principle of stepping back from the actual context of language
production and the orientation towards a common reader who needs all the
information verbalized in the text, since he cannot rely on a common
interpretation framework. Merle and Osman both are aware of this: Merle
switches over to dictating after she is exhausted from writing. Abandoning
the task of spelling, she keeps her eye on her ultimate goal, the creation of a
text. Osman clearly shows that he is aware of the structural requirements
of a written text even though he has not yet learned to write. The examples
therefore show that in societies shaped by literacy, children might start to
acquire the conceptual aspects of literacy long before they enter school.

They also show that the conceptual aspects of literacy have to be regarded
as independent of a single language or a specific writing system.
18.3 Acquiring Literacy in Multiple and Multilingual

Contexts
While the above-presented aspects of literacy acquisition affect all learners,

mono- and multilinguals, other aspects truly differ when acquiring literacy
in a multilingual context. Whereas all children have to deal with the
different structures and practices of spoken and written languages,
monolingual children learn the plurality of reading and writing practices
across different social contexts but within one language setting (Biber &
Gray 2010; Maas 2008; Silverstein 2003). School-related literacy in this
language is considered to be the written norm children must acquire in
order to be socially successful. At the same time, this language is also
practiced beyond written norms in all kinds of familiar and informal
settings such as scribbled notes, text messages with the mobile phone,
and writing in the linguistic landscape. Hence, children learn different
written forms of the same language as well as various writing and reading
practices in a broad continuum of literacies (Heath 1983; Martin-Jones &
Jones 2000). For example, a child who grows up with English in the US will
learn to use different varieties of English in spoken and written interaction
according to the expectations within a particular social domain, such as
school, family, and friends.
In multiliteracy contexts, more than one writing system is in use, and
literacy/literacies are composed of a plurality of languages, textual conven-
tions, and writing and reading practices. Taking this perspective, multi-
literacy contexts in which children grow up can be characterized by two
parameters (Figure 18.3): one parameter is the parameter of the functions
of literacy in the two languages (i.e., for what purposes reading, writing,
and particular text types are used). The second parameter is that of the
commonness of literacy practices in the given languages (i.e., how common
a literacy practice is in a language and social context).
The literacy contexts presented in Figure 18.3 are not shaped by individ-
ual practices or preferences of speech communities, but by the status of
languages in the society, and their reflection, amongst others, in school
language policies. In this perspective, four scenarios are distinguished.
First, a particular language may be a dominant language in a society
because it is the national and/or prestige language in a nation state, and/
or the lingua franca of the society, and/or the only language spoken by the
majority of the citizens. Access to and participation in all institutional
domains of the majority society, such as schooling, the labor market, the
law, and health services, depend on the language and literacy proficiency in
this dominant language. Second, a particular language may be a language

Literacy in both languages is Literacy in one language is

equally common common but uncommon in the
other
converging diverging
similar functions of literacy (a) International or bilingual (b) French/Occitan in France:
converging
private schools. attending a French school
that includes teaching of
the heritage language
Occitan: academic and
informal literacy in French
and Occitan.
different functions of literacy (c) Moroccan-Arabic/Standard- (d) Moroccan-Arabic/Standard-

Arabic/French in Morocco: Arabic/French in France:
attending a French school attending a French school
with instruction in Arabic with additional teaching in
literacy: academic and Standard Arabic: academic
informal literacy in French and and informal literacy in
Arabic; informal literacy in French; informal literacy in
Moroccan-Arabic; religious Moroccan-Arabic; religious
literacy in Arabic. literacy in Arabic.
diverging
Figure 18.3 Schematic representation of the function of literacy practices in four

multilingual contexts: (a) balanced multilingualism, (b) similar literacies, (c) partly different
literacies, (d) different literacies.
widely used in the institutions of a society because it has, at one point in

history, been enforced upon a region by a colonizing power and continues
to have high status and functionality after independence from this power.
Third, a language may have a transnational status as a foreign language, or
as a language used by certain social groups with international orientation,
like diplomats or expats. Fourth, a particular language may be a heritage
language, i.e., an indigenous minority language or a language of
immigrants and their descendants. It is acquired in the private domain of
family and peers, of limited use in the informal public domains, and of no
use in formal public domains (Lohndal et al. 2019).
Multilingual children, with one or more family language(s) different
from the dominant language(s) taught at school, learn to read and write
within the social conditions of the dominant language and its literacies
(Cenoz & Gorter 2011; Martin-Jones & Jones 2000). Heritage language prac-
tices and learning are embedded in a discourse of language loss and/or shift
and in an ideological opposition between “native languages” and dominant
national languages. Linguistic practices of heritage language speakers are
framed, in general, as deficient, regardless of how accurately they adhere to
the supposed rules of appropriateness (Flores & Rosa 2015; Montrul 2016).
However, no matter how invisible these languages and literacies might be
in the context of the dominant language literacies, they affect language and
literacy acquisition of multilingual children in the dominant language
(Brizicˊ 2006; Sürig et al. 2016). Also, as primary school children or later,
heritage speakers may wish to learn to read and write in the heritage

language, and improve and expand their linguistic proficiency in that

language (Hornberger 2007).
Figure 18.3 gives an overview of the different types of multilingual and
multiliterate practices emerging from the distinctions developed above. To
better demonstrate the conditions, we have chosen scenarios with one
particular language, i.e., French, as a dominating language. The scenarios
are typical examples of the converging or diverging functions of literacy in
terms of norms and practices in the context of multiliteracies. They cannot,
of course, be generalized to all speakers. However, they provide an overview
of the possible range of practices. Each scenario is further developed and
related to empirical studies in the following paragraphs.
(a) Balanced multilingualism and multilingual literacy practices (Cohen

2014)
Balanced multilingualism and similarly literacy practices exist in terms of
legal and sociolinguistic conditions, i.e., in the context of international
private schools. In general, these schools aim for academic excellence and
a masterful multilingualism in which children learn to read and write in
two or more languages and develop the lexical and grammatical structures
to communicate in a big range of language varieties in each language,
including academic registers.
(b) Similar literacies: Occitan and French literacy in France (Behling 1996;
Weth 2014)
Occitan is an autochthonous heritage language in France that was increas-
ingly superseding for the last centuries. Children growing up today with
Occitan language live in families where Occitan used to be the main
spoken language in previous generations but changed into French in
subsequent generations. In order to tie in with the Occitan heritage
language and history, many parents engage in Occitan culture and lan-
guage associations, sending their children to schools where Occitan lan-
guage and literacy is learned as, or instead of, a foreign language. The
children acquire similar literacy norms and practices in the two lan-
guages, although literacy practices are rarer in Occitan than in French.
In contrast to the times when Occitan speakers were perceived as unedu-
cated as they did not master French, the children attending Occitan classes
in French schools today acquire academic language and literacy in both
languages and are enjoying less social scrutiny as they master Occitan
additionally to French.
(c) Different but equally common: French and Arabic in Morocco (Ezzaki
et al. 1987; Wagner 1998)
When Morocco was a French protectorate (1912–56), French was the
official and administrative language. Today, the official languages are
Standard Arabic and Tamazight; Moroccan Arabic (Darija) is the vernacu-
lar language. However, French continues to be the language of prestige,

next to Standard Arabic. Concerning literacy practices, Moroccan Arabic,

Standard Arabic, and French are present in Morocco in multiple social
domains, varying from region to region and according to population age
(Hall 2015; Marley 2004). Tamazight is also present, orally, but not or
very rarely in terms of literacy practices. Standard Arabic, Moroccan
Arabic, and French literacies exist in formal and informal settings and
in various forms and functions. Although literacy practices in the three
languages exist in Morocco and in France, the literacy practices in
Standard and Moroccan Arabic are much more diverse in Morocco. This
visible plurality of literacies in Standard and Moroccan Arabic reduces
the strong religious connotation associated with Arabic in France (cf. (d)
below). Furthermore, to gain literacy in French and Arabic is rather the
norm, not the exception.
(d) Different literacies set apart: Moroccan Arabic, Standard Arabic and
France in France (de Ruiter 2008; Laghzaoui 2008; Weth 2015)
Children growing up with Moroccan Arabic, Standard Arabic, and French in

France are confronted with written languages using different scripts and
writing systems and conveying very different concepts of literacy: French
public school regards literacy as monolingual French literacy. Moreover,
French literacy vehicles an essential sub-skill of language and learning in
general and is seen as an essential prerequisite for life-long learning. The
perception of Arabic in France is instead often limited to religious literacy.
Literacies in French and Arabic can, of course, coexist when the children
grow up in biliterate contexts, using for example children’s books in Arabic
and French. The gap between the two literacies intensifies, however, when
the children grow up in working-class families with parents who grew up in
the literacy context in Morocco, did not attend school for long, or attended
Quranic School only, and immigrated to France as adults with limited
education and literacy even in their L1. Accordingly, the children raised
in France may grow up in social domains with linguistic and literacy
practices and norms that may contrast with the expectations of the parents
on the one hand, and with the expectations of school on the other hand. If
children with Moroccan Arabic as heritage language learn to read and write
in Arabic, they might not encounter Arabic literacy beyond religion and
outside the context of the Arabic-teaching lessons. In these restraint con-
texts, Arabic reading and writing merely consists in recitation and text
copying. These literacy practices do not necessarily imply “reading” in the
school and academic sense. Another aspect is that neither the dominant
French society nor the children’s families might consider Moroccan Arabic,
the regional dialect and language of many Moroccan families living in
France, as a proper “language.” Overall, it can be noted that, within the
monolingual language and literacy policy in France, French is the only
written language Moroccan children learn, but this is embedded in a social
context that is highly multilingual and includes multiple literacies.

When considering the four scenarios described above, it becomes clear

that reading and writing acquisition in multilingual contexts is influenced
by the norms and functions in both, the dominant and the lesser-used or
heritage languages and the literacy practices adjudicated to each. The influ-
ence of different literacy practices affects all aspects of literacy. In conse-
quence, if the literacy norms and practices of heritage and other
nondominant languages differ from the dominant languages and the school
canon, children might experience conflicting expectations on textual
norms, and on how to read and write.
Considering the norms, canons and centrality of literacy in schooling,
one aspect of literacy that has been deemed paramount is learning to write
(Fitzgerald & Shanahan 2000; Zésiger 1995). One aspect of writing is the
ability to encode speech in writing in accordance to the canons of the
writing system of a given language, already demonstrated in Section 18.2
of this contribution with regard to general aspects of spelling acquisition.
The following chapter complements Section 18.2 with regard to the influ-
ence of multilingualism and multiliteracies on spelling.
18.4 Influence of Multilingualism and Multiliteracies

on Spelling
Multilingual learners who are starting to read and write have not only to
deal with different languages and divergent literacy practices but also with
different writing systems and scripts. Both represent language visually, and
the units of a given writing system can be interpreted in a given language
(Coulmas 2013). Numerous studies describe transfer effects in multilingual
spellers at all language levels, phonology, morphology and syntax. Transfer
effects are complex and include multiple linguistic and cognitive factors
(Chung et al. 2019). One central factor for this contribution is the influence
of the first written language on spelling (Cook & Bassetti 2005; Durgunoğlu
et al. 2002; Nimz & Khattab 2019; Schroeder & Şimşek 2010; Weth 2015).
Concerning the influence of a first written language, one has to emphasize
again that an established orthography does not simply reproduce oral
speech in the visual medium. It also represents language structures that
enable the reader to have a better cognitive decoding process of the graphic
symbols (Morin et al. 2018; Saenger 1998). This applies to, for example, the
separation of the word unit, morphological constancy, and graphotactic
regularities in a given writing system. When a child learns to read and
write in a given language, the rules of word separation and the graphotactic
regularities of words in this written language influence what the learner
considers being acceptable for spelling and the visual unit of a “word”
(Cook & Bassetti 2005).

Table 18.1 Schematic representation of language-acquisition settings

as combinations of first/second spoken language and first/second
written language
First written language Second written language

(WL1) (WL2)
First spoken language (L1) L1 = WL1a L1 = WL2

Second spoken language (L2) L2 = WL1 L2 = WL2
a
The symbol = means “is congruent with”, i.e., the first spoken language is congruent with
the first written language (L1 = WL1).
Although spelling is a domain that is not at the center of literacy difficul-

ties when comparing multilinguals and monolinguals, its investigation is
well suited for understanding the analytical process which shapes the
perception of language in general. In order to understand the dynamics of
spelling acquisition in a multilingual context, it is necessary to draw an
analytical distinction between the acquisition of (spoken) languages on the
one hand and the acquisition of written languages or literacies on the other.
The first language in which a child learns to read and write, that is, his or
her first written language (WL1), may or may not be congruent with his or
her first spoken language (L1). From the combination of the acquisition of
spoken languages (L1 or L2) and the acquisition of written languages (WL1
or WL2), we can develop a diagram of four fields, with each of these
representing a different learning setting (Table 18.1).
The following paragraphs present in more detail the four different con-
texts by which the spoken and the written languages are acquired in
multilingual children:
The first spoken language is congruent with the language of literacy (L1 = WL1).
This group of learners become literate in their first language (L1). These
learners must learn to detach from their readily available oral language
resources in order to analyze how the familiar oral features such as phono-
logical and prosodic patterns correlate with its representation in the cor-
responding writing system (WL1) (Cook & Bassetti 2005; Dahmen & Weth
2018; Treiman & Kessler 2005). Depending on which language varieties (i.e.,
regional) a child grows up with, the child might have more or fewer
resources to recognize which linguistic units of the L1 are presented in
the WL1 and by what means.
The second spoken language is congruent to the language of literacy (L2 = WL1).
This group of learners become literate in a second language (L2), which is

the school language and, in general, the dominant language of the society
they live in. This group of learners grow up multilingually and, possibly,

with multilingual literacies. Typically, the learners of this group are

heritage speakers. In many countries, preschool offers special language
education that ensures that these learners have at least some knowledge
in the language of literacy instruction before they enter school. However,
the learners might acquire the dominant language at the same time they
learn to read and write in this language.
Multilingual literacy learners differ from monolingual literacy learners
as they may additionally rely on phonological and/or morphological infor-
mation in the first language (L1), already present in the learners’ mind, for
spelling the second language (WL1). Section 18.4.1 presents examples of
Turkish-speaking children growing up in Germany and learning to write
German as their first written language.
A second spoken language is congruent with a second written language

(L2 = WL2)
This scenario is typical for foreign language learners who, in general, have
already acquired literacy in at least one language. Studying a new language,
they learn the new writing system (WL2) at the same time as the (foreign)
language (L2) itself. In this setting, spelling and reading are even seen as
fundamental tools to comprehend word and sentence structures as the
learners actively engage with their L1 and WL1 to boost the acquisition of
the new language structures (L2 and WL2) (Cook 2005).
The first spoken language is congruent with the second written language
(L1 = WL2).
This scenario applies to heritage speakers who learn to read and write their
L1 after having learned to read and write the dominant language of
schooling, which is the dominant language of the society they live. In
general, heritage language speakers use one or more first language(s) orally
and learn to read and write at school in a second (foreign) language, (see
above, type L2 = WL1). However, some of these learners also follow literacy
education in their first language and acquire this language as a WL2. The
educational settings of heritage language and literacy instruction as well as
the literacy outcomes vary strongly, however (Trifonas & Aravossitas 2018).
Some studies exist where learners who had learned to read and write in a
second language (L2 = WL1) but without or with little former literacy
instruction in this language were asked to write a story in their first
language. These studies display how the learners use features of their first
written language (WL1) in order to spell their first language (L1) (Maas 2008;
Mehlem 2007; Weth 2015; Sürig et al. 2016). Hence, the studies demon-
strate how the learners make use of their language and literacy resources in
order to construct a second writing system. Section 18.4.2 provides
examples of Turkish-speaking children growing up in Germany and
spelling Turkish.

The above-presented contexts display that multilingual practices affect

spoken and written languages differently and that intricate relations exist
between languages and language modalities. The next two sections present
a zoom into the domain of spelling, exhibiting first possible difficulties in
acquiring spelling in a second language that is not yet mastered orally (L2 =
WL1), and then possible transfer effects of multilinguals who have learned
to read and write in a second language and spell their first language (L1 =
WL2). Detailed examples are given from the perspective of learners with
Turkish (L1) as a first language growing up in Germany and becoming
literate in German (L2, WL1). The writing systems of both languages are
phonologically transparent and both use the Latin script. The phonological
and morphological systems differ, however. Section 18.4.1 gives some
details of German phonology and orthography in order to point out typical
difficulties of Turkish L1 children in spelling German. Section 18.4.2 dis-
plays how learners with Turkish L1 who have become literate in German
spell Turkish. With this section, we show that not only (oral)
multilingualism affects the trajectory of becoming literate but also that
the first written language influences the perception of writing the heritage
language.
18.4.1 Learning to Spell in a Second Language (L2 = WL1)

Learners who learn to spell in their second language may still be in the
process of building up lexical and grammatical knowledge in their second
language at the same time as they are coping with learning to write and
read in this language. This may lead to difficulties in domains of spelling
which require grammatical and lexical competences, for example the spell-
ing of the orthographic word (Bahr et al. 2015; Ravid 2012).
With regard to the areas of orthography which demand phonological
analysis, differences between the first and the second language in the area
of phonology and syllable structure might pose challenges when phono-
logical and/or syllable structures are represented in L2 writing that do not
exist in the L1. It seems that noncanonical phenomena in the spelling
of the second language occur in particular in those cases, where the
second language displays more complex structures as opposed to the first
language.
An example is German with a phonologically highly transparent writing
system (Aro & Wimmer 2003). However, German disposes of the differenti-
ation between long versus short vowels (i.e., /yː/:/y/) which is also reflected in
orthography, i.e., Hüte /hyː.tə/ (‘heads’) vs. Hütte /hy.tə/ (‘hut’). Turkish does
not have this phonematic distinction. Detailed qualitative analyses of audi-
tive vowel perception and spelling acquisition in German by children with
Turkish L1 monolingual German children showed indeed differences
between the children with German L1 and those with German L2. The L2

children with Turkish L1 had spelling difficulties with long and short
vowels (Becker 2011; Şahiner 2018; Walkenhorst 2020). The quantitative
study with monolingual and multilingual fourth-graders by Steinig et al.
(2009) supports these results. However, spelling differences of many other
orthographic features have their origin less in the first language, but in
social group differences (Steinig et al. 2009).
18.4.2 Learning to Spell in the Heritage Language (L1 = WL2)

This section aims to show the influence of the WL1 (German) on the first
language spelling (Turkish). The examples are located in a setting where the
heritage language Turkish is the spoken L1 of the children. Being scarcely
present in formal education, the children have only little education in
Turkish literacy (Sürig et al. 2016). Moreover, if the children learn to read
and write in Turkish, this happens after they have been instructed to
German literacy. This section is only indirectly concerned with spelling
acquisition. The focus lies rather on the literacy tools that children have
acquired in German (L2 = WL1) and transfer onto spelling of Turkish (L1 =
WL2). Indeed, the following examples display the children’s perspective of
Turkish from a German literacy perspective.
18.4.2.1 Phonological Features in Spelling in the Heritage Language

Phonologically based spelling occurs in the heritage language especially if
the heritage and the dominant language do not share a phonologic overlap.
They occur in omitting or misrepresenting one or more graphemes
representing phonemes.
Turkish disposes of the affricate /tʃ/, which is represented in Turkish
orthography by the grapheme <ç>. Neither the consonant nor the graph-
eme exists in German. When Turkish-speaking children in Germany with
little or no access to Turkish literacy try to spell this consonant, they choose
a grapheme which represents a German phoneme with a certain phono-
logical overlap with /tʃ/. One possible grapheme is <z>, representing the
affricate /ts/ in German. Thus we will find spellings like *<zıkmak> instead
of <çıkmak> (‘to go out’).
Another example is the opposition of the graphemes <s> vs. <z>. Both
graphemes exist in Turkish and in German, but they relate to different
phonemes: in Turkish <z> represents the phoneme /z/; in German, <z>
represents the affricate /ts/, whereas <s> per default is used in the repre-
sentation of the phoneme /z/. The different representation of <s> and <z>
result in German transfer in Turkish spelling, i.e., Turkish word vazo (‘vase’)
as *<vaso> (Kalkavan-Aydın 2012). Similar is the opposition between the
graphemes <v> vs. <w>. In German, <w> has a strong tendency to
represent the phoneme /v/, whereas the grapheme <v> is a less frequent
alternative to the grapheme <f> in the representation of the phoneme /f/.
In Turkish, the grapheme <v> systematically and exclusively represents

the phoneme /v/, whereas <w> is not part of the Turkish writing system.
Turkish-German will tend to use the grapheme <w> for representing the
phoneme /v/ in Turkish texts, i.e., *<döwdü> instead of <dövdü> (‘s/he
beats’).
Transfer barely exists if WL1 and WL2 share a phoneme represented with
different graphemes. An example is the phoneme /ʃ/ represented in German
with the trigraph <sch>, in Turkish with <ş>. This clear differentiation is
rather unproblematic and easily detected by bilingual learners.
18.4.2.2 Orthographic Spelling in the Heritage Language

Orthographic spelling refers to typical patterns of a given writing system.
One example is the representation of vowel lengthening in German and
Turkish. In German, vowel lengthening is phonematic. In some contexts,
vowel lengthening is represented with combination of the respective vowel
grapheme and the grapheme <h>, such as in <Wohnung> (/ˈvoː.nʊŋ/,
‘apartment’) in contrast to <Wonne> (/ˈvɔnə/, ‘delight’). Although the
marker is not very reliable, learners perceive it as a salient marker for
vowel lengthening (Dahmen & Weth 2018; Nimz & Khattab 2019). Long
vowels are not phonematic in Turkish, but occur in certain syllable com-
binations and can also be lexical. The orthographic system can use the
grapheme <ğ>, the so-called “soft g” (yumuşak g) in combination with the
respective vowel, in order to indicate lengthening, e.g., <bağ> (/ba:/,
‘garden’). Children in Germany with heritage Turkish and little access to
Turkish literacy, as WL2, may follow one of the strategies of the German
orthographic system to represent long vowels and choose <h> in order to
represent this in Turkish, e.g., *<dehil>, instead of <değil> (‘not’).
18.4.2.3 Morphologic Spelling in the Heritage Language

With morphological spelling, we refer to spelling that represents inflec-
tional and derivational morphemes. In Turkish, with few exceptions, con-
sonant alternations (voiced/voiceless alternations) in stem-final and suffix-
initial consonants are systematically represented in spelling. An example is
the preterite suffix <-di/-dü/-du/-dı> (i.e., <geldim> come-pret-1sg,
‘I came’), becoming <-ti/-tü/-tu/-tı> when the preceding consonant is voice-
less (i.e., <gittim> got-pret-1sg, ‘I went’). The spelling hence follows
phonology. In contrast, German orthography follows a strong principle of
the invariant spelling of morphemes. Phonological alternations of the stem
or an affix are not represented in orthography. An example is the written
form of the adjective <brav> (‘well-behaved’) with two phonological forms
(/braf/ and /brav/). Which phonological form is chosen depends on whether
the consonant is located at the syllable ending or not (brav /braf/ versus brave
/bra.və/). Beginning writers of heritage Turkish as their WL2 have a ten-
dency to follow this German principle of morphological constancy in
writing. For example, they write *<dövüşdüler> instead of <dövüştüler>
(fight-pret-pl ‘they fought’).

18.4.2.4 Word Separation in the Heritage Language

The concept of a word as the basic unit of the levels of orthographic
representation differ between spelling systems (DeFrancis 1989; Fuhrhop
2018; Sampson 1985). Multilingual and multiliterate learners use the con-
cept of an orthographic word in the language in which they have learned to
read and write in order to spell the heritage language.
Turkish uses agglutination to form words from nominal and verbal
stems. The Turkish orthographic word is primarily based on the phono-
logical word. Its properties can be determined, firstly, by morphophonolo-
gical assimilation (“syllable harmony”), which means that all morphemes
following a lexical stem, which have syllable harmony in the last vowel of
the stem are spelled as one orthographic word. A second important prop-
erty of the Turkish orthographic word is word stress (Menz & Schroeder
2015). Regular word stress is applied to the final syllable of the word,
whether simplex or suffixed. Some suffixes, however, block the shift of
stress to the word-final syllable, and word stress remains on these suffixes
(Kabak & Vogel 2001).
The (phonological) rules for the Turkish orthographic word stand in
sharp contrast to the morphological principles of German (Fuhrhop 2008).
A frequently observable peculiarity in spellings of Turkish heritage
speakers is separate spellings of suffixes. Table 18.2 presents word separ-
ation of suffixes in a verb (1) and a noun (2).
The spelling examples of Turkish children with German as WL1 prob-
ably rely on the word separation rules in German, as this separation of
suffixes occurs very rarely in texts from primary school pupils in Turkey.
However, two more sources seem to trigger the separate spellings of
suffixes (cf. Schroeder & Şimşek 2010). Concerning example (1) in
Table 18.2, the verb example contains a suffix expressing the aspectual
category aorist (aor). This suffix belongs to those few suffixes that blocks
the shift of stress to the word-final syllable (see above). Word stress, then,
lies on the aorist suffix. Children with Turkish as heritage language and
German as language of literacy have a tendency to overemphasize word
stress as an indicator of the orthographic word boundary. Example (2) in
Table 18.2 Word separation in Turkish spelling of children with German

as their first written language
Turkish, spelling of bilingual pupils Turkish, orthographically correct
(1) gider sek gidersek

gid-er-se-k
go-AOR -COND -1PL
‘if we go’
(2) sinif daki cocuklar sinıfdaki çocuklar
sinıf-da-ki çocuk-lar
class-LOC -ADJ child-PL

Table 18.2 presents the children’s tendency to spell nominal suffixes

separately when they consist of more than one phoneme. Beyond this,
the stative location indicated by the Turkish (adverbial) locative case (loc)
is represented in German by a preposition, which is a distinct ortho-
graphic word and separate word category.
Together, the examples in Table 18.2 show that the WL1 German influ-
ences the increase of word separation in spelling of the L1 Turkish as WL2.
However, they also show that the first written language is not the only
trigger for word spelling of the heritage language. Other aspects play a role
as well, such as rule amplification in Turkish.
If we look at literacy acquisition (WL1) in an L2 and compare it with the
writing of the L1, completely different perspectives on the children’s
resources become apparent: when learning to write in the second language
(WL1 = L2) there can be interference with L1, for example in the perception
and the spelling of vowels. The other perspective shows the same children
who have learned to write in an L2 but have not (yet) received writing
instruction in their L1. Here it becomes apparent that the children have
understood the form–function relations of a given writing system.
Consequently, they transfer these orthographic forms with crucial functions
in the learnt writing system, such as word boundaries and the principle of
the invariant spelling of morphemes, to the newly written system of their L1.
18.5 Summary: Acquiring Literacy

and Multilingual Literacies
With a focus on spelling, this chapter showed, in Sections 18.1 and 18.2,
how much becoming literate means learning new functions and practices
of a language. Beyond learning the new communication practice, children
must also learn to process the activities of reading and writing that slow
down the language production and comprehension process and are very
labor-intensive. Furthermore, children must understand that oral language
is represented in a visual code and how this code is related to speech.
Literacy development in one or more languages and literacies is affected by
the practices and ideologies a child encounters. Literacy and literacies are not
only present at school and in the dominant language, but also in all other
social environments and languages to which the child is exposed and in
which there are explicit or implicit opportunities to use the written lan-
guage(s) in literacy related activities. Even if written texts and writing in the
heritage language might not be very present, they might have an impact on
the literacy development of multilingual children in the school language.
Sections 18.3 and 18.4 elaborated how growing up multilingually and
becoming literate can appear to be difficult as conflicting expectations
might be imposed on the child. That is because formal and schooled
literacy is still based on monolingual standards, while the reality of many

children is more complex, linguistically and in respect to literacies.

Although multilingual literacies exist and evolve, for example in
computer-mediated communication such as chats, and although multilin-
gual writing is present at home, in linguistic landscapes and material
culture, formal written texts are still expected to be monolingual, and
schooled literacy makes almost no reference to multilingual literacies.
Hence, multilingual children grow up into divergent sociolinguistic rela-
tionships of literacy practices between the dominant and their heritage
language, and with divergent relationships of first/second language and
first/second written language in general and in spelling acquisition in
particular. Section 18.3 tried to systematize and illustrate these diverse
relationships, focusing on literacy acquisition in the multilingual context
of a dominant language of a given society, particularly in its use within
the schooling settings concomitant to one or more heritage languages
used in the families, homes, and communities. When it comes to writing
and spelling, multilingual children draw on all their linguistic and literate
resources. This leads to cross-language transfer and creative solutions in
dealing with the challenges of literacy. We are only beginning to under-
stand the analytical ideas that reveal themselves in the spellings of multi-
lingual children and as an initial step in unraveling the intricacies of
multilingual writing. Section 18.4 aimed to provide concrete examples of
spelling in the heritage language as a window into the rich repertoire
of written “languaging” (Jørgensen 2008). Specifically, we illustrate the
influence of the first written language on spelling a second language, here
the heritage language of Turkish in Germany.
Looking beyond multilingualism, all learners, mono- or multilingual, are
confronted with specific social norms of how communication is structured
in reading and writing. In contrast to oral conversations, reading and
writing are essentially decontextualized monologue activities, yet highly
audience-targeted and purpose-oriented. A written text is decontextualized
from the actual social communicative situation and setting. It is easily
objectified, can be reviewed and edited, and the reader can go back and
forth in the text. The object-like character of writing holds the chance to
examine, discuss, and modify the written forms. We therefore encourage
the often highly monolingual mainstreamed curricula to recognize the
diversity of languages and to benefit from having more than one linguistic
and writing system to be drawn on for encouraging children to discover
written language and literacies throughout all social domains.
Abbreviations
3 third person
acc accusative (case)

adj suffix deriving a (complex) adjective

aor aorist (tense)
cond conditional (mode)
dat dative (case)
loc locative (case)
m masculine (gram. gender)
pl plural
pptcp past participle form
pret preterite
pst past tense
sg singular
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19
Assessing Multilinguals
Becky H. Huang & Alison L. Bailey
The number of young children between the ages of 3 and 11 growing up

learning two or more languages has been increasing rapidly around the
world (Bailey 2017; Baker & Wright 2017). The growth of this young
multilingual population comes with a parallel need for assessing their
development fairly and effectively. This chapter, therefore, aims to provide
a state-of-the-art review of the unique needs of assessing this population. In
this chapter, we chose to focus on the 3–11 age group because it’s a critical
stage of development in language as well as cognitive and social-emotional
domains (Bailey 2017; McKay 2006) and because it has strong relevance and
implications for education. A definition of the “multilingual” population
will be provided first, followed by a discussion on two domains of assess-
ment, language proficiency and content area knowledge. Three key areas of
challenge associated with assessing this young multilingual population will
then be elaborated. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of three
relatively recent and promising multilingual assessment practices, includ-
ing incorporating technology in multilingual assessments, the use of
dynamic assessment, and the application of translanguaging in
multilingual assessments.
19.1 Definition of “Multilinguals”
The definition of “multilinguals” varies in the literature. Researchers have

argued that it is best conceptualized as an umbrella term that includes a
range of proficiency levels and not just individuals who are highly profi-
cient in both or all of the languages they speak (Baker & Wright 2017;
Grosjean 1989). Following this argument, we define multilinguals as indi-
viduals who have been exposed to and/or using more than one language in
daily lives, regardless of their proficiency levels. Those include individuals
who have been exposed to two languages and known as “bilinguals” in the

442 BECKY H. HUANG & ALISON L. BAILEY
literature. In the discussion of previous work on bilinguals, we will use

either “bilingual” or “bi/multilingual” interchangeably.
Multilingual children may be further classified as “simultaneous bi/
multilinguals” or “sequential bi/multilinguals” depending on the timing
of their exposure to the multiple languages in their language inventories. If
they have been exposed to multiple languages at the same time since birth
or in early childhood, they are generally considered “simultaneous bi/multi-
linguals” because there is not a single native/first language. In fact, they
experience bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA) (DeHouwer 2009). In
contrast, if they have an established native/first language before they are
introduced to additional languages, they are considered “sequential bi/
multilinguals.”
Another popular categorization for multilinguals relates to “dominance,”
defined as either higher language proficiency or higher amount of language
exposure (Bedore et al. 2012). Multilingual individuals may be classified as
being dominant in one of their multiple languages and/or language var-
ieties/registers. For example, a multilingual child growing up in the United
States who is exposed to Mandarin Chinese at home and does not learn
English until s/he starts kindergarten would be considered Mandarin-
dominant upon kindergarten entry as they are more proficient in
Mandarin at that time. However, after they start school, they may soon
become English-dominant in terms of the amount of language exposure if
their exposure to English outweighs that of Mandarin. With more expos-
ure to and schooling in English, they may switch to English-dominance as
they become more proficient in English than in Mandarin (Jia & Aaronson
2003). In most cases, they may be considered English-dominant in
the academic language variety/register and Mandarin-dominant in the
emotional language variety/register. However, the dominance category
may not apply to some multilingual children whose language exposure is
equally divided or who have similar proficiency levels across languages.
These individuals are considered “balanced” bilinguals/multilinguals.
The dominance category is relative, dynamic and subject to change
across the lifespan depending on the multilingual individual’s starting
and evolving conditions of exposure, need and use of their different
languages.
Although there may be some universal language learning patterns in
multilingual development, the heterogeneity in the multilingual popula-
tion makes it difficult to develop a comprehensive multilingual language
learning theory to account for the variation in the process and outcomes of
language development across subgroups of multilinguals and learning
contexts. Child language development research has predominantly focused
on monolingual children, and the research base on young multilingual
children’s language development is relatively limited. Below we summarize
the literature for three subgroups of bi/multilinguals based on the age of
exposure to their languages (simultaneous bi/multilinguals vs. sequential

Assessing Multilinguals 443
bi/multilinguals) and learning contexts (sequential bi/multilinguals –

majority/societal language context vs. sequential bi/multilinguals – minor-
ity language/instructed context).
There is a growing body of research on simultaneous bi/multilinguals
who are exposed to two or more languages at the same time since birth (De
Houwer 2009, 2017; Genesee 2001; Nalls 2019; Paradis & Genesee 1997;
Silva-Corvalán 2014). This line of work has examined bi/multilingual chil-
dren’s development of various linguistic components, such as phonological
development (Tanaka & Chen 2015), lexicon/vocabulary (DeAnda et al. 2016)
and morphosyntax (Hager & Müller 2015; Huang et al. 2020; Meisel 2017).
This body of research has also explored the effects of age of exposure
(Bedore et al. 2016) and language input (De Houwer 2017) and output/use
(Ruiz-Felter et al. 2016; Ribot et al. 2018) on language outcomes. Results
from this body of research have been used to inform assessments for
evaluating one (e.g., the societal/majority language or the minority/heritage
language) or all of bi/multilingual children’s languages.
Research on sequential bi/multilingual in the target age group could be
divided into two bodies of literature: studies conducted in a majority/soci-
etal language context versus those conducted in a minority language/
instructed context (Huang & Kuo 2018). An example for the former is
studying the English language learning of Mexican or Chinese immigrants
in the US where English is the majority/societal language, and an example
for the latter is examining the English language learning of bi/multilinguals
living in Mexico or China where English is a minority/foreign language.
Research on sequential bi/multilinguals in majority/societal language con-
text has mainly focused on the learning of the majority language, and most
of the studies examining the majority language outcomes of this chapter’s
target age group (3–11) have focused on a subgroup of sequential bilinguals
who are potentially at risk for low reading or academic achievements or for
developmental language disorders. For example, many such studies were
conducted on bilingual students who are classified as English learners and
receiving English as a second language services in the US or Canada (e.g.,
Cummins et al. 2012; Hoff 2013; Kim et al. 2014; Paradis & Jia 2017) to
address education assessment and accountability issues. There is also some
literature on the heritage language maintenance of sequential bilinguals
in a majority/societal language context, such as the work by Silvina
Montrul (e.g., 2018) on Spanish heritage speakers and Maria Polinsky
(e.g., Polinsky & Scontras 2019) on Russian heritage speakers in the US.
On the other hand, a large proportion of research on sequential bi/
multilingual learning a minority/foreign language in a formal instruction
context has focused on English as the target language because of its status
as a dominant global language. The ever-increasing growth of early foreign
language programs worldwide in the past few decades, and particularly
early English language instruction, has also inspired many research studies
on young language learners (Butler et al. 2018; Enever & Lindgren 2017;

Muñoz et al. 2018). Similar to the research on simultaneous bi/multilin-

guals, the two bodies of research on sequential bi/multilinguals have also
examined the predictors of language learning outcomes, specifically
the effects of age of learning (DeKeyser 2018; Huang 2014, 2016; Huang
et al. 2018; Muñoz 2014) and language input (De Wilde et al. 2020; Tragant
et al. 2016).
Despite these investigations, there is not a consensus on a comprehensive
multilingual learning theory, which poses challenges to developing valid
and developmentally appropriate assessments. In addition to the hetero-
geneity in age of exposure and learning context, multilingual children may
also vary in the typological distances between their languages (e.g., as
Germanic languages, German and English are typologically more similar
than Mandarin and English are) as well as other individual difference
variables (e.g., motivation, personality and learning strategies) that have
been shown to impact language learning process and outcomes. Although
there are potentially language universals in multilingual development, the
large heterogeneity makes it difficult to develop norm-referenced
assessments that are valid and appropriate for all multilingual children.
19.2 Domains of Multilingual Assessment
Multilingual assessments for the target age group (3–11) generally fall into
two domains: those that target language proficiency versus those that target
content knowledge. The specific domains of multilingual assessments vary
depending on the purpose of assessment. The three major categories of
assessment purposes are: (1) to identify children who need language sup-
port services or intervention to meet developmental milestones or
education benchmarks, (2) to monitor the progress of identified children
receiving services for education or clinical accountability, and (3) to meas-
ure summative achievement (language development and academic content)
for educational accountability purposes.
19.2.1 Language Assessment: Phonology, Vocabulary, Syntax,

Discourse, Pragmatics
For the assessment of multilingual children’s language proficiency, the
target construct is language. However, questions about the definition of
“language” and the validity of interpretation have been a perceptual con-
cern in the field (Bachman 2013). Based on the formal/generativist linguis-
tics framework (Chomsky 1986), the language system is complex and
consists of a variety of well-defined subcomponents ranging from
phonology, vocabulary/lexicon, morphology and syntax/grammar. In con-
trast, functional linguistics and other applied linguistics theories (e.g.,
Halliday 1994; Schleppegrell 2004) focus on deriving language from the

ways language is used in context, thus the domains of discourse and

pragmatics. The dominant view in language assessment has aligned more
with the functional/applied theories and considered language proficiency as
consisting of multiple interrelated domains, such as grammatical know-
ledge and pragmatic knowledge that is realized in language use across
different contexts (Bachman 2013). Specifically, Bachman identified three
different approaches to measure language proficiency: ability-focused, task-
focused and interaction-focused. He argued that language tests should
consider all three approaches in their design. However, although it is
unlikely to reach a consensus on a specific construct definition anytime
soon, researchers have urged language assessment researchers and devel-
opers to focus on the validity and meaningfulness of score-based
interpretations to stakeholders rather than on the validity of the interpret-
ations for an abstract definition of language proficiency.
Although it is a common practice to use standardized norm-referenced
language proficiency assessments to evaluate monolingual children’s lan-
guage proficiency, using these assessments that are designed for and
normed on a monolingual population can be problematic. Bi/multilingual
children are not two or more monolinguals in one person (Grosjean 1989).
Their language knowledge is divided between their two or more languages.
Measuring only one of their languages and comparing their knowledge in
that language against monolingual norms thus does not reflect their
true proficiency.
A number of different types of assessment approaches can be used to
target the repertoire of developing languages in multilingual children
across the domains of phonology, vocabulary (including semantics), syntax
(including morphological skills), discourse and pragmatic domains. It is
important to note that discourse skills are frequently influenced by the
cultural practices of the speech communities to which a child belongs.
Storytelling conventions for example, differ by culture and different var-
ieties of Spanish spoken around the world (McCabe et al. 2008). We also
acknowledge that for multilinguals, but not monolinguals, coordination of
all these domains across two languages requires additional abilities in the
metalinguistic domain. Assessment of these domains can take the form of
standardized tests of a child’s first language and subsequent languages,
translations of English language standardized tests, and a range of diagnos-
tic and other supplemental methods, such as formative assessment (Bailey
et al. 2015).
Below we discuss some Spanish language standardized assessment
options that are commercially available and/or used widely, particularly
in the US, where the majority of multilingual children are from Spanish-
speaking homes. These assessments are designed to give a broad sense of
children’s domain knowledge. Diagnostic assessments and formative
assessment both supplement these broad measures. Diagnostic assessments
include sufficient numbers of items that can give clinicians and educators

more exact information about how well a student might be doing in terms
of different key aspects of a domain. Such information can be used in
intervention decisions. Formative assessment is an approach to assessment
that includes conversing with students or observing language usage during
spontaneous or elicited classroom activities and exchanges with peers.
These conversations and observations generate information about language
usage for educators to use as feedback to students directly or to inform
their instructional next steps. Key considerations which we focus on with
these different types of assessments are concerns with testing multilingual
children using potentially monolingual-normed assessments of their lan-
guages and using tasks on assessments which may not be culturally appro-
priate with or familiar to children.
Phonology
For Spanish phonology, there is the standardized Test of Phonological
Awareness in Spanish (Riccio et al. 2004) developed to assess the receptive
and productive phonological skills of 4- to 11 year-old Spanish speakers in
the US. Spanish translations of English language phonological measures are
also available. For example, an assessment designed for kindergarten–third
grade students, the phonological subtest of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic
Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS, University of Oregon, Center on Teaching and
Learning 2018) has subsequently been normed on Spanish monolingual
speakers, such as the Fluidez en la Segmentación de Fonemas or phonemic
segmentation fluency subtest of Indicadores Dinámicos del Éxito en la Lectura,
IDEL (Baker et al. 2007). This subtest requires both receptive (listening to
phonemes) and productive skills (saying phonemes aloud). This assessment
is an example of a trans-adaption rather than a direct translation because
the assessment is modified to take account of the linguistic structures of
the target translated language (e.g., different phonotactic rules in Spanish
and English for combining sounds; a greater number of letters than sounds
in Spanish, but a greater number of sounds than letters in English).
Phonological skills in Spanish and English are related (Cisero & Royer
1995), and the advantage of these translated assessments is that similar
assessments measuring comparable skills or constructs can be adminis-
tered in a child’s two languages for more meaningful comparisons to be
made. In the case of Spanish-language IDEL, the availability of the English
language DIBELS makes for such a comparison. However, it is not clear
from the available technical information on these commercial assessments
whether performance norms and benchmarks were developed with mono-
lingual Spanish speakers or children who were bilingual in Spanish and
English even at early grades. Thus expectations for performances with
multilinguals are not made clear.
Supplemental means of evaluation in the phonological domain include
conducting segmental analyses (e.g., accuracy of consonant and vowel
production) and whole-word measures such as phonological mean length

of utterance (pMLU) on speech samples (both elicited or spontaneous).

Separate analysis of phonological processing in each of a child’s languages
is ideal in order to monitor phonological development. Spontaneous
language samples can be elicited to sample consonants in differing
word positions and consonant clusters for example, and best practices
recommend retesting to ensure consistency of speech production (Stow &
Pert 1998). Following these practices can allow for more valid inferences
to be drawn about phonological abilities in a child’s two (or more)
languages.
Vocabulary
For vocabulary development there are standardized assessments available
that are normed on either monolingual Spanish-speaking populations (e.g.,
Test de Vocabulario en Imágenes Peabody, Dunn et al. 1986) or bilingual
Spanish-English speaking populations (e.g., Receptive/Expressive One-Word
Picture Vocabulary Test Spanish Bilingual Edition, Brownell 2001). Assessing
semantic development to capture a child’s ability to store elaborate word-
category representations can be done with the Diagnostic Evaluation of
Language Variation (Seymour et al. 2003). However, it is not evident that
such assessments can be accurate measures of multilingual children’s
vocabulary and semantic knowledge given the culture-specific ways that
caregivers support vocabulary development. For example, the object label-
ing practices that these vocabulary tests assume are reported to be unfamil-
iar routines in some Spanish-speaking families where the focus may
be on providing details about events, objects and relationships (Peña &
Quinn 1997).
Supplemental methods for evaluating vocabulary development, includ-
ing growth in children’s lexicons through the addition of morphologically
derived words (e.g., generating nouns from adjectives or verbs) involve
eliciting spontaneous speech samples (Huang & Ramirez 2021). Samples
can be used to analyze lexical items for the number of unique types and
the total number of words used and calculating lexical diversity with a type/
token ratio (TTR). Comparisons can also be made of words a student has in
common across their different languages and words used uniquely in only
one of their languages. Such differences are largely context dependent (e.g.,
words about the household may be known and used in one language spoken
at home; other words, such as words for a sport or recreational pastime,
may only be known and used in another language used to play sports with
school friends, for example). Educators working with multilingual students
in classrooms are in a unique position to utilize formative assessments to
additionally track the day-to-day and perhaps most authentic contexts of
vocabulary acquisition. This includes using anecdotal records, notes and
checklists of student performance matching vocabulary used in their
instruction, as well as portfolios of student work (e.g., Corcoran et al. 2004).

Syntax
The Bilingual Verbal Ability Tests (Muñoz-Sandoval et al. 1998) measures
students’ oral English proficiency in expressive vocabulary (i.e., naming
pictures, synonyms and antonyms) and verbal analogies, and their oral
language proficiency in in one of 17 other languages. The Bilingual Syntax
Measure (Burt et al. 1978) focus on oral proficiency in syntactic structures
has been widely used as a measure of students’ acquisition of English and
Spanish morphosyntactic speaking and listening abilities.
Supplemental methods for evaluating syntactic and morphological devel-
opment include eliciting spontaneous speech to calculate the mean length of
utterance, or MLU, which is based on the average length of a child’s sentences
most typically determined by the number of smallest units of meaning, or
morphemes. Adaptations of MLU that are more meaningful for use with
Spanish include counting whole words rather than individual morphemes
within words (e.g., Aguado 1988; Gutiérrez-Clellen et al. 2000). MLU is less
predictive of syntactic structure as children’s language becomes more
mature at close to the use of five words, often coinciding with around
4 years of age in monolingual English-speaking children, because length
is no longer a proxy for complexity when children can elide parts of the
sentence, especially as they acquire use of conjunctions that can make
repetition of verb forms in conjoined clauses unnecessary. Additionally, it
may be difficult to meaningfully compare MLU across languages due to the
different ways of operationally defining MLU to match the different
morphosyntactic structures of different languages as mentioned above.
For example, in Spanish MLU expressed in words and the option to drop
the use of pronouns given person marking on verbs means MLU may be
lower in Spanish than in English for a child at the same age or phase of
syntactic development.
Discourse
Discourse abilities require the organization of language beyond the level of
the sentence and can occur alone (e.g., producing a solo oral narrative,
writing expository text) or together with others (e.g., listening and contrib-
uting to a conversation). To measure oral, monologic discourse abilities,
especially with young multilingual children, story generation and fictional
narratives can be elicited using wordless picture books or a series of picture
plates. For example, the Renfrew Bus Story Test (Glasgow & Cowley 1994) is
normed for monolingual English-speaking children, but use of the Frog,
Where Are You? wordless picture book follows a similar protocol and this has
been used been extensively with children from various language back-
grounds and for comparative purposes, including narrative skills in
Spanish (e.g., Bedore et al. 2010). Children’s oral personal narratives can
also be elicited using supplemental techniques such as the give-a-narrative-to-
get-a-narrative protocol that has also been used cross-linguistically,

including in Spanish (McCabe & Peterson 1991; McCabe et al. 2008). Such
techniques can be applied to the written realm as well and to additional
genres such as informational writing, personal opinion and creative writing
abilities in a child’s different languages. For dialogic discourse skills, inter-
active tasks have been created that elicit children’s abilities to converse
(Huang et al. 2020; Kondo-Brown 2002). The format of such tasks includes
examinee–examiner and examinee–examinee peer pairs, though the latter
is less common (Sandlund et al. 2016). In a recent test validation study,
Huang et al. (2020) developed a communicative interactive test to assess
adolescent English language learners’ oral proficiency. The two-part test
included a role-play task where adolescent participants had to negotiate for
their desired birthday gifts with the examiner, who played the role of the
uncle/aunt. The second task required the participants to explain to the
examiner how to draw a flowering plant. Participants’ performances on
both tasks were evaluated based on a rubric that focused on sociolinguistic
appropriateness, turn-taking, flexibility, coherence and cohesion, and
spoken fluency.
Analyses of oral and written samples generated by these different elicit-
ation techniques can focus on discourse-level features such as use of transi-
tion words, or pronouns to replace full nouns that can build coherence and
cohesion in discourse. It is worth noting that sampling children’s language
at the discourse-level offers a fertile ground for multilingual assessment
(e.g., may spontaneously allow for use of both languages), and ample
opportunity to not only measure discourse features but also a student’s
full repertoire (i.e., their phonological skills, vocabulary knowledge, use of
syntax, etc.) that will also be present in the samples if the prompting also
allows for these domains.
Pragmatics
Children’s pragmatic competencies signal their abilities to successfully use
language in a given context and culture. Therefore, children will have
different repertoires of socially appropriate uses of language for the differ-
ent cultures they belong to or take part in across the day. There are
commercially available screeners of pragmatics functioning, including the
Children’s Communication Checklist-2 (Bishop 2003) and the Pragmatic Profile
and Observational Rating Scale of the CELF-4 (Semel et al. 2003), which provide
norms for pragmatic performances, and the Teacher Assessment of Student
Communicative Competence (Smith et al. 2000). Supplemental methods for
evaluating pragmatic development in a multilingual context include the
informal observation of children’s language use across all the different
contexts of their daily lives. The focus on pragmatics skills of multilingual
children can also tap into the metalinguistic skills, previously mentioned,
that children also need to effectively coordinate their repertoires of all the
language domains across two or more languages, as well as revealing the
contexts and knowledge involved in utilizing two or more languages in

daily life (e.g., translanguaging practices). Such observations can provide

authentic assessment of multilingual children’s pragmatic skills and can be
conducted by educators as part of their formative assessment practices to
augment any standardized assessments. Furthermore, discourse and prag-
matic skills are so deeply embedded in and reflective of students’
socialization of language at home that these two domains are also natural
targets of parental reports of student capabilities. Such reports may use-
fully supplement teacher observations of language use (e.g., Gutiérrez-
Clellen & Kreiter 2003).
Finally, comprehensive measures of school-age students’ oral language
and literacy abilities also exist for school accountability purposes. In the US,
for example, these include norm-referenced, often commercially available
English and Spanish language proficiency tests (see Barrueco et al. 2012 for
a review of assessments in both languages for preschool and younger
elementary-aged students particularly). State-mandated standards-based
comprehensive English language proficiency assessments are administered
annually for accountability purposes with students identified as English
learners (e.g., the WIDA Consortium; ELPA21 Consortium). Until the past
10–15 years, both commercial and state-created annual assessments of
English learners had largely measured social uses of language (e.g., per-
forming greetings, producing commonly used action verbs, retelling stories
from pictures, etc.) whether in school or in out-of-school contexts.
However, with changes to educational policies and the introduction of
standards for English language development of school-age children (Bailey
& Huang 2011), these assessments now attempt to measure uses of general
academic language that can cut across the different academic disciplines as
well as the different discourse practices articulated in the content standards
for the different disciplines (e.g., recounting past events in social studies,
arguing from evidence in science) (see Bailey et al. 2007 for descriptions of
linguistic characteristics of texts, tests and classroom talk). Under federal
policy, current language proficiency tests used by states operationalize
language as the receptive and expressive uses of language corresponding
to the language inherent in state academic content standards for English
language arts and mathematics (Every Student Succeeds Act, 2015, Sec. 1111(b)
(2)(G)). States must report student proficiency in listening, speaking, read-
ing and writing. Test items are in fact designed to be a sampling of a state’s
or consortium’s English language development standards that are in turn
aligned to the academic content standards as well as some social uses of
language. Items emphasize the communicative purposes of language (e.g.,
listening actively and interpreting and comprehending spoken English such
as a conversation between two students) rather than measures of discrete
language skills in the domains of phonology, semantics, syntax, etc. (For
example, see released practice items of the English Language Proficiency
Assessments for California [ELPAC] annual summative assessment; www
.elpac.org/s/pdf/ELPAC_Grades_6-8_Practice_Test_2018.pdf.)

These changes have attempted to better evaluate the linguistic and dis-
course abilities needed to access academic content (e.g., Bailey & Carroll
2015). Most recently, one US state, California, has also created a comprehen-
sive assessment of Spanish for students age 5–18 aligned with standards for
Spanish language development analogous to the English language assess-
ments and standards described above. This assessment will be useful for
accountability of student progress in both English and Spanish given the
state’s goal of quadrupling the number of Spanish-English dual immersion
programs to 1600 by 2030 (California Department of Education 2018).
However, we should caution that this Spanish language proficiency assess-
ment measures standard varieties of the language. Scoring rubrics, etc. are
based on the Spanish language register expected for an educational setting,
whereas many of students tested may be growing up with Spanish as a
heritage language in the home or community surroundings. The potential
for a mismatch in register is high and may compromise inferences about
students’ proficiency in and experiences with Spanish drawn from
such assessments.
19.2.2 Assessing Academic Content Knowledge of School-Age

Multilingual Learners
Turning now to content knowledge assessments for school-age multilingual
children in immigrant-receiving countries, we examine two key consider-
ations that can help enhance the validity of student academic content
testing: multilingual approaches to content assessment and the use of
accessibility resources during test administration. The achievement gap
that is often observed between performances by students who are still
acquiring the dominant language in their immigrant-receiving country
and students who are monolingual in the dominant societal language is
sometimes articulated as a linguistic gap. Bailey et al. (2018) report findings
from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) with 15-year-olds
worldwide that show that in every comparison the gap in reading and
mathematics scores is persistent, no matter where in the world students
are tested, whether students live in Shanghai or the US. If students are
tested in a language that differs from the language they predominantly
speak in their homes, they perform lower than students whose home
language matches that of the PISA administered in their country (Bailey
et al. 2018).
To address this inequity, multilingual approaches for assessing content,
can involve assessing students in their home language/first language (L1)
rather than in the language of school if their L1 is their most proficient
language and they are literate in the language for written test purposes. For
example, New York State offers its mathematics assessment of K-12 stu-
dents in home and community languages such as Spanish, Chinese,
Haitian, Korean and Russian (Ercikan & Por 2020). This approach is

especially fair to students who have already received formal schooling in

their country of origin and have acquired key concepts in the areas of
mathematics, science, social studies, etc. in their L1. This practice is also
meaningful for students who are being schooled in bilingual contexts such
as dual-language immersion programs and bilingual maintenance pro-
grams where one or more of the academic content areas may be taught in
a student’s L1 (i.e., the program partner language). However, the transla-
tion or trans-adaptation of content assessments into students’ home lan-
guages raises questions about comparability across the content assessment
due to differences across languages (e.g., terms may not be available in all
languages, or different languages may impact the length of an assessment).
There can also be disparity in students having had the opportunity to
acquire the content of assessments or have familiarity with assessment
practices which may include student populations from, for example, oral
cultures, lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds, or communities
where literate uses of language are not common (see, for review, Ercikan &
Por 2020).
There are also arguments for assessing students in both their L1 and the
language of school so that students can draw on all their linguistic
resources in demonstrating their content knowledge (i.e., allowing for
translanguaging practices such as code-switching between languages
during task responses). For example, Escamilla et al. (2018) describe how
students can demonstrate their writing abilities more completely when
allowed to use both Spanish and English together in one assessment con-
text. Similar results have also been found in other recent studies (e.g., Lopez
et al. 2017). An ongoing concern in multilingual assessment of student
content knowledge is comparability of assessments (Ercikan & Por 2020).
Accessibility resources can also address inequities in academic content
assessment with multilinguals. Large-scale summative assessment contexts
include supports that can be universal to all students taking a test (e.g., use
of graphic organizers) or accommodations that modify the testing adminis-
tration to specific student groups. In the case of multilingual students still
acquiring the testing language, such accommodations may include extra
time and bilingual glossaries. In classroom assessment contexts, students
may be provided with nonverbal strategies to convey their content learning,
such as selecting visual images, manipulating charts, etc. (National
Academies of Science Engineering & Medicine [NASEM] 2018).
19.3 Challenges of Assessing Multilinguals
As mentioned previously, there is an ever-increasing need for assessing

multilingual children’s language proficiency or content knowledge.
Children in this age range (3–11) are in a critical stage of development,
and the challenges are even greater for multilingual children given the

demands of learning additional languages. Understanding their age-related

developmental characteristics is thus crucial to creating reliable and valid
assessments for this population (Butler 2019; McKay 2006). Cognitively,
they have shorter memory and attention spans compared to adolescents
and adults. Based on Piaget’s cognitive development theory (Ginsburg &
Opper 1988), children generally don’t reach formal operations stage until
they turn 12 years old or so. In other words, children in this age group still
think in a concrete rather than abstract way. Those who are between the
ages of birth to 2 are in the sensorimotor stage and they know the world
through their movements and sensations. From ages 2–7, children are in
the preoperational stage where they experience a rapid growth in language
development and become increasingly fluent at using symbols. Those in the
age range of 8–11 think more logically and begin using inductive reasoning.
In general, children do not start to think abstractly and sustain abstract
topics in conversation until adolescence. It is critical that the design of
assessments and interpretation of assessment results take into account
the cognitive characteristics of the age group to ensure that the inferences
made from the assessments are valid and developmentally appropriate. It is
also important to keep in mind that there is substantial individual variation
among children even within the same age groups, such as their cultural
heritage and home language policy, and these individual differences may
pose challenges to standardize the assessment content and procedures.
Alternatives to standardized assessments, such as dynamic assessments
and translanguaging applications, will be discussed later in this chapter.
Below we discuss three major challenges encountered when administer-
ing language assessments with of this population: (1) heterogeneity in the
young multilingual population, (2) disentangling the connection between
language and content, and (3) differentiating between typically developing
multilingual development and developmental language disorders or learn-
ing difficulties.
19.3.1 Heterogeneity in the Young Multilingual Population

The majority of the child language literature centers on monolingual chil-
dren from middle-class families (Genesee et al. 2004). Such a focus rules out
variations in native languages and SES, two main variables contributing to
differences in developmental outcomes (Hoff 2003, 2013; Suskind et al.
2016). In contrast, not only is there great variation in multilingual chil-
dren’s native languages, immigration histories, and SES backgrounds, they
also differ in the order by which they acquire their two or more languages
(simultaneous bi/multilinguals vs. bi/multilinguals), the type and amount of
exposure they receive in each language and their proficiency levels in the
languages they know (language dominance). Further complicating the pic-
ture is the variation in multilingual children’s native language writing
systems, literacy skills, and years/levels of formal education. This variation

is highly relevant and important for school-age multilingual children and

particularly for those who live in societies with an education accountability
system, such as China, Japan, the US, the United Kingdom and some other
countries (Bailey et al. 2014). Due to sociopolitical changes, some school-age
multilingual children may receive interrupted/inconsistent formal general
schooling. The majority of these students arrive in the hosting countries
with limited or no literacy skills in the language of the hosting country and
for some, in their own native language as well. They may also be behind in
grade-level content area knowledge, which could lead to poor academic
performance and higher school drop-out rates (Hos 2016). Those who arrive
from war-torn countries or experience overnight uprooting of families due
to political persecution or other reasons may also have additional psycho-
logical needs because of their traumatic migration experiences. In sum,
there are both systemic as well as individual differences in the multilingual
population. The heterogeneity poses challenges to developing multilingual
learning theories and consequently the development of valid and appropri-
ate assessments. We turn to this challenge in the next section.
19.3.2 Disentangling the Connection between Language

and Content
A key issue that can plague educators of multilingual students is whether
their language abilities introduce construct-irrelevant variance to the
assessment of their academic content knowledge (e.g., Abedi 2011;
Bachman 2013). If a student is still developing his or her abilities in the
language used as the testing language there is a serious concern that any
assessment will become a test of language and not the target construct –
academic content (e.g., Bailey & Carroll 2015; Bailey et al. 2018; NASEM
2018). This obviously threatens the validity of any inferences drawn about
multilingual students’ academic knowledge and skills. Not only does this
situation have direct detrimental effects on students’ educational out-
comes, such a situation can perpetuate negative stereotypes as a conse-
quence of monolingual testing policies (e.g., Menken 2008). Similarly, if
there is a mismatch between a multilingual student’s home cultural prac-
tices and the content and/or format of an achievement test as science for
example, the student may not convey what they know and can do in that
content area (Bang 2019). While new standards and curricular policies for
school-age English language proficiency development acknowledge that
language is inextricably intertwined with content (e.g., the ELPD
Framework, Council of Chief State School Officers 2012), because, after all,
talk and text have to be about something, there are strategies for amelior-
ating deleterious effects of limited language abilities on the display of
content knowledge. Such strategies include using suitable accessibility
resources during large-sale summative assessment as already mentioned
in Section 19.2.2 above and adopting formative assessment approaches in

the classroom (e.g., observing students’ performances on tasks as they use

informal, colloquial speech; NASEM 2018; Bailey & Durán 2020).
Formative assessment such as observing student interactions and
listening to students explain their ideas can be personalized to give feed-
back to students. For example, a learning progression or trajectory that
articulates the phases of development of a particular domain can be used as
an interpretative framework of what teachers observe or hear their stu-
dents produce or comprehend so teachers know where students are in their
language or content learning. Armed with this knowledge teachers can
then provide feedback and tailor instruction to effectively move student
learning forward to the next phase (Bailey & Heritage 2008). Such an
assessment approach can contribute to sustaining a student’s cultural
background and knowledge, for example, by recognizing and promoting
the use of a student’s home language as an asset and creating assessment
tasks that are embedded in a student’s home culture (Bang 2019).
19.3.3 Differentiating between Typically Developing Multilingual

Development and Developmental Language Disorders
or Learning Difficulties
Another challenge in assessing multilingual children is the differentiation
between typical multilingual development with a slow trajectory and spe-
cific language learning difficulties (also known clinically as specific lan-
guage impairment (SLI) or developmental language disorders (DLD)) and the
accurate identification and diagnoses of learning difficulties in multilingual
children. Because of limited input and exposure to the target language,
some typically developing multilingual children may show a slower trajec-
tory of language development and are thus misidentified as having lan-
guage learning difficulties (Goldstein 2004; Paradis 2016). However, in most
cases multilingual children are only assessed in the target language rather
than in both or all of the languages they know, and such assessment is
typically normed or related to each of the languages’ monolingual
paradigms. As Grosjean (1989) argued, bilinguals are not two monolinguals
in one person. Since language learning difficulties manifest across lan-
guages, to diagnose language learning difficulties, multilingual children
should be evaluated in both/all of their languages or, alternatively, in their
dominant language.
The major challenges with this recommended assessment practice are
the lack of multilingual language assessments/measures as well as trained
multilingual speech and language pathologist (SLP) or clinicians. Take the
US for example; the majority of language assessments for identifying lan-
guage learning difficulties in the US are in standard English only and
normed on monolingual English speakers. Testing multilingual children
in their native language is federally mandated in the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA, 2004) when

diagnosing them for disabilities in US schools (20 U.S.C. § 1414(b)(3)(A)).

There are several commercial assessments for diagnosing DLDs in Spanish-
English bi/multilingual children, the largest English as a second language
population in the US. However, although other multilingual minority
groups such as those from Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese home lan-
guage backgrounds may also have a relatively large population (e.g., over a
million speakers; United States Census Bureau 2015), options for languages
other than Spanish are very limited.
There is also a documented shortage of qualified bi/multilingual SLPs
who can administer the assessments or work with these children in their
native language(s). It is critical to differentiate between slower language
acquisition and a true DLD; while children on a slower developmental
trajectory will catch up over time, a true DLD requires timely intervention.
As discussed earlier, bi/multilingual assessments for bi/multilingual chil-
dren from Spanish-speaking backgrounds are available for a variety of
language domains ranging from phonology, vocabulary to pragmatics to
document language development among typically developing children (see
Section 19.3.3). However, they may not be sensitive enough to differentiate
between a slower trajectory and a true DLD. There are few diagnostic
assessments for identifying DLD in bi/multilingual children. One widely
used assessment with Spanish-English bilingual children is the Bilingual
English-Spanish Assessment (BESA) (Peña et al. 2018; www.northernspeech
.com/accent-reduction/besabilingual-english-spanish-assessment). BESA was
developed to identify DLD in Spanish-English bilingual children as well as
English language learners between ages 4 to 6 years. It is widely used in
both bilingual research and clinical practices, and research on BESA has
provided support for its validity and use of test results in making clinical
decisions (Fitton et al. 2019). There is also an upward extension of BESA, the
Bilingual English Spanish Assessment-Middle Elementary (BESA-ME). BESA-
ME is a different test that targets older children in elementary school
grades, but the items are not released to the public for use or commercially
available at this time.
There have also been similar efforts in developing diagnostic assessments
in languages other than Spanish for bi/multilingual children in the US. For
example, Mandarin-English Language Assessment Battery (MELAB) (Sheng
et al. 2016) is an adaptation of the BESOS that includes four subtests of
semantics and morphosyntax production skills in both Mandarin and
English and targets kindergarten-/pre-elementary-aged Mandarin-English
bilingual children. While MELAB measures production skills, Mandarin-
English Child Online Language Assessment Bank (MECOLAB) focuses on
assessing receptive grammar (Sheng et al. 2019). A fully automated digital
version of MECOLAB that can be administered by clinicians without
Mandarin language skills is also under development. These Mandarin-
English bilingual assessments are still in the development and validation
stage and are not commercially available yet.

Relatedly, research has also shown that multilingual children who are
racial, ethnic or language minorities tend to be disproportionately repre-
sented in special education (Ballantyne 2013). Among multilingual children
who are language minorities in the US, i.e., children from families that
speak a home language other than English, contradictory results have been
found in theoretical and empirical research. Some studies showed that they
are overidentified for learning difficulties (also known clinically as learning
disabilities) (e.g., Sullivan & Bal 2013) while others found that they are
underidentified (e.g., Delgado & Scott 2006; Morgan et al. 2015). For
example, in a recent study that analyzed Early Childhood Longitudinal
Study-Kindergarten Cohort, 1998–1999 (ECLS-K), a longitudinal and nation-
ally representative sample of school-aged children in the US, Morgan et al.
(2015) found that multilingual school-aged children in kindergarten to 8th
grade who are from racial, ethnic, or language minorities tend to be under-
represented in special education. The underrepresentation of multilingual
minority children in special education entails serious consequences, as
children are not receiving the services they need and are entitled to. On
the other hand, misplacing and overidentifying multilingual minority chil-
dren for special education is equally problematic. The focus here, we argue,
should be on achieving accuracy of identification for eligibility for services.
19.4 The Future of Multilingual Assessment:

Where To and How?
To conclude, there is an ever-increasing need for assessing multilingual

children worldwide due to growing trends of migration and education
accountability requirements. In this chapter, we provide a state-of-the art
picture of the needs and challenges of assessing multilingual children using
the case of the US as illustration to the underlying complexity. Moving
forward, we propose three areas of considerations for the future of assess-
ment with multilinguals: use of technology, dynamic assessments and the
application of translanguaging in multilingual assessment.
Technology allows for a number of affordances in assessment with multi-
lingual students to increase efficiency of assessment administration and
improve validity (e.g., fairness, accessibility) and intelligent digital systems
(e.g., interactive devices such as social robots) are being developed that can
administer (often in adaptive ways) and score students’ language profi-
ciency to effectively save valuable instructional time. Moreover, the uni-
formity of administration through the use of technology can help
ameliorate assessment error that can impact fairness in administration
and interpretation due to a teacher’s unfamiliarity with a student’s lan-
guage productions or even biases (Bailey et al. 2020). For example,
computer-based assessments can be designed to systematically ignore pro-
nunciation biases or nonstandard varieties of the target languages that

teachers may not be able to consistently ignore as irrelevant to their

comprehension of children’s language production. Alternatively, teachers
may not have sufficient exposures to recognize as typical child approxima-
tions of adult pronunciations or the acceptable transfer of pronunciations
from one language to another that don’t interfere with the comprehension
(e.g., the schwa vowel sound before the consonant cluster /sp/ in Spanish
carried over into English pronunciations of such words as (e)space,
(e)spaghetti, (e)spin). Accessibility resources (hyperlinks to glossaries, pop-
up visual aids, etc.) that are part of the Universal Design approach to
assessment (i.e., developed to accommodate the widest range of test-takers)
do not change the language and other constructs being measured and can
be embedded in computer-based assessment of language proficiency and
academic content knowledge of students still acquiring the language of
instruction. The systematic use of computer-embedded accessibility
resources also contributes to the fairer testing of multilingual students.
These practices may also mimic the learning experiences of students in
classrooms contributing to the authenticity of assessment (Russell 2020).
Technology can also be used in important ways to support teachers’ use of
classroom-based assessment whether by automating the regular, intensive
collection of data on student progress, or to assist in the form of data
management systems for teachers assessing formatively on a moment-to-
moment basis in their classrooms. If such formative assessment serves to
prepare teachers for the range of student language responses through
integrating corpus linguistics approaches into their interpretations of stu-
dent performance, or to use discourse analysis techniques on digitally
recorded and transcribed speech samples, or to apply Natural Language
Processing to language samples, all the better (Bailey et al. 2016).
However, technology integration may come at a cost if we do not ascer-
tain whether the youngest students and newly immigrated students have
familiarity with technology (Huang & Flores 2018). Additionally, in the case
of students with disabilities who are also multilingual learners, we need to
determine whether certain features of technology exclude students from
meaningful participation in assessment (e.g., abilities to cut and paste using
a computer mouse, or use of finger swipes on an electronic tablet device).
One approach to address this has been to use nonverbal, game-like environ-
ments to judge whether a student is ready for computer-based assessment
(e.g., the Technology Readiness Checker for Students, TRCS, California
Department of Education, https://trcs.ets.org/). Furthermore, while technol-
ogy promises assessment approaches that can assist with biases in test
administrators and teachers, it can still fall afoul of biases in the original
test developers. In which case, professional bodies such as the authors of
the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA, & NCME,
2014) or peer review committees of testing systems by state and federal
governments can insist requirements be built into computer-based systems
as engineering “ground rules” that are formal specifications to help

safeguard against biases at the development level (e.g., that speech-

recognition engines used in automated assessments accept Spanish–
accented English or nonstandard varieties of English in children’s responses
to items).
On balance, advances in technology stand to enhance the overall quality of
assessments and the testing experiences of multilingual students.
Technology is particularly pertinent to multilingual assessment where the
increasing mobility of students puts teachers at a disadvantage for being able
to effectively assess the myriad of multilingual learners if they are not
familiar with or not prepared by their teacher education programs to under-
stand the full range of developments in their students’ languages.
Technology can assist such teachers and assessment systems built on univer-
sal design principles can use technology-embedded accessibility resources to
help improve the fairness of assessments for multilingual students.
Second, there is a growing interest in “dynamic assessment” (DA), an
interactive approach that focuses on children’s ability to respond to inter-
vention. Researchers have argued against the exclusive use of standardized
norm-referenced measures for assessing culturally and linguistically
diverse individuals (Peña et al. 2006), arguing that these static assessments
do not tell us why children perform poorly or whether their performance
reveals a different type of language knowledge. In contrast to the trad-
itional static procedure, DA utilizes three distinct phases, pretest, intervene
and posttest to assess the learning processes. Children are explicitly
instructed during the intervention phase in order to improve posttest
scores. Their emerging language skills and strategies they use to answer
the questions are also documented (Peña et al. 2006) and referred to as
assessments of “modifiability”. Modifiability scores have been shown to be
a reliable and sensitive measure for assessing language skills (Peña et al.
2006). Dynamic assessment thus measures children’s learning process as
well as their learning product. Assessing their learning process is critical to
reducing contextual factors for multilingual children from culturally and
linguistically diverse backgrounds. Indeed, DA have been shown to reduce
cultural and linguistic bias (Peña et al. 2001, 2014, 2006). They have also
been considered to be more sensitive for measuring language growth over
time, and more accurate and reliable in disentangling between a steeper yet
within typical range of language development versus language learning
difficulties (a.k.a. SLI/DLD; Peña et al. 2007).
There have been new DA instruments in various single language domains
including vocabulary (Camilleri & Botting 2013; Maragkaki & Hessels 2017),
syntax (Binger et al. 2017; Hasson et al. 2012) and narrative (Peña et al.
2006; Petersen et al. 2017). There are also new developments of DA that
measure multiple language domains, such as the Dynamic Assessment of
Preschoolers’ Proficiency in Learning English (DAPPLE; Hasson et al. 2013),
or written language/reading (Petersen et al. 2018; Petersen & Spencer 2014).
Despite their growing popularity, DA instruments are not yet widely used

in practice, and only one DA is commercially available (Miller et al. 2001).

Given that DA is more sensitive and helps reduces cultural and linguistic
bias for assessing multilingual children, it can be used as an alternative to
or in combination with traditional standardized assessments.
Similar to dynamic assessment, the inclusion of translanguaging within
alternative assessment has been suggested in recent years because of its
sensitivity to the heterogeneity of multilingual children (García 2009).
A relatively new approach to bi/multilingualism, translanguaging, argues
that the languages of bi/multilinguals is a unified, integrated system includ-
ing all language varieties, not just the standard variety (García 2009; Sayer
2013). Bi/multilinguals can flexibly use all of their language varieties and
operate between their entire linguistic repertoires (Li 2011). In other words,
bi/multilinguals can strategically select language features and resources
from their singular, integrated language system, depending on the context
and the speakers, for effective communication. Translanguaging differs
from the prevalent code-switching theory that argues bi/multilinguals
switch between and mix their language inventories (García & Li 2014).
Based on the premise of translanguaging, language learning is a unified
process during which bi/multilinguals draw upon their entire linguistic
repertoire rather than solely relying on resources in one language
(Ascenzi-Moreno 2016). The goal of assessing multilinguals is thus to profile
bi/multilinguals’ linguistic repertoires that consists not only of the standard
monolingual variety but also of elements of other linguistic resources.
In a recent study, Noguerón-Liu et al. (2018) worked with two emergent
bilingual first-graders to explore how they draw on their multiple linguistic
resources while taking a reading assessment that involves oral reading in
English and retelling in English or Spanish to their mothers. The authors
also examined how both bilingual students were from Spanish home lan-
guage backgrounds and learning English as a second language. The analyses
included miscue analysis for the oral reading in English, the linguistic
patterns in their English and Spanish retelling as well as the resources
and strategies they used for the retelling. The authors found that bi/multi-
lingual children in their study drew from multiple language resources
when invited to retell the text in a single language (English or Spanish).
They also used strategies of translation, connecting across languages to
negotiate reading comprehension gaps with and without their mothers’
and the researchers’ assistance.
Although a promising alternative to traditional standardized assess-
ments, application of translanguaging in assessments has proven to be
challenging, particularly in large-scale summative assessments (Schissel
et al. 2018). There is still ample debate on how to define and operationalize
the unified “repertoire” for assessment purposes, and research on trans-
languaging in assessments is still limited. Shohamy (2011) argued that,
based on a broad view of assessment that uses assessments for learning
purposes, multilingual instructional strategies can be used as assessments,

suggesting that teaching and assessment are inseparable. In a study that

examined how pre-service language teachers in a linguistically and cultur-
ally diverse state in Mexico practice translanguaging in classroom language
assessments, Schissel et al. (2018) asked their teacher participants to com-
plete two reading and writing tasks, one in English only and the other
involved both English and Spanish languages resources. Teacher partici-
pants performed better on the multilingual assessment and were able to
demonstrate high-order thinking skills in the language (English) they were
learning. Researchers and educators who are interested in applying trans-
languaging in classroom-based assessments can follow the four principles
developed by García et al. (2017): (a) considering multiple perspectives (e.g.,
students, teachers and families); (b) considering students’ performance
both independently and with support (e.g., assistance from teachers or
parents), as well as using resources; (c) using authentic tasks; and (d)
distinguishing whether students can use features across their full language
repertoire (with freedom to select across languages) or language specific
features (e.g., Spanish oracy, English literacy).
Translanguaging assessments provide a unique opportunity to connect
content knowledge and language knowledge to showcase multilingual chil-
dren’s content, linguistic as well as cognitive and procedural knowledge. In
a recent study by Lopez et al. (2017), the authors designed and implemented
a bilingual mathematics assessment for late-arriving emergent bilingual
students. The assessment included math items in English, Spanish or a
combination of both languages. The dual-language supports allowed the
students to draw on their entire linguistic repertoire to demonstrate their
mathematical knowledge, and the students perceived positively of the
supports. This study serves as an example of how translanguaging may be
applied in content assessments for bi/multilinguals. However, large-scale
summative assessment is generally separated from teaching, and incorpor-
ating translanguaging in large-scale assessments would require a different
strategy. Given that the application of translanguaging in assessments is a
new approach, developing translanguaging assessments for large-scale
summative purposes and conducting research on the validity and fairness
of such assessments is clearly needed.
As the young multilingual population continues to grow worldwide, the
need to assess their development and education outcomes also increases.
The current chapter presents the unique challenges for evaluating young
multilingual children’s language proficiency and content area knowledge
as well as discussing three promising multilingual assessment practices.
Given the heterogeneity of the multilingual population and the complexity
of the constructs of language proficiency and content area knowledge (and
the close associations between the two), more work should be devoted to
developing and validating assessments for different multilingual subgroups
to ensure that the inferences made about these children are reliable, valid,
meaningful and ultimately fair.

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20
Plurilingualism and Young
Children’s Perspectival
Cognition
Maureen Hoskyn & Danièle Moore
Perhaps one of the greatest challenges faced by young plurilingual children

is that their own beliefs and intentions about their worlds may not align
well with the perspectives held by parents, peers, teachers, and others
about them. The pressure for children to become active mental agents,
capable of coordinating multiple perspectives is more pressing than ever
in increasingly globalized societies where transnational mobility is the
norm, and where new technologies and social media have given voice to
marginalized peoples whose perspectives have often been muted. Adding to
this complexity is the dynamic, social nature of perspectival cognition.
Beliefs are not modular static representations that children adopt as their
own; rather, children’s perspectives are co-constructed through social com-
munication where they jointly focus their attention on a topic – these are
social practices, predicted in part, by children’s transgenerational experi-
ence in their linguistically and culturally diverse communities.
Recent debates on the environmental impacts of climate change within
pluralistic communities such as those located in North America highlight
this complexity. For example, in western Canada, the idea that humans
cause climate change or that action is needed to curtain this effect is the
subject of considerable controversy. Beliefs that humans play a role in
creating climate change, or that human intervention is necessary are typic-
ally rejected among people employed in positions in oil production indus-
tries, which are found throughout the region (Mildenberger et al. 2016). At
the same time, Inuit and other indigenous peoples have, for many years,
drawn global attention to the deleterious impacts of melting sea ice,
extreme coastal erosion, thawing permafrost, and rapid destructive runoff
on local communities (Sawatzky et al. 2020). Other residents are climate-
influenced immigrants, meaning they have been granted Canadian per-
manent resident status on compassionate grounds after experiencing
extreme climatic related events (e.g., hurricanes, floods, fires) in their
countries of origin (Dickson et al. 2014). Not surprisingly, young children

Plurilingualism and Children’s Perspectival Cognition 473
living in the area are likely to encounter diverse perspectives in the dis-
course of their everyday social lives: in conversations, stories, songs; at
cultural events; and in educational practices at school.
In this chapter, we propose that plurilingual children recruit a suite of
language and cognitive resources to focus attention on their own and
other’s perspectives as they engage with others in social communication.
These socio-cognitive and plurilingual competencies we believe, have sig-
nificant potential to impact how young children cooperate in social com-
munication, and in turn, how they co-construct responses to scientifically
oriented questions about the communities where they live. The chapter is
divided into two main sections. The first part discusses how plurilingualism
provides a valuable lens through which to explore young children’s
emerging perspectival cognition. The second section summarizes key points
made throughout the chapter and proposes educational design principles to
optimize plurilingual children’s perspective-taking in educational prac-
tices, with a focus on cooperative science inquiry.
20.1 Perspectival Cognition through the Lens

of Plurilingualism
Throughout the chapter we rely upon a broad conceptualization of “plur-

ilingualism” that focuses on multiple language use in social interaction and
communication (Coste et al. 2009). These links are made explicit in the
following description of plurilingualism provided in the Common European
Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR; Council of Europe 2001):
the ability to use languages for the purposes of communication and to

take part in intercultural interaction, where a person, viewed as a social
agent, has proficiency, of varying degrees, in several languages and
experience of several cultures. This is not seen as a superposition or
juxtaposition of distinct competences, but rather as the existence of a
complex or even composite competence on which the user may draw.
(p. 168)
In this view, a strong emphasis is placed on plurilingual children’s agency

to recruit multiple language resources to coordinate their own perspectives
with others in social interaction and communication. For example, in our
research at a science museum in western Canada, we provided 5-year old
children with multilingual cards that showed animal tracks along with
words from several languages that described the animal making the tracks
(Moore et al. 2018). Children held their cards and referred to them as they
moved through the museum galleries. At the entrance to one gallery, a
taxidermized cougar with a growling stance prompted rich discussions
among the children. Together, children looked at their cards for reference

474 MAUREEN HOSKYN & DANIÈLE MOORE
and described cougars in multiple ways: as a wild animal to be feared, for

attacks on pets and livestock are common in western Canada due to human
encroachment on cougar habitat; as an animal in need of protection, as the
population of cougars in eastern, but not western Canada is on the decline;
and as an animal of courage and power as depicted in many Asian stories.
As children discussed the cougar they attended to and tracked the per-
spectives of their conversation partners in the conversation. Comments of
the children in conversation represented different perspectives on the
cougar (e.g., “Its hind legs are powerful,” “Its hind legs help it jump high”).
Using language to represent a joint focus of attention (i.e., the taxidermized
cougar) in this way is foundational to how young children discover that the
same object or action in their environment can be viewed physically and
symbolically from different perspectives (Carpendale & Lewis 2015). As
children shifted their shared attentional focus from the taxidermized
cougar to the multiple languages and scripts on their cards, they discussed
a plurality of cultural perspectives on cougars. Flexibly switching their
attention between the cards and the taxidermized cougar resulted in oppor-
tunities for children to compare how their own, and their conversation
partner’s perspectives, aligned with each other and these different cultural
perspectives and expectations.
Children also carried on conversations where the shared focus of attention
was a truth-bearing proposition (e.g., “Cougars need to be protected”). The
child speaking in this case assumes this proposition to be true, in the sense
that they assume that everyone who knows about cougars would agree with
them that this is a situational reality. In response, their conversation partner
may disagree and therefore, states another proposition, one that they also
assume to have truth (e.g., “No, cougars are scary, and don’t need protec-
tion”). Following Tomasello’s (2014; 2018) theorizing on “skills for human
motivations for shared intentionality,” children not only attend to their own
and their conversation partner’s perspectives, they coordinate these views in
relation to a third, objective perspective, which is what everyone would agree
is really happening in the situation. According to Tomasello, coordination of
mental perspectives, or “shared intentionality,” is central to how young
children come to identify a belief as false, in the sense that one’s own or
their partner’s belief doesn’t align with a situational reality. A central prem-
ise of this view is that children do not implicitly coordinate mental perspec-
tives by themselves, nor could they come to do this alone. Rather, using
Davidson’s (2001) terminology, Tomasello argues that children must coord-
inate their own perspective on a shared situation with the perspective of
another person: “We both are attending to X, but you see it this way, and I see
it that way. We understand that the two of us are sharing attention to the
same entity (under the same description), but at the same time we each have
our own perspective on it” (p. 8494).
In our example, as children at the science museum attended to multiple
scripts and languages on their cards, they encountered diverse cultural

perspectives and were therefore aware that rather than a single situational
truth or reality, several were available to them. To resolve potential con-
flicts that arise from the mental coordination of perspectives in this situ-
ation, plurilingual children can potentially follow several paths. One
possibility is they accept that their own and their partner’s perspectives
align with different cultural perspectives (i.e., “cougars need protection” is
not a universal reality shared by all cultures, but instead represents a
perspective specific to people living in eastern Canada; “cougars are scary”
is a shared perspective among cultural communities in western Canada).
Notably, children are also aware that these cultural perspectives or situ-
ational truths are supported either by direct evidence from observations
(e.g., the population of cougars in eastern Canada is on the decline; the
prevalence of cougar attacks in western Canada is increasing). By valorizing
each perspective and accepting them as equally authentic, tensions are
abated. Another possibility is children acknowledge that the two subjective
perspectives may not be incompatible (i.e., a cougar can be scary as well as
in need of protection). Lastly, children may decide that one or both subject-
ive perspectives are false or inaccurate beliefs, meaning they do not align
with a known truth or reality (e.g., the proposition “cougars are black” is
false because although some cats, e.g., black panthers, have a melanistic
trait that makes an individual cat’s fur appear much darker than the usual
coloration, this effect has not been observed in cougars). The child’s belief
in this case does not align with any situational or cultural reality.
Coordinating diverse perspectives in relation to one’s own and other’s
emerging views is an important aspect of children’s social cognition and
agency. For plurilingual children, how this perspectival cognition emerges
is, in part, tied to their past and/or current experience with languages in
social interaction. Prior to exploring these relations in more detail, findings
from research that has investigated how young children come to know
about their own and other’s minds is briefly discussed.
20.1.1 Perspectival Cognition: A Developmental Perspective

The extensive body of research has focused on young children’s emerging
awareness of their own and other’s minds, or “theory of mind” (Premack &
Woodruff 1978; Wimmer & Perner 1983). At the core of perspective-taking
is the tenet that people intentionally act in accordance with their beliefs
about a cultural truth or reality. Studies that have investigated the nature
of young children’s emerging theory of mind typically include a variant of a
classic false belief task (Wimmer & Perner 1983), which requires a child to
explain or predict a person’s intentional actions when the person has a false
belief. As discussed previously, a false belief is a subjective perspective that
conflicts with a situational or cultural reality, which is described as an
objective perspective in this area of research (Tomasello 2018). In a standard
change-of-location false belief task, children are told a story where a first

protagonist puts an object (e.g., a chocolate) in one location (e.g., a box) in a

room. The first protagonist leaves the room, and in their absence, a second
protagonist takes the object and puts it in a new location (i.e., a different
box). After listening to the story and/or watching it unfold, either through
illustrations or video, children are asked to say or point to where the first
protagonist will look for the object when they re-enter the room. Another
version of a false belief task is the unexpected contents task (Perner et al.
1987), where children say that they think crayons are in a crayon box, but
when they open it, they find candies. They are then asked what a person
who has not seen the contents of the box will expect to see in the box:
crayons or candies. As on all false belief tasks, the assumption is that for
children to be successful, they are aware that actions of the protagonist
align with the protagonist’s false belief about the situation, and not with
their own beliefs.
In a meta-analytic review of over 200 studies that investigated classical
false belief task performance of children living in mostly Anglo-European
countries, Wellman et al. (2001) reported that, on average, most 4.5- to 5-
year-old children perform successfully above chance on false belief tasks,
whereas most 3-year-old children do not. The trajectories of growth in false-
belief understanding were reported as universally curvilinear, with rapid
gains occurring between 2.5 and 5 years, and a slowing after that; however,
the slopes of these trajectories (rates of growth) varied among countries
where the children lived. Since publication of the meta-analysis, several
studies of children living in countries beyond the Anglo-European context
have been conducted, with some studies reporting similar findings (e.g.,
Callaghan et al. 2005), and others, clear differences (e.g., Hughes et al. 2018;
Lecce & Hughes 2010; Liu et al. 2008). More recently, Wellman (2018)
maintains that taken together, these findings suggest that a universal,
developmental trend from below-chance to above-chance performance on
classic false belief tasks occurs over the early years; however, linguistic-
cultural influences associated with living in different communities are
critical determinants of how quickly (or slowly) children’s explicit under-
standings about the concept of false belief emerge.
Other researchers claim that children can implicitly attribute a false
belief to another agent much earlier in development than this body of
research indicates (Barone et al. 2019). Children as young as 2.5 to 3 years
of age pass a change-of-location false belief task if instead of a verbal
response, they respond by looking (Clements et al. 2000; Csibra et al.
2011) or by moving a puppet character (Rubio-Fernández & Geurts 2013).
Studies also show that from the age of 15 months, infants pass false belief
tasks that require a spontaneous response, such as on violation of expect-
ation (Onishi & Baillargeon 2005) or anticipatory looking measures (Senju
et al. 2011).
Explanations of the contradictory findings that most infants and 2.5- to 3-
year-old children pass nonverbal or spontaneous false belief tasks whereas

not all older children pass a classic false belief task tend to focus on
differences in task demands and theories on how children come to under-
stand false beliefs. Nativist accounts (e.g., Carruthers 2013; Scott &
Baillargeon 2017) posit that all false belief tasks measure an innate under-
standing of propositions and attitudes available from infancy onward.
However, tasks vary in relation to language and executive functions
demands, with nonverbal and spontaneous tasks having few demands than
classic false belief tasks. A classic false belief task requires that children
simultaneously track an agent’s beliefs and actions while inhibiting their
own point of view to respond to the false belief question (Scott & Baillargeon
2017). Since language and executive systems are malleable and not innate,
it follows that older children 4 to 5 years of age are more likely than their
younger counterparts to recruit the necessary cognitive and language
resources to pass a classic false belief task.
Alternatively, Tomasello (2018) argues that children’s understanding of
false beliefs emerges over time, through ongoing engagement in social
interactions involving shared intentionality. Other proposals emphasize
how children engage in theorizing, hypothesis testing and revision as,
much like scientists, they construct a well formulated conception of false
belief (Gopnik & Wellman 1992). These alternative accounts share the view
that infant and young children’s successful performance on spontaneous
response or nonverbal false belief tasks can be explained by factors other
than false belief understanding (Wellman 2018), including, but not limited
to: perceptual processes, such as a novelty preference (Heyes 2014); the
availability of behavioral cues (Ruffman & Taumoepeauor 2017); and
socio-cognitive competencies associated with imagining and tracking
agent’s epistemic states to predict their actions (Tomasello 2018).
Regardless of the theoretical position, there is consensus that passing a
classic false belief task requires that children have sufficient language
proficiency to understand the false belief question posed. However, success-
ful performance occurs only when, and not before, children also under-
stand that an agent’s belief may be false, and therefore, the agent will look
where they falsely believe an object is hidden. Our discussion now turns to
how plurilingualism is thought to influence children’s emerging perspec-
tival cognition.
20.1.2 Language Awareness

A growing consensus among theorists suggests that children’s language
awareness plays a role in how they come to know about the minds of others
(de Villiers & de Villiers 2014); however, there is little agreement about
which language resources are critical. One possibility is that language
systems are valuable resources to make children’s own and others’ know-
ledge, beliefs, attitudes, and intentions explicit in social interaction and
communication. As previously discussed, and illustrated in our examples

from the science museum, children’s conversations provide enriched

opportunities for them to attend to, and mentally coordinate their own
and other’s subjective perspectives with a situational or cultural reality. In
our research, we repeatedly observed children as cooperative social agents
who flexibly adjusted their use of languages in conversation to accommo-
date the perspectives of others. For example, as discussed in Moore (2015)
and Moore, Hoskyn and Mayo (2018), a 5-year-old child described her trip to
a local aquarium by drawing 魚, a traditional Chinese character that repre-
sents a fish (this character has evolved from an ancient Chinese pictograph
of a fish drawn on a vertical plane, and originally included scales and fins).
When the researcher asked about the character, the child immediately
recognized that the researcher was unfamiliar with Chinese orthography;
therefore, she rotated the page to show the Chinese character horizontally,
as a fish is often depicted graphically in North American art as swimming
not on a vertical, but rather, a horizontal plane. As she rotated the page, the
child explained why she had done so, and why the fish, from this perspec-
tive, was now swimming.
Experience with multiple spoken languages also provides young children
with an extended repertoire of words to represent beliefs, desires, and
intentions in everyday conversations and to make connections between
people’s mental states and their actions (Harris 2005). Mental state lan-
guage (e.g., “I believe,” “I know”) draws attention to subjective perspectives;
however, the relationship of these perspectives to a situational or cultural
reality may not be clear. In some languages (e.g., English, French), mental
state words such as “think” or “believe” are neutral with respect to a
situational reality, whereas in other languages (e.g., Mandarin,
Cantonese), false, as opposed to true, beliefs are made explicit through
“think-falsely” verbs. Studies have reported that compared to use of more
neutral verbs, use of think-falsely verbs on false belief task questions
improves the accuracy of performance of both Mandarin (Lee et al. 1999)
and Cantonese-speaking children (Tardif et al. 2004).
Notably, mental state language also represents cultural expectations with
respect to how and when it is appropriate for a young child to focus
attention on their own or the mental states of others in everyday discourse.
For example, Japanese children quickly come to know that hon’ne repre-
sents a person’s private, subjective feelings and desires (i.e., “true sound”),
and tatemae are the beliefs and opinions a person shares with others and
uses in public (“built in front,” “façade”; see Grein 2008 for a review of how
hon’ne and tatemae represent subjective and shared perspectives in Japanese
culture). Matsui et al. (2009) found that 3-year-old Japanese children were
also sensitive to different degrees of speaker certainty indicated by vari-
ation in the use of grammatical particles. As young Japanese children
attend to grammatical particles used by a speaker to represent a level of
(un)certainty, the degree of alignment between their own subjective per-
spective and those of others is made more explicit, a situation which

Tomasello (2018) argues is critical for false-belief understandings

to emerge.
Several studies have reported that children’s use of mental state language
in conversations with family members is associated with their performance
on perspective-taking tasks, including classic false belief tasks (Devine &
Hughes 2017; Meins et al. 2013). However, it is also well documented that
children are more likely to attend to mental state words when parents
provide reasons for why people think this way and when the words are
embedded in conversations that are meaningful to them (Lohmann &
Tomasello 2003; Ontai & Thompson 2008; Turnbull et al. 2008). By exten-
sion, it seems reasonable to assume that teachers also play a significant role
in focusing children’s attention to the how people use diverse languages to
represent their mental states and why people think this way.
20.1.3 Language Competencies

Other studies report findings that suggest individual differences in chil-
dren’s specific language competencies, including knowledge of semantic
and/or syntactic conventions facilitates perspectival cognition (Milligan
et al. 2007; de Villiers & de Villiers 2014). As previously discussed, knowledge
of mental state language (e.g., English verbs think, believe, or Japanese
grammatical particles that signal (un)certainty) provides children with a
structure for reasoning about or coordinating subjective and objective per-
spectives. Knowledge of sentential complement structures provides children
with a means to represent and contrast their own beliefs with those of others
within the same sentence. For example, subjective perspectives can be com-
pared: “I think cougars need protection, but she thinks there are too many
cougars in the world.” Also, sentential complements allow for comparison of
a subjective and situational reality perspectives to judge its truth or falsity
(de Villiers 2013): “I thought that all cougars need protection, but in fact, this
is only true in the western regions of Canada where I live.” In this example,
the complement clause “all cougars need protection” represents a false
proposition, yet the sentence represents a situational reality.
20.1.4 Metalinguistic Awareness and Executive Functions

Lastly, other researchers have proposed that in addition to plurilingual
children’s metalinguistic awareness (Jessner 2008), their capacity to recruit
executive functions (Bialystok & Barac 2012) benefits growth in perspectival
cognition and false belief task performance (Rubio-Fernández 2017). The
relatively small number of studies that have investigated these relations
compare bilingual children’s performance with that of their monolingual
age peers on classic false belief or other belief reasoning tasks, and findings
are mixed. While the majority of studies report trends where bilingual
children outperform their monolingual age peers (i.e., Berguno & Bowler

2004; Bialystok & Senman 2004; Diaz & Farrar 2018; Kovács 2009; Nguyen &
Astington 2014), other investigations found a bilingual advantage on some,
but not all tasks (i.e., Goetz 2003) and in some cases, no appreciable perform-
ance benefit was documented (i.e., Dahlgren et al. 2017). Given the well-
documented finding that classic false belief task performance is, in part,
associated with children’s language proficiencies (Milligan et al. 2007), these
disparate findings may reflect, in part, sample variation in bilingual chil-
dren’s proficiency in the language used on the false belief task. Further, as
others have claimed (e.g., Bak 2015; Baum & Titone 2014; Cox et al. 2016), it is
unlikely that complex interactions between children’s plurilingualism and
social cognition can be reduced to a dichotomous yes–no research question
such as whether a bilingual advantage exists.
Yet, among the research that has investigated bilingual-monolingual
group differences in theory of mind, Berguno and Bowler’s (2004) study
has specific relevance to our discussion of the role of plurilingualism on
children’s emerging awareness of minds. The 3- and 4-year-old children in
the sample were either single or dual language users. In contrast to other
studies in this corpus of research, the sample of dual language users in this
study represented children whose proficiencies in their languages was
highly variable. The sample was drawn from a linguistically and culturally
diverse neighborhood in an inner London borough. Dual language users
were children who preferred to use different languages at home and school,
whereas single language users used a single language in both contexts. The
appearance–reality task that was administered requires children to accept
that objects can be represented flexibly under different social conditions.
Seashells, pebbles, and seaweed were placed inside a small transparent
container filled with water that served as an aquarium into which a
research assistant put a pen that looked like a fish (round eyes, shiny red
and yellow scales, and a removable tail). In the standard condition, children
were asked three questions, beginning with an “appearance” question:
“Look at this, what does it look like to you?” Once the child identified the
object as a “fish,” the object was taken out of the water and the tail was
removed to reveal a pen. The research assistant wrote a word on a piece of
paper with the pen and provided an opportunity for the child to also use the
pen. After the child used the pen, the assistant asked a second, “reality”
question: “So, what is it really and truly?” Up to this point, children needed
to conceptualize the object as either a fish, in response to the appearance
question, or as a pen, in response to the reality question. However, once the
tail was replaced and the pen returned to the water in the aquarium,
children were asked a third, “false-belief-for-self” question: “When I first
showed this to you, what did you think it was?” In this instance, two
conflicting representations of the object were available, and for children
to solve this conflict or to not see a conflict, they had to alter their view of
the situation to accommodate the different perspectives involved. In doing
so, the children constructed meta-representations of the object’s qualities:

they came to know it can be represented in multiple ways (fish, pen) and
that even when represented one way (fish), the object may potentially
function as another (pen). Findings showed that young dual language users
were more likely than older single language users to respond accurately to
questions that probed their understanding that an object can be repre-
sented flexibility depending on one’s perspective (i.e., whether attending
to the object’s appearance or function.)
20.2 Perspective-Taking in Plurilingual

Educational Practices
The potential contributions of a plurilingual lens to deepen understandings

and to monitor and coordinate diverse perspectives as children engage in
social interactions about educational practices have so far received little
attention. For example, only in rare instances does teacher training specif-
ically emphasize the design of learning spaces that facilitate plurilingual
children’s perspective-taking in cooperative science practices. We briefly
describe four principles to guide the use of a plurilingual lens to support
perspectival cognition in educational practices, with a focus on cooperative
science inquiry.
20.2.1 Children Benefit from the Strategic Use of Multiple

Languages to Coordinate Perspectives
Throughout our discussion, we emphasized the complexity of young plur-
ilingual children’s perspective-taking as they attend to and compare each
other’s beliefs about science-related phenomena. In the social spaces where
multiple languages are in use, young children cooperatively construct
meta-representations of beliefs about scientific phenomena – a process that
is foundational to cooperation and the resolution of tensions that arise
from children’s attention to diverse perspectives on their physical and
social worlds.
Multiple modalities of representation are also essential to make beliefs
about science-related phenomena the explicit foci of attention. For
example, proprioceptive tools such as iPads, drawings, highlighter pens,
magnifying glasses, and sticky notes are tangible resources plurilingual
children can access to focus their own and others’ attention.
20.2.2 Valorizing Children’s Languages Expands Their Repertoire

of Perspectives
Parents and educators have a significant role to play in highlighting and
valorizing diverse perspectives on science available to children in their local
and extended, global communities. As adults attend to children’s

expressions of belief, they valorize the languages that make expressions of

belief possible. Further, adults also play an important role in focusing
children on the ways that mental state terms (e.g., beliefs, emotions,
intents) are represented in diverse languages when talking about science.
20.2.3 Infusing a Diversity of World Views and Cultural

Perspectives into Educational Practice Provides
Unique Learning Opportunities
The juxtaposition of perspective-taking and scientific inquiry has become a
focus of recent changes to educational practice across Canada (Aikenhead &
Elliott 2010). In British Columbia, Indigenous worldviews and perspectives
are currently infused into educational practices that span science and other
content areas from kindergarten to Grade 12. To meet this curricular goal,
teachers are provided with professional development and a suite of curricu-
lum materials, such as descriptions of the First Peoples Principles of
Learning, which uniquely includes attention to holistic learning, and
relational-focused connectedness that emphasizes a sense of place. Kerr
and Parent (2018) argue that teachers need to be made aware that
Indigenous ways of knowing are not an adjunct to the BC curriculum, but
rather they are woven into the curriculum to strengthen it.
20.2.4 Engaging in Intergenerational Conversations Highlights

Diverse Perspectives
As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, young children first come to
hear and know about science-related issues through their conversations
with people in their families and local cultural communities. This inter-
generational transmission of knowledge and beliefs about science is a
natural vehicle for children to learn from elders (as in the example of the
Innuviat peoples described earlier). Yet the reverse is also true: children are
also agents of change in their communities (Lawson et al. 2019). Child-to-
parent intergenerational learning – that is, the transfer of knowledge
gleaned from science inquiry in a school context to the home – may be an
important vehicle to surmount barriers to understanding on complex
issues such as climate change. Further, research is needed to discover
how multiple language use supports perspective-taking in parent–child
conversations about homework or science projects.
In conclusion, plurilingualism is a springboard to perspective-taking in
cooperative educational practices. The socio-cognitive processes that sup-
port these practices emerge early in children’s lives through engagement in
the discourse of their homes and communities. Plurilingualism is an asset
that magnifies and makes the beliefs of others explicit. Over the course of

early childhood, plurilingual children access their languages to become

active mental agents, capable of coordinating perspectives and negotiating
shared understandings. These emerging competencies in young children
influence how they cooperatively solve socio-scientific problems as adults,
which critically, benefits societies throughout the globe.
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Part Five
Socialization
in Childhood
Multilingualism

21
Building a Plurilingual
Identity
Adelheid Hu
21.1 Introduction
In an increasing number of families and communities, children grow up in

multilingual and multicultural environments. Children thus negotiate
their identities while navigating across linguistic practices and ideologies
at home, in school, and in community spaces. Children who grow up in
traditionally more monolingual environments are also confronted with
other languages and different cultural practices and need to position them-
selves towards them. The challenge for educational systems is to adapt to
the complex cultural and linguistic backgrounds of both multilingual and
monolingual children, families and communities, and to provide an educa-
tion that is responsive to all the children’s needs.
It must be noted that the question of school languages/languages of
schooling is intimately tied to issues of identity formation, not only on an
individual but also on a collective level. The individual language (learning)
trajectories of children or adolescents (as well as of teachers) represent a
significant part of their individual identity formation; at the same time,
emphases within the language curriculum heavily influence the import-
ance and spread of specific languages in a given country. Languages at
school and other educational institutions are thus directly related to the
linguistic and cultural identity of a society (cf. Hu 2014).
The aims of this paper are twofold. Firstly, it develops a clearer under-
standing of developments in the research domain of plurilingualism, iden-
tity, childhood and education. I deliberately use the term plurilingualism in
order to stress that “a person, viewed as a social agent has proficiency, of
varying degrees, in several languages and experience of several cultures”
(Council of Europe 2001: 168). Secondly, it provides insight into the nexus
between children’s identity construction and larger societal discourses and
practices. In the first part, the focus lies on the concept of identity itself,

492 ADELHEID HU
and the way it relates to language(s), discourse(s) and societal language

ideologies. In the second part, I will focus on some contexts that are
especially relevant for the development of children’s linguistic identities
and agency such as family language policies, early childhood education in
nurseries and day care centers (here with a special focus on the case of
Luxembourg), language regimes and pedagogical traditions of language
teaching in schools. At the end, I sketch some promising developments in
pedagogy that enhance the awareness of plurilingual and identity-related
education focusing on the children’s whole language repertoires. The
important role and responsibility of educational institutions with regard
to the lingua-cultural identity development of children and adolescents in a
globalized world become more than evident.
21.2 Identity, Language, Societal Discourses and Practices
Since the poststructuralist turn in the humanities and social sciences in the
1970s, the topic of identity and subject positioning has become very prom-
inent, and the interconnectedness between language, identity and broader
societal discourses and practices has started to play a more and more
important role. At the same time, essentializing concepts of identity have
been increasingly challenged.
Concepts which essentialize identity are characterized by the notion that
there are stable identities with an essence which is independent of the
surrounding society and discourse. Stuart Hall, for example, characterizes
(and criticizes) such essentializing concepts of identity as those which
believe in a stable core of the self, “unfolding from beginning to end
through all the vicissitudes of history without change; the bit of the self
which remains always-already ‘the same’, identical through itself across
time” (Hall 2000: 17). Instead of following this kind of essentialist under-
standing about identity, sociocultural approaches adopt a view of identity
as constructed in discourse, and as negotiated in interactions and narratives
in social contexts. As Bamberg et al. (2011: 178) state:
Instead of following a more traditional essentialist project and asking

what identity is – and from there attempting to pursue the lead into
human actions that follow from how we defined identity – we suggest to
study identity as constructed in discourse, as negotiated among
speaking subjects in social contexts, and as emerging in the form of
subjectivity and a sense of self. Our suggestion implies a shift away from
viewing the person as self-contained, having identity, and generating his/
her individuality and character as a personal identity project toward
focusing instead on the processes in which identity is done or made – as
constructed in discursive activities. This process of active engagement in
the construction of identity, as we will show, takes place and is

Building a Plurilingual Identity 493
continuously practiced in everyday, mundane situations, where it is

open to be observed and studied.
In many deconstructivist approaches to identity, discourse and language (as

well as power relations) are of essential significance:
Precisely because identities are constructed within, not outside

discourse, we need to understand them as produced in specific historical
and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and
practices, by specific enunciative strategies. Moreover they emerge
within the play of specific modalities of power, and thus are more the
product of the marking of difference and exclusion, than they are the
sign of an identical, naturally constituted unity – an identity in its
traditional meaning (that is, an all-inclusive sameness, seamless,
without internal differentiation).
(Hall 2000: 17)
Within the context of languages and plurilingualism, the relevant dis-

courses often consist of so-called language ideologies, i.e., conceptualiza-
tions about languages, speakers and discursive practices. Irvine (2012: 63)
defines language ideologies as follows:
Like other kinds of ideologies, language ideologies are pervaded with

political and moral interests and are shaped in a cultural setting. To
study language ideologies, then, is to explore the nexus of language,
culture, and politics. It is to examine how people construe language’s
role in a social and cultural world, and how their construals are socially
positioned. Those construals include the ways people conceive of
language itself, as well as what they understand by the particular
languages and ways of speaking that are within their purview. Language
ideologies are inherently plural: because they are positioned, there is
always another position – another perspective from which the world of
discursive practice is differently viewed. Their positioning makes
language ideologies always partial, in that they can never encompass all
possible views – but also partial in that they are at play in the sphere of
interested human social action.
A language ideologies perspective thus assumes an inextricable link

between local language use and broader historical and institutional prac-
tices, values and interests (Razfar 2012).
Especially in the context of migration studies, essentializing identity
concepts have been systematically deconstructed. In turning away from
simplifying concepts, which imply a clear overlap of self, language and
cultural localization (Bronfen 1995: 10), identities are conceptualized not
only as co-constructed in interaction and/or narratives, but as hybrid in
parallel to the concept of hybrid cultures (Bhabha 1994). Subjects are
conceived as “multiply coded, complex identities” (Bronfen & Marius

494 ADELHEID HU
1997: 7). According to Obojska (2020), taking into consideration the larger
societal discourses is of particular importance when studying migrant
narratives and identities. While narrating stories, people respond not only
to the immediate interactional context, but also to socially circulated stor-
ies and images. De Fina (2003) underlines the same idea:
Thus, when immigrants present certain images of themselves or apply

definitions to others, they are often reacting to what the media, or other
social actors say about them. Their stories are often designed to counter
negative images or to incorporate commonly held prejudice about
competing groups. Interactional negotiations about identity cannot be
explained without reference to these external voices.
(p. 30)
In terms of empirical research on identity construction, on the one hand

narrative approaches, and on the other hand conversation-analytic and
interactional approaches play a predominant role. Within the narrative
approach, the focus falls on the processes of (re-)constructions of the ‘self’,
often understood as processual and reflexive, in retellings of personal
experiences (Obojska, 2020). Narrative conceptions of identity imply that
a narrative identity provides a subjective sense of self-continuity as it
symbolically integrates the events of lived experience in the plot of the
story the person tells about his or her life (Ezzi 1998). While traditionally
the essential self prevailed over language, narrative conceptions see the self
as constituted through language:
On a narrative account, the self is to be construed not as a prelinguistic

given that merely employs language, much as we might employ a tool,
but rather as a product of language – what might be called the implied
subject of self-referring utterances.
(Kerby 1991: 4; see also Straub 2004)
In the conversation-analytic and interactional paradigm, ‘identity’ is seen

as primarily relevant and emergent in interactions (e.g., Antaki &
Widdicombe 1998; Wilkinson & Kitzinger 2003). To quote again Obojska
(2020):
The processes of ‘identity’ negotiation are often understood here as

interactional attempts to ascribe, assume or reject certain identity
categories. In this paradigm, identities are fleeting, situationally-
occasioned and context-dependent, with virtually no relevance outside
of the given interaction.
21.2.1 Identity, Language Learning, and “Translanguaging”

The identity issue has also become very prominent within research on
Second Language Acquisition (SLA) (Block 2007). The theoretical basis is,

on the one hand, poststructuralist theories of language which interpret

language as a complex social practice through which relationships are
defined, negotiated, and resisted (Norton & McKinney 2011: 77; Bakhtin
1981) and, on the other hand, sociocultural theories of learning (e.g., Lave &
Wenger 1991), which emphasize the role of participation in and belonging
to communities of practice. From the perspective of sociocultural theory,
language learners are not seen as individually internalizing stable systems
of language knowledge, but as members of social and historical collectives,
using language as a dynamic tool:
Whereas some linguists may assume, as Noam Chomsky does, that

questions of identity are not central to theories of language, we as L2
educators need to take this relationship seriously. The questions we ask
necessarily assume that speech, speakers and social relationships are
inseparable. . . . In this view, every time language learners speak, they
are not only exchanging information with their interlocutors, they are
also constantly organizing and reorganizing a sense of who they are and
how they relate to the social world. They are in other words, engaged in
identity construction and negotiation.
(Norton 1997: 410; cf. also Norton & McKinney 2011; Norton 2012)
In a similar vein, Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) see language learning as an

act of identity positioning. They highlight the fact that language learning is
a process in which one becomes a member of a specific (often imagined)
community: “Applying such an approach to SLA involves shifting the focus
of investigation from language structure to language use in context, and to
the issue of context and belonging” (Pavlenko & Lantolf 2000: 156; see also
Kramsch 2000, 2009).
The conceptual developments on language and identity described above
have been of high significance for the development of an integrative under-
standing of language education, taking into account the complex and often
hybrid identities of the learners (Cummins 2001; Cummins & Early 2011;
De Florio-Hansen & Hu 2003). If language and identity are interrelated, this
has important implications for understanding and redesigning language
education in pluralistic societies, where, nevertheless, in many cases a
“monolingual habitus” still persists (Gogolin 2013).
In addition, the concept of language itself has been put into question,
mainly the idea of separate languages or different language systems,
replacing it with the concept of language repertoire as an integrative whole
and the concept of languaging:
To look at language as a practice is to view language as an activity rather

than a structure, as something we do rather than a system we draw on,
as a material part of social and cultural life rather than an abstract
entity.
(Pennycook 2010: 2)

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Thus, the traditional view of language as a referential code is being decon-

structed by focusing on the concrete interactional practices in which lan-
guage is used not only to express, but to create identities, belongings, and
differences (Seele 2016: 21; Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz 1982).
Many educational linguists use the term translanguaging (Canagarajah
2011; García & Li 2014; Lewis et al. 2012), which focuses on “the ability of
multilingual speakers to shuttle between languages, treating the diverse
languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system” (Canagarajah
2011: 401). The concept of translanguaging not only gives up the principle
of separate languages in favor of fluid and permeable approaches; at the
same time it is closely related to the learners’ identities as socially con-
structed in interaction. As Creese & Blackledge (2015: 2) point out, “trans-
languaging enables students to construct and constantly modify their socio-
cultural identities and values, as they respond to their historical and pre-
sent conditions critically and creatively.”
21.3 Children’s Linguistic Identities
While until now the argumentation has been general – not related to a
specific age group – the question arises as to how far all this also counts for
children and especially young children. As Ely et al. point out (2007: 160)
there has been for a long time a general consensus that young children (less
than 6 years of age) have an
appreciation of the self that is more physical than psychological, often

focus on routine activities and momentary moods, and rarely locate the
self in a social context. . . . However, this characterization of early self-
development has now been widely criticized as misleading. . . .
Researchers have clearly demonstrated that even relatively young
children have a rather sophisticated appreciation of how the mind
works, and children as young as 4 years old understand that behavior is
motivated by intentions and beliefs . . .
Important research in developmental psychology (Barrett 2007: 1) has

shown that
children usually acquire various beliefs about other countries and the
people who live in them. They also often display distinctive patterns of
national preferences, prejudices and feelings, with their own nation and
national group usually occupying a privileged position in their feelings,
evaluations and judgements.
Also Compton-Lilly et al. (2017: 120) underline that identity negotiations

begin long before children approach adolescence. From their point of view,
“children are no longer viewed as mere recipients of available identity

positions and roles. They are recognized as participants and producers who
draw on literacy practices to contribute to the negotiation of their own
identities.”
A large number of empirical research projects working with young
children (mainly between the age of 3 and 12) have come to similar results:
Working with child-friendly research methods (body language silhouettes,
drawings, storytelling and other types of narratives) children generally
show a high degree of (linguistic and cultural) awareness (Jessner 2006),
and position themselves within the linguistic context of family, peers or
school. Just one empirical example taken from the studies by Tracy (2002: 4)
concerning early metalinguistic competence – the child here is not even
3 years old – serves to illustrate this:
Hannah 2;7: Ich hab ein Zug gebaut in Kita.

Mutter: And did they say “clever Hannah”?
Hannah: Nein, “brave Hannah,” ’cause it’s German.
Also the emotional relationship to the different languages (affiliation,

inheritance) can play an important role, as, e.g., Krumm has shown in his
research based on language portraits (2001, 2011; see also Dressler 2014).
Nevertheless, research has also shown that many children do not develop
a positive attitude towards their plurilingual repertoire, but that they show
embarrassment and shame in their attitudes towards their plurilingualism
(Hu 2003). Alternatively, children growing up in a monolingual context are
not motivated to learn other languages, and thus might not develop a
plurilingual identity at all. As we will see below, many factors can be
influential here, such as family language policies/practices, and language
ideologies/practices within educational institutions and in society in gen-
eral. Although I shall treat these topics separately, it is obvious that they are
interrelated: family multilingualism, for example, can only be appropri-
ately understood within the broader political, ideological and historical
context that in many regards impacts on family practices. The same is
relevant for education systems and their language regimes which are
highly influenced by general socioeconomic and political developments,
and at the same time, can have a strong impact on family language
management.
21.3.1 Family Multilingualism

The family is considered to be an extremely important domain for studying
children’s language development, and research in the field of minority
language maintenance and loss regards the family as the central driving
force in children’s socialization (Schwartz 2010: 171). Within recent contri-
butions to family multilingualism King and Lanza (2017) identify especially
four aspects that become prominent: ideology, agency, imagination – and
identity. On the one hand, the question how families make sense of

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multilingualism and how language is woven into family dynamics plays an

increasingly important role. On the other hand, we need to gain more
insights into language ideologies and linguistic identities among parents
(beyond everyday strategies such as one person one language, one language
on one day another on another, mixed language strategies, conscious meta-
linguistic reflections, etc.)
Palviainen and Bergroth (2018), for example, conducted a study in the
Finnish context that investigates how parents “discursively co-construct
and negotiate their own and their children’s language and cultural iden-
tities, and in doing this, how they circulate official language ideologies”
(p. 263). In this case the parents’ understanding of the notion of “bilingual-
ism” led to interesting insights into their beliefs and language ideologies.
Although different co-occurring ideologies (e.g., on proficiency, order of
acquisition or cultural appropriation) could be observed, a “nativeness
and inheritance ideology” on bilingualism became evident as the main
feature, which basically corresponds to an essentializing understanding of
linguistic identity. Languages learned later had often been described as
additional, separate pieces “glued onto the original identity” (p. 273), rather
than being an integral part of it. These findings are especially interesting, as
the parents are all plurilingual and apply multilingual language practices
within and outside their bilingual homes. The study illustrates how the
Finnish policy on official registration of the linguistic affiliation of its
citizens which only allows one “mother tongue,” can force monolingual
identities onto multilingual individuals. Along with individual lived experi-
ences, societal ideologies and discourses affect how parents define the
linguistic identity of their family and its members. In a similar study,
Pukarthofer investigated how families envision multilingual futures
for their children, and how these aspirations are linked to an imagined
multilingual Europe in which language competence is highly valued
(Pukarthofer 2017).
How far children perceive themselves positively as plurilingual individ-
uals strongly depends on a shared understanding of parents and other
family members about the role of language(s) for their children and linguis-
tic practice in family life. Where power struggles and competing ideologies
exist within a family, this might lead to difficult conflictual situations for
the children. The same counts for different ideologies and a lack of cooper-
ation between families and institutional early childhood education (Lanza &
Curdt-Christiansen 2018).
21.3.2 Language Practices and Identities in Multilingual Day Care

Centers: The Example of Luxembourg
As research has shown (de Houwer 2015; Seele 2016; Tracy 2008), an
important basis for a positive and identity-strengthening language
development is laid during the early years. Beside family and peers,

institutional Early Childhood Education therefore plays an especially

important role and asks for innovative approaches and practices that build
on children’s language repertoires and cultural backgrounds, always taking
into account the specificities of the children’s cognitive, emotional and
physical development in the early years. I will concentrate here on the
specific case of Early Childhood Education in the multilingual Grand
Duchy of Luxembourg and mainly refer to an excellent ethnographic study
about language practices in Luxembourgish daycare centers (Seele 2016).
Seele especially looks at the actual doing of language as a social practice
that is constitutive for the accomplishment of social realities in general,
and of educational realities in particular. Especially in multilingual set-
tings, according to Seele, “language practices contribute to the making
and marking of different actor positions, and are always tied to questions
of identity and belonging, to processes of in- and exclusion, to expectations
of social cohesion, as well as to fears of disintegration” (p. 22).
21.3.2.1 Some Preliminary Remarks about Multilingualism

and Education in Luxembourg
In contrast to countries with a strong monolingual tradition, such as France
and Germany, Luxembourg has a historically rooted and politically estab-
lished self-conception as a multilingual country. In comparison to other
officially multilingual countries, such as Switzerland or Belgium, the lan-
guages in Luxembourg are less territorially divided and instead more com-
partmentalized – that is, different languages fulfill different functions in
everyday life (Maurer-Hetto 2009: 69).
How multilingualism and language learning are linked to the question of
identity can be experienced particularly well in this multilingual micro
cosmos of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where the multilingual trad-
ition is combined with the fact that almost 50 percent of the population are
immigrants (cf. Statec 2018). On the one hand, a historical look at the
development of different languages in Luxembourg (Luxembourgish,
German, French, but also, for example, Portuguese, Italian and English)
shows to what extent the various language policy decisions were justified
by identity. In this case it is a matter of national identity, as is illustrated by
the decision in 1984, to declare Luxembourgish (linguistically a Moselle
Franconian language variety of German with a strong French element) as
the national language (Péporté et al. 2010: 229–322).
On the other hand, and in parallel with these centripetal tendencies, a
centrifugal discourse about the linguistic situation in Luxembourg has
existed for a long time and emphasizes border crossing, European identity,
in-between culture and multilingualism. In some texts it is even said that
the mother tongue of Luxembourgish people is multilingualism (Berg &
Weis 2005: 33). The meaning of Luxembourgish as the “national language
of the Luxembourgers” is thus very ambivalent. Horner and Weber (2008:
85f.) describe these two competing strategies of national identification as

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between on the one hand a strong emphasis on Luxembourgish as a marker

of national identity, and on the other a commitment to the historically
established and politically recognized multilingualism as the central char-
acteristic of Luxembourgish identity and of cultural and economic benefit
to the country’s citizens:
The monolingual (Luxembourgish) language-identity link tends to be

formulated in terms of essentialist criteria, the ethnic model of the
nation, and discourses of romanticism, whereas the trilingual
(Luxembourgish/French/German) language-identity link is based on
instrumental criteria, the civic model of the nation, and positivist
discourses. This “two-pronged language ideology” underlies discursive
conflict in Luxembourg, as voices supporting the maintenance of an
officially trilingual nation-state sometimes clash with those in favour of
a monolingual identity linked to the national language, Lëtzebuergesch.
(Horner & Weber 2008: 85, emphasis in the original)
As a consequence, in educational contexts, the question of languages is

highly controversial and emotionally charged.
In pre-school education, Luxembourgish is spoken and taught exclusively
not least in order to strengthen the Luxembourgish identity. It must,
however, be mentioned that since fall 2017 the Ministry of Education has
started to implement a bilingual model, which still stresses the important
role of Luxembourgish but also systematically introduces French in early
childhood education and claims at the same time to value all the other
languages of the children (see Service National de la Jeunesse 2018).
In public primary schools, all children (including, for example, children
of Portuguese descent, who make up a high percentage) are taught to read
and write in German. French is taught from the 2nd grade, and even from
the 1st grade in some schools. The textbooks are traditionally written in
German, with the exception of books for the French classes. The language
of instruction is thus, in the strict sense, High German. In practice, how-
ever, the teaching staff often use Luxembourgish for oral explanation of the
subject matter. In secondary schools (7th to 13th grade) this practice is
continued up to the 9th grade. English is taught from the 8th grade
onwards as a foreign language. The language of instruction is – except for
French and foreign languages as subjects and mathematics – High German
and Luxembourgish. In the lycée classique the language of instruction is,
beginning from the 10th grade, mostly French; at the lycée technique High
German remains mostly the language of instruction. Generally speaking,
language competencies can be seen as a decisive selection criterion in the
Luxembourgish education system, which in itself plays an important part
in determining what counts as ‘legitimate language competency’ (for more
details, see Seele 2016: 14).
For many years, a highly emotional and especially identity-related debate
has been taking place around multilingualism in school, which identifies

the various problems and challenges of each different group of students.

Thus, the teaching of subjects in French presents great difficulties for many
of Luxembourg’s students, whereas literacy in German presents a major
obstacle for many of the Portuguese-origin students. Suggestions for a
parallel literacy education in French and German (Weber 2009) have so
far not been implemented on a larger scale, due to a fear of division in the
society. The unclear role of the Luxembourgish language is being increas-
ingly criticized, and there are demands that it be strengthened. In addition,
many people want to give a stronger role to the English language in
addition to the three official languages of Luxembourg. Multilingualism
and the question of language education are, in Luxembourg, both in terms
of collective identity as well as personal identity, a sensitive issue of central
significance (Hu 2014).
21.3.2.2 Language Practices and Children’s Identity in Luxembourgish

Day Care Centers: Some Insights on Pluri-/Monolingualism
and Identity Positioning
Seele’s ethnographic study, which took place in several day care centers in
Luxembourg, investigates in depth linguistic practices, front- and backstage
interactions, rituals, the creation of linguistic spaces (e.g., inside/outside/
everyday world) and institutionalization processes based on linguistic prac-
tices. From within the extremely rich data I will focus here only on two
aspects, the creation of monolingual spaces in a multilingual setting, and
the practices of identity positioning.
The Creation of Monolingual Spaces

Although linguistic diversity is often materially present in the day care
centers in the form of multilingual signs and messages, and thus gives a
clear impression of multilingualism-friendly institutions, it seems to be, as
Seele observes, “pedagogically ‘domesticated’ in the actual use of these
objects by transferring and translating them into the official language of
the center, that is Luxembourgish.” The following two examples show expli-
citly this practice of pedagogical ‘domestication’ and monolingualization:
Now, the butter is nearly used up. Ilona (the caregiver) says: “Do ass
nach Botter am Fri-go.” [There is more butter in the fridge
(Luxembourgish).] Alexander objects: “Nee, am . . . am Kühlschrank.”
[No, in the . . . in the ‘fridge’ (German).] Ilona insists: “Nee, am Frigo. Mir
sinn hei am Butzegäertchen an do schwätzen mir op Lëtzebuergesch.”
[No, in the fridge. We are here in the Butzegäertchen and here we speak
Luxembourgish.]
(Seele 2016 60)
After some time of “free play”, the caregivers start calling on the
children to tidy up the room. Rebecca asks Diego (3;1) and Alexander
(2;6) to clear the tunnel, which they have stuffed with books, blankets

502 ADELHEID HU
and Lego bricks. Alexander begins to put some of the things away, but
Diego vehemently resists. After repeated appeals and reprimands in
Luxembourgish, Denise calls out to him in Spanish: “¡Diego, mira me!
¡Escucha me, Die-go! ¡Hablo, contigo!” [Diego, look at me! Listen to me,
Diego! I am talking to you!] But still, he doesn’t react. Ilona, another
caregiver, objects: “Mat Diego schwätzen mir awer op Lëtzebuergesch.”
[But with Diego we speak Luxembourgish.] Denise counters: “Hien
héiert jo net. Weder op Lëtzebuergesch nach op Spuenesch héiert hien.”
[But he doesn’t listen. Neither in Luxembourgish nor in Spanish does
he listen.] Ilona then says: “Jo, mee net, well hien net verstot. Hie
wëll just net.” [Yes, but not because he doesn’t understand. He just
doesn’t want to.] Denise now continues to talk in Luxembourgish
with Diego.
(Seele 2016: 71)
Multilingualism is obviously located in the transitional spheres of the

organization while a monolingual pedagogical space is created in the
‘inside’. According to Seele, these practices
help to build and maintain institutional boundaries vis-à-vis the

organizational environment. They are geared towards the monolingual
ideal of a relatively strict separation of languages, thus resulting in a
fragmentation of individual multilingual realities into several disparate
social spaces that are marked off not only by different languages, but by
different local language regimes.
(2016: 62)
These practices obviously have to be seen in relation to the children’s

linguistic self-perception, and the question is, in how far these practices
lead to a plurilingual identity and encourage the children to use their entire
language repertoire or in how far they hierarchize the languages and
therefore hinder a positive plurilingual development.
Practices of Positioning
As mentioned in the first part of this text, language plays a fundamental
role in processes of social categorization and identity formation. In this
sense, language practices are themselves the place where identities are
constructed, negotiated, challenged and reinvented. At the same time,
these practices can only be understood in relation to underlying ideological
meanings, normative discourses and power relations, “which are (re)
enacted, (re)confirmed and (re) created in the local doings and sayings”
(Seele 2016: 71; see also Blackledge & Creese 2010: 58f.). One central ques-
tion in this context is how and on the basis of which assumptions differ-
ences among the children are created and which role languages play within
these practices of differentiation. In the following example, it is interesting
to look at how assumptions are made about what counts as “normal”

language and “abnormal” language, and in what way national characteris-

tics and languages are interwoven:
During breakfast, the caregiver Stéphane talks to the new temporary

assistant Tanja to give her some basic information: about the daily
routines, the times for bringing and picking up the children, mealtimes
and sleeping time, the morning conference, pedagogical activities, the
group arrangement etc. . . . He then explains that they “normally” use
Luxembourgish with the children. But if they cry or do not listen or
do not seem to understand, then the caregivers would also use “their”
(i.e., the children’s) language – provided they know the language, which
is not always the case (e.g., Chinese). Stéphane enumerates these further
languages they use with the children: German, French, Spanish, Italian,
Portuguese, some words in Japanese. He now continues to introduce the
children who are sitting at the table. In doing so, he always states the
child’s name first and then her or his national/ethnic background. For
example: “Dat ass Lian. Hien ass chinesesch.” [This is Lian, he is
Chinese.] Some children are also put into multiple categories, for
example “hallef däitsch, hallef hollännesch” [half German, half Dutch].
(Seele 2016: 75)
Here, on the one hand, the educator stresses the possibility of using differ-
ent languages in specific situations where special care is needed. On the
other hand, she defines Luxembourgish as the ‘normal’ language of com-
munication within the kindergarten, while the use of other languages
appears as an exception, a deviation from the norm. As Seele underlines,
these ‘other’ languages are marked as ‘their’ languages, i.e., the

children’s languages as opposed to the institutional standard, thus
positing a cleavage between the languages of the children and the
language of the day care centre – a cleavage that needs to be bridged
through pedagogical efforts. These efforts may entail the promotion of
Luxembourgish as well as the occasional use of the children’s languages
to comfort or to reprimand them as well as to assure
mutual understanding.
(2016: 76)
At the same time, this episode clearly shows how the categorization of
groups of people in this case is linked to clear-cut and fixed understandings
of the children’s identities. By ascribing these essentialized identities to the
children, they become somehow “fixed in the position of ‘the Other’ and
also come to observe themselves and one another as ‘different’” (Seele 2016:
76). By setting an institutional linguistic norm, normality and abnormality
is constructed, and children are not only constituted as children, but as
(culturally, nationally, linguistically) different kinds of children. For how
far children accept these attributions or not, in other words how far they

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reproduce and undermine or transform the explicit or implicit institutional

language policy, see Simoes and Neumann (forthcoming).
21.3.3 Children’s Linguistic Identities and School Policies/Practices

While until now the focus has been mostly placed on the role of the
educators, we will now look more intensively to the children’s perspective
and look at their views on multilingualism and identity. As we will see, on
the one hand, children do actively resist, react and rework institutional
expectations. On the other hand, educational contexts matter significantly
and can have a strong impact on the children’s self-perception (see also
Seals 2018).
An early empirical study conducted within the German context (Hu 2003)
focused on the inclusion of migrant languages, the dominant language of
schooling and foreign language education within the German context. To
investigate the social conditions within which multilingualism is located,
this study looked at two cases: the 10th grade of a Hauptschule (general
secondary school) and a Gymnasium (academic secondary school). In both
schools, in-depth interviews were conducted with 10th grade students and
their language teachers (including in the Hauptschule, English, German as a
Second Language, and heritage language education in Turkish and Arabic;
in the Gymnasium, beside those languages also French and Spanish).
One of the results of this study was that it provided clear evidence of a
gap between the learners’ and the foreign language teachers’ perceptions of
plurilingualism: while the students identified plurilingualism and
linguistic-cultural identity as central categories, these played a much less
important role for the foreign language teachers. Not only were the
biographical-cultural experiences and memories of students hardly per-
ceived or constructively included in classwork, but the respective concep-
tions of language diverged notably. For the young people, emotional and
identity-related aspects played an important role, whereas the teachers
emphasized much more an achievement-and testing-oriented understand-
ing related to the “target language.” Owing to their biographical experi-
ences with multilingualism in various countries, the students exhibited a
notable sensitivity for questions of cultural norms, cultural identity and the
connection between language and culture, aspects that did not play an
important role for most of the teachers. Apparently, the teachers’ beliefs
centered around (1) a deep-rooted tradition of foreign language education to
exclude on principle all first languages in the classroom apart from
German, (2) the presupposition of a monolingual group of learners, and
(3) languages as not being connected to the emotionality and identity of the
learners (for a recent study in the Finnish context with similar results, see
Linderoos 2016).
An empirical study by Spotti (2007) investigated how immigrant minority
pupils in a primary Flemish 5th grade construct their self-ascribed

identities in terms of their cultural and linguistic affiliations. The study

tries to unravel the complexities of these pupils’ ongoing cultural and
linguistic affiliations and the role that these affiliations play in their
identity construction both within and outside the classroom (Spotti 2007:
32). I will focus here on some findings concerning especially the linguistic
identities of the children. One interesting outcome of the study is related to
the pupils’ investment in classroom language norms. For the vast majority
of the children, their immigrant minority languages represent the least
liked languages given their lack of competence in those languages.
Nevertheless, most students still referred to their immigrant minority
languages as “my language,” because these languages are spoken in the
family or with relatives back in the parental homeland. I quote one espe-
cially relevant part of the focus group interview where it becomes clear how
far the pupils adopt an ideology that equates territoriality and language
norm:
Birsen: If we were to speak Turkish now, for instance to each

other or so, then she (the teacher) does not understand
that. [. . .]
Saloua: If they know something, then we may as well speak but
they know nothing.
Birsen: We live in Belgium and Flanders then she has to speak
Dutch in class.
Interviewer: One has to do that?
Birsen: Has to. Yes.
Sariye: One has to do that.
Birsen: When the teacher knows just Dutch then you have to
still speak just Dutch as well. [. . .] We have to learn
Dutch she (the teacher) does not.
(Spotti 2007: 41)
The extract shows that not only are immigrant minority languages not used
in the classroom because it is understood by the pupils as violating the
territory–language equation, but also that one has to speak Dutch because
the teacher knows only Dutch. As Spotti explains,
The process . . . involves the hearing and assimilating of an institutional

discourse; for instance the discourse of the educational system of which
a pupil is part, which that this discourse becomes dialogically processed
so that this discourse becomes “tightly interwoven with one’s own
words” (Bakhtin 1981, 345).
(Spotti 2007: 42)
At the same time, the children show a high degree of awareness concerning
their language repertoires and how they invest in them. Saloua, for
example, one of the participants in the study, knows with whom
Moroccan Arabic can be used at school, in her case with her sisters. She

506 ADELHEID HU
also uses Moroccan Arabic because the other children at school will not
understand what she and her sisters are talking about.
The reconstruction of these pupils’ self-subscribed identities appears to

emerge as those of culturally and linguistically heterogeneous stock-
brokers who are busy managing their own cultural and linguistic
belongings and who are ready to invest in cultural and linguistic
polyphonic elements . . . to achieve inclusion within the communities of
practice they inhabit.
(Spotti 2007: 48)
I would like finally to mention the study by Compton-Lilly et al. (2017)

which was conducted in the US American context. The authors highlight two
contrasting cases of young children which again prove the important impact
of the educational context on children’s identity negotiations. Generally
speaking, the study shows how especially immigrant pupils navigate within
educational systems “that often devalue their native languages and socio-
cultural competencies, and quickly learn whose languages and literacies are
valued in classroom and come to view themselves accordingly” (p. 119)
The first case is Carlos, 7 years old, whose family came to the US from a
rural region of Mexico, seeking employment. Carlos attended at first a dual-
language school, where he was taught to read and write in Spanish and had
been transferred later to a 50/50 English-Spanish program. Liz, the second
case, was born in Alaska, her parents being US/Korean citizens. Liz attends a
regular English-dominant classroom, and speaks Korean only at home and
in church. Similar to the study of Spotti, the authors come to the following
conclusion:
Thus, being a male, soccer-playing Mexican student who lives in the

United States, meets school benchmarks in English and Spanish, and
attends a dual-language school presents very different possibilities for
self than being a female, biracial Korean student living in the United
States, who is falling behind in reading and attends a traditional
classroom where being and speaking Korean is marginalized.
Significantly, Carlos is successful not only because he, his teachers, and
his parents agree that he is bilingual but also because he passed
standardized assessments in both languages. Liz did less well in English,
and her abilities in Korean are only anecdotally assessed or reported.
Significantly, educational contexts matter. Although Spanish has
historically been considered a low-status language spoken by poor
immigrant and migrant students, Carlos’s bilingual abilities are
celebrated and supported in his dual-language classrooms. Ironically,
Korean, which is often associated with “model minority” children, is
invisible at school, and Liz’s decision to stop attending Korean school is
treated as an understandable deferral to peer pressure.
(p. 135)

21.4 Some Promising Curricular and Pedagogical

Approaches
I will focus finally on some pedagogical approaches that take explicitly into
account the learners’ full repertoires, i.e., the first languages including
migration-related multilingualism, the language(s) of schooling, and for-
eign/second language teaching (for a detailed overview, see Hu 2018). These
approaches are especially important if the learners themselves and their
identities are to be seriously taken into account.
In terms of family multilingualism, I would like to mention the book by
Rosemarie Tracy, Wie Kinder Sprachen lernen: Und wie wir sie dabei unterstützen
können (Tracy 2008), where she presents a very useful range of practices for
parents and families in order to encourage children’s plurilingualism and
develop a positive plurilingual identity. Tracy underlines strongly plurilin-
gual practices, also on the side of the parents, and suggests a kind of
“relaxed” approach to family multilingualism; for example, she suggests
seeing translanguaging as normality (in contrast to the strict one person one
language approach), she encourages parents to read children’s books in
two/three languages, to sing in different languages, and if possible, to have
good cooperation with the educators in the kindergarten in order to bridge
the gap between home and school.
Within the context of educational settings, already in the 1990s interest-
ing and dedicated approaches were proposed in order to facilitate and pro-
mote multilingualism in an integrative sense. On the pedagogical level
Krumm (2011) developed the language portraits mentioned above in order to
reveal the identity-forming functions of languages for multilingual children,
a method that has been used many times since for this purpose, as well as for
research or for pedagogical objectives (see, e.g., Dressler 2014; Kolb 2007;
Mélo-Pfeifer 2017; Portnaia 2014). For their language portraits, the children
receive blank figures on which they can draw their languages in different
colors and then comment on their specific way of positioning their language
in the body silhouette (Krumm 2001, 2011: 101). The approach allows chil-
dren to reflect on their entire language repertoire, and enhance language and
cultural awareness. It has also been an important part of the European
Language Portfolio (Council of Europe n.d.), another influential project which
enhances plurilingualism and the development of plurilingual identities.
Generally speaking, the Council of Europe has been very active in supporting
and developing projects which encourage all kind of language learning,
especially emphasizing the idea of plurilingual and pluricultural compe-
tence. (See also the “Éveil aux langues” project in the French-speaking
context (Candelier 2003) or the Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters
for younger learners (Council of Europe 2009), which focuses mainly on
cultural awareness and cultural identity of children and adolescents.)
An important contribution to identity-related pedagogical approaches
has been made by Jim Cummins. On the one hand, his interdependence and

508 ADELHEID HU
underlying proficiency theory which models the transfer of cognitive/academic

or literacy related proficiency from one language to another (Cummins
1981), has been very influential. It has fundamentally problematized the
long established tradition of the “two solitudes” (Cummins & Hornberger
2008), i.e., the conviction that languages should be taught as separately as
possible in order to avoid interference and mixture (see also Cummins
2016; Hu 2016). On the other hand, his approach to introducing “identity
texts” into the classroom is equally important. The approach argues that
schools can respond to the devaluation of identity experienced by many
students by exploring strategies that enable students to use their emerging
academic language and multilingual repertoires for powerful identity-
affirming purposes. Concretely speaking, teachers encourage students to
use their multilingual skills as cognitive tools and to employ a broad range
of modalities to create multimodal texts about personal realities.
21.5 Conclusion
Based on theoretical developments within poststructuralist and sociocul-

tural identity theory, the chapter presents a number of empirical studies on
children’s linguistic identities within different settings: family, pre-school
and school. The empirical examples confirm the main theoretical hypoth-
esis that identity should not be conceptualized as something stable, internal
or essential which is independent of the surrounding society. Instead, a
social-constructivist and sociocultural framework interprets identity as
having its reality “in an intersubjectively reached agreement that is histor-
ically and culturally negotiated” (Bamberg et al. 2011: 178) and that this
agreement is constantly (re)negotiated and dynamic.
It seems obvious that within this theoretical approach identity is closely
linked to language, “languaging” and narratives, as well as to larger societal
discourses, power relations and (institutional) practices. Research has also
shown, both adults and children – even at an early age – reflect on and
negotiate their identities using different literacy practices to express them.
This sheds new light on the understanding of language learning and
language education, since language learning/teaching and language prac-
tices, for example in schools, can be seen as closely interrelated with pupils’
identity construction and negotiation.
The empirical examples from three main settings – family multilingual-
ism, multilingual day care centers and school – show how identity con-
struction and negotiation occurs in practice. The following aspects are
especially worth mentioning:
• It was demonstrated that societal discourses, for example on mono- or

multilingualism and/or other language ideologies, can have a direct
impact on parents’ attitudes and language education practices within

the family context. The extent to which children perceive themselves

positively as plurilingual individuals depends largely on their parents’
communicative behavior, which in turn might depend on broader
macro-societal discourses.
• Based on the case of day care centers in the multilingual and linguistic-
ally very diverse context of Luxembourg, the extent to which children’s
linguistic and cultural identities are directly shaped by linguistic
practices within the institution is also clear. Although the settings are
clearly and officially multilingual, and the linguistic diversity among
the children is extremely high, studies demonstrated that practices of
“domestication” and “monolingualization” lead to a hierarchy between
languages, giving an especially important role to the “national” lan-
guage of the country, in this case Luxembourgish. By setting an insti-
tutional linguistic norm, a linguistic normality (and abnormality) is
constructed which again has a direct impact on children’s (linguistic)
identities and agency.
• Within the school context, similar ideologies and practices were demon-
strated. On the one hand, pedagogical and didactical traditions (e.g.,
target-language orientation within foreign language pedagogy) tend to
marginalize or even exclude the children’s biographical plurilingual rep-
ertoires. On the other hand, studies in Flemish and US contexts showed
the extent to which children navigate between school discourses and their
own feelings of cultural and linguistic belonging and identification.
Children construct their linguistic identities in constant negotiation and

positioning with the social world around them. The extent to which they
build positive plurilingual identities and develop self-confidence and agency
largely depends on the way in which their social world encourages or
discourages them to do so.
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22
Multilingual Parenting
in the United States:
Language, Culture
and Emotion
Gigliana Melzi, Nydia Prishker, Viviana Kawas
& Jessica Huancacuri
Multilingualism is a common phenomenon around the world, with some

statistics showing that about two thirds of the world’s population under-
stand and speak two or more languages (Grosjean 2010). Although not as
culturally and linguistically diverse as its northern and southern neighbors,
the United States is home to more than 350 language and cultural groups
(US Census Bureau 2015). Among the young sector of the population, about
22 percent of US children live in households where a language other than
English is spoken, with some states, such as California, doubling that
number. Many of these children grow up bilingually as they learn English
at school and their heritage language(s) at home. While the number of
languages a child adopts and develops is seemingly an individual choice
families make, these choices are not made in a vacuum, nor are they
entirely deliberate. Children’s experiences are embedded in multiple con-
texts beyond the family that shape their language developmental trajector-
ies. These contextual layers include societal language ideologies and
policies, which influence parental and children’s attitudes and perceptions
toward their languages, as well as the home and school practices used to
support the development of these languages.
Although much has been written about bilingual children’s language
development in the United States, less is known about bi- and multilingual
parenting, in particular with respect to parental perceptions and decisions
about raising children who speak two or more languages, as well as how
parents might rely on their multiple languages as a child-rearing strategy.
In this chapter, we explore the perceptions and practices of US families with

516 G. M ELZI, N. PRISHKER, V. KAWAS & J. HUANCACURI-HARLOW
young children (i.e., children between 0 and 8 years of age) who are bi- or
multilingual, focusing mostly on research with families from Latin
American backgrounds who represent the largest and fastest-growing eth-
nocultural and linguistic community in the United States. In US academic
circles, the term Latino to refer to individuals from the various Latin
American countries has been replaced with Latinx as a gender-inclusive
term. In this chapter, however, we opted to use the Spanish language
gender-inclusive ending and adopted Latine to refer to individuals whose
cultural background originated in Latin America (see also de Onís 2017).
In our discussion of bi- and multilingual parenting, we pay special atten-
tion to the intersection of language, culture and emotion. We begin with a
general overview of multilingualism in the United States, describing who is
bi- or multilingual, introducing the prevalent terms used in reference to
young US children who speak more than one language, and exploring bi-
and multilingualism in the relation to the larger educational and socio-
political contexts. We then examine why and how families choose to raise
children bi- or multilingually, focusing on parental perceptions and chal-
lenges, as well as on the practices used to support children’s learning and
development across languages. In the final section, we explore how families
who have at their disposal multiple languages employ them as a child-
rearing strategy, in particular in emotional and affective situations.
22.1 The Context of Multilingual Parenting
The bi- or multilingual population in the United States is sizable and

growing. In 2015, around 64.7 million people, or 22 percent of the total
population, were identified as speaking a language other than English, and
about 40 percent were classified as having limited English proficiency
(Batalova & Zong 2016). While most bi- or multilingual people in the
United States are recent immigrants, a smaller percentage is comprised of
US natives who speak English as their first language and who decide, for
various personal and professional reasons, to acquire an additional or more
languages. After English, the most commonly used languages are Spanish,
Chinese and Tagalog, which together account for about 70 percent of the
foreign languages spoken regularly in the United States. Of these, Spanish is
the most widely spoken, with about 40 million speakers nationwide
(Batalova & Zong 2016).
In particular, Latine families comprise one of the most rapidly growing
cultural groups, with Latine children accounting for about 25 percent of
young children in the country (Cabrera et al. 2019; Zong et al. 2019). While
there is wide variability within the community with respect to various
demographic characteristics, including geographic and national origin,
immigration history, languages spoken, socioeconomic status and religious
affiliation, the majority of the Latine population in the United States (about

Multilingual Parenting in the United States 517
65 percent) are of Mexican descent and speak Spanish as their primary

language, with a small minority speaking an Indigenous language (i.e.,
Mixtec, Nahuatl) either as a primary or as a sole language. Around 90 per-
cent of Latine children have been born in the United States and approxi-
mately 50 percent have parents who were born in a Latin American
country. The majority of US Latine parents (about 85 percent) report speak-
ing Spanish to their children, although this proportion decreases as the
generational status of parents increases (i.e., 97 percent of foreign-born
Latine parents speak Spanish compared to 71 percent of first-generation
US-born and 49 percent in later generations; López et al. 2018). Therefore,
the overwhelming majority of US Latine children are growing up with
multiple languages, and most are doing so bilingually, speaking Spanish
and English to varying degrees. However, a small minority grow up multi-
lingually, speaking an Indigenous language in addition to Spanish
and English.
Although in the United States there is no official national language,
English is the common language and holds a privileged status as compared
to most other languages spoken by children from multilingual homes.
However, individual states have the jurisdiction of instituting language
policies. For instance, Hawaii, has two official languages, English and
Hawaiian (ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi). Similarly, New Mexico and the US territory of
Puerto Rico have both Spanish and English as their official languages. Even
though English is not the only language used in education across the
country, it is often the only language used in important government and
business transactions, as well as in the various means of communication,
including navigational and environmental signage. The widespread use of
English in the country implicitly communicates that to participate in the
larger society, English must be spoken. While English has held a privileged
status for many years, there has been a recent increase in its prestige as a
result of globalization and its use as a lingua franca (Gallagher-Geurtsen
2007). The higher status of English is compounded with a pervasive mono-
lingual language ideology (Wiley & Lukes 1996) and a general distrust
towards other languages (Haviland 2003) that together might negatively
impact multilingual parents’ stance towards supporting their heritage
language(s) at home, as well as their children’s attitudes and willingness
to sustain their heritage language(s) learning (García & Torres-Guevara
2009; López 2009).
A complicating reality in the case of the United States is that the families
who likely have the linguistic resources to raise multilingual children also
tend to be in vulnerable social positions, as they often belong to immigrant
ethnic groups that are minoritized, as is the case of Latine families. Thus,
children from multilingual US families are often not only susceptible to
being marginalized as a result of their linguistic identities, but are also
likely to experience further marginalization as a result of their racial and/or
ethnic affiliations. Parents might also face added constraints as a

consequence of their immigration status or economic conditions, or as a

result of government policies and the social climate created by these pol-
icies; all of which might lead to barriers to their involvement and partici-
pation in the larger society (García Coll et al. 1996). Statistics show, for
instance, that while there is substantial income variability among bilingual
or multilingual Latine families, about 67 percent of young Latine children
live in low-income households (i.e., households with an income less than or
equal to 200 percent of the federal poverty line, identified as $26,200 USD
for a family of four; US Department of Health and Human Services 2020),
and about 37 percent of all young Latine children live in neighborhoods
with high concentrations of poverty (Cabrera & Hennigar 2019). These
economic conditions are likely going to influence families’ access to the
external resources needed for sustained support of their children’s bilin-
gual or multilingual language development.
As these young children enter the educational system, educators as well
as policy makers and researchers, have found ways to identify them mostly
with the intent to provide the necessary support to ensure their academic
integration and success. While there is no standard identification process,
most states rely on parental report of language use in the home and by the
child, followed by a formal assessment of oral and written English profi-
ciency. The most common label used in educational settings is English
language learner (ELL), along with derivatives such as English as a second
language (ESL) learner, English as an additional language (EAL) learner, and
English learner (EL). ELL is therefore an umbrella term used to identify, in the
school system, children who come from homes where English is not the
main language and who are at varying stages of the English language
acquisition process. The use of the labels might have been well intended,
but in reality, it separates bilingual or multilingual children from their
English-speaking monolingual peers, largely based on their linguistic abil-
ities in the majority societal language. As such, the widespread use of labels
such as these has been criticized for disregarding children’s skill level in
their home/heritage language(s) and, thus, failing to capture the develop-
mental complexity and variability of bilingual or multilingual language
acquisition (Callahan 2005; Gutiérrez & Orellana 2006; Valdés et al. 2015).
In addition, critics argue that these labels underscore the relative prestige
of the home language in comparison to English, and associate the lack of
English language skills with academic underperformance, thereby
fostering a deficit view of multilingual children (Gutiérrez & Orellana
2006; Valdés et al. 2015). Moreover, when teaching multilingual children
labeled as ELLs educators often focus on supporting the acquisition of the
majority language at the expense of supporting the learning of academic
content areas (Callahan 2005). Therefore, critics argue that the use of these
labels have had the unintended consequence of placing bilingual and multi-
lingual children in a marginalized position solely on the basis of their
knowledge of the majority language.

In an effort to correct the negative implications of using labels such as

ELL, other terms have been coined. For instance, Dual Language Learners
(DLLs) intends to highlight the ongoing developmental process of majority
and home languages. DLL is a term used mostly by early childhood educa-
tors, policymakers, and researchers to refer to children under the age of 5
(i.e., before school entry) who come from non-English speaking homes.
However, unless the home language of children is fostered through a
dual-language program at school, DLL children are at risk of, and often
are, labeled ELL upon school entry. More recently, García et al. (2008) coined
the term emergent bilingual to refer to students who are exposed to two or
more languages irrespective of their age or linguistic proficiency. García
and colleagues argue that the term emergent bilingual is better suited to
describe the diversity of US children who speak a language other than
English at home, as it captures the complexity of bi-/multilingual language
acquisition in an educational system which predominantly supports mono-
lingual language development. The appearance and institutional use of
these labels provides a window into the complex relationship the US society
has had with multilingualism (Fitzgerald 1993), reflected not only in the
country’s language ideologies, but also in its educational policies. In par-
ticular, these spheres demonstrate the complicated and ambivalent history
towards bi- and multilingual education, one that has oscillated between
viewing linguistic diversity as an opportunity for the enrichment of future
generations, on the one hand, and as a problem to be solved, on the other.
The current state of US bilingual education is a result of two critical
federal laws that were passed in the 1960s during the civil rights era. In
1968, the government passed the Bilingual Education Act (BEA) as part of an
educational restructuring to assist the academic learning of children who
did not speak or were not proficient in English. The BEA was likely the
result of another landmark legislative action (i.e., Title VI of the Civil Rights
Act) prohibiting the discrimination against and denial of education to
students on the basis of color, race, ethnicity or national origin. These
two laws allocated federal funding for the development of programs for
minority language-speaking children, for the professional development of
their teachers, as well as for research and evaluation of bilingual programs.
These laws were then interpreted and implemented differently by each
state, as public education in the United States is a function of individual
states and not of the federal government. The BEA has gone through radical
amendments, from early expansions that increased eligibility to English-
speaking students, enhanced professional development for teachers, and
provided literacy programs for families, to changes that either favored
monolingual English instruction or increased support for heritage language
instruction. In 2001, Title III of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act
replaced the BEA, shifting the focus of bilingual education from one that
supports and maintains heritage language(s) to one that supports the devel-
opment of English.

In 2015, a new reauthorization, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA),

was approved to ensure that all children receive equitable services, but
increased the power of individual states to decide the funding of programs
intended to support bilingual/multilingual children. In this new version of
the law, bilingual education is described as a means to learn English and
not as a route toward bi or multilingualism. Schools across the United
States, then, use English as the official language of instruction, prioritizing
English proficiency over that of the heritage languages. Thus, the key
objective of education programs supporting the teaching and learning of
children with a language other than English is to ensure that students
achieve the listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills in English as
delineated by the curriculum and standards, all of which are based on
monolingual language development. Educational policies such as these
clearly impact the school-based program options offered to parents and
limit the multilingual options especially for families who are not able to
able to programs offered in their local public schools.
These policies are embedded within a larger societal context and thus not
only reflect societal attitudes, but also likely shape individual attitudes
towards linguistic diversity and multilingualism (Castro et al. 2021;
Gándara et al. 2004). Ideas suggesting that continuing to support the heri-
tage language(s) at home and school will hinder the acquisition of English,
or that learning more than one language at a young age will cause confu-
sion that might lead to language delays, have been debunked by research
(Byers-Heinlein & Lew-Williams 2018; Cummins 1979; McLeod et al. 2016),
but continue to exist in societal discourses and likely influence parental
attitudes, decisions and practices (Endo & Reece-Miller 2010; Espinosa
2015). Unfortunately, the misconceptions about bi-/multilingualism and
bi-/multilingual education are often reified by misinformed professionals,
who, unfamiliar with the scientific evidence about childhood
multilingualism, often fail to reassure parents (King & Fogle 2006; Paradis
et al. 2011).
In short, despite its multilingualism and multiculturalism, the US society
regards English as the language of knowledge and status. This prestige is
sustained and strengthened by our current political discourse that shuns
outsiders and diversity, as well as by federal educational policies that
overtly discourage multilingualism. In this general context, families who
decide to raise bilingual or multilingual children face multiple constraints,
in particular those who are marginalized because of their racial and ethnic
affiliations and identities, or their social and economic conditions.
22.2 Parenting Multiple Languages
Fostering the development of multiple languages involves making various

choices about when and how to support and encourage each language at

home, at school, and in the community. Traditionally, scholars have

described parenting multiple languages through general models that rely
on different language combinations that caregivers adopt to provide the
necessary input to foster the development of children’s multiple languages.
These models range in possibilities from the one person-one language
combination, where each parent identifies as monolingual in a particular
language to the child, to combinations in which both parents present
themselves as fully bilingual to the child, and speak both languages as they
see fit (see De Houwer 1998; Piller 2001). This overarching decision influ-
ences the languages used with and around children, which in turn provides
the necessary input to support children’s development across their target
languages. While these models do, to some extent, acknowledge societal
and other factors that influence parental language choice, they fail to
integrate the factors into the larger model, giving the semblance that
parental language input is largely a result of individual decisions (see De
Houwer 2007). Moreover, the bulk of research documenting language
choices has been conducted outside of the United States or with “elite
bilinguals” (i.e., those who become bilingual or multilingual by their own
choice, and for their own advantage; de Mejía 2002: 41). Therefore, it is
likely that the existing models have limited applicability to the majority of
bilingual or multilingual families in the United States.
Recently, scholars have proposed more nuanced and complex representa-
tions of multilingual parenting that embed parental choices within the
larger sociopolitical and ideological contexts shaping parental language
beliefs, attitudes and perceptions, as well as the decisions and strategies
they use to support the development of multiple languages in their chil-
dren. King et al. (2008), for instance, provide a comprehensive multilevel
framework to understand how bilingual or multilingual families make
implicit and explicit decisions about language use and how they enact these
decisions. In addition, a family’s decisions and practices are also susceptible
to family-level and individual-level factors, such as family structure, paren-
tal education, family cohesion, family language ideology and practice (e.g.,
parental beliefs about the benefits of timing, exposure and acquisition of
language, and their ability to put language acquisition into practice), among
others (e.g., Schwartz 2010). Existing research with Latine bilingual and
multilingual families, especially those who are not “elite bilinguals,” points
to the necessity of adopting this more comprehensive approach, one that
takes into account societal, family-level and individual-level factors as well
as the interplay between these factors, to reflect more accurately the experi-
ences of multilingual parents’ decisions, perceptions and practices.
There are relatively few studies that have examined the experiences of US
families raising young bilingual or multilingual children from parents’ own
perspectives (e.g., Cycyk & Hammer 2018; Lee et al. 2015; Rodríguez 2015;
Schecter et al. 1996; Sims et al. 2016; Velázquez 2009; Worthy & Rodríguez-
Galindo 2006; Yan 2003). The available work shows that multilingual

caregivers are aware and understand the benefits of raising children who
will be able to communicate and function in more than one language.
Parents are consistent in their intentions and their motivations to foster
multiple languages in their children. For instance, parents usually report
that being bilingual is a sign of good parenting because it is one way in
which parents are increasing their children’s life opportunities, such as
having greater access to more diverse career choices, as well as being able to
interact and communicate with a wider range of people (Lee et al. 2015;
Rodríguez 2015; Worthy & Rodríguez-Galindo 2006; Yan 2003). A widely
mentioned reason for fostering the home or heritage language(s) is the close
relation between the language and culture. Thus, parents talk about how
speaking Spanish is a way to maintain their cultural roots and familial
bonds (Cycyk & Hammer 2018; Chumak-Horbatsch 2008; Guardado 2011), a
way to foster a positive sense of ethnic and cultural identity in their
children (Schecter et al. 1996; Yan 2003) and also a portal for children to
access parents’ “real” selves (Sims et al. 2016). While most of this past work
has focused on school-aged children, our own work with low-income Latine
caregivers of preschool-aged children shows that parents report similar
reasons for younger children. Caregivers, for instance, point out the diverse
ways in which speaking multiple languages (i.e., Spanish, English and/or
Mixtec or Nahuatl) can promote and expand young children’s future eco-
nomic opportunities. Parents of preschoolers also reflect on how multilin-
gualism can facilitate their children’s interpersonal communication
(i.e., they can have friends from different parts of the world), and the
important role that knowing the heritage languages plays in maintaining
and fostering ethnic cultural identities (Melzi et al. 2021; Ochoa et al.
forthcoming).
Although parents report an overwhelmingly appreciation for functioning
in multiple languages, there are marked differences in families’ motiv-
ations, emphases and approaches towards supporting their children’s
multilingual development. For instance, foreign-born parents often under-
score the need for their children to learn English as a way to ensure
educational success and career prospects. In doing so, they often underesti-
mate the amount of extra effort and additional support they would need for
their children to maintain their heritage language(s) after school entry.
Parents are often surprised when they realize that the support they provide
at home is not sufficient to maintain their children’s level of language
proficiency they had aspired to, in particular as children’s social world
expands beyond the family and home. These findings echo those of past
ethnographic (e.g., Pease-Alvarez 2002; Zentella 1997) as well as that of
more recent qualitative work (Rodríguez 2015) that documents the chal-
lenges Latine immigrant parents experience in maintaining Spanish, espe-
cially recent immigrants, as they are more concerned with their children’s
acquisition of English. Parents are often unaware of the societal pressures
that children face that increase the use of English with peers and with

siblings that ultimately leads to a rapid decrease in productive skill of the

heritage language(s). By comparison, parents who are either born or
schooled in the United States – in other words, those who have personally
experienced heritage language loss – actively work at maintaining or revit-
alizing the heritage language(s) in the younger generations as they often
regret the language loss they or their peers experienced (Ochoa et al. 2021;
Pease-Alvarez 2002). Thus, despite the challenges, Latine families across
generations value both the majority and the heritage language(s), and are
committed to supporting them.
The available research on Latine families has mostly focused on low-
income Spanish-speaking immigrant families, and thus there is not enough
information to disentangle the social and economic factors that contribute
to parental attitudes and the challenges experienced as parents from
diverse socioeconomic backgrounds raise multilingual children in the
United States. We would expect that having greater social and economic
capital might positively influence parental access to information and
resources, which in turn would allow them to navigate societal pressures
more effectively and have greater freedom to make decisions about lan-
guage use as compared to their less affluent counterparts. King and Fogle
(2006), for instance, investigated how Spanish-English elite bilingual fam-
ilies from middle-income communities and from diverse ethnic back-
grounds explained their language choices and practices. They found that
parents prioritized their personal language learning experiences over pro-
fessional or popular advice, especially when this advice went against their
own beliefs. In addition, unlike parents with limited resources, parents
with greater financial resources are also likely to seek out schools where
dual language or language immersion programs are offered, or they can
secure language tutors or childcare providers who can speak the target
language. Additionally, more affluent parents can support the language
further through travel to places where the heritage languages are spoken.
Unfortunately, there is little research in the US that examines the atti-
tudes and perspectives of multilingual (immigrant and nonimmigrant)
parents from middle-income or more affluent backgrounds. The existing
research (e.g., Hoff, Rumiche, et al. 2014; Hoff, Welsh, et al. 2013; Pearson
2007) documents that families with higher education and who live in more
affluent bilingual communities (such as Miami, Florida) do face difficulties
in trying to maintain and foster children’s Spanish development as a result
of societal pressures and messages. In one of the few investigations among
Latine parents from diverse socioeconomic groups, Velázquez (2009)
investigated parental perceptions of bilingualism and their relation to
parental investments with a group of Mexican American bilingual families
in the Southwest region of the United States. Parents’ perceptions were
varied and ranged from regarding bilingualism as inevitable, to stressing
the importance of English (over Spanish) as a conduit to economic and
social mobility, to viewing multilingualism as a means of affording children

with a competitive edge or as a conduit to enhancing their understanding of

the world. Most critically, Velázquez found disconnects between parental
perceptions and practices. First, parents underestimated the resources that
were needed to support the type of bilingualism they sought to implement.
Second, irrespective of their perceptions towards bilingualism, parents
were highly concerned about their children’s learning of English, and often
worried that the bilingual programs available to them would hinder their
children’s acquisition of English. For some parents, their desire for having
their children learn English well and without an accent was a determining
factor in their choices, as they were motivated by trying to prevent their
children from experiencing linguistic discrimination in the future
(Velázquez 2009).
Taken together then, the research on parental experiences documents
that parenting multiple languages in the United States is not without its
struggles, irrespective of socioeconomic realities. The assimilative pressure
of English is colossal, and the expansion of American culture and English at
a global scale might only augment this pressure. Even in homes where all
household members speak the heritage language(s) regularly, English
quickly becomes the predominant language used by the younger gener-
ations, and thus, as statistics show, there is a slow pattern of language loss
across generations. As difficult as supporting the development of multiple
languages in the United States is, however, it is not without its unique
opportunities. Pease-Alvarez (2002), for instance, argues that multilingual
communities redefine language use to engage in a blend of practices that
socialize children to become multilingual and multicultural. We now turn
to review how parents might use their multiple languages to parent
their children.
22.3 Parenting in Multiple Languages through

Code-Switching
In much the same way that parenting multiple languages in young children
leads to unique circumstances and choices, being a bilingual or multilin-
gual parent offers unique opportunities. At the most obvious level, unlike
monolingual parents, multilingual parents have at their disposal two or
more languages and they likely use these languages in deliberate and
nondeliberate ways to raise their children. While the reasons for choosing
one language over the other can be related to the social conditions of the
immediate context (e.g., what languages are spoken by those present) or the
language abilities of parents and children, others are less evident and might
be a result of unconscious preferences for discussing certain topics in a
particular language. These implicit preferences might manifest themselves
through the switching of languages within a speech or conversational event
(Auer 1998; Blom & Gumperz 1972; Myers-Scotton 1993). Thus, while

multilingual parents might make deliberate choices about language

practices in the home, school and community, in practice they often mix
languages to varying degrees and for a wide range of reasons (Gumperz
1977; Stavans 1992; Stavans & Swisher 2006).
Code-switching is defined as the alternate use of two or more languages
(or language varieties) within the same speech or conversational event
(Genesee 2008; Grosjean 1998; Woolard 2004). In bilingual or multilingual
communities, speakers often label the practice with neologisms created by
combining the names of the languages, as in Spanglish for the simultan-
eous use of Spanish and English, Frenglish or Franglais for the use of French
and English, or Chinglish for the use of Chinese and English. Historically,
there are deeply rooted misconceptions about code-switching as an
indication of incomplete or substandard proficiency in the language(s) of
the speakers. This misconception has led to generalized negative percep-
tions and attitudes, even among bilinguals towards code-switching
(e.g., Casielles-Suárez 2017), even though research shows that code-
switching is a sophisticated and rule-governed practice (e.g., Belazi et al.
1994; MacSwan 2014; Paradis 2012; Toribio 2001). The negative views
towards code-switching are perpetuated through positions adopted by
language institutions, such as the Real Academia de la Lengua Española
(RAE) and its North American branch, the Asociación Nacional de la Lengua
Española (ANLE) which, for instance, up until recently, defined espanglish,
as a “deformed” type of speech used by certain Hispanic groups in the
United States (Zentella 2017). As a consequence, and unsurprisingly, bilin-
gual and multilingual US parents often report wanting to keep languages
separate, avoiding code-switching when interacting with their children
(Bail et al. 2015; Goodz 1989), and attempting to use the most unadulter-
ated form of the language(s) (Pease-Alvarez 2002).
Nonetheless, code-switching during conversations between multilingual
speakers is often inevitable and occurs frequently and in response to both
situational and conversational changes (Gumperz 1982). Although there are
relatively few studies on parent–child code-switching practices in family
contexts, especially with younger children, available work shows that
multilingual parents code-switch frequently and do so for various purposes
(Lanza 1997; Myers-Scotton 1993). Ethnographic work in Spanish-English
speaking communities in the United States, in particular, shows that
parents often switch into Spanish as a way to signal cultural membership
and to highlight the views, values or beliefs associated with the heritage
culture (Pease-Alvarez 2002; Pease-Alvarez & Vasquez 1994; Shin 2010;
Zentella 1997). In other words, switching into the heritage language occurs
as a way to mark for children the unique aspects of the heritage culture,
and in so doing, parents are also underscoring the connections between
language and culture. However, there are variations across communities in
the ways in which the language and cultural practices intersect, and the use
of the majority language in the family does not indicate disengagement

with the heritage culture (e.g., Schecter & Bayley 2002), but rather its use
might signal multicultural belonging. Thus, the practice of code-switching
across languages during parent–child conversations serves as a linguistic
socialization tool for the development of a multicultural or transnational
identity in the next generation (Schieffelin 1994; Zentella 1997).
The function of code-switching as a tool to index and negotiate multiple
cultural identities is particularly evident during intergenerational family
conflicts that highlight diverse cultural perspectives. During these discus-
sions between immigrant parents and their older children, code-switching
is used as a linguistic strategy to communicate stance, as well as to negoti-
ate interpersonal relations and cultural perspectives (e.g., Myers-Scotton
1993; Wang 2019). Parents use code-switching both as a means to assert
authority and to establish affiliation with their children. Children, by
comparison, often code-switch to challenge parental perspectives and ques-
tion norms (Flores-Ferrán & Suh 2015; Hua 2008). Thus, by code-switching,
both parents and children are operating in a transcultural space.
In addition, code-switching is also used frequently during both highly
charged negative and positive affective interactions between parents and
children. Research documents extensive individual variation in the ways in
which code-switching is used during these parent–child contexts. Some
multilingual parents report feeling more comfortable issuing commands
and warnings, as well as conveying affection, in their native language
(Hoffman 1971; Luykx 2003), whereas others prefer to use the majority
language to convey authority, or relay messages in both languages to add
emphasis (Woolard 2004; Zentella 1997). Empirical work shows that these
shifts are partly motivated by the way emotions are encoded and repre-
sented in a particular language as compared to other more general concepts
(Altarriba & Canary 2004). Multilingual speakers, thus, seem to process and
experience emotions differently across their languages (Caldwell-Harris &
Ayçiçeği-Dinn 2009; Harris et al. 2006). Moreover, languages offer its
speakers diverse repertoires of emotional expressions (Pavlenko 2007,
2008; Wierzbicke 2008). For instance, in English, parents usually express
affection to their children through the verb to love (and perhaps to a lesser
extent to adore). In Spanish, however, parents could express affection to
their children through the three verbs of querer, adorar and amar. As
another example, when talking about a person who is socially adept and
likable, Spanish speakers talk about someone who is simpático/simpática,
which is often translated as friendly or nice; however, none of these trans-
lations has the same depth of meaning as the word does in Spanish. As a
result of these linguistic differences, speakers develop different emotional
associations with each language across their lifetime (Pavlenko 2006, 2007).
Hence, multilingual parents have the opportunity to switch into the lan-
guage they feel more or less emotionally connected to depending on the
situation or context. Some parents, for instance, might switch into their
heritage language (i.e., the more emotionally connected language) during

highly charged emotional experiences, and yet other parents will prefer to
use the majority or the nonheritage language to express emotionality as a
way to create an emotional distance between the event and their reactions,
giving them the needed space to process their emotions in a more detached
manner (Pavlenko 2004).
Chen et al. (2012) labels this type of parental code-switching parental
emotional-related language shifts, which, he argues, serve to signal for children
the different cultural ways of doing emotion, in much the same way that
shifts are used to negotiate cultural identities during charged conversation.
Past research examining everyday parent–child discussions about emotions
have shown cultural patterns in the frequency and manner in which
parents discuss emotions with their children (e.g., Cervantes 2002;
Melzi & Fernández 2004; Pérez Rivera & Dunsmore 2011). These cultural
patterns reflect the community’s acceptable norms for the open expression
of emotions, who should express emotions, in which contexts, and how. For
example, in comparison to US European American parents, East Asian
parents discourage the open expression of emotions (Eisenberg et al.
2001; Tsai et al. 2007), and thus, unsurprisingly, parents from various
East Asian communities often talk less about emotions with their children
and do so in a more perfunctory manner (e.g., Tao et al. 2012; Wang 2001)
compared to US European American parents. Interestingly, when discuss-
ing emotions with their children, bilingual East Asian parents prefer to
switch into the nonheritage language, as they report feeling more comfort-
able discussing emotions in that language over their heritage language.
Thus, when code-switching, parents are operating not only in a multilin-
gual space but also in multicultural space and in this way are socializing
children’s multiple cultural identities.
In summary, code-switching is a language-based practice, unique to and
prevalent in multilingual and multicultural communities. Code-switching
serves as a social, emotional and cultural socialization tool. Given the
singular and multifaceted nature of code-switching in the family context,
the dearth of research on its use and functionality in the parenting of young
children is surprising. We argue that in order to shift perspectives on
children’s multilingualism, especially in societies such as the United
States that implicitly and explicitly uphold dominant monolingual ideolo-
gies, more research is needed that examines the unique parenting strategies
used to support not only multilingual children’s language and cognitive
development, but also their sociocultural and emotional learning.
22.4 Conclusion
Throughout this chapter we have described who is bilingual or multilingual

in the United States, discussed the issues surrounding parenting bilingual
or multilingual children, and highlighted a unique parenting tool accessible

to bilingual and multilingual parents. We focused our discussion on Latine

communities, as they are the fastest-growing ethnocultural and linguistic
group in the United States. A singular challenge faced by US Latine parents
who want to raise children in two or more languages is the constant battle
against societal voices that diminish the importance of languages other
than English. This English-only ideology is reified by the educational
system, which has led to the creation of labels that, while having the
benign objective of identifying and supporting the needs of non-native
English speakers, have led to an unintended neglect to foster heritage
languages and the failure to account for the complexity of bi- or multilin-
gual language learning. We discussed the historically rooted societal
values and language ideologies, as well as the relatively recent, and con-
tinuously changing, education policies at the federal level, noting how in
both contexts English is enshrined as the language of opportunity and
privilege. Since many children learn their heritage language(s) at home
rather than at school, parents recognize that the onus is on them to
be the main supporters and facilitators of their children’s multilingual
acquisition.
We briefly listed approaches to raising bi or multilingual children identi-
fied in past scholarship while discussing the appropriateness of these
models for understanding the complexities of multilingual upbringing,
language planning and instruction. We have capitalized on the need to
account for the various levels comprising the ecology of bi/multilingual
parenting, such as the degree to which parents have the linguistic, socio-
economic and cultural resources to teach their children their heritage
language, as well as the ideologies, overt and implicit, and the sociopolitical
contexts from which parental beliefs and choices emerge. Within this
critical juncture, we have highlighted family language policy as a recent
framework aiming to capture both the features of caregiver–child inter-
actions as well as the larger societal factors affecting family language
planning and, ultimately, multilingual acquisition. Finally, we have pointed
out that while multilingual parents make explicit choices regarding lan-
guage use in the home, school, and community, they often engage in code-
switching, using more than one language in a conversation. Parents and
children use this strategy in a variety of contexts and with different motiv-
ations, yet we emphasize the emotional situations that play the role of
moderator for language preference while code-switching.
While raising bi-/multilingual children in a country with an overwhelm-
ingly monolingual ideology like the United States is indeed a challenge, it is
not impossible. Bilingual or multilingual parents have various motivations
for raising their children bilingually or multilingually, and they are largely
aware of the benefits that multilingualism can provide should they be
successful in their endeavor. While many parents are aware, and often
apprehensive, about the challenges of this choice, they choose to raise their
children with more than one language, taking initiative in deploying

various strategies to make sure bilingualism or multilingualism is not only

achieved, but also maintained, as their children grow older.
Parents’ resilience and ongoing efforts to raise their children with lan-
guages other than English has persisted across generations of immigrant
families in the United States. This reality, and the growth of family
language policies supporting multilingualism in the home, is a call for
research and education systems to allocate more resources and develop
more appropriate, holistic models, particularly for multilingual and multi-
cultural children in the United States who are marginalized for using two
or more languages. While the fragmented state of multilingual parenting is
evident, it is not fixed, but rather fertile in its urgency for systemic change:
Against all odds, within a hostile sociopolitical climate, families continue to
form and grow multilingually, both in and outside of the home, as they
plan for their children’s and family’s futures.
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23
The Development
of the Heritage
Language in Childhood
Bi-/Multilingualism
Silvina Montrul
The vast majority of children grow up in bilingual or multilingual house-

holds, but the extent to which children develop advanced linguistic abilities
and even literacy in all their languages depends on many factors. These
include age of acquisition of the two languages (simultaneous vs. sequential
bilinguals or multilinguals) and the amount of exposure to and use of the
languages daily and in specific or diverse contexts and, related to the latter,
the status of the languages in the society (majority vs. minority language),
including access to schooling. For some simultaneous and sequential bilin-
gual children, one or more of their languages are a minority language, not
widely spoken outside the home and with little cultural, educational, social
and political status. In some other circumstances, the language or lan-
guages can be minoritized; that is, available beyond the home but con-
sidered lower in status in the society. In this chapter, I discuss research
on the development of the minority/heritage language(s) in simultaneous
and sequential bilingual and multilingual children, with specific focus on
the school-age period. I focus on how bilingual balance and language shift
in these children in many cases leads to language attrition and incomplete
acquisition of morphosyntactic aspects of the minority language.
23.1 Introduction
While many children are born into bilingual and multilingual households
and have the potential to become fully multilingual and multiliterate,
many factors affect the development of the heritage language or languages
of bilingual and multilingual children. The term heritage language (also
ethnic, minority, community, third, nonofficial language) is used to refer to a
sociopolitically minority and/or minoritized language acquired in a

538 S I LV I N A M O N T R U L
bilingual or multilingual context as a first or one of the first languages

in situations of reduced exposure and use with respect to the majority
language. The term heritage language was initially coined in Canada
(Cummins & Danesi 1990) to refer to languages other than the aboriginal
languages of native and Inuit people and the two official languages of
Canada (French and English). The term rapidly expanded in the United
States to refer to children of immigrant and immigrant children. Despite
the different labels used in different countries, the terms heritage language
and heritage speakers have been gaining ground in Europe and in other
countries as well. This chapter starts with a description of different profiles
of pre-school bilingual and multilingual children, and I discuss how all
children are born with the capacity to handle more than one language
since birth. What happens to the languages soon after birth depends on
the nature of the linguistic environment. The main purpose of this chapter
is to stress how crucial the school-age period is to support the growth of the
heritage language, and how insufficient input during this period leads to
incomplete acquisition and attrition of several structural properties of the
heritage language. I suggest that further research with bilingual and multi-
lingual children ages 6 to 18 is critically needed to unravel the linguistic,
educational, social, affective and political factors that contribute to multi-
lingualism at the individual level.
23.2 Diverse Profiles of Childhood

Bilingualism/Multilingualism
Many children around the world are born into a bilingual or multilingual
home or become bilingual/multilingual due to life circumstances, most
often related to transnational migration and family relocation. Thus, the
context of multilingualism is the family, the broader society or both.
However, migration is not the only reason for multilingualism. There are
also many multilingual societies around the world, where several languages
are spoken, and children may be exposed to two or more of the society
languages. For example, Spanish-Basque bilingual children in the Basque
Country become trilingual at school when they start learning English
(Cenoz 2013). Immigrants to bilingual societies may also become multilin-
gual: Japanese and Chinese immigrants in Catalonia are exposed to both
Spanish and Catalan in the host society (Fukuda 2017); immigrant families
to Quebec, Canada, speak their heritage language at home (Portuguese,
Hindi, Chinese, Polish) and their children learn two societal languages
(English and French) in the community and at school. Both situations can
also be combined: immigrants can speak more than one language when
they come to a new country: many Ethiopian children in Israel speak
Amharic and Tigris at home (Stavans et al. 2009), Guatemalan immigrants
to the United States speak a Mayan language (e.g., Q’anjoba’l) and Spanish

The Development of the Heritage Language 539
on arrival and learn English in the society as they join the public school
system. Other children are born into families where one parent speaks a
language (e.g., Chinese), the other another language (e.g., Japanese), but the
family lives in France and the parents communicate in French with their
children. Regardless of how they become multilingual, the reality is that
the extent to which bilingual and multilingual children develop their
languages depends on factors such as age of acquisition of the languages
(simultaneously or quasi simultaneously before age 3, or sequentially, after
age 3 and before or after puberty), the structural relation between the
languages, the amount and frequency of use of the languages at home in
the family and, perhaps most importantly for later language development,
the sociopolitical status of the languages.
The status and availability of the heritage languages outside the home
greatly impact their acquisition, maintenance or loss in a bilingual or
multilingual environment. Research in the last two decades has supported
the view that bilingual and multilingual children are born with the cogni-
tive and linguistic capacity to acquire and differentiate the languages of
their environment, and the development of each language depends on the
degree of exposure to the languages and the amount of daily language use.
There are several studies of children between the ages of 1;00 and 4;00 years
showing the parallel and age-appropriate lexical, phonological and syntac-
tic development of two or more languages (Maneva & Genesee 2002;
Montanari 2006; Paradis 2001; Pearson 2007; Pearson et al. 1995; Quay
2008; Silva-Corvalán 2014) in response to input factors. For example,
Montanari (2009) reported on the longitudinal development from ages 1;1
to 2;1 of a Tagalog-Spanish-English child born to a Tagalog-speaking mother
and a Spanish-speaking father and living in the United States. We can say
that the child is already a heritage speaker of two languages. According to
Montrul (2016), heritage speakers are child and adult members of a linguis-
tic minority who grow up exposed to their home language – in this particu-
lar case Spanish and Tagalog – and the majority official language spoken
and used in the broader speech community: English. The language of
communication between the parents was English, the majority language
of the society where this child was born. Until age 2;2, the child was cared
at home by Tagalog-speaking grandparents and was exposed to Tagalog
48 percent of the time, to Spanish 29 percent of the time, and to English
23 percent of the time. During the period studied, and based on mean
length of utterance (MLU) measures, the dominant language of the child
was Tagalog, a heritage language in the United States, just like Spanish. The
syntactic analysis of this child’s utterances showed that the child displayed
different structural preferences depending on the language in which she
was interacting and following the input patterns of their caregivers in each
language. There was no syntactic transfer of the word-order patterns of the
languages (even when these languages differed significantly), supporting
the claim that early word-order differentiation is possible (cf. Deuchar &

Quay 2000). Montanari (2009, 2013) concluded that trilingual – as opposed

to bilingual – exposure does not delay the process of language differenti-
ation; on the contrary, it might even facilitate it (see also Paradis 2007).
It is clear from this case study that the multilingual child is able to
handle three languages (the majority language and two heritage languages)
at age-appropriate levels at an early age, and when the heritage languages
are supported in the environment through sufficient input and use, they do
develop well. It is not unusual to see that the heritage language spoken
primarily at home is the stronger/dominant language of the bilingual or
trilingual child when family members are the only source of input and
interactions with the young child. As Gathercole and Thomas (2009) have
shown for Welsh, only consistent exposure to these languages throughout
development and a social context that strongly supports trilingualism will
allow the child to maintain her multilingual abilities and become a success-
ful member of three language communities. But as children grow up and
start school a few years later, when these ideal environmental conditions
are not met, the fate of the heritage language is very different, as we
see next.
23.3 The Development of the Minority/Heritage Language
As we have just seen, many heritage speakers born in a bilingual or multi-

lingual territory start off as balanced simultaneous bilinguals, with the two
or three languages developing and growing simultaneously. This is very
common until about age 3. However, what happens next is critical, because
fast-forwarding several years we know that most of these children eventu-
ally end as unbalanced bilinguals with weaker knowledge of the heritage(s)
language by adulthood. The study of bilingual first language acquisition
tends to focus on the pre-literate child, and in the last few years new work
has investigated what happens with the two languages of these bilingual
children beyond age 4. This work shows that we cannot assume that the
balanced bilingualism or multilingualism we may see in 3-year-olds will
continue unchanged until adulthood. An example of a study that followed
simultaneous Spanish-English bilingual children in the United States until
age 6 is Silva-Corvalán’s (2014) case study of two of her grandchildren, Nico
and Bren. Silva-Corvalán’s morphosyntactic analysis of the children’s
speech measured in MLU showed that the two children had autonomous
and simultaneous development of Spanish and English until age 3;00,
which matched the typical development of monolingual English-speaking
children and monolingual Spanish-speaking children of the same age. After
age 3;00, however, the bilingual balance of the two siblings changed, and
the change was related to the amount of input. Before age 3;00, a 25–30
percent amount of input in the heritage language (Spanish) was sufficient
to support the healthy development of Spanish up to that age; however, a

25–30 percent amount of input beyond age 3;00 and up to age 6;11 (when
observations stopped) was no longer sufficient to foster more complex
language development. Silva-Corvalán showed that the verbal system of
Spanish and subject expression did not develop at age-appropriate levels.
However, with 65–70 percent of input in English, the majority language,
development was at the level of English monolingual norms for 6-year-old
children for the morphosyntactic structures examined. Therefore, the early
success and the full potential for bilingualism that simultaneous bilingual
and multilingual children start with cannot often be maintained in
later childhood.
Simultaneous bi-/multilingualism is not the only pattern we find in heri-
tage language children. Many heritage speakers are second language (L2)
learners of the majority language. In the case of immigration, some move
with their family to the host country between ages 4 and 9 (early child L2
learners) or after age 10 (late child L2 learners). There are also children who
were born in the country/territory but were exposed to only the heritage
language until the time they go to school. These children also acquire the
heritage language as their first language, and the majority language is the
second language. Typically, in these cases, intense exposure to the L2 begins
at school, where the majority and official language of their territory is the
predominant medium of instruction. While some heritage speakers have
access to instruction in the heritage language, especially in some European
countries (Norway, Sweden), including different types of immersion or bilin-
gual education programs depending on where they live (Ireland, the Basque
Country, Catalonia, Canada, United States, etc.) (Juan-Garau 2014), these
favorable circumstances do not generalize to many heritage speakers. Lack
of academic support of the heritage language during the school-age period
also leads to the partial development of the heritage language.
The majority of research on older bilingual children has focused on the
rate and extent of development of the second language in school-age
immigrant children (Jia & Aaronson 2003; Paradis 2011). Research has also
demonstrated that as they learn the second language and become proficient
in it, child L2 learners immersed in a situation where the L2 is the majority
language tend to lose linguistic ability in their own L1 (the heritage lan-
guage), especially when they do not receive academic instruction in their L1
during the school-age period (Jia & Paradis 2015; Merino 1983). When these
children start school in the majority, official language (their L2), input and
use of the L1 decreases as input and use of the L2 increases, progressively
leading to language shift. Eventually, the L2 takes over in total frequency of
use, as well as in the type of contexts of use. The patterns of language
proficiency and dominance are such that the L2 continues developing
whereas linguistic ability in the L1 diminishes or stabilizes before reaching
its potentially full linguistic development (Jia & Paradis 2015).
Many children from immigrant families in the United States usually
experience subtractive bilingualism of this sort (Oller & Jarmulowicz

2009). The majority language takes over and impinges on the development
of the heritage language (or languages in the case of multilingual heritage
speakers). As a result, many aspects of the heritage language do not fully
develop (partial or incomplete acquisition) and others are acquired but soon
regress over time (attrition), as we see next.
23.4 Incomplete Acquisition and Attrition

of the Heritage Language
Normally developing monolingual children eventually develop native mas-

tery of their first language. As shown with the example of the trilingual
child studied by Montanari (2009, 2013), when the appropriate environ-
mental conditions are available, multilingual children can also develop
three languages. Later in life there may be areas of daily life where one
language may be more dominant or preferred to the other (Grosjean 2008).
When a language of the bilingual does not develop to the same extent as the
other, it is not due to cognitive inabilities or other deficiencies germane to
the bilingual individual. Rather, it is due to environmental circumstances.
Amount of exposure to and use of the minority language fluctuates during
the life cycle of heritage speakers and many heritage speakers do not
receive sufficient input and use of the language during crucial stages in
childhood, such as for example, during the school-age period, a time when
significant cognitive and neurobiological development, critical language
learning, and linguistic restructuring takes place (Montrul 2016).
Heritage speakers of different languages acquire many grammatical
properties of their heritage language(s), morphosyntactic properties like
agreement, case, aspect, knowledge of passives, some conditionals, etc.,
but these do not seem to reach age-appropriate mastery, especially in
speakers with lower proficiency in the language (Polinsky 2018). With
insufficient exposure to the heritage language beyond the home, they did
not receive the minimum threshold of input required to acquire and master
different aspects of the grammar that are acquired after the age of primary
linguistic development (Coşkun-Kunduz, A, & Montrul, S. 2021). Because
different morphosyntactic structures have different developmental sched-
ules in monolingual development, if a given grammatical property is
acquired by age 6 or 7, and the bilingual or multilingual receives limited
exposure to the heritage language before that age, it is likely that that
property will not be developed in the heritage speakers by age 6 or 7. It
may reach criterial levels of mastery either later or never at all. For
example, Albirini (2015) shows that plural morphology in Arabic is
acquired by age 9 in monolingual children, and until that age children
make overregularization errors with the feminine suffix -aat. It is not
surprising, then, that young adult heritage speakers of Palestinian and
Egyptian Arabic have accuracy rates with plural morphology below

80 percent and continue to make overgeneralization errors with the femi-

nine suffix. Others and I have referred to this nonconvergent development
as incomplete acquisition (Montrul 2002, 2008; Montrul & Silva-Corvalán 2019;
O’Grady et al. 2011; Polinsky 2006; Silva-Corvalán 2018) to describe the
process and ultimate attainment of many adult heritage language speakers
with specific grammatical properties of their language. (On disagreements
about the use of this term when describing the linguistic process and
outcome of heritage language development see Domínguez et al. 2019;
Kupisch & Rothman 2018; Otheguy 2016; Pascual y Cabo & Rothman 2012).
The other pattern of heritage language weakening, which can only be
documented longitudinally, is language attrition. Language attrition is the
opposite of language acquisition; namely, regression, and implies less
knowledge of something at a later time in development than earlier. In a
recent review of studies on morphological attrition, Montrul and Yoon
(2019) concluded that lack of input or reduced input and language use also
contribute to language attrition, especially in childhood, whereas adults in
general manifest little attrition compared to children. An example of child-
hood attrition is reported by Kaufman and Aronoff (1991) in their study of
the systematic morphological loss of Hebrew (which has both nonconcate-
native/templatic and concatenative/suffixal morphology) in a young
Hebrew-English bilingual child (Michal). Their study focused on the “disin-
tegration” of Michal’s verbal system, a child acquiring Hebrew as her native
language in Israel who immigrated with her parents in the United States at
the age of 2;6. Therefore, on arrival in the United States, Hebrew became
the heritage language. According to what Kaufman and Aronoff reported,
Michal’s command of Hebrew was age-appropriate at the time of immigra-
tion. At age 2;7, one month after her arrival, Michal started attending an
English-speaking nursery school 3 hours a day and decline of her Hebrew
proficiency soon ensued. First, Michal began to forget words in Hebrew
after 4 months of exposure to and use of English. The onset of attrition
began manifesting itself in the lexicon, when Michal started to insert
English nouns in Hebrew sentences. At first, the English verbs borrowed
were not integrated with Hebrew verbal morphology. After almost a year in
the new environment she no longer produced the different morphological
templates of Hebrew, and after a year in the bilingual environment. Michal
created a hybrid verbal pattern by adopting the most colloquial and pro-
ductive template in Hebrew child language (iCaCe(C)), which she overex-
tended to other idiosyncratic templates. The rich L1 derivational and
inflectional system was reduced to one form. Therefore, there was substan-
tial lexical and morphological loss in this child in less than 2 years.
Two other studies showing attrition in young bilingual children (one
simultaneous, one sequential) are Anderson’s (1999, 2001) studies of two
Puerto Rican siblings who arrived in the United States with their parents at
ages 2;00 and 4;00, respectively, and were studied longitudinally for 2 years
starting 2 years after arrival (4;00 to 6;00 years the younger sibling and 6:00

to 8;00 years the older sibling). Anderson (1999, 2001) documented the
incomplete acquisition in the case of the younger child and attrition in
the case of the older sibling of gender morphology on noun phrases
(Anderson 1999) and the verb conjugation of past and subjunctive forms
(Anderson 2001). Silva-Corvalán (2014), discussed earlier, also documented
the incomplete acquisition of the tense-aspect and mood (TAM) system of
her two grandchildren in Spanish, who at age 6;00 showed very little
development from age 3;00, while the children had developed full com-
mand of the simple and complex tenses in English. As these examples show,
significant attrition and incomplete acquisition can occur in very young
children when the heritage language or languages are used significantly
less than the majority language. These tendencies, however, do not imply
that achieving balanced bilingualism after age 4 is not possible in heritage
speakers; it is just not typical in many countries like the United States. If
the optimal family, environmental and educational conditions obtain, rela-
tively balanced bilingualism in adulthood is possible (Montrul et al. 2019).
In the next section we examine the role of formal schooling in maintenance
and loss of the heritage language(s) in school-age bilingual and multilingual
children.
23.5 The Role of Schooling in Heritage Language

Acquisition and Maintenance
Even when families make efforts to help their children develop and main-
tain their home language(s), the situation can change dramatically with the
onset of schooling. Depending on the sociolinguistic circumstances, and the
status of the minority language(s) in the particular society, academic sup-
port of the heritage language(s) at school is often not an option, except
perhaps in countries where the minority language has official status in its
territory, as in the Basque Country, parts of Ireland, and Wales, to give
some examples. In the United States, there are bilingual education and
dual-immersion programs for some languages, but again, this does not
generalize to all heritage languages. In Sweden, heritage speakers of any
language have the right to mother tongue instruction if there are a small
number of heritage speakers of a particular language at school. In general,
however, many heritage speakers all over the world have limited to no
access to their heritage language at school, a period when the development
of the heritage language stalls or declines even more without such support.
Let’s take Inuktitut as an example. Inuktitut is an aboriginal language
(Eskimo-Aleut family) spoken in Alaska, Siberia, Labrador, Greenland and
Eastern Canada. In Canada, Inuktitut is presently taught in the schools
until Grade 2. In Grades 3 and 4, English and French – the two official
majority languages – are introduced in the school system. Inuktitut instruc-
tion may continue or may not in some content areas, depending on the

availability of qualified teachers. Allen (2007) reviewed several studies of

very young simultaneous Inuktitut-English speaking children and con-
cluded that these very young bilingual children (1;8–2;11 years) possess
age-appropriate native-like knowledge of the grammatical properties of
both English and Inuktitut, two languages that are typologically very dif-
ferent. However, these early achievements are not sustained: the situation
changes dramatically for Inuktitut once these children start exposure to
English or French at school. Wright et al. Macarthur (2000) followed a
group of 62 Inuit children for four years, since kindergarten. Some children
received instruction in Inuktitut, some in English, and some in French. The
results of their study, as well as those of Allen et al. (2006), suggest that
even when the Inuit continue to be bilingual, there is native language
decline, slow development, and even stagnation of Inuktitut as a result of
school or community exposure to an L2 that is a majority language as
children progress in school.
In addition to instruction in the heritage language not being available,
shift to greater use of the societal language is associated with children’s
desire to be accepted at school and communicate with majority language-
speaking peers (Hakuta & D’Andrea 1992; Wong-Fillmore 1991). This is also
the time when heritage language-speaking children refuse to use the heri-
tage language, even when the parents make efforts to use it or provide
opportunities for learning in private or community settings, because they
need to blend in and be accepted by their peers. One of the earliest research
projects documenting interrupted acquisition and loss of morphosyntax in
the minority language in school-age bilingual children is Merino (1983).
Merino (1983) reports the results of two studies on language loss in Spanish-
speaking children of Mexican origin, attending English-only school, with no
support for Spanish. The first study followed 41 bilingual children ranging
from kindergarten to fourth grade (5–10 years old), and measured degree of
language loss in comprehension and production in a variety of
morphosyntactic features of Spanish (gender and number, tense, word
order, relative clauses, conditional and subjunctive) and their equivalents
in English. Results showed steady chronological development between kin-
dergarten and the upper grades in English (both in comprehension and
production), but a significant decline in Spanish comprehension in third
and fourth grade. With respect to the structures most affected in produc-
tion, the children had significant difficulty with the subjunctive and the
conditional verb forms, the most complex forms. With the subjunctive in
particular, the fourth graders performed at the level of the kindergarteners,
and with the past tense, the fourth graders performed below the level of
first graders.
A follow-up study was conducted by Merino (1983) 2 years later with
32 children from the original sample. The children were again adminis-
tered the Spanish and English production and comprehension tests. The
results showed that performance in English continued to improve for all

the Spanish-speaking children, while performance in Spanish deteriorated

dramatically: 50 percent of the children showed loss of some sort, while
another 25 percent did not show any progress. A look at the personal
history of the children revealed that use of language at home in early
childhood was a strong predictor of language maintenance and loss.
Children who used Spanish only with parents, relatives and friends had
stronger Spanish language skills. Children who tended to use both lan-
guages with their parents, relatives and friends demonstrated the greatest
loss. Thus, use of English in the home and lack of academic support at
school contribute to language shift and eventual language loss.
A relevant observation is that the children studied by Merino (1983) and
the Inuit children from Canada come from low socioeconomic status (SES)
families. In addition to no school support for the heritage language and
children’s desire to fit in, another key variable that plays a role in heritage
language maintenance is parental SES. SES is a measure that combines
individual level education, occupation and family income level.
Examination of SES as a variable in the social sciences and education reveals
inequity in access to resources as well as in issues related to privilege, power
and control. In the case of heritage languages, some low-SES families see
learning of the majority language as an absolute need for their children to
advance in the new society, even if this occurs at the expense of the
heritage language.
The Ethiopian families studied by Stavans et al. (2009), who immigrated
to Israel in the early 1990s, are an example of an immigrant community
with low socioeconomic status, limited schooling and non-Western oral or
literate cultural traditions. Children from such background are Amharic/
Tigris bilinguals who acquire Hebrew as the dominant language of the host
community. The Ethiopian family has oral literacy in the home languages,
while school requires and promotes literacy in Hebrew. Stavans et al. (2009)
report that these Ethiopian parents are not different from other immigrant
groups in their attitudes towards L1 and L2 or their perceptions of their
child’s bilingualism as an asset or an obstacle to literacy development.
Ethiopian parents see the importance of the heritage languages in the
home, but once their children enter the school system in Hebrew the
parents favor the development of Hebrew over the maintenance of Tigris
and Amharic. Like many low-SES immigrants, Ethiopian parents fear that
their heritage languages will become an obstacle to learning Hebrew (the
majority language), which they see as the ticket to their children’s success
and societal advancement. As a result of these firmly held attitudes and
ideologies, Ethiopian parents end up speaking to their children in Hebrew,
which they do not fully command, critically obstructing the development
of Amharic/Tigris and not helping the development of Hebrew, while at the
same time impairing communication within the family. Ethiopian chil-
dren, as it turns out, are deprived of the benefits of the bilingual and
bicultural context in which they live. In this case, as with many low-SES

immigrants in many other countries, parental belief systems and attitudes

contribute to the loss of the heritage languages during the school period.
SES has been shown to be an important predictor of literacy and aca-
demic performance of elementary school children, independent of bilin-
gualism. Low SES may contribute to lower grammatical development of the
heritage language (or both languages) during the school-age period, but it is
not the main cause, as children of mid to high SES also undergo weakening
of the heritage language when they receive insufficient or no academic
support of the heritage languages at school. There is also evidence that
children receiving instruction in the heritage language at school and sup-
port of the heritage language at home fare much better. The children
studied by Merino (1983) were from California. In the Miami area, however,
Spanish enjoys a different prestige because many of the first Cuban immi-
grants were from middle and high SES households, and Spanish is used and
maintained by Spanish speakers from all SES levels. In a large-scale study of
Spanish-English bilingual children from the Miami-Dade area, Mueller
Gathercole (2002a, 2002b, 2002c) investigated the effects of the school
environment, language spoken at home, and SES in bilingual children’s
performance in morphosyntactic aspects of Spanish and English. The
research design included 294 second and fifth grade children. There were
simultaneous bilinguals, who typically use Spanish and English at home,
and sequential bilinguals, who tend to speak only Spanish at home. The
control group for the Spanish parts of the study consisted of 32 monolingual
Peruvian children (matched for age and SES). The research design also
permitted the investigation of the three current models for bilingual
instruction in the United States: English-only, transitional bilingual, and
dual-immersion (two-way bilingual) programs.
Three morphosyntactic properties of Spanish and English were tested in
three experiments: the mass/count distinction in English nouns, gender
agreement in Spanish nouns, and the that-trace phenomenon in Spanish
and English. In the three experiments, the children were asked to give
grammaticality judgments of correct and incorrect oral sentences spoken
by a puppet. If sentences uttered by the puppet sounded wrong, children
were asked to tell the puppet how to say it correctly. Mueller Gathercole
found that the children who spoke Spanish only at home did better than the
children who spoke Spanish and English or only English at home. There
was no effect for SES in Spanish, but SES was significant in English (lower
SES bilingual children did poorer in English than higher SES bilingual
children). The results also showed that children attending two-way bilin-
gual schools performed better than the children schooled in English
immersion, especially in the fifth grade. In conclusion, while many
Spanish-English bilingual children lag behind their Spanish monolingual
peers in the acquisition of the morphosyntactic properties of Spanish
tested, bilingual children who receive the greatest amount of input in
Spanish – at school and at home – have an advantage over bilinguals

exposed to English and less Spanish. A reanalysis of the Miami study carried
out by Oller et al. (2007) found that these bilingual children’s language and
literacy is stronger in some domains than in others. Profile effects indicated
comparable performance of the monolingual and bilingual children in basic
reading, but lower vocabulary scores for the bilingual children in the two
languages, which are easily explained by the distributed characteristics of
bilingual lexical knowledge. Typically, bilingual children learn the words
for the two languages in different contexts (home vs. school).
Montrul and Potowski (2007) further confirmed that a dual-immersion
school environment is conducive for language maintenance in Spanish-
speaking children. Their study also tested command of gender agreement
in common, canonical-ending nouns in two oral production tasks with first,
third and fifth graders. Although simultaneous bilingual children produced
more gender errors with feminine words (60 percent) in the elicited pro-
duction task than sequential bilingual children (36 percent) and more than
monolingual children (0 percent), the error rate did not increase with age,
as the study by Merino (1983) showed. Overall, the children examined by
Montrul and Potowski did not necessarily improve but maintained the
same level of Spanish proficiency in the language, at least in the area of
gender agreement between nouns and adjectives. Overall, although
Spanish-speaking children in the United States maintain a certain com-
mand of Spanish as they learn English throughout elementary school,
quality and quantity of input in each of the languages are crucial for
bilingual outcomes, in addition to language status, access to literacy, family
language use and community support (Pearson 2007).
In very recent studies, Jia and Paradis (2015, 2020) added more novel
evidence that schooling promotes heritage language development. Jia and
Paradis (2015) investigated the referring expressions used for first mentions
of participants and entities in the oral narratives of 38 Mandarin heritage
language and monolingual school-age children aged 6–10. The heritage
speakers were living in Canada: they were all simultaneous bilinguals, half
of whom were born in Canada and the other half immigrated soon after
birth. Twenty-one of the children were attending an English-Mandarin
bilingual school in Edmonton, Alberta, whereas the other 17 were recruited
from English-only schools in the same city. The 15 monolingual Mandarin
children who acted as comparison group were tested in Mainland China.
Referring expressions for first mentions in Mandarin comprise lexical,
morphological and syntactic devices. Compared to the monolingual
Mandarin children, Jia and Paradis (2015) found that the heritage language
children overgeneralized classifiers and lacked vocabulary knowledge, a
finding that Jia and Paradis attributed to incomplete acquisition of the
classifier system and smaller vocabulary in Mandarin. At the same time,
the heritage language children did not differ from the Mandarin monolin-
guals in their use of the possessive construction, the numerical determiner
yi1 in the indefinite NP construction, and in the use of different postverbal

and relative clauses. This study also showed that the children who were
receiving schooling in Mandarin produced richer first mention expressions
than those children who were not receiving Mandarin input at school.
Older age of arrival, higher maternal education levels, and a rich and
diverse Mandarin environment at home predicted stronger narrative out-
comes, also pointing to an important role for input in heritage language
acquisition.
So far, we have seen that many studies of heritage bilingual and multi-
lingual children show incomplete acquisition or attrition of aspects of the
heritage language. It is unclear whether the nontarget structures used by
heritage bilingual children occur due to incomplete development of the L1,
or because they had acquired knowledge of some aspect of the L1 at some
point but then lost that knowledge later on due to insufficient input and
use of the heritage language. Because most of the studies on child heritage
speakers to date are either cross-sectional or follow children for a limited
time in childhood, it is unclear whether the children retain incomplete
knowledge of some aspects of the L1 over time, or they eventually acquire
the knowledge later. For Jia and Paradis (2020), protracted acquisition
means that heritage bilingual children could develop native-like L1 ability
of the heritage language eventually, but that the whole acquisition process
requires a longer time frame (see also Flores & Barbosa 2014). To tease apart
the effects of incomplete acquisition, L1 attrition, and protracted L1 acqui-
sition, Jia and Paradis (2020) conducted a cross-sectional study and a longi-
tudinal study, just like Merino (1983), and focused on the comprehension
and production of subject and object relative clauses. The same bilingual
heritage speakers and Mandarin monolingual children from the Jia and
Paradis (2015) study participated in this study. In a comprehension task,
children heard relative clauses in Chinese and had to select the picture that
matched the sentence. In an elicited production task, the children were
asked to produce subject and object relative clauses. The results of the
comprehension task revealed target-like performance by the heritage chil-
dren at time 1 and 2, who were not different from the monolingual chil-
dren. In production, the heritage language-speaking children were less
accurate than the monolingual children at the first testing, but when they
took the same tests again a year later their production matched that of the
monolingual Mandarin children for both subject and object relative clauses.
The combined results of the Jia and Paradis studies show that different
aspects of the heritage language have different developmental schedules
and different outcomes. While Mandarin-speaking children have lower
vocabulary scores than monolingual children and show incomplete acqui-
sition of classifiers, they can achieve native-like acquisition of complex
structures, in this case relative clauses, although it takes longer. Domains
requiring a great deal of input to acquire, such as vocabulary and the large
repertoire of classifier morphemes, might be more vulnerable to incom-
plete acquisition than complex syntax. Jia and Paradis also confirmed the

importance of academic support of the heritage language: that those chil-

dren receiving instruction in Mandarin showed more native-like achieve-
ment than those who did not.
23.6 Issues for Further Research
To date, the vast majority of research on the linguistic abilities of heritage

speakers (early bilinguals one of whose languages is a sociopolitical minor-
ity language) has focused on young adults whose heritage language is no
longer developing. These adults began their journey as bilingual children
acquiring the heritage language with the majority language simultaneously
since birth or sequentially, as a second language. In contrast to monolin-
gual native speakers and relatively balanced and fluent bilinguals, the
ultimate grammatical attainment of the heritage language by early adult-
hood is often significantly different from that of both their immigrant
parents and native speakers in the home country. One way to understand
adults is to focus more on childhood. As we have seen, bilingual and
multilingual children who speak one or more heritage languages are born
with the capacity to learn those languages and maintain bi-/multi-lingual-
ism, -culturalism and -literacy when the proper family, social and environ-
mental circumstances during later childhood and adolescence are given.
However, linguistic research on school-age children is still quite scarce
compared to research on early bilingual acquisition (the pre-school period)
and research on adult heritage bilingualism (Montrul 2016; Polinsky 2018).
There are so many factors that play a role in the fate of bilingualism and
multilingualism during late childhood and adolescence that this period
deserves and needs more scrutiny. If longitudinal studies from early child-
hood to adulthood are not always feasible, linking research on the struc-
tural development of bilingual pre-school children with research on young
adult heritage speakers adds a much-needed perspective to understand
their linguistic journey from initial state to the end state of heritage
language development.
There are many variables that shape the language development of bilin-
gual children during the school-age period: language attitudes and values,
the home environment, the society, the school, as well as issues of identity
and affect germane to this critical developmental period in the life of any
human being. Future research would need to look more closely at the later
childhood period, when bilingual language children are at school, and to
examine heritage language development in children who receive linguistic
support in the heritage language and those who do not. Family circum-
stances, social networks and affective factors need to be incorporated into
linguistic analyses. To gain a broader understanding of the complexity and
variability of bilingual development during childhood, research should
endeavor to investigate children around the world, with different heritage

languages and living different bi-/multilingual situations, where the minor-

ity languages have different sociopolitical status in the territory they
occupy with the other language. Since schooling is critical to language
development and socialization, we need to understand better how school
systems and types of bilingual programs contribute to promote or the
language development of bilingual and multilingual children who speak
heritage languages. While most studies of school-age children are con-
cerned with the development of literacy, the relationship between language
development and literacy in one or more languages are critically needed,
especially to understand, inform and address situations where bilingual
children who speak minority languages persistently fall behind majority
language-speaking children in overall academic achievement.
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24
Social Cohesion and
Childhood Multilingualism
in South Africa
Susan Coetzee-Van Rooy
24.1 Contextualization
The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of research conducted about

social cohesion and childhood multilingualism in South Africa. The chapter is
situated in the sociology of language approach that studies the relationship
between society and language (Fishman 1968: 5). The sociology of language
approach is ideal for a study of social cohesion and childhood multilingualism
in South Africa because of the distinctive apartheid history where an insidious
distinction (or divisive relationships) between social groups and languages was
actively used as a form of social engineering to minimize contact between
people of different races. This chapter will review progress with the ‘social
cohesion’ project in the post-1994 South Africa where contact between all
people is increasing within a context of long-standing and everyday multilin-
gualism and a sinister history where languages were used to divide people.
The chapter is also situated within the African context. African multilin-
gualism is unique in one important way when compared to current forms
of multilingualism emerging in, for example, the contexts of European
countries where the notion of ‘one-language-one-nation’ prevails.
Multilingualism is viewed as ‘an everyday phenomenon in Africa’ (Woolf
2000: 3) because of its long-standing nature (Mufwene 2017: 5). Within the
South African context, Ndlangamandla (2010: 61) observes that multilin-
gualism is ‘a defining characteristic of being South African’. A review of
childhood multilingualism in South Africa would therefore contribute an
understanding from a deeply and long-standing multilingual context.
A focus on the relationships between social cohesion and childhood
multilingualism in the South African context is important for two reasons.
I want to thank Professors Stavans and Jessner for their inspiration to write this chapter. I want to thank Bertus van Rooy
who took time to read a pre-final draft of the chapter. His careful and thoughtful feedback improved the clarity of the
chapter markedly.

556 SUSAN COETZEE-VAN ROOY
Firstly, the social cohesion project in South Africa has a complex history
that is unfolding in complicated ways in the post-1994 context. Secondly,
South Africa is widely acknowledged as a deeply multilingual country
where pre-school multilingualism in urban contexts is common. The
South African case therefore provides a powerful opportunity for sociolo-
gists of language to investigate the formation of social groups in the ‘new’
South Africa and to determine how the maintenance, acquisition and shift
of languages relate to social reorganization in this transitional context.
24.2 Social Cohesion in South Africa
One of the most comprehensive and insightful essays about the issue of
language and social cohesion or unity in South Africa was written by Neville
Alexander (1989). This essay forms the basis of the discussion of the issue of
social cohesion and its relationship with multilingualism in this chapter,
because Alexander (1989: 8) also couched his essay within the framework of
the sociology of language which he maintained included a serious ‘attempt
to understand the relationships between language, class, exploitation, dom-
ination, nationalism, education, culture and ideology’.
The history of the ‘social cohesion’ project in South Africa runs through a
period of several colonisations, apartheid and the post-apartheid period. This
section will attempt to summarize the main events during these historical
periods that highlight how the relationship between languages and society
was construed with a view to provide the necessary background information
for the focus on social cohesion and childhood multilingualism presented in
the next section. The main narrative of language and social cohesion that
emerges throughout South Africa’s history is one of using languages as
weapons in maintaining social control, often with the sole aim to divide
people and to minimize contact between people. The influence of languages
on the social cohesion project in South Africa therefore remains complex.
South Africa was colonized by the Netherlands and Great Britain from
the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries (Alexander 1989: 9–12). In the
initial phases of colonization where the Cape was used as a halfway station
to other important trading partners, the Dutch cared little for the indigen-
ous languages from the Khoe and San families (Mesthrie 2002: 14) and made
no attempt to acquire them. Interpreters provided a conduit between the
colonizers and the indigenous peoples. When the policy of the Dutch East
Indian Company shifted from minimal trade with the indigenous people to
more comprehensive colonization of the land, the language situation
changed as an increase in the demand for labour also increased the need
for more direct communication between the colonizers and the indigenous
people. Indigenous people who were employed by the Dutch East Indian
Company now had to learn Dutch; and the schooling project started in
South Africa with the work of missionaries. The development of Afrikaans
is also directly linked to the increased communicative contact during this

Social Cohesion and Multilingualism in South Africa 557
period between the colonizers and the indigenous people. By the end of the
seventeenth century, the early form of what developed into Afrikaans was
spoken by most of the people living in the Cape. In relation to the social
cohesion project, Afrikaans played a role as lingua franca to foster commu-
nication in this community.
The British occupied the Cape from 1806 and a struggle between Cape
Dutch (the earliest form of Afrikaans) and English ensued (Alexander 1989:
12–14). From the early nineteenth century, the British implemented wide-
ranging policies that successfully made English the language of higher-
order domains and public life, pushing Afrikaans into the intimate domains
of its speakers. The aim of the Anglicization project was to support the use
of English as language of wider communication, which would enable com-
munication among the colonizers and a large enough group of elite indigen-
ous people that could provide services to the British.
The role of the missionaries in relation to the development of African
languages and the offering of schooling to a small number of indigenous
people is important for our discussion (Alexander 1989: 14–18). There were
two types of influence of the missionaries on language development in
South Africa. On the one hand, they spread English among a small group
of indigenous people. The elite nature of English education for indigenous
people imbued English with economic and social value. On the other hand,
the missionaries committed the Sotho and Nguni indigenous languages to
writing to advance their missionary work, notably for Bible translation, and
some indigenous people were schooled in these indigenous languages,
although this form of schooling was not viewed as prestigious. The esteem
of English as the language in education (compared to African language
education) was one effect of the colonial period.
One of the consequences of the ‘uncoordinated work among different
missionary groups’ (Makalela 2015a: 201) was the development of divergent
orthographic systems for what was probably perceived by indigenous
people as clines of same language. The division of the Sotho language into
three distinct languages (Sepedi, Setswana and Sesotho) was the result of
this process; and the same types of processes of division occurred for the
Nguni languages (isiNdebele, isiZulu and isiXhosa). This system of ‘linguis-
tic separateness’ of the indigenous languages was used and entrenched
during the apartheid period (since 1948) where the apartheid government
adopted a political system of separate development (Makalela 2015a: 202).
The main aim of the apartheid policy was to divide people along racial lines
and to create separate lives with limited contact between people along strict
racial and hierarchical lines (Alexander 1989: 19–23) in order to maintain
the position of privilege of Europeans and regulate the access of indigenous
people to the labour market. The language policies under apartheid used
the notion of ‘separate languages’ to divide people into different ‘nations’
that had to live separately in separate ‘townships’. Prior to 1948 (or effect-
ively from 1953, when Bantu education was enacted), the provision of
education for African people was very limited and most children were not

in school at all. When Bantu education was implemented, it entailed mas-

sification, and alongside that also the use of indigenous languages as media
of instruction in the early years. The massification of education for African
children from 1953 onwards could not and did not compare to the quality
that some mission schools offered. Bantu education, in comparison to the
education of the small group of African children in the missionary schools,
contributed to the perception of inferior education. In addition, there were
not nearly enough teachers proficient in English to continue with the
English-language education on the scale possible under missionary educa-
tion, where at least some teachers were either native speakers or otherwise
quite proficient second language speakers of English.
The effect of use of African languages as languages of teaching and
learning in the impoverished Bantu education system deeply stigmatized
the use of African languages as conduits of quality education as explained
above. At the same time, the enforcement of Afrikaans as a language of
teaching and learning was resisted vehemently and resulted in the now
well-known Soweto uprisings in 1976 (Alexander 1989: 23–25). Afrikaans
formed part of the government’s insistence on the equality of Afrikaans
and English in all spheres of life under government control. From 1950
onwards, the government’s language policies and plans related to Afrikaans
can be viewed as a ‘restitution phase’ after the Anglicization phase in the
nineteenth century and the pain caused in the Anglo-Boer war (Van Rooy
2014: 27). Ironically, the government’s extension of the use of Afrikaans to
Bantu education as language of teaching and learning after the initial home
language phase can be seen as similar to the Anglicization phase where
English was forced on Afrikaans-speaking South Africans. This event, as
well as the experiences of impoverished Bantu education provided in
African languages (compared to the better quality mission education pro-
vided to small groups of African children), cemented the support for
English as the preferred language of teaching and learning for African
children.
In the post-1994 South Africa, the esteem of the multilingual nature of
the South African people at the individual and societal levels is restored in
the declaration of 11 official languages and multilingual language policies
for all levels of education. The official languages of South Africa as declared
in the constitution are: Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda,
Xitsonga, Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele, isiXhosa and isiZulu. The main
thrust of the social cohesion project is to foster unity in South Africa among
its diverse people via the vast multilingual abilities of the majority of
its people.
The flexibility and openness of the multilingual language in education
policies did not result in the implementation of home language instruction
in the schooling system of the post-1994 South Africa. In the main, African
home language parents insist that English be used as the language of
teaching and learning of their children. In a critique of the flexibility of

the multilingual language in education policies in the post-1994 South

Africa, Lafon (2010: 435) proposes the enforcement of ‘a compulsory pass
in an African language to obtain the NSC [National Senior Certificate]’. He
argues that all learners in South Africa should exit high school with some
knowledge of an African language that would foster ‘knowledge and
mutual understanding between youth across racial and social barriers, thus
paving the way for a more caring and united society’ (Lafon 2010: 418). The
colonial and apartheid histories of South Africa paralyse the departments of
education to support such views because of the ‘revered policy according to
which a given language should not be imposed’ (Lafon 2010: 434). Mbatha
and Plüddeman (2004: 17) express this complex position when they main-
tain that ‘[w]hile making the learning of African languages such as isiXhosa
compulsory would raise their status overnight and swell the numbers of
takers, it would also risk a serious political backlash’. The complex rela-
tionship between the social cohesion project and multilingualism (in this
case in the education domain) is illustrated with this impasse.
24.3 Childhood Multilingualism in South Africa
As stated earlier, multilingualism in Africa and in South Africa at the

societal and individual levels is acknowledged widely. The multilingual
repertoires of urban students in South Africa have been described compre-
hensively (for example, Antia & Dyers 2016; Coetzee-Van Rooy 2012, 2013;
Ditsele & Mann 2014; Ditsele 2017; Dyers & Antia 2019). Yet, there is a
paucity of research that describes the nature of childhood multilingualism
in Africa and in South Africa. Wolff (2000: 5) verbalizes this quite strongly:
Given the observation that millions of multilingual African adults and

teenagers must have acquired their particular linguistic competence
during childhood, it is hard to believe that there are virtually no studies
on early childhood language acquisition in general, and multilingualism
in particular, in the African context.
In preparation for this chapter, I searched for specific work that describes
the nature of childhood multilingualism in South Africa. To my surprise,
the situation since 2000 has not changed markedly. Other than the study by
Wolff (2000), I could not find studies that aimed specifically at describing
the nature of South African childhood multilingualism. However, one could
make inferences about childhood development of multilingualism from
some of the language repertoire work conducted on students in South
Africa. In addition, there is a large enough body of work on the reading
and literacy development of South African children, which typically
includes some information about the conditions under which multilingual-
ism developed in early childhood in rural and urban contexts. In the rest of

this section, I will review findings from the study of Wolff (2000) and
discuss the relevant findings from language repertoire studies with stu-
dents, as well as infer findings from descriptions of childhood African
reading and literacy development studies with a focus on implications for
social cohesion.
Wolff’s (2000) study focuses on the description of early childhood
multilingualism and the communicative competence of two families in
Bombo, Uganda. The study describes the exceptional mastery of communi-
cative competence based on the individual multilingual repertoires of the
participants. Seventeen children between the ages of 2 and 8 from two
families participated in the study (Wolff 2000: 9). The children acquired
Nubi and Ganda simultaneously and they successively learned Swahili and
English (Wolff 2000: 9). The children were observed during play and the
transcribed data were analysed to observe and interpret code-switching
patterns (Wolff 2000: 9). Wolff (2000: 9–17) discusses six functions of
code-switching which demonstrate the advanced communicative compe-
tence of the participants in detail. One of the most prominent findings of
the study related directly to the issue of social cohesion. Wolff (2000: 10)
reports that the older child participants were extremely sensitive to the
language preferences of the younger child participants. In other words,
older child participants in the study made language choices for conversa-
tions that respected the language preferences of the younger children.
Wolff (2000: 10) observes: ‘Such parameter of language choice has never
before been mentioned in the literature of child bilingualism [as observed
in Europe and the USA].’ He then explains that this exceptional language
behaviour appears ‘to be the result of the particular socialisation of chil-
dren in an African village context where one of the goals of education
would be to enable children to consider themselves as part of a group and
[that being part of the group requires one to] respect the needs of other
members of that group’ (Wolff 2000: 10). This socialization pattern that is
reflected in the choice of language preference for conversations is therefore
a strong facilitator of group cohesion that indicates that early childhood
multilinguals in the African context have an advanced awareness of the
social and communicative functions of language choices that assist them to
foster social cohesion through communication. These findings are similar
to those reported in Chapter 25 of this volume for the Indian context that
relate to the period of ‘competent multilingual functioning’.
In addition to Wolff’s (2000) study, there are studies that describe the
multilingual repertoires of students or adults in South Africa. Some of the
work is done via language history interviews and some is done via language
repertoire surveys. A language repertoire is defined as ‘the range of lan-
guages known from which multilingual people draw the resources they
need to communicate in multilingual societies’ (Coetzee-Van Rooy 2012:
89). Language repertoire survey studies refer to census type surveys that
request multilingual participants to self-identify all the languages that they

‘know’ and to answer a set of questions about these languages. ‘Knowing’

a language is defined specifically in survey studies to ensure that partici-
pants can identify the languages that they want to include in their survey
responses. For example, to ‘know a language’ is defined as follows in
some language repertoire work: ‘People who know more than one lan-
guage do not know them all at the same level of proficiency and they use
them for different communication functions’ (Coetzee-Van Rooy 2016a).
A list of different functions performed by the languages that are known
to participants is provided in the survey instrument. For example, some
people can understand a language that they listen to, but they cannot
read or write it and sometimes that cannot reply in that language in a
conversation. Some people can understand, read and write some of the
languages known to them. This is similar to Chapter 25 in this volume,
where in the Indian context, ‘multilingualism is not a sum of (native-
like) competences in multiple languages; it is a holistic use of languages
for functionally effective communication in multilingual societies’. All of
these studies (the interview studies and the survey studies) include infor-
mation on the ages of acquisition of the languages in the repertoires of
participants, and the discussion that follows will focus on one study
where this information is available. Information about the ages of acqui-
sition of the languages in the repertoires of multilingual South African
students provides indirect evidence about the nature of the acquisition
patterns for early childhood.
Almost all white South Africans who include an African language in their
repertoires (for example, who can speak and understand an African lan-
guage) have learnt this language in their early childhood, often in the home
domains and on farms. In a language history interview study with a multi-
lingual minister (Coetzee-Van Rooy 2014), he reported knowing 12 lan-
guages, and he learnt Sesotho first in life, because he was exposed to it
most of the time on the farm where he grew up. He reports to have
exceptional abilities in Sesotho, Afrikaans and English. This person never
learnt Sesotho in school, but he taught himself to read and write Sesotho
because after he completed high school he had to do compulsory army
service, and then he started to write letters to his Sesotho-speaking friend at
home who started working for his father on the farm. He tried hard to keep
up his abilities in Sesotho, despite being stationed in a Sepedi region after
high school. As an adult he became a minister, and he uses Sesotho daily in
his ministry in Sebokeng (a township that forms part of the Vaal Triangle
region in South Africa). Concerning social cohesion, this participant
strongly believes that his exceptional abilities in Sesotho afford him oppor-
tunities to ‘create a specific personal communication strategy where he
uses his multilingual abilities to start conversations with all people, that
provide an entrance point for him to start relationships, so that he could
invite them into his ministry’ (Coetzee-Van Rooy 2014: 20). This participant
therefore clearly sees a direct relationship between his ability in Sesotho

and the quality of the relationships that he has with fellow South Africans
in the region where he works.
Kruger (2018: 174) studies the repertoires of a group of white Afrikaans-
and English-speaking people in the Vaal Triangle region in South Africa.
She included a group of white Afrikaans-speaking participants who know
an African language (12) and a group whose repertoires do not include an
African language (12). Similarly, she included a group of white English-
speaking participants who know an African language (10) and a group
whose repertoires do not include an African language (12). Two of the
participants with an African language in their repertoires did not provide
an answer about the age of acquisition of the African languages. Therefore,
data from 20 participants studied by Kruger (2018) are reported. Twelve out
of the 20 (60 percent) African languages that were acquired by Kruger’s
(2018: 174) participants were acquired before the participants were 7 years
old; in other words, before they entered school. During the school years,
five of the participants acquired African languages (25 percent); and after
19 years of age, three of the participants (15 percent) acquired African
languages. On the one hand, the data indicate that the majority of these
white participants acquired African languages at an early age; in other
words, they could be regarded at least as childhood trilinguals. At the other
end of the spectrum, the data also indicate that some African languages
were still acquired after the age of 19. It therefore seems as if there is no age
cut-off point for the learning of African languages in the white population
studied by Kruger (2018).
In general, Kruger (2018: 368) finds that the family and the home domain
played the most important role in the acquisition of African languages in
the repertoires of these white Afrikaans- and English participants. This is
similar to the findings reported by Johanson Botha (2015: 32). Kruger (2018:
vi–vii) finds that
[t]he main research finding of this study is that there is a definite

relationship between language and social integration in South Africa.
The knowledge of an African language allows the participants in Groups
A1 [Afrikaans-speaking participants with an African language in the
repertoire] and E1 [English-speaking participants with an African
language in the repertoire] to communicate and integrate with black
South Africans. The lack of knowledge of an African language limits the
participants in Groups A2 [no African language in the repertoire] and E2
[no African language in the repertoire] to communicate and integrate
with black South Africans and the participants in this study express the
wish to also know an African language in order to communicate and
integrate with more ease.
Kruger (2016: 93) also indicates that the lack of effective offering of African
languages at school is raised as one of the most important concerns of
White Afrikaans- and English-speaking participants in her study.

A language history interview study of a Venda home language speaker

(Coetzee-Van Rooy 2016a) indicates that he acquired Venda from birth, and
between the ages of 2 and 13 he acquired eight other languages: Sepedi,
Shona, Chichewa [or Nyanzha], isiNdebele, Shangaan [or Tsonga], Ndau,
English and Afrikaans. Since he was 2 years old, he was a resident in a town
in the North of the Limpopo province with a large copper mining industry
that employed workers from South Africa and the surrounding countries,
where he acquired the languages that he learnt during this period of his life.
Between the ages of 14 and 22 he did not acquire new languages, but some
languages developed more strongly. He acquired isiZulu and isiXhosa
between the ages of 22 and 27 when he did advanced studies in KwaZulu-
Natal. Between 27 and 43 years of age he acquired Sesotho and Setswana
when he worked in regions where these languages were prominent. From
that age onwards languages that were not used in the regions where he
worked and lived declined, but languages that were used developed further.
The participant expressed a direct relationship between the use of languages
of his interlocutors and social cohesion in relation to how he taught his boys.
The participant explains that he taught his boys to respect people and to
answer people in the languages that they use when they start conversations.
The participant says, ‘You see, if you meet any of my boys and speak in Sotho
they will talk to you . . . If you meet them and you speak to them in Zulu
they’ll speak to you in Zulu . . . but you’ll be able to tell that this person
speaks Zulu but he’s not Zulu . . . Ja, Sesotho, same thing . . .’ (Coetzee-Van
Rooy 2016b: 279). This viewpoint confirms the finding about an enhanced
awareness related to language choices of interlocutors reported by Wolff
(2000: 10) in another African context.
Banda (2003) contributed a language repertoire survey study of literacy
practices in South African communities in the Western Cape. Findings
from this survey indicate that the participants are multilingual (2003:
112), and that writing and reading happen in the African home language
and English (2003: 112–13). The starting ages for reading and writing in
English vary across the Black and Coloured participants in Banda’s (2003:
18) study. This is an effect of the apartheid legacy, because Black and
Coloured population groups were designated to specific residential areas
with ‘different cultural, historical and socio-economic conditions’ (Banda
2003: 108). These different conditions influenced the availability of reading
material and the quality of education, which in turn, for example, is visible
in the different ages for reading acquisition reported by Banda (2003). The
majority of the Black participants (52.4 percent) started to read between the
ages of 7 and 10 years old (Banda 2003: 18). The majority of the Coloured
participants (51.4 percent) started to read and write between the ages of
4 and 6 years. Furthermore, most of the urban participants (40.4 percent)
started to read between the ages of 4 and 6 years; and for rural participants,
reading and writing started between the ages of 7 and 10 years (52.3
percent) for most of the participants.

Age of acquisition of African languages

(Southern Sotho home language participants, 2015)
300
250
Nr of participants
200
150
100
50
0
Southern Sotho English Additional First additional Second Third
(home (second African African additional additional
language) language) languages language African African
(combined) language language
0– 2 years 250 4 23 21 2
3– 6 years 46 88 71 61 9 1
7 – 13 years 14 166 95 57 31 7
14– 18 years 9 145 77 49 19
19+ years 17 6 10 1
Figure 24.1 Ages of acquisition
In a language repertoire survey study (see Coetzee-Van Rooy 2012, 2014

for details) conducted in 2015, participants were asked to reflect on their
five ‘strongest languages’. As part of the study they also had to indicate
when they started to learn the languages in their repertoires. The ages of
acquisition of Southern Sotho (perceived as strongest language by the
participants), English (perceived as second strongest language) and the
African languages (perceived as additional languages in the repertoires of
the Sesotho participants) in this study are reported in Figure 24.1.
The home language (Southern Sotho) is acquired from birth and English
is mainly learned from pre-school and in primary school. Considering the
combined frequencies of the ages of acquisition of additional African lan-
guages in the repertoires of these Southern Sotho participants, a quarter of
the additional African languages (94/351 or 26.7 percent) are acquired
between birth and 6 years of age; 68.4 percent (or 240/351) of the additional
African languages are acquired between the ages of 7 and 18; and 4.8 percent
(or 17/351) are acquired after 19 years of age. At least a quarter of these
participants can be considered as early childhood multilinguals; and again
some additional African languages are acquired after the age of 19.
The largest body of work related to African multilingualism in early
childhood is in the domain of reading and literacy development. This is
an important finding in itself, because it confirms that descriptions of
childhood African multilingualism are mostly seen as important in relation
to their implications for reading and literacy development in education
contexts. Many of the studies do report on the potential of social cohesion
related to multilingual repertoires and literacies as well.

Naudé et al. (2007: 519) investigated the nature of multilingual urban

pre-schoolers in the Pretoria region with a view to evaluating assessment
tools for speech therapists. They agree with Wolff (2000) that previous
research mainly focused on adults and has paid particularly little attention
to the pre-school context. Naudé et al. (2007: 522) report that in cities like
Pretoria, many children acquire two languages simultaneously before going
to any kind of pre-school or primary school, where they subsequently often
acquire one or more further languages. These speech therapists eagerly
await descriptive work on the multilingual repertoires of pre-school
learners in different regions in South Africa from applied linguists (Naudé
et al. 2007: 535).
Some scholars have contributed descriptive work of multilingual literacy
profiles of children in South Africa to fill the gap identified by Mkhize
(2016: 44) as far as our understanding of home literacy practices of children
is concerned. She focuses on the description of the multilingual literacy
practices of three rural families. The main findings from Mkhize’s (2016:
52) study are that the participants and their families are engaged in mul-
tiple literacies using many languages. For one of the participants, this
included oral story telling in Zulu and book reading in English and Zulu.
For the second participant, engagement with multiple literacies included
designing birthday cards in Zulu and English. The third participant enjoyed
watching Nigerian and South African TV programmes, and he read sub-
titles in Nigerian Pidgin English, African languages and South African
English. He used all of these languages to discuss developments in these
programmes with friends. The findings from this study debunk deficit
assumptions about multilingual and multimodal literacies in rural commu-
nities. Mkhize (2016: 53) concludes that teachers should harness the home
literacy practices of participants in classrooms to advance literacy
development. She believes that closing the gap between home literacies
and literacy development in the school context would lead to inclusive
education that will ultimately address social injustices and inequalities
(Mkhize 2016: 53). The implications for social cohesion emanating from
this study are related to inclusion in education, an issue mentioned by
many other scholars as well.
In the field of reading development, Pretorius and her associates also take
into account the multilingual nature of their participants in primary school
contexts. Pretorius and Currin (2010: 67) note our understanding of reading
practices and achievement in multilingual contexts is quite limited, and
hence they call for the prioritization of reading development in ‘high
poverty, print poor schools in multilingual developing countries’ (2010:
75). In addition, Pretorius and Stoffelsma (2017: 4, 10) state that guidelines
for vocabulary development should take the multilingual nature of pupils
and schools in South Africa into account and that the development of
multilinguistically appropriate and culturally sensitive standardized
vocabulary tests deserve urgent attention.

Prinsloo (2004) describes the social semiotic activities when a group of

multilingual play together in Khwezi Park in Cape Town. The study focuses
on the multimodal and multilingual meaning-making practices of one child
(7 years old) who is learning to read and write in Xhosa (her home language)
at school (Prinsloo 2004: 293). Prinsloo (2004) describes the sophisticated
and nonregimented learning that is in stark contrast to the rote-learning
expected by the participant in school (Prinsloo 2004: 296), and he highlights
the importance of out-of-school peer play (2004: 292) in his description,
leading to the conclusion that:
What gets lost in her [the participant’s] school learning, in contrast with
her play learning, is the development of rich, situated, permeable and
reflexive ways of making and taking meaning (in ‘school ways’) that she
will need to be a successful player in her later years of school learning.
(Prinsloo 2004: 302)
These reading development studies do not directly relate its findings to

social cohesion. However, the focus on the gap between print-poor and
print-rich communities and schools and ‘out-of-school’ play and learning
in school relate to the concerns raised by Pretorius and Prinsloo’s work on
reading development and Mkhize’s concern of using home literacies in the
school context. An inference from these studies is that to close the gap
between home and school and to make learners feel that they belong in the
school should be an important concern for educators and researchers. This
finding is also consistent with more general work on early childhood
development in education. Goduka (1997: 316) have reported earlier that
‘[i]nitiatives to integrate the African culture [read home based literacies in
this context] in early childhood education was perceived important by most
respondents [in her study] from rural areas’. Goduka (1997: 319) links this
statement specifically to the use of African languages in education and she
believes that schools should connect with the language and culture with
which children enter school. Chikovore et al. (2012: 304) also echo the need
to close the gap between the home and school. One of the most prominent
mismatches between the home and the school that they identify is the lack
of positive attitudes among teachers concerning the home languages of
their pupils (Chikovore et al. 2012: 306; Margetts and Phatudi 2013: 46). If
children, especially in early childhood development contexts, could experi-
ence a more seamless transition from the home to the school with regard to
the use of their home languages in school, they will also view school and
learning more positively and hopefully feel that they belong in that context
and that they can succeed in that context.
There is a large and important body of work on early literacy
development in multilingual South Africa. Scholars like Bloch (1999a,
1999b, 2000, 2004, 2006), Banda (2003, 2009) and Makalela (2015a, 2015b)
and others developed some important insights in this respect. Bloch (1999b:
107) points out that the Language in Education Policy (1997) in South Africa

promotes multilingualism as an instrument towards the achievement

of nation-building, and the children do not cause the problems (Bloch
1999b: 104). They arrive at school multilingual, but the school does not
acknowledge or optimize these exceptional abilities that they bring to
education.
Educators should build on the practices for meaning-making that chil-
dren bring to the classroom (Bloch 1999a: 42, 56; 2000: 63; 2004: 6, 14;
2006: 15); in other words, the discontinuities between home and school
should be minimized to facilitate success in education (Bloch 1999b: 111;
2006: 16); the gap between ‘everyday literacies’ and ‘school literacies’
should be decreased (Banda 2003: 109). Makalela (2015a, 2015b) illustrates
the dilemma poignantly with reference to how some of his participants
articulated their experience inside and outside the classroom after taking a
course with a deliberate multilingual pedagogy, in contrast to the more
usual situation where the multilingualism of students is not taken into
account:
Using more than one language in class made me think the way I usually
do at home or when I am with my friends. The class has allowed me to
truly become myself by using more than one language to talk about
something. It felt just like the way I communicate with friends and
relatives outside of varsity. I had never had an experience like this . . .
but wow, I felt so fulfilled in the way I want to think through concepts.
(Makalela 2015a: 210)
The outside environment and what we did in this class are the same.
I use more than one language most for the time when I talk with friend,
parents and relatives. It is normal for me to be multilingual and mix
languages when I communicate. The class has made it feel like the way
I usually talk. I heard and used almost all the languages that I knew in
class – it felt odd at first because we were in an academic environment,
but later I realized that this was the better way for me to learn the new
language and its literacies so I could compare what I already knew.
(Makalela 2015b: 22)
To overcome the colonial and apartheid damage to the status of the African
home language as language of teaching and learning is important because
there is evidence that learning in an additional language reduces it to a
‘cerebral activity and not an emotionally felt experience’ (Bloch 1999b:
107). The school landscape should send clear messages about the import-
ance of home languages in the school context (Bloch 1999a: 45). At the same
time the print environment in African languages should be increased with
many more stories in African languages (Bloch 1999b: 118; 2000: 60; 2004:
14; 2006: 22, 30), because where material is available in African languages
(e.g., weekly community newspapers), they are read more likely than
English daily papers (Banda 2003: 125).

Hearing stories is one of the most crucial predictors of educational

success (Bloch 1999a: 55; 2006: 7, 13), and bi- and multilingual stories are
furthermore imperative to counter linguicism and racism (Bloch 1999b:
117). African children come from mostly oral and multilingual contexts
and this has implications for how literacy should be taught (Bloch 1999b:
113; 2000: 58). The aim of literacy education should be (among other things)
to assist early childhood learners to see themselves as potential and suc-
cessful readers (Bloch 1999b: 113).
Schooled literacy is linked to community and national discourses, espe-
cially insofar as it can contribute to the fostering of social cohesion (Banda
2003: 103). The beneficial effects of multilingual pedagogies (Banda 2009)
can be seen in the following two extracts from participants in Makalela’s
(2015b) study):
This is different from learning in the language I don’t understand.

I never thought about it this way. Always when I learned in English,
I felt so much like an outsider. The fact that I was allowed to use my own
language in this class made me feel at home. Both sides of me were
brought into play. One side I was an expert in my own language and the
other side a novice in the new language. This gave me control over what
I was going through – a balance I don’t usually get when I learn a
language or content subject.
I liked the way the class made me feel at home and belonging. It is
always a struggle for me to change from who I am and become a
different person in class. The class has for the first time in my life made
it easy for me to feel I have brought myself in class and I just loved the
feel of it.
The studies discussed in this section confirm that the African home
language participants are multilingual, often at a very early age and they
definitely acquire African languages during their school career. Several
studies note the advanced and nuanced social and communicative abilities
of these early childhood multilinguals. The ability of these participants to
accommodate their interlocutors by selecting languages for conversation
that are the most comfortable for their speech partners indicates the high
potential for these participants to build relationships with many people.
There is evidence that this is true for Black and White multilingual South
Africans with African languages in their repertoires. There is evidence that
this multilingual ability is also developing in rural contexts and not just in
urban settings.
A major finding reported in this section is that there is a clear gap
between the multilingual experiences of the participants in the studies
reported on, and their school experiences in South Africa because they

are either taught in an African home language or English. The lack of

implementation of multilingual pedagogies in education that would match
the early childhood multilingual experiences of the participants is a missed
opportunity, also reported in the Indian context in Chapter 25 of
this volume.
24.4 Linguistic Evidence of Social Cohesion

in Post-apartheid South Africa
Against the background of the dismantling of the apartheid system, the

social spaces in which South Africans live are slowly becoming more inte-
grated. There is evidence of the development of a small Black middle class
that is moving into former white suburbs, and for some time the movement
of Black middle-class children into former white schools has progressed
steadily. The Black middle class is still decidedly small, and Burger et al.
(2015) point out that the rate of growth of the black middle class and its
social effects should not be overestimated:
While the surge in the black middle class is expected to help dismantle
the association between race and class in South Africa, the analysis
suggests that notions of identity may adjust more slowly to these new
realities and consequently racial integration and social cohesion may
emerge with a substantial lag.
(Burger et al. 2015: x)
Inkeri (2019: 1) studies ‘whether and how race effects and shapes social
integration in the post-apartheid Cape Town neighbourhood’. The conclu-
sion of the study points to ‘the persistent nature of social classification and
categorizing difference’ in the post-1994 South Africa (Inkeri 2019: 1) and
the remaining ‘complex relationship between segregation and integration’
(Inkeri 2019: 191). Taking these warnings into consideration, several
researchers report that the physical social reorganization of space in the
post-1994 South Africa at least creates the potential for people to live closer
to one another. In the linguistic context, the deracialization of schools in
South Africa provides an important space in which contact between chil-
dren who use African languages as home languages and English home
language children in selected schools is much more extensive than ever
before in the country’s history. These schools provide some spaces where
linguists can investigate if there is sociolinguistic evidence of more inte-
grated lives en route to the social cohesion that post-1994 South Africa
strives for. Although these studies do not focus on early childhood multi-
lingualism, evidence of linguistic convergence across racial lines down-
stream in the education system do provide empirical evidence related to
discussions of social cohesion and languages in contact in South Africa.

The studies discussed in what follows introduce a new kind of multilingual-

ism in the chapter: multilingualism with English. The increased contact of
Black middle-class children with White English-speaking children mainly
results in advanced proficiency in the White form of South African English
in the case of the Black middle-class children and, sadly, does not translate
into the acquisition of additional African languages in the case of the White
English-speaking children.
Mesthrie (2010: 3) ‘examines the degree of sociolinguistic change in the
English of young middle-class South Africans of different ethnic back-
grounds in relation to new post-apartheid opportunities and friendships’.
He argues that in the post-1994 South Africa, middle-class speakers of
Black, Coloured and Indian groups are in more contact with each other
and with home language White speakers of English. In this paper, he
studies the sociolinguistic changes to the GOOSE vowel in these popula-
tions. The GOOSE vowel refers to the ‘oo’ (or [u]) sound made when the
word ‘goose’ is pronounced. Mesthrie (2010: 3) finds that
middle-class speakers of the three ethnicities are fronting the vowel, but
in different ways. Black speakers show the greatest accommodation to
erstwhile White norms. Females show greater resistance among
Coloureds and Indians, but overall it is the Black females of the study
who approximate most closely to the norms of the White reference
group of their gender.
The population groups of the participants used in this study are the same as
those referred to by Banda (2003) above. This study provides linguistic
evidence for a form of social integration among the participants who use
English increasingly. This study also indicates that as contact between these
populations increases, the participants continue to use slightly different
varieties of English, so even in English, vestiges of old group demarcations
are maintained to some extent in post-1994 South African society.
In another study, Mesthrie et al. (2015: 391) report that the desegregation of
South African schools after 1994 ‘fostered major changes in South African
English’ among university students. Mesthrie et al. (2015: 391) prepared brief
clips from interviews with a variety of White and Black South African stu-
dents from multiracial schools as audio stimulus material. These audio clips
were played to a group of university students and they were asked to judge the
ethnic backgrounds of the speakers. The results of the study show that the
participants were unable to identify the ethnic background of the speakers in
many instances and the participants found it easier to correctly identify the
ethnic backgrounds of male speakers when compared to female speakers. In
other words, ‘English is thus being deracialised among the young middle-
class university students of this study’ (Mesthrie et al. 2015: 404).
Continuing this line of inquiry, Mesthrie (2017: 314) recently reported
results of a study of changes in ‘schwa as a full vowel, and neutralizations
of vowel length’ among young Black middle-class speakers of English in

South Africa. These speakers are in increasing contact with White home
language users of English in the deracializing post-1994 South Africa, and
Mesthrie (2017) is interested to study the acquisition of so-called prestige
varieties of English in this context. The main findings of this study are: that
there are differences between the ‘schwa as a full vowel, and neutraliza-
tions of vowel length’ among the participants and their parents; that there
are significant internal differences between gender and social class in the
realization of this vowel; and that ‘young Black women are in the lead in
acquiring the prestige variety’ (Mesthrie 2017: 314)
The findings from these selected studies indicate that some form of
linguistic assimilation towards and absorption in the prestigious White
variety of home language English is occurring among young Black
middle-class South Africans who share spaces like schools and universities
(Van Rooy 2004: 33–34). The deracialization of the post-1994 South Africa,
including the dismantling of one of the most basic forms of violence during
apartheid – namely the separation of people based on race in spaces across
all domains of life – is leading to a form of ‘linguistic assimilation’ which
privileges the White form of South African English. Changes in the social
spatial arrangements in South Africa co-vary with linguistic changes, at
least in the case of the development of a shared form of educated South
African English among young Black middle-class students and White stu-
dents. Sadly, there is no evidence of White middle-class students acquiring
African home languages in any numbers. Based on the findings discussed in
this section, the crucial question really becomes whether the spread of
English among the middle class in South Africa will not in the long run
have effects on the degree of multilingualism of speakers. Two inferences
are possible from the data reported in this section: (a) that the multilingual
nature of participants reported on in this section will decrease over time,
because the school no longer functions as a setting for the acquisition of
additional African languages, and mostly focuses on extensive exposure to
English; and (b) somewhat speculatively, it might be that in the desegre-
gated neighbourhoods, the patterns of social interaction may be less condu-
cive to learning multiple African languages, and more conducive to ‘play’
only in the home language, or else English, since access to English is
probably earlier and stronger in these integrated neighbourhoods.
Longitudinal studies in specific neighbourhoods or regions should be con-
ducted to trace the size and the shape of the multilingual repertoires of
South African children in the post-1994 South Africa.
24.5 Discussion of Main Findings
There are four main findings from the discussion in this chapter.
First of all, across contingent research fields linked to childhood multi-
lingualism, there is evidence that urban African children (at least in South

Africa and Uganda) acquire multiple languages and arrive at school as

multilinguals. Mkhize (2016) even indicates that early childhood
multilingualism develops among African home languages participants in
rural areas in South Africa. This is different for White South African
children. Afrikaans-English bilinguals acquire English in school, and there
is evidence that they develop a form of high level bilingualism. English-
Afrikaans bilinguals acquire Afrikaans at school, and it seems that they do
not develop high levels of bilingualism. White Afrikaans and English home
language children rarely acquire a third language, and if they do, it is not
often an African language. White children who do acquire an African
language acquire this from birth and they are usually in farming contexts
where their main caregivers and friends are speakers of African home
languages. There are reports that these children arrive at school with
stronger proficiency in the African home language than in Afrikaans or
English (Coetzee-Van Rooy; Johanson Botha) and they often have to adjust
their language repertoires for school purposes.
The second main finding is that there is a sizeable gap between the
language experiences of early childhood multilinguals in the home and in
the school. The natural and everyday multilingualism that forms an inte-
gral part of the lives and experiences of early childhood multilingual South
Africans is disregarded in schools where the children either use the home
language or English as main language of teaching and learning for grades
1 to 3. There is evidence that more schools are becoming more adept at
creating welcoming multilingual classrooms for these multilingual learners
(Bratland 2016), but many researchers still lament the gap between the
multilingual experiences in the home and the language compartementali-
zation that is prevalent in the school context. This gap between the ordin-
ary and everyday existence of childhood multilingualism and the linguistic
practices at schools influence the reading and literacy development of the
majority of South African children.
The third finding indicates that the closer proximity of diverse groups of
school pupils in South Africa do lead to linguistic assimilation where Black
African speakers of English in English-speaking schools acquire the features
of the White African speakers in the same school. In other words, the
dismantling of apartheid divisions of segregated schools is resulting in
some form of linguistic convergence, or even absorption. Sadly, however,
we observe that there is no evidence that White African learners acquire
African languages in a reciprocal response.
The fourth finding relates to the relationship between social cohesion
and early childhood multilingualism. Banda (2003: 123) states that, con-
cerning the implementation of multilingual pedagogies and curriculums in
South African schools, things have not changed much in the post-apartheid
period. At the social level of space, however, Banda (2003: 113) confirm that
there is still extensive interaction between speakers of different languages,
if more extensively in the urban than the rural environments. However, the

special separation inherited from apartheid South Africa continues to dom-

inate the ‘racial, class and language composition of school populations in
different areas’ (Johanson Botha & Baxen 2018: 450).
Mesthrie (2008: 315) argues that the negotiated settlement captured in
the Constitution of South Africa (1996) is the most tangible change from the
apartheid to the post-apartheid era. He points out, though, that
[l]ess tangible have been practices that attempt to realize the new
constitutional ideals and the policies they engendered. Here the
successes have been more symbolic than material, and a decade on from
the new constitution there is a sense in which a new nation is still very
much ‘under construction’.
(Mesthrie 2008: 315)
Focusing on the linguistic element that forms part of nation-building, Bloch

(2006: 27) states that:
our struggles to intellectualise African languages (Alexander 2003) and

the larger goal to systematise and normalise societal multilingualism in
South African life must be seen against the often farcical backdrop of
post-colonial language policy development in other parts of Africa, with
the many glaring examples of implementation failure due to lack of
political will by governments
(Mazrui & Mazrui 1998: 64–65, Alexander 2000: 6–11).
Despite these sober views about the status of the nation-building project
and its corollary linguistic developments, scholars in higher education have
been consistently reporting that the implementation of multilingual peda-
gogies in these contexts are gaining ground (see for example, Antia & Dyers
2016; Dyers & Antia 2019). Makalela (2015b: 26) is hopeful that the
multilingual or translanguaging strategies that he used in university class-
rooms are ‘effective in naturalising multilingualism as a classroom norm’.
Bratland (2016: 148) expresses her amazement at the ordinary multilingual
ethos displayed by the South African teachers in her study. She is aston-
ished by the teachers’ treatment of the multilingualism in their classes as
an everyday event. She settles her mind in the end, by linking the multilin-
gual classroom set-up of her study to the South African identity: ‘The
multilingual situation was part of the identity of South African and of
being South African. In that sense, the gap between the home culture and
the school culture is quite small’ (Bratland 2016: 148). Based on the discus-
sion in this chapter, we know that the gap between the home culture and
the school culture could shrink even more – but the findings reported in
this chapter indicate that childhood multilingualism is sustained through-
out the education system that is increasingly getting better at building on
the ordinary magic of the multilingualism that children bring to schools in
South Africa. I have great faith that we are on the right track when we focus

on the development of locally successful multilingual pedagogies across all

levels of education, and that if we get this right, the social cohesion project,
an even more united South Africa, would materialize supported by all its
multilingual glory.
24.6 Conclusions
In bears reiterating that there is a paucity of descriptive research about early

childhood multilingualism in South African and across Africa (Wolff 2000).
More research should be done to describe how and why the majority of urban
children in South Africa acquire many languages before they enter school.
The absence of early childhood multilingualism for White South African
children should also be investigated within the context of the role that
African languages could play in advancing the social cohesion project. The
wisdom of many participants across studies and contingent fields indicates
that knowledge of an African languages is a prerequisite requirement for
social cohesion in contexts like South Africa, because via the African lan-
guage one can communicate more effectively with more people and there-
fore build more effective relationships. The failure of the school system to
create conditions in which Black African and White African children could
take African languages as additional languages (Mbatha & Plüddeman 2004)
is highly problematic for this project.
More importantly, in a context where there are clear reports about the
increase of exposure to English in middle-class South African communities,
as well as evidence of assimilation of the features of White South African
English in this group, longitudinal studies in specific neighbourhoods or
regions should be conducted to trace the size and the shape of the multilin-
gual repertoires of South African children in the post-1994 South Africa.
Research should also focus on the potential of English to foster a shared
‘South African identity’, which to date has not been reported in any of the
studies surveyed in this chapter. It is therefore proposed in this chapter that
more research should be conducted to describe the acquisition of early
childhood multilingualism in South Africa and that research should be
done about the most effective and efficient ways to offer African languages
as additional languages to Black African and White African learners across
all levels of education.
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25
Growing Up in
Multilingual Societies:
Violations of Linguistic
Human Rights
in Education
Ajit K. Mohanty & Tove Skutnabb-Kangas
25.1 Introduction
Presence of multiple languages in different societies and contexts is an

increasingly global phenomenon. However, simple presence of languages
does not make a society multilingual. Many societies remain dominantly
monolingual despite multiplicity of languages which are used as separate
entities with impermeable boundaries between them. Gogolin (1997: 41)
has written about ‘monolingual habitus’ as ‘the deep-seated habit of assum-
ing monolingualism as the norm’. Languages are often associated with
specific communities, ethnic groups, regions or nations, and this associ-
ation leads to promotion of a single dominant language even when other
languages are present in the milieu. Those who can and do use multiple
languages in such contexts are usually parallel users of the languages with
clear borders between them. Heller (1999) describes such situations as
‘parallel monolingualism’. Similarly, Li (2011) speaks of use of ‘one lan-
guage at a time’ in societies characterised by presence of many languages.
In dominant monolingual societies, use of multiple languages in the same
communicative context may be uncommon. Such use is likely to be viewed
as a deviation from a relatively rigid context specificity of languages and as
a transgression of the boundaries between them. The situation can be
described as a multiglossia, where each language has its own domain.
In contrast, growing up in societies where multilingualism is the norm
involves moving between languages naturally and spontaneously as one
moves between people and contexts of use (Mohanty 2019). Languages in

Growing Up in Multilingual Societies 579
multilingual societies may be viewed as distinct entities, but the boundaries

remain fluid. Moving across such boundaries is usually not treated as
infringements. This is partly because the presence of languages in these
societies as well as in the minds of the language users is holistic and
integrated. The usual distinctions between being a monolingual, bilingual,
trilingual and multilingual may be matters of formal learning of languages
as sets of monolingual skills, but they do not reflect the totality of the
communicative repertoire of the common language user in multilingual
societies where ‘languages are experienced as a network or a totality of
communicative acts’ (Mohanty 2019: 2). Languages are also not used in
isolation but as a composite set of tools complementing each other for
making such communicative acts more effective. A multilingual’s
competence in using different languages as communicative tools is not
static across domains of use since such use is guided by the functional
significance of a preferred language in a given context of communication.
As Skutnabb-Kangas (1984) suggested in her early attempt at conceptual-
ising bilingualism, free use of languages and switching between them are
two functional aspects of communication in multilingual societies. As such,
multilingualism is not to be viewed as a sum of specific (and, often, norma-
tive) levels of competencies in societies and individuals in different lan-
guages, but as holistic acts of communication involving functionally
effective use of more than one language in a variety of sociolinguistic
contexts. Mohanty (2019: 17) addresses the core aspects of multilingualism
in defining it as ‘[t]he ability of communities or persons to meet the
communicative requirements of themselves and their society in normal
daily life in two or more languages in their interaction with speakers of
any of these languages’. This can be compared with a part of Skutnabb-
Kangas’ (1984: 90) definition of bilingualism as an educational goal: ‘A
bilingual speaker is someone who is able to function in two (or more)
languages, either in monolingual or bilingual communities, in accordance
with the sociocultural demands made on an individual’s communicative
and cognitive competence by these communities or by the individual herself ’
(emphasis added).
Thus, multilingualism is not a sum of (native-like) competences in mul-
tiple languages; it is a holistic use of languages for functionally effective
communication in multilingual societies. Children grow up developing
socially appropriate communicative skills as a lifestyle in multilingual
societies and, as Skutnabb-Kangas (2019a: xiii) observes, such patterns
of development can be characterised as ‘multilingualism as a first
language’ (MFL).
In all societies children are socialised to use language(s) socially appropri-
ately. The processes of such socialisation necessarily involve use of language
(s) by the adults and peers to shape children’s acquisition of the norms of
communication in multilingual contexts. Languages, thus, are both objects
and instruments of socialisation. However, the degree to which a child’s

580 AJIT K. MOHANTY & TOVE SKUTNABB-KANGAS
early experience fosters awareness of multilingual norms of communica-

tion and openness to multiple languages differs across sociolinguistic con-
texts in diverse societies which vary on a continuum between
monolingualism and multilingualism. In all societies children’s early socio-
linguistic experiences are also divergent across hierarchies of social class
and languages as well as gender and other social conditions.
While there are broad differences across societies in the extent to which
the processes of early language socialisation promote monolingual or multi-
lingual ideologies, there are also notable variations within each society in
respect of how languages and their speakers are placed vis-à-vis other
languages, but all societies organise languages hierarchically. Languages
of the Indigenous/Tribal, Minority and Minoritized (ITM) communities all
over the world are invariably subjected to the processes of discrimination
and stigmatisation, together with a relative glorification of more dominant
languages. Usually one language, such as a colonial/‘international’ language
like English or a ‘national’ or official language has a dominant presence at
the top of the hierarchy. There are mostly two major power cleavages – one
between the most dominant or powerful language and the major national/
regional languages, and the other between these latter languages and the
ITM languages. Languages on the lower rungs of the hierarchy are con-
stantly under pressure from the more powerful languages, and ITM lan-
guages are under constant threat of displacement from significant domains
of use in the society, including education. This sociolinguistic ‘double
divide’ (Mohanty 2010, 2019) affects the nature of multilingualism in any
society. These processes (stigmatisation, glorification) and their results are
then rationalised in a hegemonic way, always to the benefit of those higher
up in the linguistic and social hierarchies (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000: 196).
In this chapter, we discuss how children grow up in multilingual societies
moving between languages and sociolinguistic contexts of their use and
how they go through the developmental processes of multilingual socialisa-
tion acquiring MFL. This involves not so much learning of the languages as
separate systems as learning multilingualism as the norm of communica-
tion. Our examples are taken from Indian contexts, but the basic processes
of development of multilingualism are similar across all linguistically
diverse societies which do not suffer from a monolingual habitus. This
includes, for instance, most African countries. The developmental processes
of childhood multilingualism in multilingual societies are contrasted with
those in relatively monolingual ones. The role of early formal educational
practices in sustenance of the societal multilingual orientation is discussed.
We discuss how schools as social power instruments perpetuate inequality
and discrimination and violate linguistic human rights (LHRs) of children.
We show that social practices and State (and local) policies in education
across the world often promote linguistic homogenisation. Likewise, they
promote loss of childhood multilingualism, particularly among the ITM
communities, often leading to linguistic genocide in education, using the

definitions of genocide in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention

and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). In conclusion, the chapter
reflects on the meaning and implications of growing up in a multilingual
world, and how children’s LHRs, provided that they are implemented and
do not only stay on paper, can support the development and maintenance
(and also revitalisation) of both multilingualism and endangered languages.
25.2 Growing Up in Multilingual Societies
Multilingualism is not just the presence of many languages in a society; it is

how these languages are interrelated both in their sociolinguistic contexts
and in the minds of the language users. Languages in multilingual societies
are characterised by two striking features. The boundaries between the
languages remain fluid with these languages extending into each other in
their social use; often, it is difficult to say where one language ends and
another begins. Further, multiple languages used in specific domains com-
plement each other for effective communication, and communicative func-
tions in social domains are usually shared by multiple languages.
‘Complementarity of languages and their functions across different
domains makes living with many languages easier and it forms a major
aspect of early language socialisation’ (Mohanty 2019: 23). In this section,
we describe how children in multilingual societies gradually move from a
relatively less complex home domain to wider social contexts and learn to
negotiate multiple languages. Our studies show that children do so by not
necessarily acquiring high competence in multiple languages, but by pro-
gressively sharing the norms for socially appropriate communication in
multilingual contexts.
25.2.1 Moving from Home Language to Many Languages

Children learn to communicate using the language(s) they encounter in
their sociocultural context. In multilingual societies children encounter
‘concentric layers of societal multilingualism’ (Mohanty 2006: 263) quite
early in development. Fluid layers of languages are nested into each other
as one moves from the zone of immediate family and neighbourhood
communication to the wider local and regional areas of communication
and to more complex multilingual zones such as a marketplace. The lan-
guages form a network of communication for the common person as she
learns to engage effectively in multilingual communication in routine daily
life activities. In many cases (except in families where parents have differ-
ent first languages and both use their own languages), the home environ-
ment of children can be dominantly but not exclusively monolingual.
As a child widens her domains of social interaction she moves into zones
of other languages as part of her multilingual exposure. Our examples here

come from Kui-speaking Kond tribal communities in Odisha (India).

Members of the family typically use a particular variety of Kui, often
code-mixed with words or expressions borrowed from other languages
present in the wider social context. The adults are multilinguals and use
Odia, the dominant contact language in the region, in their daily life
routine interactions with Odia-speaking non-tribals, many of whom also
have passive understanding of Kui. Hindi, Telugu and other languages are
also contact languages that are present particularly in the local shops,
weekly markets, banks and Government offices. Occasionally, some words
from Hindi or English or other languages with which the community has
contact (either through visitors to the local weekly markets or through
television and radio programmes) also form part of the code-mixed Kui.
Many words borrowed from Odia, with some minor modifications, are used
as part of regular Kui vocabulary. For example, the Odia word hāti (ele-
phant) is used as āti. Some common English words such as ball, bus which
are often used by Odia speakers have also become a part of Kui vocabulary.
As soon as children are able to move outside their home, between 2 and 3
years of age, they come in greater contact with Odia spoken by adults and
children from non-tribal Odia settlements adjacent to the Kond villages.
Gradually children accompany their parents to local shops and weekly,
markets which are linguistically more heterogeneous domains of inter-
action with two to three other languages, besides Kui and Odia, used by
the vendors and some of the commercial traders who visit regularly. Visits
to the local churches by the Christian families or to the local Hindu and
tribal places of worship by the non-Christian families also widen the com-
municative network of children through exposure to languages like English
(particularly for the churchgoers; the Bible was translated into Kui and
printed in Odia script as early as 1850, and religious discourses and other
domains of communicative activities in the local Churches use many
English terms and expressions), Hindi, Odia and Sanskrit (used in prayers
in local temples). Children in the tribal areas and other rural settings grow
up with gradual exposure to multiple languages in different domains of
their communication. The urban areas are distinctly more heterogeneous
linguistic areas, with communities from different parts of the country in
mutual contact. Thus, children in most parts of India grow up as multi-
linguals. They learn to live with and communicate effectively in multiple
languages in their daily life interactions with other contact groups from a
variety of language communities. With some exceptions, these children
may not show high levels of proficiency in the languages other than their
home language(s), but they show age-appropriate skills in using multiple
languages in socially appropriate ways in their communication.
However, children’s multilingualism and their proficiency in the mother
tongue are affected by the hierarchical organisation of languages in the
society, state policies of discrimination, and monolingual school practices.
As a result, development of children’s linguistic resources and

multilingualism that they bring to school are adversely affected by formal

education that denies them LHRs.
As we have noted children’s communicative development happens at two
levels. Their sphere of exposure to varieties of languages in multilingual
societies progressively widens as they acquire varying degrees of skills in
language use ranging from development of age-appropriate competence in
the language(s) of their family and immediate neighbourhood to functional
proficiency in multiple languages in their society. At a second level, they
learn to communicate socially appropriately in the multilingual environ-
ment that they encounter in their daily routine life. In the next section, we
describe how children proceed through this second level of development in
multilingual socialisation.
25.2.2 Multilingual Socialisation: Stages and Strategies

Acquisition of language(s) involves socialisation of children in their family,
community and sociocultural context to use language(s) to communicate in
a culturally appropriate manner. The processes of such socialisation by the
adults, peers and others in the family and in the neighbourhood involve use
of language(s) for development of children’s language(s) and also their
understanding of the principles for socially appropriate use of these lan-
guage(s) in communication. ‘While proper use of language must reflect
social parameters, language also serves as a powerful medium through
which family and others seek to socialise the child. Thus, language is both
a medium and a product of socialisation’ (Mohanty et al. 1999: 126).
Language socialisation is defined as the process of ‘socialisation through
language and socialisation to use language’ (Ochs 1986:2). Processes and
goals of language socialisation vary across cultures. Cultures may differ in
socialisation strategies and in relative functional emphases such as social-
and person-orientation, object exploration and control of child’s actions
through the use of language. But language socialisation practices in different
sociocultural contexts do share some common goals of developing under-
standing of rules of social communication, orienting children to status- and
role-appropriate use of language, setting stylistic preferences and functional
priorities in the use of language in social interactions, transmitting values
and affect, controlling children’s actions, providing exposure and practice in
socially appropriate use of language and development of metacommunica-
tive awareness (Mohanty 1994a; Mohanty et al. 1999).
Multilingual societies are characterised by grassroots levels of multilin-
gualism and functional allocation of languages into domains of daily life
activities. As contexts and interlocutors vary in their sociolinguistic charac-
teristics, learning to communicate appropriately requires attention to and
awareness of this diversity and of the underlying social norms. Multilingual
socialisation involves development of awareness of language variations,
differentiation of languages in terms of their functions and a hierarchy of

preferences in patterns of language use in diverse sociolinguistic domains

of use. As Mohanty et al. (1999) point out, in addition to the broader
processes of language socialisation, multilingual socialisation involves the
following developmental tasks:
(1) awareness of language variations across sociolinguistic contexts;

(2) domain-appropriate hierarchy of preferences for use of languages;
(3) functional allocation of languages in different domains of
communication;
(4) understanding and use of rules for appropriate code-switching and
code-mixing in different contexts; and
(5) sharing and using appropriately the social norms (such as politeness rules,
status appropriate use of language) of multilingual communication.
Children in multilingual environments may develop some competence in

multiple languages as they go through the processes of multilingual social-
isation. However, learning aspects of the languages per se and learning the
social competences listed above as part of language socialisation must be
viewed as different (though overlapping) processes. Multilingual socialisa-
tion is not learning of languages as such, but understanding how these
languages are socially interrelated and projected into the real world of
many languages. Differentiation of languages and codes into specific
domains and hierarchical layers of communication also have pragmatic
functions, since use of any incongruent code is problematic and likely to
be viewed as socially unacceptable. Pragmatic knowledge of context-
appropriate choice of languages is an essential element of language social-
isation in multilingual societies. Multilingual socialisation is more about
learning multilingualism as a first language than learning multiple lan-
guages (Mohanty 2019).
A number of studies on multilingual socialisation were conducted by
Mohanty and his students (Bujorbarua 2006; Mohanty 1994a; Mohanty
et al. 1999) among 2- to 9-year-old children from different regions of India
(multilingual campus of the GB Pant University of Agriculture and
Technology, Uttarakhand; multilingual contact areas of Gorakhpur, Uttar
Pradesh; migrant non-Odia families living in Cuttack city of Odisha;
Assamese families in Delhi; and middle-class Assamese families in multi-
lingual contact areas in Guwahati, Assam) with diverse levels of linguistic
heterogeneity. These studies show that multilingual socialisation involves
development of social and communicative skills necessary for competent
functioning in multilingual contexts regardless of children’s personal com-
petence in the use of the languages in their milieu. Children do not usually
develop any appreciable or age-appropriate monolingual-like competence in
these languages, but they progressively develop skills necessary for func-
tioning effectively in their multilingual context. They show gradual differ-
entiation of languages in the milieu, moving from early undifferentiated
perception of languages to broader differentiation. Such differentiation of

languages and contexts of use is necessary for children to learn to commu-

nicate socially appropriately. The studies show that, by about 9 years of age,
most children have developed an understanding of the hierarchical pos-
itioning of languages in the society and display awareness of the sociolin-
guistic hierarchy which makes some languages more prestigious and
preferred over others in specific contexts of use. For example, most
9-year-olds in India, regardless of their own experience and language of
schooling, show some awareness that English is a more prestigious lan-
guage and a preferred language of schooling than the regional languages
and other mother tongues. Our analysis shows that Indian children go
through three broad developmental periods in their multilingual socialisa-
tion – a period of language differentiation, a period of social awareness of
languages, and a period of competent multilingual functioning. While
learning to live with many languages does continue through life-span
development, each of the early periods of development has a major focus
on and development of a specific aspect of multilingual socialisation. Each
period is further divided into two stages (Mohanty et al. 1999).
The Period of Language Differentiation

This period is characterised by development of awareness of differences
between languages based on regularity of their occurrence in specific com-
municative contexts as well as a rote-level knowledge of languages. The first
stage of emergence of language differentiation begins quite early (by about
2 years of age) with the child’s recognition of the existence of different
languages (e.g., TV programmes in different language-specific channels,
specific visitors or persons in the neighbourhood who use different lan-
guages), awareness of different labels/names (in different languages) for
familiar objects and also differences in modes of expression. Children’s
ability to differentiate languages develops earlier than their ability to con-
sistently name the languages in their surroundings.
Children move beyond simple awareness and naming of languages during
the second stage of this period of language differentiation; they develop some
understanding of how the languages are differentiated. They respond to
various languages as different from each other and begin to follow the social
conformity norm of responding in a language one is spoken to. For example,
Chotu, a 3 years and 10 months old child in our study (Mohanty et al. 1999)
tries to correct his mother’s Punjabi to Hindi to make it more appropriate for
the third person (Hindi speaker) being spoken to.
Mother: (in Punjabi) Teri nā ki hai? (What’s your name?)

Chotu: (in Hindi) Nām kyā hai, ye pucho. (What’s the name? Ask like
this.)
Sometimes, lacking the required competence in using another language

appropriately, children try to follow this norm by making some attempt in

their communication to bring in the language of interlocutors from differ-

ent language communities. The implicit social norms requiring a speaker to
try and accommodate to the language of the interlocutor is quite typical of
the multilingual societies contrasted with dominant monolingualism ones.
Studies in the South African context also show similar fine-tuned develop-
ment of an awareness that a multilingual person tries to use the language
of her interlocutor in a conversation; the accommodation is from the
speaker towards the interlocutor, and the speaker does not insist on using
her language preference in conversations.
The Period of Social Awareness of Languages

The second period of multilingual socialisation usually begins around the
age of 4 when children show greater appreciation of the norms of multilin-
gual communication and social practices associated with sociocultural and
contextual differentiation of languages. They begin to understand that
use of a certain language may be appropriate in some contexts but not
in others.
The first stage in this period shows emergence of social awareness of
context-appropriate use of multiple languages and recognition of language
variations across different domains and speakers. During this stage, chil-
dren begin to understand the need for appropriate choice among languages
and try to speak differently in the presence of speakers of different lan-
guages. For example, a Tamil child Aditya (4 years 3 months) talks to his
mother in Tamil, but tries to speak in ‘broken’ Odia to the milkman (who is
an Odia speaker) and, when probed, he says that it is not ‘right’ to speak in
Tamil to the Odia milkman. However, Aditya cannot say why it is not right.
He is also aware that Odia is spoken in his neighbourhood, Tamil in his
home and English in his school.
During the next stage in the period of social awareness of languages,
children begin to understand that languages have different social roles and
contextual appropriateness. For example, children in this stage understand
the politeness norms that the home language may not be appropriate for
use with a visitor who speaks a different language. Even when they do not
know the language of another person in a social context, they show clear
awareness of the need to use that language or, at least, a language different
from home language. A 5 year 3 months old Bengali child Teeya, living in
an Odia-majority city in Odisha, speaks in Bengali with her parents but
attempts to change to Hindi (not Odia) in presence of visitors from other
language communities (regardless of their language background) and,
sometimes, seeks to obtain social support from other family members for
communication in a different language. Even with little or no competence
in other languages, children at this stage show context-sensitivity in their
own choice of languages and in attempting code-switching for enhance-
ment of communicative effectiveness. Children’s understanding of the
social role of languages in multilingual contexts shows that they have a

broad appreciation of the need for their own speech acts to be communi-
cative. It also involves basic perception of the mental state of others when a
language is not intelligible.
The Period of Competent Multilingual Functioning

The norms of communication in multilingual societies are progressively
internalised by children. Usually 7- to 9-year-old children begin to show
their norm awareness and develop competence in multilingual functioning.
During this third period of multilingual socialisation, children, who, in
most cases, are already able to display sensitivity to context-specific use of
languages, develop a broader understanding of the social hierarchy of
preferences for languages. They also appreciate the relative appropriateness
of different languages to a given social context in which multilingual
speakers are present. During this stage, children show awareness of the
implicit social rules of functional code-switching (politeness- and prestige-
based rules, for example). This period is also characterised by emergence of
systematic code-mixing in multilingual communication.
The first stage in this period involves development of understanding of
the social conventions associated with functional roles of different lan-
guages. Children show some understanding that, in multilingual communi-
cation, languages have socially accepted functions in different contexts.
Children begin to understand that their home language is more appropriate
for intimate and affective communication and other languages like English
may be more appropriate in formal and academic contexts. They perceive
the social differences in prestige value of languages and begin to internalise
the preference hierarchy across languages. In our studies there were many
7- to 8-year-old urban middle-class children who tried to impress the
Research Investigators (RIs) by attempting to use English in their conversa-
tions even if they had other Indian languages (e.g., Odia, Hindi or Assamese)
in common with the RIs and even when they were being spoken to in an
Indian language which they knew.
During the second stage of this period, children’s multilingual communi-
cation becomes more systematic and socially appropriate; they show pro-
gressive understanding of the linguistic hierarchy and the implicit social
norms for code-switching. Code-switching or, at least, some attempt to use
a different language to communicate meaningfully in the presence of other
speakers of different language(s) becomes more consistent and regular. Puja,
an 8-and-a-half-year-old girl from a Bengali family living in Odisha, tries to
use Odia in speaking to local visitors and switches to Bengali talking to her
family members. She also knows that in her school she has to speak in
English and not in Bengali or Odia. Another child Samparna (also 8 and and
a half ) speaks to the RI in Hindi, switches to Odia when her friend enters and
then speaks to her mother freely mixing Hindi and Odia. By about 9 years of
age, children seem to be able to show socially appropriate and systematic
(rule-based) code-switching and code-mixing. They are able to deal with the

nuances of multilingual social communication even as they continue to

develop proficiency in the languages in their environment and schooling.
Strategies in Multilingual Socialisation

A variety of socialisation strategies and devices are used by adults in the
families and communities to facilitate children’s differentiation of lan-
guages and understanding of the norms of multilingual communication
(Mohanty 2014). Parents and adult members of the family model multilin-
gual speech for children through speech expansions, translation and sim-
plification devices and repeated code-mixing and code-switching routines.
In their own multilingual communication, parents demonstrate preferen-
tial patterns of language use. Language socialisation is a collaborative
process in which adults and children mutually regulate and change their
own speech acts to gradually approximate the social norms of communi-
cation in their interactions. In multilingual societies, children’s encounters
with family members and adults of the communities of practice in a given
sociocultural setting and repeated collaborative (and agentic) participation
in multilanguaging activities lead to progressive appreciation and approxi-
mation of a variety of complex norms of multilingual lifestyle. Parents,
grandparents, other family members, neighbours, community members
and visitors share distributed roles and responsibilities in multilingual
socialisation. It is also important to note that as children are socialised to
multilingual modes of functioning and multilingual communication, they
develop conscious awareness of languages in society and show increased
communicative sensitivity compared to their counterparts in monolingual
societies.
Mohanty (2019) argues that multilingual socialisation and diversity of
sociolinguistic encounters facilitate children’s metalinguistic awareness
quite early in their development. He cites the case of his grandson Om,
who grew up in a multilingual area in Delhi, India. Om grew up with Odia
in his family, Hindi through interactions with Hindi-speaking children,
domestic helpers and family visitors, and some exposure to Bengali,
English and other Indian languages. Later, Om moved to Mumbai at the
age of 4 and attended an English-medium pre-primary school. Soon he
showed a differentiated perception of languages in his surroundings.
Asked about the languages in his school, Om could name a number of
languages (English, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati) in his classroom used by
his friends and showed his awareness of the use of English in the classroom
and use of other languages only outside the classroom. His metalinguistic
reflections included identifying some words common between Odia and
Marathi languages (such as pāni or water, sakāla or morning) and between
Odia and Bengali. Om also showed his awareness of the differences in
articulation of Odia and Bengali words. It seems that, due to the early
encounters with multiple languages and the challenges involved in dealing
with societal multilingualism, children show early development of

metalinguistic awareness. Mohanty (2019) has argued that, with early

metalinguistic development, cross-linguistic transfer is more likely to occur
earlier among children in multilingual societies. As a result, aspects of
cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP; see Cummins 1979, 1984)
may develop even before formal schooling. This has implications for plan-
ning multilingual education for children in these societies.
The processes of multilingual socialisation prime the children to develop
multilingualism as a first language. Mohanty (2019: 33–34) elaborates this
priming:
Our language socialisation studies show that a multilingual society is

NOT a tower of Babel; it is a dynamic structure of multiple languages
each extending into the other in a complex interplay of multiple
identities and, early in their development, children are socialised to live
with multilingualism as a natural phenomenon.
Societal multilingualism is thus supported and sustained by early multilin-

gual socialisation. Further, it is also likely that early development of lin-
guistic sensitivity leads to appreciation of linguistic diversity and to
psychological readiness which supports the features of multilingualism
such as its maintenance norms and multiplicity of linguistic identities,
making multilingualism a positive force (Mohanty 2019). The processes of
multilingual socialisation transform the sociolinguistic synergy in multilin-
gual societies to a psychological reality for every child.
Children growing up in multilingual societies do have divergent experi-
ences of diversity in the specific contexts of their development and
exposure to the complexities of multilingualism. The challenges of dealing
with the nuances of multilingual communication are a major developmental
task for children. It requires greater cognitive effort and these experiences
endow them with cognitive advantages (Bialystok & Barac 2013; Bialystok
et al. 2012; see Mohanty 2019 for a review). Thus, languages are resources
for children in multilingual societies even if, as we show later, they are
often not treated as such in multilingual societies.
In contrast, children growing up in monolingually oriented societies
experience a different sociolinguistic reality, and the processes underlying
their communicative development are likely to be less challenging in
many respects.
25.3 Growing Up in Societies with Monolingual Orientation
Unfortunately, most of what we know about development of linguistic and

communicative skills of children is based on studies in what we call dom-
inant monolingual societies. Early development of monolingual children in
these societies (except ITM children) lacks the experience of sociolinguistic

diversity and associated complexity of the level that we have noted above
for children in multilingual societies. Monolingual societies do have
regional, dialectal and cross-linguistic variations and diversity. However,
awareness of such diversity develops much later in children growing up as
typically monolingual in these societies, at least partly because languages
and varieties do not usually come in social contact in the early experience of
children, in contrast to the ones facing complex sociolinguistic realities in
multilingual societies. Monolingual children’s language socialisation
targets development of communicative skills in their language including
pragmatic and social conventions of such communication. Contextual dif-
ferentiation of languages, learning of the implicit social rules for communi-
cation as in multilingual contexts and requirements of frequent code-
switching and code-mixing routines often do not constitute aspects of such
early language socialisation of these children.
In dominant monolingual societies, bilingualism and multilingualism
are typically minority-group phenomena except in cases of elite learning
of multiple languages through schooling or formal learning and informal
acquisition associated with prolonged contact with other languages. The
migrant and other ITM communities in these societies are mostly bilingual
in their indigenous/native languages. However, such bilingualism is usually
a marked phase of transition from monolingualism in the native language
to monolingualism in the dominant language (Mohanty 1994b). The native
languages of the ITM communities are under pressure of language shift,
and there is a gradual decline in the rate of maintenance of the native
languages of the Indigenous and migrant communities all over the world.
The report of the US Census Bureau (Ryan 2013) shows the presence of
169 Native languages out of approximately 300 before colonisation; while
20 per cent of the 65+ age group of the American Indians speak a Native
language at home, 10 per cent of the 5–17 age group speak their Native
language. In Canada, 29 per cent of the Aboriginal people spoke an
Aboriginal language in 1996; by 2001 this figure declined to 24 per cent
(Bear Nicholas 2009). The number of languages of the First Nations People
in Canada has declined rapidly compared to the pre-colonisation period
(Mohanty 2019). In Europe there is a language shift of the native languages
of the immigrant families in about three to four generations (Tabouret-
Keller 2013), and this is also true of the immigrants in most other dominant
monolingual societies. As pointed out earlier, in dominant monolingual
contexts, the bilinguals or multilinguals are parallel users of languages
which otherwise occur without much social contact among them. It is
unusual for multiple languages to be used simultaneously in code-mixed
and/or in code-switched forms as languages of communication in common
contexts of social interaction.
Multilingual/bilingual children in monolingual societies use any one of
their multiple languages in specific contexts and they are usually not
expected to engage in code-mixing or free code-switching for effective

communication. For example, the three 12-, 7- and 5-year-old children in an

Odia-speaking immigrant family in the US mostly speak in Odia with their
parents and grandparents. They speak to each other and with the visitors to
their home (including two other Odia-knowing children of a family friend)
in English. They speak in English in all other contexts outside their home.
Their bilingualism involves a clear diglossic use of Odia and English in
parallel contexts; the domains of use of the two languages have clear
boundaries which are normally not transgressed. In most cases, the lan-
guages of multilingual children in monolingual societies remain as inde-
pendent skills. These children develop varied levels of competence in their
first, second and other languages, but they do not use them holistically for
effective communication. Such isolated use of languages leads to the view
of multilingualism as a sum of independent competences in multiple lan-
guages and not as MFL. Sami (12 years 2 months; the names of the children
have been changed for anonymity) speaks to his parents and grandparents
in Odia, occasionally using English words for effective communication
when he cannot find a corresponding word in his Odia lexicon. He believes
that the English words he uses are also Odia words and, on being probed
further, he cites many English words which his parents use in their conver-
sation in Odia. The use of Odia is very specific to informal communication
in the home domain mostly for daily social routines and communication of
affect. However, when Sami speaks to his parents or grandparents about his
studies, school and academic matters, his hobbies and co-curricular activ-
ities, he reverts to English. The younger children also speak in Odia, but,
since they are still learning to speak in the language, they use more English
expressions in their communication. When these children speak in English
there is no attempt at all to code-mix or to bring in Odia to supplement
their communication; code-switching and some code-mixing happen only
when they speak in Odia in their home domain. In her conversations in
home, the youngest child, Mira (5 years 11 months) uses English more often
than her elder brothers. Clearly, the children display age-appropriate com-
petence in English, whereas their competence in Odia is below the expected
level (if one compares them to children who speak Odia as their first and
the only language) and is mostly limited to informal social affective com-
munication in their home domain.
However, the usual subtractive effects of learning a dominant language
are not quite evident in the case of the three children, since their parents
repeatedly encourage them to continue speaking in Odia in home. Siba
(7 years 10 months) likes to participate in his parents’ telephone conversa-
tions with relatives and family friends back in India and uses Odia in
speaking to them. He uses some colloquial expressions in Odia that he
picked up from such conversations and often repeats such expressions in
talking to his grandparents and younger sister to create some fun and
humour. In contrast, his use of English is more formal even when he speaks
to family members in his home. Siba has started learning some Spanish in

school, but he never attempts to use the language except when he is

specifically asked to translate simple words or expressions from English
to Spanish. He always speaks to the Spanish-knowing workers and lawn
developers who visit his home in English even if his parents want him to
practise speaking Spanish with them. This shows a reluctance to code-
switch when one can manage with the dominant language. Unlike multi-
lingual societies, children who grow up as multilinguals in monolingual
societies are not subjected to any normative pressure to code-mix or code-
switch in presence of interlocutors from a different language community.
The contexts of use of languages by multilingual children in dominant
monolingual societies are distinct, and each context clearly defines an
appropriate language of communication with very little deviation.
Language socialisation of these children sets the contextual boundaries
for languages as distinct entities, and children develop the multiple lan-
guages as separate systems with little overlap in their use. It seems that the
multilingual children growing up in the monolingual social contexts are
socialised to use the dominant language (such as English) for wider social
and interpersonal communication and native/indigenous languages for
family and in-group communication. The monolingual ideology of the
wider society seems to override the multilinguality of children regardless
of whether their ‘other’ languages are indigenous or immigrant minority
languages. Asked about their preference for using Odia or English, Siba
(7 years 10 months) says that he likes speaking in Odia with family
members and relatives because it is ‘fun’, but he is very emphatic that
English is ‘good’ because it can be used ‘everywhere’. Mira (5 years
11 months), on the other hand, has no hesitation in saying that she prefers
speaking in English, but she cannot say why; ‘I like it,’ she says. In fact, she
makes no attempt to bring in the language(s) of interlocutors from a
different language community or enter into communication in a common
language, even when the other person does not understand English. When
she met a visiting grandmother of her friend from a Telugu-speaking family
who did not understand English, she persisted in speaking to her in English
even after her friend told her, ‘my grandma does not know English’. She
failed to accept that some people may not know English and, probed later,
she said, ‘she (referring to her friend’s grandmother) speaks Indian’. Her
elder brothers, however, understand that some people may not know
English. Of course, these children’s preference for using English is quite
clear. Sami (12 years 2 months) says that English is a more ‘important
language and it is spoken worldwide’ and, at the same time, he says, ‘it’s
nice to speak Odia and know more languages’.
Contextual isolation of languages in monolingual societies also seems to
delay children’s awareness of diversity compared to their counterparts in
multilingual societies. Children who grow up as multilinguals in monolin-
gual societies do not show the expected or age-appropriate level of
awareness of languages. The three children in the Odia immigrant family

in the USA show limited awareness of languages around them even if they
have family friends and regular visitors to their home who speak many
languages besides English – Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Malayalam, Marathi,
Nepali, Odia, Spanish, Telugu and Urdu. They also visit the family friends
and hear the members of the host family often speak to each other in these
languages. Besides, these and many other languages are used in social
gatherings and parties that the children sometimes attend. Asked to name
the languages in the world or languages around them, Mira (5 years 11
months) says, ‘English’ and names Odia only when she is specifically told to
name the languages she speaks. She cannot name the languages spoken by
the specific family friends other than that they speak English. Siba (7 years
10 months) is able to name English, Odia and Spanish (which he never uses
even when he has the opportunity and is encouraged by his parents). When
asked about other languages that the specific family friends use, he is able
to name only Bengali. He is aware that some of the family friends and
visitors speak other languages, but he is unable to name them. Sami (12
years 2 months) is able to name most of the languages spoken by the family
friends and shows his awareness of multiple languages in the world and in
the USA, including Native languages of the American First Nations. He
specifically mentions the linguistic diversity in India, Africa and Europe.
It seems that development of awareness of linguistic diversity among chil-
dren in monolingual societies is not an aspect of their language socialisa-
tion and, hence, development of such awareness awaits curricular learning
in schools. Further, differentiation of languages used in their surrounding
is not a major challenge for these children: languages they use are very
clearly demarcated and isolated in the contexts of their use and, with
a dominant monolingual mindset, other non-dominant languages in
their surrounding are mostly not perceived until much later in their
development.
Multilingual children in dominant monolingual societies are character-
ised by parallel use of languages as they move between clearly differenti-
ated contexts of their use. The pattern is multiglossic rather than
multilingual since, unlike the multilingual societies, the languages do not
move across the sociolinguistic contexts of use. Children’s communicative
competence is distinctly distributed across specific contexts associated with
specific languages; typically, the communicative repertoire of these chil-
dren is a combination of their competences in the languages that they can
use. They can aptly be characterised as users of multiple languages in
monolingual contexts rather than as multilinguals who grow up with
multilingualism as their first language.
Multilingual children do grow up with different worldviews compared to
their monolingual counterparts. However, those growing up as multilin-
guals in monolingual social contexts are constrained by relative isolation of
languages or by ‘parallel multilingualism’ (Heller 1999). This isolation of
languages in monolingual societies limits the nature of multilinguality and

children’s perception of languages and linguistic diversity. In multilingual

societies, on the other hand, children are more likely to show greater
acceptance of diversity and willingness to move across languages and
domains of their use. As we have pointed out, early exposure to multiple
languages and the sociolinguistic and psychological challenges of switching
between them endows multilingual children with early awareness of lan-
guages and metalinguistic skills. Multiple languages are resources of multi-
lingual children, more so in multilingual societies (Mohanty 2019).
Children’s participation in their communities of practice and the wider
ecology of the multilingual societies, as in African and Asian countries,
enables them to deal effectively with many languages which constitute part
of their communicative repertoire. Unfortunately, schools in most of these
multilingual societies do no treat children’s language skills acquired in
home and community as classroom resources. Often, schools isolate and
exclude many languages which form part of children’s communicative
repertoire at the point of school entry and emphasise learning of some
dominant languages which may not overlap with those acquired early in
development. As we discuss next, formal systems of education in most parts
of the multilingual world not only fail to support children’s multilingual-
ism but also suppress their mother tongues and, thus, violate their LHRs.
25.4 Formal Education and Violation of Children’s

Linguistic Human Rights
The inequality and discrimination in education are perpetuated by exclu-

sion of ITM languages in formal education. Panda and Mohanty (2014: 114)
show how, due to the social inequalities and the hierarchical power struc-
ture of languages, schools become a basis of power, control and discrimin-
ation, ‘institutionalised instruments for exclusion’. In India, English
dominates the formal educational systems, particularly in the higher levels,
at the same time as the ITM languages are neglected in all levels. Tribal
children constitute over 90 per cent of children in nearly 60,000 primary
schools (Grades 1 to 5) and the majority in over 100,000 schools. Still, there
is no provision for using their mother tongue (MT) as the medium of
education, except in a few special programmes. Of the tribal children
joining Grade 1, 35.6 per cent are pushed out by Grade 5, 55 per cent by
Grade 8 and 70.9 per cent by Grade 10. Less than 30 per cent of the tribal
children joining Grade 1 appear in the High School examination at the end
of 10 years of formal schooling. Only 9 per cent succeed. Thus, there is a
wastage of 91 per cent in the existing system of submersion education in a
non-MT language for the tribal children in India (Mohanty 2019).
Submersion education of ITM children in a dominant language fails to
provide high-quality education and enhance their cognitive and intellectual
capabilities. It has a subtractive effect on children’s MT competence, leads

to loss of their linguistic capital and their cultural and linguistic identity,
and limits their choice and freedom. Large-scale educational failure and an
inability to move into the higher levels of education and technical training
necessary to join the skilled workforce limit the chances of upward mobil-
ity for ITM children, thus perpetuating poverty (Mohanty 2019: 141; see
Mohanty & Skutnabb-Kangas 2013 for elaboration of capability
deprivation).
Besides the ITM children, a large number of other children in multilin-
gual societies are educated in dominant foreign or non-MT language-
medium schools, which also leads to loss of languages. In India, besides
the tribal children (over 8 per cent of the school-age population), at least
40 per cent of other children are in English-medium schools (Mohanty
2019), meaning nearly half of the 7- to 18-year old children in India are
educated in a language which is not their MT. Mohanty (2017, 2019) speaks
of five layers of school education in India in English- and vernacular-
medium schools associated with social class. While the very rich and the
upper- and middle-class children join elite and high-quality English-
medium (EM) private schools, respectively, many children from the aspir-
ational poor class join low-cost and very-poor quality private EM schools
where they neither learn English well nor develop their MT. Most of the
public schools offer poor quality vernacular-medium schools for poor chil-
dren from vernacular-language MT communities or non-MT medium sub-
mersion education for children from disadvantaged ITM communities.
Thus, dominant-language-medium education in multilingual societies does
not support MTs and multilingualism of many children, including those
from ITM language communities.
Research on educational performance indicates that ITM children taught
through the medium of a dominant language in submersion programmes
often perform considerably less well than native dominant-language-speak-
ing children in the same class, in general and on tests of both (dominant)
language and school achievement. They suffer from higher levels of push-
out rates, stay in school fewer years, have higher figures for unemployment
later on and, for some groups, drugs use, criminality, including incest, and
suicide figures are prominent social ills (see Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). There
is strong evidence that such children do not benefit from the right to
education to the same extent as children whose MT is the teaching language
of the school, and that this distinction is based on language.
Worldwide, exclusion of MTs from the education of ITM children and
imposition of (a) dominant language(s) lead to educational failure and loss of
ITM languages. Those (mostly Asian immigrant minority) groups that show a
more positive pattern (e.g., in Canada, the USA, the UK) seem to do this not
because of the way their education is organised but despite it. There is a direct
link (both correlational and causal) between the exclusion of ITM languages
and educational failure of ITM children (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000; Skutnabb-
Kangas & Dunbar 2010). Imposed formal education in dominant languages in

both ‘monolingual’ and multilingual societies is a site for educational viola-

tion of LHRs. Formal education participates in linguistic genocide.
When what became the UN International Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (E793, 1948, www1.umn.edu/humanrts/
instree/x1cppcg.htm) was being prepared after the Second World War, its
final Draft had in Article III definitions of linguistic and cultural genocide;
it also saw them as crimes against humanity. Article III was voted down by
16 states in the UN General Assembly in 1948, and is thus NOT part of the final
Convention. But all states who were members of the UN agreed about the
definition of what should be considered linguistic genocide: ‘Prohibiting
the use of the language of the group in daily intercourse or in schools, or
the printing and circulation of publications in the language of the group’.
The present Convention (UN International Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, E793, 1948, www1.umn.edu/humanrts/
instree/x1cppcg.htm) has five definitions of genocide in its Article 2:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts

committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
What much ITM education worldwide is doing is trying (and sometimes/

often succeeding) is to forcibly transfer ITM children linguistically and
culturally to a dominant group, at the same time as it is causing both
mental and, indirectly, at least in the long term, physical harm to members
of ITM groups (Article 2e and 2b). Skutnabb-Kangas and Dunbar (2010) sum
up consequences of submersion education for ITM children, using world-
wide research evidence and concrete examples:
(1) negative educational consequences, in terms of achievement and outcomes;

(2) negative physical consequences, both short term and long term: the eco-
nomic marginalisation reproduced by education in its turn often
results in direct physical harmful consequences in terms of health-related
issues: no or poor maternity care, high infant mortality, under-
nourishment, dangerous work (e.g., mines, logging, chemicals in agri-
culture) or unemployment, child labour, and poor housing and health
care. Health and other physical effects from alcoholism, abuse of
women and children in families, incest, and overrepresentation in
suicide and crime statistics are also instances of serious physical harm.
(3) negative psychological consequences, shame, low self-confidence, identity
challenges, etc;

(4) loss of language and in-depth knowledge of culture: and

(5) negative socio-economic and other social consequences which influence the life
chances of children as adults, and which are long term and can last for
generations (e.g., higher levels of unemployment, lower incomes, eco-
nomic and social marginalisation, alienation, mental illness).
ITM children should be guaranteed a right to learn both their own lan-
guages and at least a/the dominant language in the country where they
live, up to a high formal level, through bilingual education of various
kinds, most importantly including a right to mother-tongue-based
multilingual education (see Skutnabb-Kangas & McCarty 2008 for defin-
itions). All children must have the right to access to high-quality education,
regardless of what their MT is. Schools should support ITM communities’
right to reproduce themselves as Indigenous/tribal peoples/minorities
through enabling and encouraging intergenerational transfer of their lan-
guages. If not, ITM children do not enjoy basic educational linguistic human
rights (LHRs) that linguistically dominant group children and their parents
take for granted. Given the educational benefits of Mother-Tongue-Based
Multilingual Education (MLE) and, as importantly, the educational harm of
education of ITM children mainly through another language, it can be
forcefully argued that only MLE, at least in primary school, is consistent
with the provisions of several human rights documents (see Skutnabb-
Kangas & Dunbar 2010 and Skutnabb-Kangas et al. 2019 for elaboration).
No other form of education seems to guarantee the full development of the
human personality and the sense of its dignity, nor does it enable children
who are subject to non-MLE education to participate as effectively in
society. There is much research that shows that maintenance-oriented
MLE education (with good teaching of a dominant language as a second
language, with bilingual teachers) is often the best way to enhance ITM
children’s high-level bilingualism, school achievement, a positive develop-
ment of identity and self-confidence, and their future life chances (see, e.g.,
May 2017).
Skutnabb-Kangas and Dunbar (2010) (and our earlier UN Permanent
Forum on Indigenous Issues Expert reports) report in great detail what
kind of international and regional human rights instruments there are
about educational LHRs, and we refer here to them, and to Skutnabb-
Kangas et al. (2019), which gives updates on them (using Nunavut,
Canada, as an example: almost the whole population speaks Inuktut as
their MT, while most formal education is in English, with disastrous
results). Indigenous peoples and minorities are provided with some gen-
eral protections under various UN and regional charters and conventions.
The UN and other instruments discussed below are presented in detail in
both Skutnabb-Kangas and Dunbar (2010) and Skutnabb-Kangas et al.
(2019); both can be freely downloaded. One of the ‘best’ is Article 30 of
the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by more states

than any other UN Convention (the USA is the only exception). It pro-
vides that
in those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities or

persons of indigenous origin exist, a child belonging to such a minority
or who is indigenous shall not be denied the right, in community with
other members of his or her group, to enjoy his or her own culture, to
profess and practise his or her own religion, or to use his or her
own language.
The Human Rights Committee has noted (in its General Comment No. 23
of 1994 on Art. 27 of the ICCPR, International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights that the above Art. 30 is based on) that, although phrased
in the negative, the Article requires States to take positive measures in
support of minorities. Unfortunately, the Human Rights Committee has
not spelled out what those measures are, or whether they include measures
relating to the medium of education. UNDRIP, the United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Resolution A/61/L.67,
September 13, 2007) provides in Articles 13.1–2 and 14.1 the right for an
Indigenous child to learn the mother tongue, and in 14.2 access to the
‘education of the State’; the child does not have this access without know-
ing the State language; hence high levels of at least bilingualism must be a
goal in the education of an Indigenous child. But since state education
through the medium of the dominant state language is ‘free’ (although
there are school fees even in elementary education in many countries
where Indigenous peoples live), most Indigenous children are forced to
‘choose’ the ‘state education’. Their parents are ‘free’ to establish and
control their own educational systems, with their own languages as teach-
ing languages – but at their own cost. How many Indigenous and tribal
peoples can afford this? There is nothing about the State having to allocate
public resources to Indigenous-language-medium education (see Skutnabb-
Kangas & Dunbar 2010 for details).
There are still relatively few binding positive rights to MTM education or
bilingual education in present international law, including case law. Today
most language-related human rights are negative rights, only prohibiting
discrimination on the basis of language, as a prerequisite for the promotion
of equality. Despite both the positive tone of these and other recommenda-
tions, and the high level of awareness and networking of many ITMs, opt-
outs and claw-backs in educational provisions for ITMs are significant. In
addition, the many possibilities of interpreting even the few existing posi-
tive human rights instruments in ways that would support ITM children’s
educational LHRs have seldom been used adequately. Comparing the vari-
ous developments in how human rights instruments, courts and various
regulations have handled educational LHRs during the last many decades,
there seems to be a constant tension in how the place, function and future
of ITMs (seen as Other) and their languages has been envisaged. States seem

to strive towards some kind of unity, wholeness, integration, but ideas

about how this can be achieved vary. Segregation versus integration, and
multilingual versus monolingual are some of the main polarities here.
Homogenisation instead of positive unity and integration has often been
a result.
The work to prevent linguistic and cultural genocide in education and to
prevent the ‘ruining’ of the positive early multilingualism of children in
multilingually oriented countries, and to start seeing multilingualism as
the resource it is, is only at its beginning. Researchers, teachers and parents
have a moral responsibility to participate – all the research evidence to back
up this work has existed for a long time (see Skutnabb-Kangas 2019b
on this).
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Part Six
Multilingual
Children’s
Landscape

26
Linguistic Landscapes
in the Home: Multilingual
Children’s Toys, Books
and Games
Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer
26.1 Introduction
Literature addressing the theme of (playful) multilingual resources avail-

able to multilingual children and how they value and make use of such
resources is still scarce. Nevertheless, it is of paramount importance to
analyse if and how multilingual toys, books and games promote a dynamic
and integrative vision of multilingualism (instead of separated linguistic
resources) and thus a more liquid usage of languages in daily life, perme-
ated by translanguaging practices, both to live by and to learn from
(whether in formal or non-formal contexts). We distinguish between
monolingual, multilingual and mixed resources, the first referring to arte-
facts in just one language (for example, monolingual films or games), the
second to artefacts in, at least, two languages (for example, bilingual picture
books), and the third to artefacts that do not display any language and can
therefore be used in monolingual or multilingual modus. This contribution
focuses on ‘homescapes’, i.e., the languages visible in the family
environment. We will consider resources containing the presence of lan-
guages (monolingual and multilingual), and not object-free games (such as
chase or pretend play), which do not fall under the category ‘homescape’
because of their non-materiality.
This chapter presents a review regarding the constitution of and linguis-
tic practices around linguistic landscapes of infancy and affordances pro-
vided by those landscapes, in terms of linguistic, cognitive, affective, social
and identity development of the multilingual child. We will focus particu-
larly on: (i) the material multilingual resources of multilingual families and
communities coping with the transmission and maintenance of heritage
languages (and therefore involved in multiliteracy practices); (ii) children’s,
families’ and educators’ perceptions of multilingual environments and

606 S Í LV I A M E L O - P F E I F E R
resources; and (iii) children’s and families’ practices and agency within
such environments, in order to improve children’s language awareness
and literacy across languages.
This chapter is organised in three main sections: a review of studies
related to what here are called ‘homescapes’ in early years, in terms of
their materiality, perceptions of the speakers who inhabit them, practices
carried out within them, and their impact on the linguistic, cognitive,
affective, social and identity development of the multilingual child; a dis-
cussion of methodologies and research practices employed in these studies;
further research perspectives, both in terms of thematic strands and
methodological paths.
This contribution shows that studies analysing multilingual children
playing (whether alone, with other children or with a parent) with their
toys, books and games at home in studies that do not have explicit didactic
purposes are very residual and that this specific setting should be given
more attention. While it is undisputable that play, recreation and (playful)
interaction with adults are a cornerstone of children’s linguistic
development (Blum-Kulka 1997; Vygotsky 1962), also in multilingual set-
tings, more empirical studies are needed to analyse which affordances toys,
books and games offer to the development of multiliteracies, how these
affordances change throughout childhood and how children notice these
affordances (noticing being crucial for linguistic learning).
26.2 Homescapes and Multiliteracy Practices in Early Years:

Materiality, Perceptions and Practices
‘Multiliteracies’ refers to ‘multiple forms of literacy associated with differ-

ent channels or modalities such as, for instance, computer literacy, math-
ematical literacy (numeracy) and visual literacy’ (Stavans & Hoffmann 2015:
269). Being ‘multiliterate’ means being able to read and write in more than
one language and combining semiotic resources to create meaning (recep-
tively, productively or both) in a multiplicity of modalities (speech, writing
or music) and modes or semiotic resources (language, images or sounds)
(Melo-Pfeifer 2021; see Jewitt 2009, section ‘Glossary’). ‘Multiliteracy
practices’ thus refers to the array of actions involving multilingual written
texts that lead to the production of socially and individually meaningful
actions. Dealing with multilingual texts can refer either to the co-presence
of texts each written in a different language (monolingual resources), texts
juxtaposing information in more than one language (multilingual
resources) or texts resorting to code-meshing (Canagarajah 2011).
Not all families dealing with more than one language engage in multilin-
gual communicative practices nor in transmission practices that acknow-
ledge the benefit of bilingualism and multilingualism. Some families adopt

Linguistic Landscapes in the Home 607
a monolingual language policy, despite their multilingualism, either

because they wish to comply with the surrounding monolingual habitus
(in the school or within society), or because they have negative representa-
tions about growing up multilingual and their languages (which might be
considered shameful, lacking in prestige and status, etc.), or even because
they perceive their languages as not being socially relevant. This can be the
case both for parents and for children. However, families coping positively
with more than one language at home and within the community usually
foster the maintenance and transmission of such linguistic resources,
engaging in literacy practices that are respectful of diversity and that value
heritage languages. In such cases, the linguistic landscape at home
embodies the presence of those available resources, by displaying human
assets and mediational artefacts (toys, books, games, decorative objects,
videos, etc.) in different languages (see Ibrahim 2015) or referring to differ-
ent linguistic contexts (since some objects are language-free), exhibiting the
hidden potential of multilingual development through parent/family-medi-
ated interactions in childhood (Blum-Kulka 1997; Vygotsky 1962).
Homescapes can thus include both visual features, such as picture books,
and/or acoustic features such as music (the latter also called the ‘linguistic
soundscape’ by Scarvaglieri et al. (2013)). In this contribution, we will
consider the role of material homescapes showcasing visible linguistic
resources (called ‘language-defined objects’ by Aronin & Ó Laoire 2013), in
general, and games and toys more specifically, in the development of the
multilingual child. In doing so, we acknowledge those resources as part of a
lived bilingualism and multilingualism, i.e., as concrete evidence of what it
means to grow up multilingually and experience multilingualism. Such a
stance understands the concept of the homescape as a lens with which to
analyse how families experience language and literacy and their linguistic
funds of knowledge, i.e., ‘the diverse bodies of knowledge existing in
households and communities that develop from people’s social histories
and from their everyday practices’ (Reys & Moll 2008).
26.2.1 The Materiality of Homescapes

Taking linguistic landscapes at home and the multilingual child as a theme
requires understanding family and community as non-formal, naturalistic-
ally driven, primal agents of language education (Blackledge 2000; Li 1999;
Melo-Pfeifer 2015; Nomura & Caidi 2013; Saracho 2010), with specific funds
of knowledge (Gosselin-Lavoie & Armand 2019) and the ability to provide
children with rich heritage language environments. Families are social
units with particular norms of speech, observation, action and beliefs that
provide the foundations for language socialisation and development
(adapted from Curdt-Christiansen 2018; see also Slavkov 2017). Indeed,
‘home environments provide children’s first encounters with language

and literacy’ (Grieshaber et al. 2011: 115) and are relevant scenarios for
understanding how families deal with languages, intertwined with their
respective histories and trajectories (Hua & Li 2016).
Grounded in the definition of linguistic landscapes referring to ‘the social
context in which more than one language is present [which] implies the use
in speech or writing of more than one language and thus of multilingual-
ism’ (Gorter 2006: 1; 2013), the analysis of homescapes, understood as a
particular social and linguistic landscape, gives us a glimpse of the organisa-
tion of the private space of the family. The study of homescapes thus
provides valuable insights into family language policies, i.e., the sometimes
tacit (and unspoken) or blatantly explicit planning in relation to language
maintenance, transmission, and/or use within the home among family
members (Spolsky 2012; also King et al. 2008; Schwartz 2010; Schwartz &
Verschik 2016). Besides this display of languages and culturally charged
objects at home, other aspects can be considered a cause and a consequence
of family language policy (see, e.g., Slavkov 2017; Soler & Zabrodskaja 2017):
(i) families’ linguistic ideologies, policies and practices (language distribu-
tions across actors, spaces and actions); (ii) family members’ representa-
tions of the languages; (iii) (symbolic) roles of each language within the
family environment; (iv) hierarchies of languages in the family life; (v)
distribution of literacy experiences and events across different languages;
and (vi) the ethnolinguistic vitality of each language, at home, in the
community and abroad.
Considering the relationship between homescaping and family language
policies, the visual environment of the family may be considered central to
its discursive construction as a monolingual, bilingual or multilingual
family and to the perception of the home as a (multi)linguistic setting.
Indeed, ‘in both monolingual and bilingual contexts, children’s linguistic
environments are shaped to a large degree by the parents’ beliefs and
attitudes, which constitute the primary environments of early childhood’
(Schwartz 2010: 177).
Considering the framework established through research on ethnolin-
guistic vitality, linguistic landscapes certainly have a role in language
maintenance in multilingual contexts, such as regions, cities or, at a more
local level, schools and families (Ben-Rafael et al. 2006). It is therefore
plausible to assume that homescapes may also be perceived as an indicator
for the ‘vital signs’ of the family’s languages and their choice of whether (or
not) to care for a supportive, multilingual sociolinguistic environment.
Moreover, it could be argued that analysing homescapes shows us the
symbolic linguistic construction of the family space, thus inviting us to
view ‘language as a series of social and spatial practices’ (Laursen &
Mogensen 2016: 74). In monolingual literacy practices, ‘children develop
literacy skills in the home environment when (1) print items (e.g., news-
papers, books, magnetic refrigerator letters, posters, writing materials for
making lists, and memoranda) are displayed and (2) parent and child

discuss environmental print’ (Saracho 2010: 114). These artefacts and prac-
tices, which form part of the homescape, are also found in multilingual
families, thus making it reasonable to accept that children, intentionally or
unintentionally, acquire and develop multiliteracy skills when exposed to
and playing with multilingual items, which support the zone of proximal
development (Vygotsky 1962) by fostering increased noticing, a cognitive
ability necessary to detect new linguistic items. Stavans (2014; 2015) argues
that learning and literacy development can occur as children are immersed
in visual landscapes that provide them with adequate input in a variety of
scripts and languages.
Just speaking the heritage language at home has proven insufficient to
secure heritage language transmission and to foster literacy in that lan-
guage (Eisenchlas et al. 2016; Gosselin-Lavoie & Armand 2019; Sneddon
2000), especially when only one parent is engaged in the maintenance and
transmission of the heritage language. Instead, appropriate resources, such
as toys and books, and play peers are needed to create meaningful oppor-
tunities to learn and use the language, in situations that are real and
authentic. Therefore, while the role of parents is of paramount importance
in providing the first contact with the acoustic linguistic landscape of the
heritage language (above called soundscape), coupling it with emotional
and cognitive support, they must also surround themselves with objects
that support them in the task of transmitting multilingual literacy.
As stated by Nomura and Caidi (2013: 2), ‘rich literacy practices are often
embedded within family life, the home environment is often depicted as a
key predictor for the development of literacy skills in young children’. This
means that contact with rich written resources, such as books, is undeni-
ably a factor positively influencing the development of literacy skills in any
language. Furthermore, empirical studies carried out with families in dif-
ferent national formal and informal contexts have shown the positive
impact of home literacy environments made of rich language and print
resources on the emergence and development of children’s literacy abil-
ities. Another factor fostering those abilities is parents’ commitment to
reading books to children, showing that just having the resources around is
not enough as the parents still need to scaffold the content, in what may be
called linguistic and cognitive mediation (Council of Europe 2018), in order
to make it comprehensible (Grieshaber et al. 2011: 116; see Bloch 2018 and
Devos 2018 for literacy development projects in informal and non-formal
settings). In addition, languages spoken at home are also embedded in the
digital practices of early childhood, fostering children’s multilingual skills
because ‘practices involv[ing] looking at text and images on screens’ (Marsh
et al. 2017: 53) create (digital) multilingual homescapes which offer multi-
lingual digital literacy experiences, and are a well-established part of
lived multilingualism.
In summary, families make materials accessible to children and children
engage in contact with multilingual ‘mediascapes’ (Appadurai 1996), as

part of the homescapes, thereby fostering the development of multilitera-

cies. Indeed, ‘children’s surroundings offer natural opportunities to look at
and learn about printed language, such as on food packets, road signs and
labels’ (Marsh 2003: 372). Kirsch (2006: 264) reports that when multilingual
children are ‘asked how they learned languages, all children described the
contexts where they used them. They did not always distinguish between
language learning and language use; rather, they seemed to consider lan-
guage learning as a social process where such a distinction made little
sense’ (also Busch 2014).
26.3 Children’s Multilingual Environments at Home:

Resources and Linguistic Practices
26.3.1 Home Resources Used to Maintain the Heritage Language

It is striking to observe that studies reporting on children’s contact with
multilingual resources and games mainly present the perceptions of
parents and adults, in what Marsh calls an ‘interventionist stance’ (2003:
370). This observation is even more surprising if we acknowledge, with
Schwartz, that ‘children’s reports about their attitudes toward L1 mainten-
ance, in contrast to those of their parents, seem to reflect the real family
language policy and appear to be an indicator of the effectiveness of their
parents’ efforts to preserve the [Russian] language at home’ (2010: 178). In
such a stance, parents are overtly seen as active agents in facilitating
literacy practices at home, while children are given little consideration
with regards to expectations, goals and preferences. In fact, Spolsky (2012)
states that parents have little to no planning in their family language policy
and in many ways they do not do literacy agency intentionally. Agency
displayed by parents is commonly explained through ‘parental beliefs’
towards reading, literacy development and heritage language maintenance,
feeling that they are responsible for literacy development and heritage
language transmission (Da Costa Wätzold & Melo-Pfeifer 2020; Grieshaber
et al. 2011: 117).
Early research of home literacy environments and resources of
multilingual families tended to emphasise shared book reading and the
way adults scaffold understanding, while more recent research is viewing
home literacy environments as more complex and mediated by techno-
logical devices (Kirsch 2006; Little 2019). To the best of our knowledge,
the reading of picture books is still the most common practice (Gosselin-
Lavoie & Armand 2019; Little 2019) for some ages, namely in early years,
but other resources are usually combined (Kharchenko 2018).
Reporting on families trying to transmit and maintain the heritage
language in a linguistic majority environment, several authors analyse
children’s and families’ uses of a number of resources that are either
bilingual or can accommodate the introduction of the family repertoires:

reading text books and picture books (purchased in libraries or online or

sent by the family, as demonstration of agency in heritage language main-
tenance) (Gosselin-Lavoie & Armand 2019; Li 1999; Nomura & Caidi 2013;
Zhang & Slaughter-Defoe 2009), using childhood education materials (Li
1999; Zhang & Slaughter-Defoe 2009), showing TV programmes (Kirsch
2006; Tse 2001) and watching videos or films on online platforms or
DVDs (Li 1999), using smartphone applications (Little 2019) and educational
toys (Nomura & Caidi 2013) or online games (Eisenchlas et al. 2016; Little
2019), using online applications to communicate with the family abroad
(Nomura & Caidi 2013) and singing songs in the heritage language (Kirsch
2006; Saracho 2010). Some families also attend church, playgroups and
events in the heritage language (Da Costa Wätzold & Melo-Pfeifer 2020;
Zhang & Slaughter-Defoe 2009) and, when lacking resources in the lan-
guage, translate materials from the language of the host country into the
heritage language.
Other practices, although rarely reported, may include playing computer
and online games and exploring virtual worlds with the family, thus ‘inte-
grating new technologies within early literacy provision’ at home (Burnett
2010: 248; also Eisenchlas et al. 2016; Little 2019). In cases where technolo-
gies are present, using them tends to replicate the use of ‘old literacies’,
(Burnett 2010: 248), even if home-based practices tend to become largely
‘multilingual and often associated with networked, multimodal texts
embedded in meaningful, social contexts’ (Burnett 2010: 250; also Marsh
2003). Marsh et al. (2017: 48) also recognise that ‘children’s acts of decod-
ing, encoding and meaning-making are practiced in relation to letters and
words, signs, symbols, still images, moving images, sound and movement
(e.g., animation, gesture; . . .)’.
Albeit rarely, some studies also report on children referring to contacts
with visual and acoustic homescapes as ways to improve linguistic and
literacy skills. Kirsch (2006) presents children’s accounts of reading books,
watching programmes on TV, listening to music on the radio, looking at
signposts, doing homework with parents, looking for new words in the
dictionary in order to improve foreign and second language skills in multi-
lingual countries. Other children reported ‘activities such as listening to
music or people; watching TV; playing games; conversing; and reading and
writing’ (Kirsch 2006: 267). The author’s conclusion affirms ‘children’s
awareness of their rich linguistic setting and their understanding of prac-
tices fostering language learning’ (2006: 266), observing that children ‘felt
that they had a choice to use or to avoid [the] language’ (2006: 272),
demonstrating children’s agency in multilingual situations. Choosing and
displaying multilingual resources may therefore be considered a sign
of children’s conscious production of a multilingual space, ‘in which chil-
dren actively participate when they use language’ (Laursen & Mogensen
2016: 77; see Curdt-Christiansen and Sun, Chapter 11 in this volume, on
children’ agency).

Most of the literacy practices reported so far are not exclusive to

multilingual families, rather being also typical of monolingual families
engaged in the development of child literacy (Saracho 2010; Thomas &
Skage 1998). The common and key feature is the degree of parental
involvement. In the case of multilingual families, these usually display a
preference for active and communicative activities, where language
becomes more salient, such as, but not limited to, reading (Gosselin-
Lavoie & Armand 2019). Another distinctive trait is the idea of engage-
ment/commitment to multilingual practices, as multilingual families con-
sciously report attending playgroups, visiting community centres and
schools, and meeting other multilingual families (da Costa Wätzold &
Melo-Pfeifer 2020), thereby coupling multilingual homescaping with
multilingual external resources, such as peer groups. Grieshaber et al.
show that ‘most ethnic minority families had a child-directed HLE
[Heritage Language Education] . . ., which meant that a lot of minority
children are frequently exposed to school-related literacy activities in
their homes’ (2011: 118; also Gosselin-Lavoie & Armand 2019). This is
carried out through shared multiliteracy activities around reading (books,
magazines, newspapers, advertising brochures), writing (making shopping
lists, writing letters/postcards), listening (oral storytelling, watching
literacy-focused television programmes) and speaking (singing children’s
songs/rhymes) (Grieshaber et al. 2011; van Steensel 2006).
26.3.2 Linguistic Practices

Visual and/or acoustic homescapes and non-formal or informal linguistic
landscapes tend to be at least bilingual, combining resources in the lan-
guage(s) of the host country and the heritage language(s). To make the
situation more complex, families may be engaged in the maintenance and
transmission of more than one heritage language, in the case of mixed
couples where both parents have a migratory background, or be involved in
supporting their children’s curricular language learning, for which
resources in other languages are needed. Furthermore, the appeal of
English and the dominant presence of this language in society – and the
positive social representations attached to mastering it for academic suc-
cess – also motivate parents to look for opportunities to introduce this
language into children’s lives, whether they are being brought up bilingual
or not. Therefore, many of the resources present in the homescapes now-
adays are picturebooks, films, electronic devices and games that commonly
make use of English.
Several studies on home multilingual literacy practices have shown that
languages are kept separate. Parents usually engage in monolingual and
monoglossic practices, either by speaking, reading and writing in one
language at a time – depending on the language of the parent if they wish

to maintain the language of their cultural capital, resulting in a clear policy

of which parent is responsible for speaking and reading in which language
(Wilson 2020), or reading in the language of the majority for scholastic
purposes. These practices can be achieved through reading the original
books aloud or instantaneously translating their content and thus turning
one monolingual resource into another monolingual resource in another
language (or a situated oral production of a dual-language picture book,
according to children’s needs). In the case of bilingual books and picture
books, the same book can induce monolingual, (successive, simultaneous or
mixed) bilingual or multilingual reading strategies and subsequent inter-
actions (Gosselin-Lavoie & Armand 2019), even if parents seem to prefer a
monolingual stance. As reported by Daly (2017), the same book can further
serve two different languages, which can be problematic in the perception
of alphabetic systems, if the languages for which the book is being used do
not share the same script. Other families report comparative bilingual and
trilingual practices, while reading in different languages, and also report
engaging in lateral sequences of ‘focus on form’ in order to ensure that the
children understand the content and structures in the two languages (Daly
2017; also Gosselin-Lavoie & Armand 2019). Dual-language books embody
‘a particular kind of linguistic landscape’ as ‘the languages used in a picture
book reflect the relative status of languages, attitudes towards the lan-
guages, and perhaps also the purpose of the book’ (Daly 2017: 558).
Gosselin-Lavoie and Armand (2019) also point out that bilingual comics
and picture books may not represent families’ complex and dynamic use
of languages and linguistic varieties, and thus multilingual literacy prac-
tices, as literacy is not just dependent on reading books, but can also depend
on discourse preference patterns in child-parent oral interaction (Stavans
2012). In fact, literacy practices, as social practices, involve and lead to
linguistic and non-linguistic skills, namely enhanced oral competency, both
receptive and productive, noticing and metalinguistic awareness (Bialystok
2001, 2007), and are sometimes unintentional (Stavans 2014, 2015 on
kindergarten children experimenting with writing when they have been
exposed at home to multiple resources of different writing systems).
To sum up, this review of the literature shows that literacy practices and
resources that keep languages apart are preferred over more integrative
and dynamic ones. Regarding the linguistic landscape of dual-language
picture books, Daly also concludes that ‘most of the dual-language picture
books present the two language versions of the stories in a way which
suggests that languages must be kept separate’ (2017: 564). The same
author also concludes that few books present instances of translanguaging
(García & Li 2014) and are mostly intended to be read monolingually, not
always mirroring the linguistic practices of multilingual children and thus
reproducing an understanding of bilinguals as the juxtaposition of two
equivalent monolinguals.

26.4 Studying Multilingual Homescapes:

A Methodological Review
Studying multilingual homescapes as scaffold to multilingual, multicul-

tural and multiliteracy development is highly challenging. The main obs-
tacles to be overcome in such methodologies are access to the families and
their private environments, identifying and counting languages, research-
ing families’ language ideologies and practices, isolating variables in multi-
literacy development, and triangulating the whole information obtained in
field research. In the case of small case studies, issues related to represen-
tativity of the results could also be added. Stavans, reporting on the studies
analysing the effective outputs of children’s unintentional exposure to
literacy, adds that ‘there are methodological difficulties and empirical
obstacles in the way of studying what is actually learned, attended to or
inferred from this type of input’ (2015: 168)
Studies of multilingual homescapes tend to be mostly qualitative, based
on case study reports, even if quantitative and mixed-methods design were
also identified (for example, Little 2019). For qualitative studies, content
analysis of interviews with family members and interactions between
mother and child are the most common research instruments and
methods. For quantitative studies, family surveys are used. Some studies
offer a thick description and analysis of multilingual resources.
Most studies are also rather exploratory and/or small-scale studies, some-
times consisting of self-reported experiences, offering snapshots of multi-
lingual practices and individuals’ representations of those practices (mainly
from parents). It should also be stated that these studies tend to be gen-
dered (see Blackledge 2000 and Gosselin-Lavoie & Armand 2019 for
examples), with women more often being engaged in literacy events in
the family and the main providers of the information regarding
multilingual resources and practices in the family. The resources them-
selves (games, books, etc.) are seldom the object of analysis. Children
studied are aged from near-born to 18, but their direct input is rarely
sought or considered.
Several approaches can also be identified: Nomura and Caidi (2013) and
Park and Sarkar (2007) both interviewed mothers about their efforts to pass
on the heritage language, though Nomura and Caidi (2013) also combined
interviews with visual methods to grasp mothers’ representations about the
ideal library and its resources to support heritage language transmission.
A common strand is to use surveys asking parents ‘about demographics,
home print resources, home print practices and home media practices’
(Grieshaber et al. 2011: 121; also Marsh 2006). Eisenchlas et al. (2016)
conducted face-to-face demographic interviews with parents in order to
access family language policy and practices (in terms of patterns of lan-
guage use and linguistic goals and hopes) and they also tested the children
in their linguistic skills in the minority language. The design of this study is

quasi-experimental, the children being exposed to linguistic games in order

to improve their literacy skills (the study design includes a pre and post
written test for assessment purposes).
Some studies triangulate several data sources, but this does not always
mean that children’s voices are heard. In one case, ‘parents were co-
researchers in the study in that they made written observations on chil-
dren’s activities and captured practices using a digital camera and a digital
camcorder over the period of 1 month’ (Marsh et al. 2017: 1). Subsequently,
the mothers of the four children were interviewed over one month. In
another study, by Marsh (2006), the families were asked to complete a
literacy diary documenting the texts read (television and film, computer
games, comics, books and environmental print), over the period of 1
month. Families were subsequently interviewed for in-depth information
about children’s literacy practices.
In Gosselin-Lavoie and Armand (2019), the researchers observed and
registered the interactions between six parent–child dyads (with children
at pre-school age), in order to analyse the affordances co-constructed
during the reading of bilingual picture books. This study also collected
sociodemographic and sociolinguistic data through questionnaire, as well
as information about family reading habits. The researchers performed a
detailed conversation analysis of the linguistic means employed by actors
during the reading task, namely in cases of emergence of linguistic
incomprehension.
Little (2019), using a mixed-method research design, combined a survey
(with 21 families) and an in-depth interview with those families (including
children) aiming to explore families’ attitudes and practices regarding the
use of digital tools for heritage language learning and use, and literacy
development.
Five studies report systematic involvement of children in data collection
(Kirsch 2006; Laursen & Mogensen 2016; Little 2019; Sneddon 2000; Wilson
2020). Kirsch (2006) interviewed children about their process of becoming
multilingual in a multilingual environment. Laursen and Mogensen (2016)
interviewed children and generated activities, accompanying one child
during the 7-year project. Little (2019) interviewed 10 families, including
the children, about their attitudes and practices of using apps and digital
games for heritage language learning. Sneddon (2000) investigated the
language use and literacy practices of bilingual children and their three-
generation families, in the community and in school, through interviews,
recordings and observations. Wilson (2020) analyses how parents’ and
children’s views on the efforts to maintain the heritage language may
collide, and how families’ language policies can have a counterproductive
effect on children’s willingness to acquire and use it. Finally, in another
strand regarding the analysis of multilingual resources, Daly (2017) pro-
vides us with a close quantitative and qualitative (content) analysis of dual-
picturebooks (English-Spanish).

26.5 Further Research Perspectives: A Programme?
In Sections 26.3 and 26.4, we summarised the thematic and methodological

strands in research on how multilingual families, in general, and multilin-
gual children, more particularly, engage in home literacy practices through
books, games and toys. In terms of thematic evolution, it could be import-
ant to analyse how the introduction of new resources changes the linguistic
landscape of the home. Also important could be to focus on the way
‘intermittent’ and dynamic landscapes are constructed, through artefacts
and resources that change what languages are being displayed (television,
computer screen). This refers to how individuals switch languages and
language settings in their devices in order to change the linguistic space
they inhabit.
As we saw, little space has so far been given to children’s voice within
research studies of home linguistic landscapes and multilingualism, even if
more recent studies are already considering them (Ibrahim 2015, 2019;
Wilson 2020). In order to hear and understand children’s agency, it would
be relevant to analyse ‘self-directed literacy development by young children
in their home language’ (Grieshaber et al. 2011: 141) and how children act
as autonomous user/learner at home. Also interesting could be an analysis
of the relationship between imposed multilingual landscapes (top-down)
and chosen and created landscapes (bottom-up). Such a thematic develop-
ment could provide us with information on how children make use of their
language speaker agency and their space at home, and how they voluntarily
give saliency to different languages in their lives: Which languages do they
choose to display? In which spaces? With which affective attachments and
cognitive goals? Which languages are attached to which toys, games and
readings? Are there any intercultural differences and similarities found in
homescaping across cultures? How are multilingual linguistic practices and
the reasoning behind them different from the practices of monolingual
children and their families? Are toys, books and games of multilingual
children different from those of monolingual children? How different
are they?
In terms of thematic strands representing a more immediate challenge
for recent studies, it could be important to identify and explain the continu-
ities and discontinuities between homescapes, schoolscapes and other
social linguistic landscapes across time (see Reys & Moll 2008: 151 for a
similar claim). How are they connected? How do they contradict or oppose
each other? How do they evolve? When do they display competing interests
and ideologies?
Another evolution in this field could be the recognition that homescapes,
just like other linguistic landscapes, are dynamic and heterogeneous.
Accepting this position could lead researchers to analyse children’s private
and ‘public’ homescapes: languages and resources that are encountered in
spaces which are specific to the child (such as a bedroom or part of the

living room which the child may use as their own space) and in spaces
which are shared by other family members (Marsh 2006: 376). Also inter-
esting would be an analysis of children’s contact with and interpretation of
different linguistic homescapes, both in cases of divorced parents and when
spending time with other (multilingual) families.
In terms of the nature of multilingual homescapes, we would not wish to
give an idea of languages being solely those that are spoken and/or written.
In this vein, valuable questions to ask would be: How are visual and acoustic
landscapes combined in the case of unwritten languages? How are tactile
and gestural landscapes present in families with deaf or mute members?
How is bimodal bilingualism used at home? Which toys, books and games
are available and develop children multilingualism, including non-spoken
languages (braille and gestural)?
Furthermore, it could be thought-provoking to analyse how linguistic
landscapes (written, spoken, sign language, tactile languages) combine with
each other and create spaces of multisensorial/synesthetic translanguaging
(Prada & Melo-Pfeifer forthcoming). In addition, if we stretch the concept of
homescape to embrace a wider perception of multiple language-culture
environments, it becomes significant to study the multisensorial/synes-
thetic multilingual and intercultural surroundings of family lives, encom-
passing objects, artefacts, and other family members (as in Ibrahim 2019),
smells and tastes, colours and textures that make multilingualism and
multiculturalism an intense experience (Pennycook 2017) in a host country,
contributing to the identity of the family.
In terms of methodology, a diversification of methods and individuals
might be expected in the near future. Children could be called upon to
become co-ethnographers of their homescapes, involved in sampling and
interpretation processes. In the direct environment they are expected to
describe, they could walk/tour around the house, describing their environ-
ments as experts, being acknowledged as ‘active co-creators of the spaces in
which language is used’ (Laursen & Mogensen 2016: 74). They could also
make use of visual and multimodal methods (Kalaja & Melo-Pfeifer 2019),
such as drawings, collages and photos, to depict and explain their interpret-
ation of their homescapes. Different voices inhabiting the homescape
(grandparents, siblings, for example) might also be heard, displaying con-
tinuities and discontinuities of practices and ideologies within the family.
How different family members chose their toys and books could also be
analysed: Who chooses what books, toys, games get brought into the home
and how is this agency distributed and/or attributed? With what intention?
Another strand could be called a ‘diachronic approach’: in this perspective,
changes in homescapes from childhood into adolescence could be analysed,
as the child comes in contact with other languages or is subject to heritage
language attrition and language loss. Another diachronic perspective could
be an analysis of the evolution of literacy skills, depending on the prolonged
contact with multilingual resources.

26.6 Conclusion
This contribution has shown how studies explicitly exploiting homescapes

are scarce and how useful it would be to consider homescapes as a research
object, considering the perception of multilingualism as lived and con-
structed by the family through visual, acoustic, and multimodal and multi-
sensorial means. Since, from an ecological perspective (Van Lier 2004), the
development of literacy competences depends on and occurs within com-
plex environments through intricate interactions within them, we should
consider the study of homescapes in their relation to other linguistic
landscapes, such as those at school (formal setting) and in informal (such
as theatres, museums, etc.) and non-formal learning settings (such as
organised playgrounds to practice the heritage language with other chil-
dren). Indeed, the home as a ‘niche’ for multiliteracy development should
not be seen as separated from other linguistic environments.
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Language, Culture and Curriculum, 22(2), 77–93.

27
Linguistic Landscapes
in School
Eva Vetter
27.1 The Relevance of Linguistic Landscapes for the Initial

Stages of Schooling
The first phase of schooling is paramount to a child’s rapid development

until the age of 10. Most commonly, children enroll in primary schooling
between the ages of 5 and 7. Depending on national regulations, enrollment
can, of course, start earlier, e.g., when elementary or pre-schools are
counted as well. The pre-school/school divide can be more (e.g., Austria,
Germany, Switzerland) or less (e.g., France, USA) pronounced. From a global
perspective, two out of every three children participate in organized learn-
ing one year before the official primary entry age (UN Economic and Social
Council 2019: 11). The rate is, however, lower than 50 percent in Sub-
Saharan Africa and in least developed countries (ibid). Unsurprisingly, there
are significant divergences across regions and countries with respect to the
initial stages of schooling, particularly rates of enrollment, quality, or
institutionalization of schooling. Despite these divergencies, all schools
worldwide share the common feature of representing rich literate
environments where children develop functional literacy and numeracy
skills, i.e., learn to read and write and do basic arithmetic. Therefore, the
initial stages of schooling are a major component in all worldwide
education strategies, as particularly manifest since 2015 in the
Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, i.e., to ensure inclusive and equit-
able quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
(https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg4).
For a few decades, research into the linguistic landscape (LL) has substan-
tially contributed to the generation of language-related knowledge about a
variety of educational themes. That the present chapter is limited to the
landscapes of educational institutions must not obscure the wide range of
other actors that similarly contribute to the creation of rich and dynamic
literate environments such as libraries or (mobile) resource centers and

624 EVA VETTER
families. The scarcity of research in these fields and the multifaceted results
of landscape research performed in or initiated by actors in educational
institutions for young children have led to this limitation.
Even under the assumption that monolingualism and monolingual
children exist, childcare and schools with exclusively monolingual children
are rare. When enrolling in school, children will generally encounter other
children with linguistic repertoires, experiences, and practices different
from their own. From this perspective, nearly all schools are multilingual
although these multilingual resources might not be seen or heard.
Language education policy of states and schools responds very differently
to the linguistic properties of citizens and pupils. The national and local
strategies range from ignoring and banning all resources except the code
that is chosen in terms of the national language to (moderate) multilingual
policies. France is a well-known example for the adoption of a monolingual
language policy that penetrates all areas of human life and that is particu-
larly influential in schools. Moderate multilingual strategies include
existing linguistic resources in a variety of ways, a historical example is
the language policy adopted in the Austrian part of the Austrian-Hungarian
Empire (Schjerve-Rindler 2003).
The presence of language/s and different linguistic practices is an issue of
language policy and of human rights. The first aspect has been acknow-
ledged by language education policy makers such as the European Union
and the Council of Europe. In its 2019 Council Recommendation (OJ 2019
R 189), the Council of the European Union emphasizes the need for multi-
lingual competence and calls for comprehensive approaches. Member states
are called to value linguistic diversity of learners and to validate language
competence resulting from informal learning (i.e., learning which is not
organized in terms of objectives, time or learning support). This recommen-
dation explicitly states that the development of language awareness shall be
fostered in school (OJ 2019 R 189: 18). The commission staff working
document preparing the recommendation is precise about what valuing
linguistic diversity can mean for schools:
Acknowledging the linguistic diversity of schools can include the

incorporation of languages taught in schools, but also other learner’s
home languages, for example through display of signs and notices.
Schools can create physical and symbolic spaces for different languages
that children use and learn. Languages can be not only reflected the
curriculum and teaching practices, but are also ‘heard and seen’ literally
in schools.
(SWD(218) 174 final, part 1/2)
Hearing and seeing languages is not restricted to schools. Article 50.1 of the
Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (1996) gives any language the
right to be visible in the linguistic landscape: “All language communities
have the right for their language to occupy a pre-eminent place in

Linguistic Landscapes in School 625
advertising, signs, external signposting, and in the image of the country as a

whole” (UDLR 1996). The place of language inside and outside schools is
exactly what linguistic landscape research started to investigate a few
decades ago. Its relevance for children’s development results from the
assumption that linguistic landscapes are at the heart of the linguistic
reality for most children in the world and at the same time part of the
pedagogical and didactic enterprise of teaching and learning in complex
multilingual contexts. Hence, linguistic landscape research investigates
features of the multilingual world that are paramount to the context of
the child’s intensive social, emotional, linguistic, and cognitive develop-
ment at the transitory stages to and the first phase of schooling.
This chapter will be tripartite, starting with an overview of the develop-
ment of linguistic landscape research (Section 27.2), presenting studies on
landscapes inside and outside schools (Section 27.3) and lastly coming to
pedagogies that include the landscape (Section 27.4). With this, the chapter
will showcase major results of linguistic landscape research in the field of
early schooling and draw on a variety of theoretical and methodological
groundings of this research.
27.2 Widening the Scope of Linguistic Landscape Research:

A Historical Account
Linguistic landscape research focuses “on public spaces as arenas of lan-

guage use, representation, and controversy” (Shohamy 2017: 44). Linguistic
landscape research as an area of research on its own (Coulmas 2009;
Spolsky 2009) is predated by the study of public signage. Some works even
date back to the 1970s and 1980s (Masai 1972, 1983, as cited in Backhaus
2019). However, the empirical study of linguistic landscape and ethnolin-
guistic vitality (Landry & Bourhis 1997) is widely acknowledged as the
beginning of linguistic landscape research.
Linguistic landscape refers to the visibility and salience of languages on

public and commercial signs in a given territory or region. It is proposed
that the linguistic landscape may serve important informational and
symbolic functions as a marker of the relative power and status of the
linguistic communities inhabiting the territory.
(Landry & Bourhis 1997: 1)
Since then, this field of research has developed rapidly (Backhaus 2019).
The quantity of publications, particularly of edited volumes (Backhaus
2007; Blackwood et al. 2016; Blommaert 2013; Hult 2018; Pütz & Mundt
2018; Shohamy & Gorter 2009) and articles published in the disciplinary
journal Linguistic Landscape: An International Journal (John Benjamins,
Amsterdam and Philadelphia), initiated a theoretical and methodological

626 EVA VETTER
diversification that has blurred this highly dynamic branch of sociolinguis-

tics. Although the development of this research is multifaceted, two prom-
inent development lines borne out of such expansion can be identified, i.e.,
the shift from a quantitative to a more qualitative orientation (Backhaus
2019; Huebner 2016), and the broadening from linguistic aspects to semi-
otic assemblages of discursive modalities (Pennycook 2019).
These two features are also evident in Shohamy’s overview on the
development of linguistic landscape research (Shohamy 2017: 45–62).
Phase 1, “Documenting Diversity,” concerns quantitative studies counting
the languages present in public space in order to measure language diver-
sity (e.g., Ben-Rafael et al. 2006). An important distinction made in this
phase is between top-down signs, i.e., signs initiated by institutions and
corporations, and bottom-up signs that were installed by individuals.
Shohamy notes that these studies overlooked internal diversity. She
stresses the need to address the complexities of the social world beyond
the number of languages and to investigate deeper levels of diversity such
as different modalities, status and prestige of languages. This is partly
realized in Phase 2, “Expanding the LL Construct to Multimodality,” which
incorporates semiotic practices such as images, graffiti, sounds and smells,
bodies and people. Going beyond language and including the specific role
of people for the creation, interpretation or contestation of signs provides
more valid interpretations about the distribution of languages in public
space (Hult 2009; Shohamy & Waksman 2009, 2010). The conjunction of
LL research with nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon 2004) is such an
approach that systematically includes the human action behind the lin-
guistic landscape and “opens new possibilities for making discursive con-
nections between the actions of individuals who inhabit a particular
multilingual social space and the societies of which they form part”
(Hult 2009: 95).
Phase 3, “Language Diversity in the City: Contesting Homogeneity,”
focuses on smaller units, particularly cities, and their diversity.
Multimodal linguistic landscape can serve as a tool for contesting the
homogenizing top-down policy (e.g., Shohamy & Waksman 2012). The focus
of Phase 4, “Expanding Diversity: Focus on Neighborhoods,” is concerned
with even smaller units of analysis, such as ghettos, districts, regions,
neighborhoods, or buildings. The last phase identified by Shohamy,
“Engagement in Diversity: Critical Awareness and Activism,” shifts to activ-
ism in terms of a possible willingness to transform the space and to
awareness resulting from the engagement with the linguistic landscape.
The expansion of LL research over the last decades has also significantly
influenced the understanding of LL relating to educational institutions and
the way it can be investigated. Three facets are particularly relevant here,
namely (a) the wide range of understanding signs, (b) the multitude of
theories and methodologies that can be linked to LL, and (c) more recent
approaches towards the contextualization of signs.

Multimodality is the first developmental feature to be considered.

Multimodal signage seems to have supplanted the understanding of signs
that is restricted to words only. Following its broadest definition, the LL
database includes all visible and nonverbal signs which communicate mean-
ings and intentions such as signposts, photographs, videos, safety signs,
slogans, lighting and printed materials, graffiti or tattoos, and cyber space
(Pütz & Mundt 2018: 2). The expansion of objects (and practice) under investi-
gation has initiated a proliferation of new terms. Semiotic landscape is an
alternative term used for encompassing semiotic signage and multimodality
in the sense of a discursively constructed space that symbolically represents
social, cultural and political values (Jaworski & Thurlow 2010). Skinscape, as
coined by Peck and Stroud (2015), extends LL to the body; smellscapes
(Pennycook & Otsuji 2015) or linguistic soundscaping (Scarvaglieri et al. 2012)
are other terms that indicate a particular focus. Material culture is used as
proposed by Aronin and Ò Laoire (2012, 2013) for widening the scope of the
linguistic landscape to materialities such as artifacts, objects and spaces.
Multimodality is a common ground in all areas of linguistic landscape
research, also in those that are particularly relevant for young children, i.e.,
the school- and homescape. The term schoolscape was proposed by Brown to
describe “the physical and social setting in which teaching and learning take
place” (Brown 2005: 79). Homescape, a term first used in the context of
Australian multicultural theater (Tompkins 2001), has been redefined and
designates “a space where we build experiential memories, both individually
and collectively, that are created through emotional intimacy” (Boivin 2020:
8). Both scapes surpass the conrete geographical place and include the sym-
bolic context for local interactions that is embedded “in layered translocal
space and time scales” in the sense of Canagarajah (2013: 822).
The second facet that influences LL research in educational institutions is
the impressive multitude of theories and methodologies that can be linked
to LL. Theoretical grounding as presented in Shohamy and Gorter (2009)
ranges from historical, sociological, economic, and ecological to sociolin-
guistic orientations and draws upon theoretical components such as lan-
guage management (Spolsky 2009), Bourdieu’s concept of power and
Lefèvre’s notion of space (Ben-Rafael 2009), or the speaking model of
Hymes (Huebner 2009). As to methodology, Blommaert’s (2016: 2) plea for
ethnographic-historical approaches has been heard, since observation of
language use, participant observation or informal interviews have come
to dominate over counting and ranking languages (Pütz & Mundt 2018: 5).
The third developmental feature is the increasing contextualization of
the signs that Barni and Bagna (2015) refer to in terms of a critical turn in
which multimodal signs are seen as situated in sociocultural and historical
space, hence, creators and recipients are assigned a more active role and
human agency comes to the fore.
With respect to linguistic landscape in school, Backhaus’ warning against
normativity is noted: the more recent qualitative and ethnographic trend

628 EVA VETTER
should not discredit former quantitative research. Depending on the

research question, a mixture of methodologies can bring about promising
results. There is “definitely no one proper way of doing linguistic landscape
research” (Backhaus 2019: 165), which also holds true for LL research
relating to young children.
27.3 Studies on Schoolscapes and Beyond
Linguistic landscape research in education covers the full range of research

perspectives outlined above, with a clear tendency towards mixed and
ethnographic approaches that actively include the actors that both influ-
ence and are influenced by this space. Following Brown, schoolscapes repre-
sent the “vital, symbolic context in which the curriculum unfolds and
specific ideas and messages are officially sanctioned and socially supported”
(Brown 2005: 79). Schoolscapes are the material environment where texts
and images “constitute, reproduce and transform language ideologies”
(Brown 2012: 282). Beyond the growing body of research concerned with
the ideological working of schoolscapes, there is also research about the
outside world, i.e., the world outside the institutions. In the context of
childhood multilingualism, the interest in the linguistic landscape outside
can be placed under the motto of considering the whole world as a class-
room (Malinowski 2015). The pedagogical purpose of such an investigation
is mostly directed towards developing language awareness, critical literacy,
or language skills. There is a third line of thinking about the LL in relation
to young children, i.e., pedagogies that include multimodal signage without
labeling them schoolscape or linguistic landscape. Although the boundaries
between these three research strands are not always clear-cut, this tripar-
tite structure of the present chapter is analytically purposeful since it
enables us to distinguish landscape research (inside and outside schools)
from pedagogical and didactic activities that draw on the potentialities
of signage.
27.3.1 The Inside World aka Schoolscapes

Research in schoolscapes shares the interest in the production, transform-
ation and contestation of (language) ideologies with earlier anthropological
research about the influence of cultural visualizations on socialization
(Cohen 1971; Johnson 1980). The power of schoolscapes lies in the presen-
tation of cultural orientations and narratives without critical interpretation
as they provide opportunities for coherent socialization experiences that
are likely to remain unreflected, particularly at an early age. Most of the
research originates from this basic assumption. These opportunities for
orientations and experiences can have many different forms, as will be
shown in the following examples from minority language education.

Brown’s (2005) study of Võro culture and language, in which she intro-
duces the term schoolscape, is based on intensive ethnography in rural
Southeastern Estonia. Her research in schools includes observations of
Võro language classes, interviews with Võro-language teachers, and an in-
depth case study of an individual school based on observation and photog-
raphy across different spaces in the school (foyer, classrooms and museum).
A major result is that the schools’ importance for regional language, cul-
ture and identity is not visible in the schoolscape. In her case study, the
school museum, for example, which is a space typically dedicated to the
region and local community in Estonian schools, turned out to be a periph-
eral and inaccessible place with unorganized and dusty materials. These
local and regional materials stand in contrast to the shiny artifacts that
connect the school to both Europe and Estonia. Brown concludes that the
maintenance of regional and local identity is hampered by the traditionally
strong role of national identity and the emerging new importance of
European identity in education. She concludes that regional identity is
marginalized in Estonian education and that the strong asymmetry
between Estonian and European identity, on the one hand, and local/
regional identity, on the other, condemns the activities for the regional
revival of Võro to failure.
About 10 years later, Brown revisited the schools and elaborated a quali-
tative method for comparing schoolscapes across time (Brown 2018). In the
second study, she visited the same schools as well as the language nest
kindergartens that had emerged in the meantime, and took photographs of
any evidence of the regional language in and around the school or kinder-
garten. Moreover, she interviewed the same teacher participants. Brown
based her investigation into the teachers’ reflections on and experiences
with language policy work on an understanding of the past as continuously
present (Halonen et al. 2015: 4). The comparison of the schoolscapes from
both studies reveals “minor, but noticeable changes over a decade” (Brown
2018: 17). Contrary to expectations, the presence of the regional language
Võro has increased. The results from the observation and diachronic inter-
view data analysis point to three dynamics (“engines”; Brown 2018: 15) that
drove this transformation. First, institutionally appropriate, familiar forms
of materials in the regional language such as Võro calendars are available.
Second, the regional culture and language have obtained market appeal and
serve as a distinctive feature for the promotion of the institutions. Third,
the teachers are committed to sound immersion pedagogy. This last
dynamic is particularly remarkable since the development of the immer-
sion pedagogy is grounded in the teachers’ dedication to in-service teacher
workshops. Teacher education did not include immersion instruction.
Nevertheless, teachers transformed the schoolscape in kindergarten –
Brown coins the term kinderscape (Brown 2018: 17) – into spaces for Võro
language learning. Brown’s inquiry into the schoolscape is particularly
innovative for the unique diachronic multimethod methodology.

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Laihonen and Tódor (2015) carried out another project in a minority

setting that explores the potential of research into schoolscape for histor-
ical change. In their study in Szeklerland (Romania), they analyse the
changes in the schoolscape that are generated by the political, economic
and social transition after the fall of the Ceauşescu regime in 1989.
Democratization and the revival of a Hungarian identity have also changed
the way language/s are displayed. In contrast to Brown (2018), who revisited
her research site after a decade, this study in Hungarian schools took place
within one particular period of time (summer 2012 to spring 2013) and
registered the diachronic dimension through the artifacts from the past
and qualitative methods such as interviews. The authors focused on one
elementary school in a village with 99 percent Hungarian first-language
speakers, who use the Szekler dialect of Hungarian as a local vernacular.
Similar to Brown, their investigation is based on an ethnographic approach
and addresses the diachronic facets of the schoolscape. Following Aronin
and Ó Laoire (2012), Laihonen and Tódor (2015) include all kinds of signs,
such as maps and images, with or without text, into their concept of visual
communication. In an ethnographic and multimethod approach, Laihonen
and Tódor (2015) did intensive fieldwork in the village and its school in
order to gather various kinds of data such as photographs of the village,
inside and outside the school, interview data with the present and former
school director, parents, local villagers, staff, data from a survey among
pupils, and from classroom observation. This approach enabled them to
learn about emic interpretations of the schoolscape alongside the research-
ers’, i.e., their own, etic interpretations, and to make change visible. The
analysis of the photographs brought about a functional differentiation with
Romanian used for state administrative purposes and Hungarian indexing
local heritage and everyday life at school. It comes as no surprise that
Romanian is much less present in the schoolscape of the Hungarian-
medium school than Hungarian, but what is noteworthy is the absence of
the local Szekler dialect. Laihonen and Tódor (2015: 377) conclude that the
particular solidarity built upon language is that of a normative Hungarian
language community. Szeklerness, however, is not absent. Szekler identity
is not displayed through language, but through local folk emblems such as
the flag, artifacts made of wood or costumes.
Interview data allowed for more precise diachronic interpretations.
Although the signs from the Ceauşescu period had been mostly removed,
there remained bilingual graduation boards showing people in urban dress.
Research participants explained in the interviews that this was part of a
state-wide dress code for schools. Later class reunion boards display people
in Szekler folk costume and monolingual inscriptions in Hungarian. These
signs index the post-socialist area, de-urbanization and local authenticity,
and contribute, together with other artifacts, to the construction of a local
Szekler identity. Laihonen and Tódor (2015: 376) conclude that their multi-
method analysis of the local schoolscape enabled them to provide a close

diagnosis of an ongoing transformation since the signs “displayed the

changing aspirations of the local community, while the official curriculum
was changing much more slowly.”
Schoolscape research that captures change requires a specific and com-
plex methodology. It is, however, a particularly rewarding enterprise, as the
above-mentioned studies in minority schooling have shown. The following
contributions focus on synchronic aspects of the schoolscape.
In their 2015 study in the Basque Autonomous Community, Gorter and
Cenoz (2015) found that the overall density of signs is particularly high in
primary in contrast to secondary schools. From their “reasonably complete
overview” of all signs in the seven schools investigated, they conclude that
Basque clearly predominates, since it is used on 70 percent of all signs
(monolingual and bi/multilingual signs combined); Spanish comes second.
This differs from signage in the public space surrounding the schools, on
which Basque was present on only half of the signs and Spanish was
dominant. Moreover, Gorter and Cenoz take up the distinction between
the symbolic and informative function of signs (Landry & Bourhis 1997) and
specify the functions that signs can fulfill, e.g., educating the children to
behave in specific ways, informing about the function of a room, selling a
product or service, informing about the dos and don’ts of school life as well
as representing a teaching aid when signs are produced as (an extension of )
learning materials.
Similar to the difference between public space and schoolscape revealed
in Gorter and Cenoz (2015), Osterkorn and Vetter (2015) found that the
schoolscapes of Breton private minority schooling differ significantly from
the linguistic landscape outside school. Grounded in Lefebvre’s (1991) triad
of “the spatial practices,” “the representation of space” and “the spaces of
representation,” this study includes ethnographic and interview data, and
reveals the emotional component of top-down and bottom-up spatial prac-
tice, i.e., the linguistic day-to-day practices of individuals in a space, who
contribute to the construction of this space. The authors concluded that the
discrepancy between the monolingual schoolspace and the pupils’ commu-
nicative demands created considerable tensions and silenced the playful
aspects of multilingual practice inside school. Despite their considerable
theoretical and methodological differences, both studies in minority
schooling reveal how the meaning conveyed by signage re/produces a par-
ticular normative ideology supporting the minority language. They demon-
strate how the schoolscape fosters local language education policies, even if
these stand in contrast to wider (i.e., regional or national) norms, as is the
case for Brittany.
Different multilingual settings are a rich research arena for schoolscape
studies as also illustrated in Biró’s study in Hungarian schools in
Sepsiszentgyörgy/Sfântu Gheorghe, Szeklerland (Biró 2016). In contrast to
the schoolscape research of Laihonen and Tódor (2015), Biró’s study in
Szeklerland focuses on the languages learned and taught at school.

632 EVA VETTER
Members of this Hungarian minority usually attend Hungarian-medium

schools, learn the official state language Romanian at school and use
Hungarian in everyday life (Biró 2016: 112). In these Hungarian-medium
schools, English and German are taught as foreign languages in addition to
Romanian, which is also used as medium of instruction in some subjects,
such as Romanian history. The outcome of teaching Romanian is con-
sidered as rather limited, in contrast to that of English, which is considered
as high. The aim of Biró’s study was to reveal the hidden curriculum, i.e.,
the values, expectations and ideologies associated with the language/s,
particularly Hungarian, Romanian, English and German.
Biró involves the authors and recipients of the signs in a particularly
substantial way when she applies the tourist guide technique, a methodology
originating in the walking tour (Garvin 2010: 255–56), which was adapted by
Szabó (2015) to educational institutions. Researchers and teachers co-explore
the schoolscapes in eight schools, with the teachers acting as school guides
and researchers as tourists, asking questions and taking photos. Interviews
with teachers and students complement the data base. Similar to Gorter and
Cenoz (2015), Biró finds a high density of signs in primary schools in contrast
to secondary schools and links this up with “an increasing lack of interest on
behalf of high-school students . . . who have become immune to the abun-
dance of messages around them” (Biró 2016: 118). Moreover, Biró shows that
the top-down policy presented by the authorities of the institutions and
visible on permanent or long-term signs at entrances or walls of corridors
supports the Romanian language. These top-down signs mirror state norma-
tivity. Teacher engagement and student involvement, on the contrary, pro-
duce temporary displays as a result of bottom-up policies and outline a
multilingual (Hungarian–Romanian–English) environment.
Minority schooling is a prominent field of schoolscape research, although
not the only one. In the following cases of elite and everyday
multilingualism at school, the ideological working of the schoolscape on
identity is possibly less foregrounded than in the case of minority schools,
although multimodal signage similarly relates to power asymmetries. The
focus of schoolscape research in these schools lies on the production and
reception of signs that are conceived of as an environmental print that
creates language input for the children and increases language awareness.
Dressler’s (2015) research in a German bilingual program in a Canadian
elementary public school (kindergarten to sixth grade) is one of the rare
investigations into sign-making practices as a means for promoting
bilingualism. The school under investigation had two programs that were
located in separate wings of the building, the German bilingual program
and an English-medium program. Following Giles and Tunks (2010),
Dressler conceives of signs as the children’s first concrete exposures to
written language, which is beneficial to their early literacy. When teachers
create signs for the classroom, they add homemade environmental print
(Giles & Tunks 2010) to the environmental print of the world that they

see around them and that they are already accustomed to. Dressler uses the
holistic framework developed by Hult (2009) in order to systematically
include human practice behind the schoolscape. She combines nexus analy-
sis (Scollon & Scollon 2004) and traditional visual analysis of photographs
based on a functional classification following Halliday (1969). This allows
her to make systematic interpretations about the distribution of the lan-
guages at school. Nexus analysis examines the mutual constitutive relation
of discourse and society. Following Scollon and Scollon (2004), there are
three cycles of discourse coming together in a social action, i.e., discourses in
place (wider circulating ideas), interaction order (norms of social behavior)
and the historical body (ideas embodied in the social practices) (Dressler 2015:
134). Dressler takes up the framework suggested by Hult (2009: 95) in order
to link the social actions behind signage to wider circulating discourses.
During her fieldwork, Dressler created a slide show with representative
photographs and organized a focus group of teachers to gain insights into
the sign-makers’ identity, the decision making about hanging a sign and
about the function of the sign as well as the intended audience. The results
of the focus group revealed the diversity of the sign-makers with teachers as
the most productive ones (historical body). The way of producing signs
(interaction order) is characterized by the coexistence of orderly placement
and organic proliferation. The analysis of purpose, audience and function of
the signs pointed to the dominance of representational signs in the class-
rooms and regulatory signs in the common areas as well as to a clear
asymmetry between the German bilingual and the English-medium wing
concerning representational signs (discourses in place). Dressler concluded
that: (a) German-English signs are primarily placed by teachers, (b) not all
signs are subject to orderly placement, and (c) the promotion of
bilingualism is only one of several discourses at school. From this, she
derives constraints upon responsibility for and reach of sign-making, such
as the teachers’ difficulty in promoting bilingualism in the context of the
other discourses present. In order to minimize these constraints, Dressler
formulates three concrete recommendations for educators: They should (a)
explicitly target bilingualism through bottom-up signage, (b) invite stu-
dents from the bilingual program to create bilingual signs, and (c) lobby
for funds for top-down sign-making. In her directions for future research,
Dressler points to the inclusion of the sign-makers’ voices and the opening
towards further discourses.
The relation to language education policy discourse is tackled in the
research done by Menken et al. (2018), who plead for more explicit connec-
tions between the schoolscape and the local language education policy. In
their study, the schoolscape is investigated in terms of an indicator for
a change resulting from the CUNY-NYSIEB initiative on emergent bilin-
guals, which is a collaborative project of the Research Institute for the
Study of Language in Urban Society (RISLUS) and the PhD Program in
Urban Education funded by the New York State Education Department

634 EVA VETTER
(www.cuny-nysieb.org). The CUNY-NYSIEB initiative supports professional

development of schools in the context of multilingualism. The participating
schools were invited to regard multilingualism as a resource in instruction.
In a qualitative research study in 23 schools in New York City, Menken et al.
(2018) document the many ways these schools transformed their school-
scapes and how the pupils’ languages became visually and orally incorpor-
ated in teaching and sign-making. Moreover, they show that the
transformation of the schoolscape was in many schools tied to an ideo-
logical shift towards a heteroglossic view of multilingualism and multilin-
gual practice in education, i.e., a view that is not oriented towards a
monolingual norm and that includes translingual practice. The study high-
lights the need for contextualizing sign-making in schools. The authors
concluded that “transforming the physical LL by making students’ lan-
guages visible served as a stepping stone for many schools to make further
changes” (Menken et al. 2018: 122). Hence, the transformation of the
schoolscape represented a “language policy mechanism” (Menken at al.
2018: 123). The authors plea for more schoolscape research that connects
with “pedagogy, programming, and language policies” (2018: 123).
Looking inside has revealed a prolific, although still young body of
schoolscape research on the features of the institutional world (kindergar-
ten and schools) surrounding young children. Schoolscape research mirrors
the trends identified for LL research, i.e., multimodality, multiple theoret-
ical approaches, and contextualization of signs. From the studies men-
tioned above it can be concluded that all kinds of signs such as artifacts,
photographs and sometimes also spoken language have come to comple-
ment textual signs. Although the theoretical and methodological
approaches are diverse, there is a clear tendency towards ethnographic
research in order to gather the process of production and reception of signs.
The need for contextualization has pointed to the co-construction of school-
scape and (local) language education policy since signage indexes and may
also shape language education policy. Results refer to issues of identity,
power asymmetries, inclusion and exclusion. Moreover, methodology has
addressed diachronic perspectives and made transformation visible. From
the overview on selected studies inside schools presented above, school-
scape research emerges as a particularly powerful approach to understand-
ing the ideological working of signs that surround children in institutions
without being critically reflected by them.
27.3.2 The Out-of-School World

Although educational institutions such as schools and kindergartens are
definitely the most prominent places for doing educational landscape
research targeting (young) children, researchers have extended their field
of enquiry beyond the buildings and investigate the out-of-school world as
well. In most cases this research into out-of-school landscapes is focused on

signage surrounding schools and/or in the neighborhood of the pupils’

homes. The establishment of a connection between the inside world, i.e.,
curricula, competence to be achieved, etc., and the out-of-school environ-
ment is a particularly characteristic feature of this investigation. The link-
age between the out-of-school landscape and the inside world can be quite
diverse and range from critically investigating the linguistic landscape
outside school to using the landscape for language learning (Gormier
2019). Until now, out-of-school linguistic landscape research has often
concentrated on older children and secondary schools. It has, however, a
great potential for including young children. In the following, out-of-school
landscape research including young children will be grouped into three
types according to the target pursued by teachers and/or researchers: early
literacy education, language awareness and language learning.
Walking field trips (Hudelson 1984) and environmental print walks (Vukelich
et al. 2012) are long-established approaches that involve young children.
The aim is to encourage emergent literacy long before entry into formal
literacy instruction. In their literacy walk study with young children in
central Los Angeles, Orellana and Hernandez (1999) found that children
were very interested in signs that related to their prior experiences, such as
signs for their parents’ workplaces or places where they regularly shopped
with their families. They state that these signs represent opportunities for
learning, whereas other signs without relevance to the children rather
created disinterest and boredom.
More recently, there has come support from neuroscience for including
outdoor learning environments in a purposeful and pedagogical manner for
literacy education. In addition to the long-lasting effects of the quality of
the children’s environment, i.e., the importance of good organization and a
thoughtful and calm atmosphere, brain research points to the potential of
environmental print for early literacy. In their eye-tracking study with 3- to
5-year-old pre-school children, Neumann et al. (2014) demonstrate that
children spent more time attending to the environmental print items than
to the standard print items. The authors attribute this increased attention
in environmental print to the attractiveness of designs, colors and pictures.
They conclude that environmental print can extend the children’s print
experiences and suggest using it as an early print learning resource, e.g., for
fostering letter and word knowledge.
Beyond literacy learning, the out-of-school environment has also been
used for various kinds of metalinguistic activities, particularly with the aim
of raising (critical) language awareness. This research strand is methodo-
logically and theoretically close to the schoolscape research presented
above. The following examples show that, here, the linguistic landscape is
commonly linked to further issues such as identity or power relations.
In one of the first out-of-school landscape studies in this vein, Pietikäinen
(2012) was interested in how the youngest generation of Sámi speakers in
the Finnish part of Sámiland “experience, express and make sense of the

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multilingualism present in their daily life” (Pietikäinen 2012: 163). In an

action-research photographing case study, which is part of a larger multi-
methods research project, she worked with a group of Sámi-speaking chil-
dren who had predominantly Sámi language education. These children
were all fluent in Finnish and had varied competence in Sámi. Visual
ethnography served as an approach to open up to new ways of understand-
ing young people, to overcome limited literacy at an early age and to grant
more space and independence to the young research participants. These
innovative visual ethnographic data, i.e., photographs and drawings, were
complemented by more traditional approaches such as interviews and a
questionnaire. The photograph project entitled “Where is my Sámi lan-
guage” followed the pedagogical approach of empowering photography. The
children turned into researcher photographers and were invited to take
pictures to illustrate, document and reflect upon the languages and their
environment. In a one-on-one discussion about the photos, the children
discussed their pictures with the researcher and finally chose one photo
with particular importance to them for an exhibition. The children framed
this photo and were free to choose a language to name it and give a short
description (if they wanted to). They chose a place and hung their photo for
the exhibition, which was received enthusiastically by the local community
and the school. From her analysis of the photos and the transcription of the
discussions, Pietikäinen concludes that the Sámi language enters the chil-
dren’s world through family, nature and animals (reindeer), i.e., key aspects
of Sámi culture. She states that the visual ethnographic task enabled the
children to represent their language experiences and to reflect upon them.
In doing so, the children could find their own voice in the multilingual,
multimodal environment, which illustrates the potential of this more het-
eroglossic understanding of multilingualism.
Similarly concerned with endangered languages is the language ecology
project with 6-year-old pupils in a Portuguese primary school in the central
coast area (Clemente et al. 2012). This project in Portugal, a country that is
often considered monolingual, aims to raise children’s awareness to lin-
guistic diversity worldwide and to the many factors that shape linguistic
and social and biological landscapes. In contrast to the Sámi project, the
languages at stake are not part of the children’s everyday lives. The project,
entitled “Learning to read the world, learning to look at the linguistic
landscape,” involved the children in pedagogical activities such as reading
and recognizing signs in different languages. The researchers concluded
that this approach is beneficial for the development of the children’s
language awareness.
Another early out-of-school landscape study is the one presented by
Dagenais et al. (2009) on elementary school children’s documentation of
their literacy practices in their multilingual and diverse communities. The
study is part of a larger project in Vancouver and Montreal that aims at
understanding how the children respond to the community’s multimodal

environment and at documenting how they read the multimodal signs. The
main assumption, rooted in Francophone sociolinguistics and Canadian
research in education, was that “constructing representations of the lin-
guistic landscape involves a process of interpretation and discursive negoti-
ation” (Dagenais et al. 2009: 255). Starting out from “LL as heuristic for
learning” and committed to critical pedagogy, this study presents a rich
inventory for using LL as a tool to stimulate the children’s observation of
the different value attributed to languages and the reflection on relations of
power behind this (de-)valuation. One activity was an outing for taking
photographs. The children were organized in groups, equipped with
cameras and maps of the school environment, and they were asked to
follow a trajectory and to take pictures of signs in different languages along
their way. Later, they were invited to categorize these pictures and to
describe their categories. With this activity, the children shifted their
attention from the material world of signage to the symbolic meaning of
the signs and were deeply engaged in critically reflecting on language and
territory. The authors conclude that critical pedagogy drawing upon the
out-of-school landscape enabled them to capture and transform the chil-
dren’s awareness of the school environment.
Beyond literacy and (critical) language awareness, the out-of-school LL is
also used for language learning in general. There is a large body of research
on engaging with the linguistic landscape outside school for second and
foreign language learning. Cenoz and Gorter (2008) were one of the first to
conceive of it in terms of authentic and contextualized language input and
of a support for incidental learning and the development of pragmatic
(multi-)competence. Other researchers have continued this approach, for
an overview on the exploration of the linguistic landscape for (foreign)
language learning see Rowland (2013) and Malinowski (2015). In contrast
to this line of research, which is mostly concerned with young adults and
older children, Chern and Dooley (2014) present an “English literacy walk”
similar to those developed for early literacy and address young children.
Through the example of Taipei, they illustrate how the English-friendly
environment in globalized cities around the world can be used for early
English language learning. The authors elaborate on activities to develop
each of the four types of literate practice, i.e., code-breaking (e.g., knowing
the alphabetic code of written English), text participation (e.g., drawing on
knowledge of topic to make meaning), text use (e.g., taking part in social
activities to which a text is integral) and text analysis (e.g., critically analyz-
ing how a text positions readers). Code-breaking activities are particularly
suitable for young children. They include guessing at which place a picture
with a familiar sign such as a shopping mall was taken, or post-walk
activities such as comparing the number of letters in English and of char-
acters in Chinese on bilingual signs, counting the “A”s on the pictures or
showing different symbols for one sound on a phonics chart. These activ-
ities prompt learners to use environmental English for authentic purposes.

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The last out-of-school research that will be reported here is the innovative
SIGNS framework developed by Przymus and Kohler (2018). The acronym
SIGNS stands for Semiotic Index of Gains in Nature and Society, an interdis-
ciplinary framework for the study of LL, which aims to uncover the influ-
ence of the LL on language policy and the schoolscape. SIGNS is not about
relating the LL to language learning, but Przymus and Kohler demonstrate
through their SIGNS-based analysis of 30 school neighborhoods in the US-
American Southwest border town of Tucson, Arizona, how far the LL is
influential on opportunities for language learning. To put it in a nutshell,
SIGNS takes into account the place, human cognition, reverse indexicality
as strategies of condescension, interpretation of the LL through societal
myths and metonyms and metaphors as a key to understanding the
relationships.
Przymus and Kohler (2018) analyzed 1,600 street signs in 30 neighbor-
hoods in the vicinity of schools. They discovered a majority of non-English
(i.e., Spanish) street signs in wealthier, whiter, English-monolingual neigh-
borhoods that promote local policies supporting bilingual education. On
the other hand, English street signs dominate in historically Mexican-
American, poorer, bilingual (Spanish and English) neighborhoods that are
characterized by English-only programs. Przymus and Kohler conclude that
the language on signs implicitly justifies these different language of
instruction policies. The result is that some, in this case the English mono-
linguals, are privileged to select bilingualism, whereas others lose their
bilingualism through English-only education. The SIGNS framework hence
uncovers the ideological working of the LL on educational opportunities.
To sum up, there is a great variety of studies in the out-of-school land-
scape. These studies differ in their theoretical background, their methodo-
logical approaches, their aim of studying the out-of-school world and, of
course, in what they say about the LL’s influence on young children. We
have identified three primary aims, i.e., (early) literacy education, (critical)
language awareness and language learning. These three lines of research
can be ordered alongside a continuum of place and time: The place under
investigation ranges from the environment of the school (e.g., Dagenais
et al. 2009; Przymus & Kohler 2018) to the communities (e.g., Pietikäinen
2012), the city (e.g., Chern & Dooley 2014; Vukelich et al. 2012) or even the
whole world (Clemente et al. 2012). As to time, most of the studies pursue a
synchronic approach, although diachronic elements may be included as
well, when the reflection on the LL includes past experiences. It seems,
however, that the hic et nunc of the children’s everyday lives is considered
as the most influential landscape for young children.
The theoretical and methodological background of the studies suggest
the distinction between research on children (e.g., Neumann et al. 2014;
Przymus & Kohler 2018) and research with children (e.g., Pietikäinen 2012).
Research on children has revealed the double impact of the out-of-school
landscape on young children: on the one hand, it is an attractive resource

for (literacy) learning, on the other, its ideological working influences

language education policy. Research with children includes young partici-
pants as researchers and involves them actively in different activities relat-
ing to the LL. Here, the LL turns out to be a powerful tool to develop, foster
or even transform the children’s (critical) language awareness and to make
them receptive for issues such as identity and power relations in society.
27.4 LL as a Pedagogical Device
At first glance, the LL inside (schoolscape) and outside educational insti-

tutions (out-of-school LL) might appear as two complementary perspectives,
and even if we are fully aware of the eclectic nature of the examples given,
the overall picture could appear as complete. However, there also exist
educational activities and pedagogies that do not use the label linguistic
landscape or schoolscape, yet they contribute to our understanding of the
relation between the LL and young children. The aim of the present chapter
is to provide a non-exhaustive presentation of such endeavors.
The promotion of language awareness is a common denominator of the
pedagogies that include the LL. According to their primary goals, these
pedagogies will be grouped into awareness-raising activities and pedagogies
that pursue a further aim, such as doing identity work.
The Éveil aux langues movement with Michel Candelier as its most prom-
inent advocate (Candelier 1998, 2003a, 2003b, 2007) is a good example of
pedagogies that include the schoolscape for awareness raising. The website
of the Edilic (Education et Diversité Linguistique et Culturelle, www.edilic
.org), the association promoting Éveil aux langues internationally, provides
an insightful documentation of the development of this movement, but also
of the school material created. Despite the impressive multiplicity of activ-
ities elaborated by various partners for different target groups, it is evident
that children engaged in pre- and primary schooling are an important
focus. From a schoolscape perspective, the material can be read as an
invitation to use and (re-)produce multimodal signs. Language portrayals,
activities on greetings in different languages, portfolios – the language-
related activities are multifaceted, diverse and created through bottom-up
activities. Languages are not only made visible through signage, but also
audible through audio documents. The aim is to bring languages into the
classroom that are not formally taught at school. These languages can be
languages that the children encounter in their everyday life, their neigh-
borhood or their city as well as languages of the world without particular
relevance to the children. The goal of making a huge variety of languages
visible (and audible) is to welcome and value linguistic diversity.
Multilingual pedagogies are also prominent in the work of the European
Centre for Modern Languages of the Council of Europe (www.ecml.at). The
ECML is an important player in the field of language education policy and

640 EVA VETTER
hosts some of the many activities of the research group around Michel
Candelier as well as many other resources for linguistic landscape and
schoolscape work with young children. Although it is difficult to draw a
line between the awareness-raising work and the ECML activities, it can be
said that the focus of the ECML projects is more on language learning. i.e.,
languages that are learned in the educational institutions are more expli-
citly addressed. One example of such a language learning activity that
includes young children is the project PluriMobil (plurimobil.ecml.at).
PluriMobil is about group mobility of pupils and supports intercultural
and plurilingual learning before, during, and after a mobility project, in
primary schools, often short-term exchanges within the same country or
region or virtual exchanges using the Internet. Activities suggested for
primary school children include creating silhouettes and/or a booklet about
themselves and taking pictures to explore the surroundings of the school.
Songs, games, stories and all kinds of objects are part of these multimodal
activities proposed by the project. The products resulting from these activ-
ities are presented in the classrooms and hence turn into prominent com-
ponents of the schoolscapes. Similar to the awareness-raising activities,
these language learning approaches make a difference for the schoolscape.
There is a huge range of pedagogies that considerably transform school-
scapes. Many of them pursue particular goals that go beyond the aim of
making linguistic diversity visible or of language learning. The work of the
already mentioned CUNY-NYS initiative targets the empowerment of emer-
gent bilinguals through translanguaging. Translanguaging pedagogy,
widely described in the research published by Ofelia García and her team
(e.g., García 2017), builds on the home language practices of emergent
multilingual students whose home or primary languages are not the lan-
guage of schooling. At the level of pre-schooling, the material culture plays
a primordial role and all kinds of objects (toys, costumes, etc.) and other
resources such as audio and video are included to support multimodal
learning. The website of the CUNY-NYS initiative and the examples given
under the label of linguistically appropriate practice as coined by Chumak-
Horbatsch (2019) are full of activities that considerably transform
the schoolscape.
One prominent tool within translanguaging pedagogy and other multi-
lingual approaches are storybooks. The use of storybooks (e.g., www
.africanstorybook.org) and picture books (Pietikäinen & Pitkänen-Huhta
2013) is quite commonly directed towards the aim of doing identity work,
e.g., with the aim to develop multilingual reading identities (Pietikäinen &
Pitkänen-Huhta 2013). Identity work is even more foregrounded in the so-
called identity texts. They are mentioned since they are often found on
classroom walls and hence also become a component of the schoolscape:
“The identity text then holds a mirror up to students in which their
identities are reflected back in a positive light” (Cummins & Early 2011: 3).
At the same time, identity texts engage learners in cognitive demanding

tasks. In doing so, these texts turn into a powerful tool to create identities
of competence and concretize the substantial aim behind many of the
above-mentioned projects, i.e., to combat marginalization and promote
equity in education.
It has to be noted that the LL pedagogies mentioned in this section have a
significant impact on the schoolscapes, however, an impact on the out-of-
school world is not (yet) visible. These pedagogies may dramatically change
the semiotic schoolscape: Multilingual signs, posters in different languages
(with the languages changing every week/month, etc.), multilanguage
charts for the different subjects, greetings at the beginning of the lesson
in different and ever changing languages, picture books and identity texts –
all activities are strongly associated with the bottom-up creation of signs in
order to make existing linguistic diversity visible and valuable. It needs to
be mentioned that many of the initiatives listed above conceive of aware-
ness raising as a first step and go beyond the visualization and valuation of
multi-semiotic diversity in order to pursue additional aims such as the
empowerment of multilingual learners or the strengthening of positive
multilingual identities. The common aim is to take into account the multi-
lingual children’s resources for teaching and learning and this is visible in
the schoolscape.
27.5 Concluding Remarks
There is an impressive variety of ways in which the relationship between

young children and the LL around them can be understood. Even though
this chapter is limited to investigations within or initiated by educational
institutions, multiple perspectives emerge. The diversity of theories and
methodologies echoes this variety. In order to bring together the findings of
research and pedagogy in relation to LL and young children, we will first
identify common features for the three lines of investigation in which this
chapter was divided, i.e., embracing multilingualism and sharing common
ground with general LL research. Second, we will suggest three perspectives
on the children’s interaction with LL.
A basic assumption characteristic to the three lines of investigation is that
the LL and particularly the schoolscape, i.e., the landscape inside schools,
represent rich literate environments that support children in developing
functional literacy and numeracy skills. For multilingual children, this
means that the LL and the schoolscape may represent their linguistic
resources or they may not. The LL can display a monolingual approach
and educators may use it in order to foster knowledge in one school
language. In this case the children’s other linguistic resources may be com-
pletely absent and silenced, and children may experience a significant gap
between institutional (school, kindergarten) experiences and out-of-(pre-)
school experiences. The present chapter showcases that research and

642 EVA VETTER
pedagogy are directed towards multilingualism and opportunities for the

multilingual child. The great majority of the investigations and pedagogies
presented includes more than one language and explicitly engages in diver-
sity in the sense of including the children’s multilingual resources or the
language diversity of the world (around them). The question raised is not if,
but how the present multilingual resources are displayed in the school-
and landscape.
The second feature relevant to the three lines of investigation is that the
following three main assumptions are shared with general LL research:
First, signs are multimodal and not to be reduced to texts alone; Second,
understanding the LL calls for engaging with agents at place, i.e., those who
produce, transform, and perceive the LL; Third, the active engagement with
diversity in the LL has a potential for transformation. To sum up, research
and pedagogy strengthen the tendency towards multimodality, qualitative
(complementing quantitative), and situated approaches as well as critical
awareness and activism in landscape research.
As to the results brought about by the three lines of investigation, i.e.,
inside institutions (schoolscape), outside institutions and pedagogy, they
will be ordered alongside three perspectives that place the children at the
center, i.e., how children react to the LL, how they create the LL and how
they engage with the LL.
Children react to the LL, even if they do not always reflect on their
reaction. They benefit from (attractive) signs for early literacy or language
learning. They experience coherent socialization opportunities through the
cultural orientations and narratives displayed in the schoolscape. The high
density of signs indicates that the creators of schoolscapes are well aware of
the powerful ideological working of signage. Schoolscapes cannot be separ-
ated from wider discourses about language, power and ideology.
Schoolscapes position the language (education) policy of a particular insti-
tution in line with (e.g., bilingual schooling) or in contradiction to (e.g.,
minority schooling) these wider discourses and the societal relations of
power. However, they represent a kind of hidden curriculum or language
(education) policy mechanism that young children take up in their lan-
guage practice and learning as well as in their attitudes towards language
(practice).
Young children are also creators of signs. This is particularly the case in
critical pedagogies that pursue transformative goals such as the empower-
ment of marginalized groups or the strengthening of positive multilingual
identities. These pedagogies draw on the children’s resources and involve
them in the creation of signs. In doing so, the children may cross the inside-
outside border and bring with them out-of-(pre-)school experiences that are
equally valued.
Young children also actively engage with the land- and schoolscape.
Research showcases many ways in which children can be actively involved
in reflection upon the LL outside (pre-)schools and upon the schoolscape.

This is possibly the most powerful relation between the multimodal scapes
and young children. Critical engagement means that children discuss the
symbolic function of signage and discover ideologies of language and lan-
guage use. This engagement makes them aware of issues of power in society
and possibly empowers them in the struggle for educational equity.
There is neither a proper way of doing landscape research (Backhaus
2019: 165), nor of conceptualizing the influential role of LL on young
children. Children react, create and engage and this is what makes LL so
powerful to them.
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28
Children’s Perception of
Multilingual Landscapes
in Interaction
Asta Cekaite
28.1 Introduction
The present chapter discusses children’s multilingual landscapes and

language practices in peer group encounters in general, and in their play
interactions specifically. Multilingualism characterizes a significant part of
contemporary societies worldwide. It is present and experienced by chil-
dren of different ages both in interactions in families, and in peer groups in
informal and formal educational settings. Frequently, however, studies on
children and multilingualism are directed at the practices of teaching in an
educational setting. This chapter argues that children’s peer interactions,
and their social activities, such as play, can provide important insights into
multilingualism, children’s novel linguistic landscapes and language learn-
ing. Broadly defined, children’s multilingualism can involve the use of
multiple languages, varieties and styles, as well as the use of different
modes of communication, such as speaking and writing. As increasing
numbers of bilingual and multilingual children are entering monolingual
educational settings, pertinent questions for investigation concern social
and linguistic processes and children’s novel multilingual landscapes when
(i) children from diverse linguistic backgrounds share a lingua franca, a
majority societal language that is their emerging additional language, and
(ii) children take part in and agentively create multilingual language
practices.
The chapter presents studies on children of various ages, specifically
focusing on how children with multilingual linguistic potentials and vari-
ous kinds of language proficiency encounter a variety of social settings
where multilingual or monolingual discursive practices are used. It dis-
cusses main theoretical perspectives on multilingualism, children’s learn-
ing and play, and introduces a bottom-up conceptualization of children’s
multilingual landscapes. The chapter reviews research on children’s multi-
lingual peer play, language creativity and metalinguistic awareness.

650 ASTA CEKAITE
Further, it discusses how children co-create language norms and social

order in multilingual peer groups; and how linguistic assets within multi-
lingual families and in multilingual educational environments are invoked
and exploited.
28.2 Theoretical Perspectives
There are various theoretical perspectives and conceptualizations of

multilingualism. According to an additive, monoglossic view, popular in
many societal contexts, languages are stable, limited and bounded systems.
A multilingual person is viewed as one who has separate monolingual
capacities in different languages. Consequently, a relevant level of profi-
ciency in multiple languages is rarely achieved since it is a time consuming
and resource demanding endeavor (cf. Jessner 2008). The development of
multiple languages, especially in immigrant children, is rarely actively
encouraged by educational institutions, and even families and parents
may encourage children’s transition to the majority, i.e., societal language.
Moreover, in societies characterized by monoglossic norms, multilingual
individuals may feel a lack of entitlement and authenticity in using mul-
tiple languages, reporting feeling speechlessness (Hoffman 1989) and
experiencing that “changing languages is like imposing another role on
oneself, like being someone else temporarily” (Stavans 2001).
A contrasting view to additive conceptualization of multilingualism is
articulated by applied linguists who define multilingualism “as the ability
to use several linguistic systems in everyday life and to draw on several
cultural contexts of experience” in order to put forth several social and
linguistic identities (Kramsch 2012: 116). The key notions of heteroglossia
and translanguaging (Bakhtin 1981; Cenoz 2013; Heller 2007; Kramsch
2012; Wei 2014) counter the view that one’s multilingual competencies
develop and are used as separate monolingual capacities in different lan-
guages. The notion of translanguaging captures the heteroglossic – i.e.,
multi-voiced (Bakhtin 1981) – nature of communication: it involves the
convergence as well as tensions and conflicts that arise among multiple
linguistic features because of the sociocultural associations that they carry.
Translanguaging is thus not just something speakers do “when they feel
they are lacking words or phrases needed to express themselves in a
monolingual environment” (García & Wei 2014: 42; Wei 2014). Instead, it
is conceptualized as the use of a “set of resources which circulate in
unequal ways in social networks and discursive spaces, and whose meaning
and values are socially constructed within the constraints of social organ-
izational processes, under specific historical conditions” (Heller 2007: 2).
Such a notion of multilingualism is inclusive, involving speakers who can
use features associated with different “languages,” even when they know
very little of these “languages” (see, for instance, linguistic practices of

Children’s Perception of Multilingual Landscapes 651
“crossing,” Rampton 1995). This understanding foregrounds the historical

and sociocultural associations of linguistic features and characterizes lan-
guage users, including children and youth as social actors, who employ,
interpret, and create different “sets of linguistic resources” across a broad
range of social contexts and participants (Heller 2007: 2).
The conceptualization of language use as socioculturally anchored rever-
berates with the Vygotskian perspective on development that locates learn-
ing processes in social interaction and dialogue between the more
experienced social actors and novices (Rogoff 2003; Vygotsky 1986).
Sociocultural perspectives emphasize the situatedness of learning and
teaching encounters within the socioculturally structured practices of the
community, including children’s peer groups, all of which are interwoven
in larger institutional and cultural frameworks (Cekaite et al. 2014: 5–9).
Socialization in monolingual and multilingual contexts has also, under this
theoretical influence, been re-conceptualized as a dynamic, and bi-
directional process. It involves both top-down, and bottom-up processes,
i.e., including wider societal and micro- interactional levels and various
participant constellations (Cekaite et al. 2014; Ochs & Schieffelin 2012;
Rogoff 2003). Children’s peer talk and peer cultures are characterized by a
relatively egalitarian participation that is generally unavailable in adult–
child discourse and it allows for particular types of peer collaboration and
discursive genres. Through their talk, recurrent discursive genres, and play,
multilingual children create new arenas – specific multilingual landscapes –
that are characteristic and powerful in their social lives. This view on
linguistic landscapes foregrounds the processual, bottom-up conceptualiza-
tion of a linguistic landscape, compared with the earlier conceptualizations
that are based on geographical, spatio-temporal underpinnings (see
Shohamy & Gorter 2009). By taking a bottom-up approach, we can discover
new linguascapes that are created and participated in through the use of
language in play and other types of social interactions.
28.3 Multilingual Peer Group Play and Language Creativity
Play and leisure activities in informal peer group encounters present a site
for examining how children in their peer cultures perceive and exploit
multiple languages. In the context of play, time and space shape specific
linguistic landscapes, and various types of play – sociodramatic role play,
language play, banter and teasing – constitute linguistic landscapes, where
children can pursue their own interests, establish linguistic routines and
exercise language creativity. Different voices and discourses are at the
service of meaning making and identity building, characteristic for multi-
linguals. There is a growing number of studies that show how children of
various ages (preschool, school and adolescents) use multiple linguistic
varieties for a range of social purposes, such as “structuring play, games,

652 ASTA CEKAITE
and other activities, negotiating meanings and rights, and asserting their
shifting identities and allegiances” (Paugh 2005: 63). A number of anthro-
pological studies conducted in Latin American, African and Asian contexts
adopt a language socialization perspective in exploring children’s social
encounters in multilingual and/or multiethnic contexts (de Leon 2019;
Garrett 2012; Goodwin & Kyratzis 2012; Howard 2009; Minks 2010; Paugh
2005). According to a language socialization perspective, there is a close
link between socialization into how to use language, and socialization into
culture through the use of language (Duranti et al. 2012). Moreover, lan-
guage socialization processes link the micro-interactional level of children’s
social interactions and the wider societal language ideologies and policies,
including those that concern views on multilingualism. It is on the level of
children’s social interactions that negotiations and transformations of the
societal and community level linguistic ideologies become visible.
As demonstrated by Paugh in her longitudinal anthropological studies
(2005; 2019) on language behavior among Dominican children and adults in
rural areas, children used multilingual language practices in their imagin-
ary play. Through their role play enactments, children tried out multilin-
gual practices and socialized each other (i.e., implicitly taught each other
and practiced) into the ways in which contrasting languages (English,
language of schooling and church, vs. Patwa, a French-lexicon creole, local
language of farmers) indexed contrasting social identities, places and activ-
ities. They created multilingual spaces where languages were used in ways
that were not sanctioned by adults. While adults themselves used Patwa in
their local community practices, they prohibited children from using it and
requested the use of English, the official language of schooling. Despite
possible sanctions from adults, children used Patwa to enact adult roles
during peer play, choosing appropriate languages according to the role and
place of their use in regular daily practices (creating realistic imaginary
activities, characters and scenes). The children playfully resisted adults’
authority and the monolingual norm of English, and took part in their
multilingual world as they experience it, exploiting the sociolinguistic
characteristics of various social roles and identities.
Aesthetic activities such as language play are frequent peer play genres,
and it is in the contour of the aesthetics of children’s interaction during
play that new linguistic landscapes emerge. Children’s multilingual
creativity in language play can be employed for the social purposes of
teasing and verbal dueling in peer groups where children belong to various
linguistic and ethnic groups, (Evaldsson 2005; Lytra 2007, 2009). For
instance, Lytra (2007, 2009) in a school ethnography shows that a multilin-
gual peer group (comprised of majority Greek and minority Turkish-
speaking children of Roma heritage in Athens) used verbal play and dueling
for the purposes of cross-sex teasing. In their recess interactions, children
exploited teasing as a versatile discursive device for gender and school
identity work. By using contextualization cues from multiple language

varieties and cultures, children produced elaborate teasing practices: they

constructed others as “poor” pupils and positioned themselves as “good”
pupils (Lytra 2007, 2009). Notably, multilingual discourses also indexed
children’s concerns with language and academic success and, through the
use of particular identity ascriptions, children ascribed the others contrast-
ing linguistic and academic identities. The communicative resources used
originated in children’s performances in various contexts, such as school-
based literacy activities.
Similarly, “crossing” (Rampton 1995) can be used in peer interactions for
verbal banter, teasing and conflictual, gendered, as well as ethnic and
linguistic positionings. As demonstrated by Evaldsson (2005) in a study of
peer group interactions among linguistically and ethnically diverse
immigrant children (6-to 10-year-old Syrian, Romani, Somali) in a regular
Swedish school, the boys’ group used “crossing” to insult each other, and to
collaboratively stage and monitor conflict and aggressive talk. By using
multiple language varieties, including a simplified, pejorative, immigrant-
associated variety of the majority language, Swedish, and by transforming
their features, they were able to skillfully stage their insults as a form of
ritual verbal dueling. Successful participation in such nonserious talk
required children’s linguistic creativity and metalinguistic abilities to be
able to momentarily transform each other’s contributions.
In language play activities, children creatively exploit multiple linguistic
features and multimodal semiotic resources, including various communi-
cation modes and music. These discursive practices can have social as well
as linguistic implications, contributing to children’s development of
multilingual awareness, language learning, and identity formation.
Children’s peer groups can use multilingual play in negotiating pertinent
features of their social life, for instance, gender relations, social identities
and other aspects characteristic to their way into adulthood (e.g., on
Mexican Tzotzil children, see de Leon 2019). For instance, as demonstrated
in a study of Nicaraguan Miskitu children’s song games (Minks 2010),
children used multilingual aesthetic forms that served as communicative
resources for the formation of their gender identities. In their song game
performances, children used Spanish, Miskitu and Creole English. These
performances enacted the tensions between social expectations and gen-
dered desires, and poetic texts were embedded in a heteroglossic vernacular
discourse that unsettled clear gender divisions between boys and girls.
Multilingual and multimodal resources can be exploited to invoke various
social roles, languages and cultures, as well as hierarchies between ethni-
cities, gender and age (Cekaite & Aronsson 2005, 2014; Howard 2009). As
demonstrated in an ethnographic study of children’s peer interactions in
Khwezi Park outside Cape Town (Prinsloo 2004), 6- to 10-year-old children
used multilingual semiotic resources from various music genres (including
local rap (kwaito) music, international pop music, and church music includ-
ing Xhosa and English hymns), selecting specific languages and cultural

654 ASTA CEKAITE
messages to play with. By using multilingual and multimodal – written,

visual and aural – modes of communication, children were able to address
issues that concerned their experiences in school, religion and home/paren-
tal values, and popular youth culture. During their performances, they also
displayed and exercised their metalinguistic awareness concerning the
contextual situatedness of word meanings (actualized differently across
different social sites and semiotic domains).
Children’s engagement in language play is fueled by an entertaining
potential achieved and sustained by collaborative aesthetics. Studies on
children’s multilingual play show that play interactions provide social
spaces and interactional templates for children’s creativity and symmetric
social relations that make multilingual exploration and experiences pos-
sible between peers (Howard, 2009; see also Cekaite & Aronsson 2005,
2014). This contrasts with power asymmetry and hierarchies that charac-
terize adult–child interactions (Blum-Kulka & Snow 2004). In adult–child
interactions, adults usually adopt a hierarchical social position and tend to
postulate normative limitations on children’s conduct, including their lan-
guage use. In contrast, children’s social interactions allow for a more
symmetric distribution of knowledge (Cekaite et al. 2014; Piaget 1962). In
multilingual contexts, older and more experienced children’s performances
can provide scaffolding for the younger ones. Children who have more
developed multilingual competences can use complex linguistic and poetic
structures, repetitions, recyclings and transformations of linguistic forms
and unexpected combinations of multiple languages creatively in spinning
around linguistic materials. By repeating and extending their peers’ contri-
butions, children can help the less proficient ones to adjust their linguistic
performances to the expectations of being entertaining and creative
(Howard 2009). Such actions can scaffold the younger child’s participation,
making his/her actions look much in line with the multilingual perform-
ances of their older peers. In such a way, they can assist the younger and
less linguistically proficient children to achieve a participant position in
peer language play.
28.4 Multilingual Language Play and Linguistic Awareness
Even very young children from multiple linguistic backgrounds can engage
in ludic multilingual practices and create language contact encounters that
foster curiosity towards their peers’ and their own language. In such a way,
multilingualism and language awareness are related to everyday aesthetic
practices and informal performance spaces between children, emerging as a
part of their play. Thus, not only children’s language practices and social
relations, but also children’s metalinguistic awareness is reflected in their
talk, and specifically, in their talk about language. Metalinguistic know-
ledge plays a crucial role in the development of individual multilingualism.

Children in multilingual conversations and play engage with linguistic

features in ways that can influence their linguistic, interactional and prag-
matic competences, allowing experimentation with conventionalized, ritu-
alized expressions, translation, and enhancing their “communicative
sensitivity and flexibility” (Jessner 2008: 277). Taking a sociocultural per-
spective, multilingual awareness can be conceptualized as “collective and
socio-constructive,” achieved, for instance, through translanguaging prac-
tices; the social context is considered to play a crucial role in influencing
children’s awareness of “linguistic landscapes,” relationships between lan-
guages, linguistic communities, hierarchies and power (Melo-Pfeifer 2015:
199). For instance, as demonstrated in a linguistic ethnography-based study
of young immigrant children’s interactions in a regular Swedish preschool
(for 4- to 5-year-olds), children in multilingual playful activities used
heritage language forms and created playful heritage language instructions
(Cekaite & Evaldsson 2019). The peer group represented multiple minority
languages: Arabic, Bosnian, and the Kurdish dialects Kurmanji and Sorani.
In the preschool, children predominantly used Swedish as their lingua
franca. In multilingual play, they were able to highlight linguistic incongru-
ities and similarities between various heritage languages (see also Montrul
2016). The children used exaggerated repetitions and transformed phon-
etic, morphological and syntactic features of each other’s heritage lan-
guage, invented new words, adapting them to the collaborative aesthetic
engagement, e.g., rudimentary rhyming. The children created collaborative
metalinguistic events, used hybrid linguistic constructions where multiple
linguistic varieties were combined, and enacted playful heritage language
performances for the peer audience. Such conversations attest to children’s
multilingual competences, early sociolinguistic orientations and the com-
plex psycholinguistic dynamics of multilingualism (Jessner 2008).
Children can be sensitized to the grammatic and social characteristics of
multiple languages and they can engage in metatalk about appropriate
spaces for heritage language use (Aukrust & Rydland 2009), foreign lan-
guages taught in schooling (Kearney & Barbour 2015) and global languages
of popular culture (Duran 2017). Children’s multilingual engagements in
digital landscapes, such as online video-gaming communities, present
important yet under-researched social, multilingual and multicultural
arenas for peer socialization through play activities. Several studies have
shown that these social arenas can provide child-driven contexts for lan-
guage learning and development of metalinguistic/metasociolinguistic
awareness through participation in online communities. As demonstrated
in a study of 6- to 9-year-old refugee Karenni children’s video-gaming in the
USA (Duran 2017), socialization into the main community and language
learning were promoted by children’s desire for social engagement through
online gaming and the affordances of multiple semiotic modalities.
Children who lived with scarce resources in marginalized and segregated
areas in their new host communities were confidently communicating in

656 ASTA CEKAITE
English, other languages and modes (digital resources and traditional print-
based media). These communicative modes and resources promoted
translanguaging and contributed to the emergence of online-based linguis-
tic landscapes that were fueled by children’s interest and social ambitions
in becoming and being members of online communities in the
globalized world.
28.5 Co-creating Language Norms and Social Order in

Multilingual Peer Groups: Monolingual vs. Multilingual
Language Norms in Peer Group Interactions
Multiethnic and multilingual peer groups that share the societal majority
language as the main available meaning-making mode constitute a particu-
lar locus for young children’s experiences and exploration of multiple
languages, their linguistic and societal values, as well as related social and
linguistic identities. Usually, educational settings are monolingual and the
society’s majority language is used both by teachers and by students, even
in cases where students represent multiple language backgrounds. Such
conditions arise in immigration contexts as a consequence of globalization,
or in ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous countries (e.g., South
Africa). In such educational environments, children have been shown to
gear themselves to the societal and educational language policies in differ-
ent ways. They may deploy their heritage languages and use multilingual
resources, or they may exploit and highlight the linguistic ideology of
monolingualism by preferring the societal majority language. Children’s
linguistic agency is important in determining what linguistic landscapes
are created, and whether and how official language policies of the state and
educational institutions (e.g., schools) are confirmed or resisted in these
sociocultural contexts.
A wealth of studies conducted in Western contexts show that multilin-
gual or bilingual children (children who use two or more languages on a
daily basis) are primarily exposed to monolingual language practices in the
majority language of the society (Bernstein 2016, 2018; on Israeli context,
see Blum-Kulka & Gorbatt 2014). As such, the monolingual ideology can be
adopted and propagated not only by the institutional representatives, but
also by young children themselves because of the urge they may have to
belong to the majority group. In educational settings characterized by
institutionally prescribed monolingual practices, young children have been
shown to aspire to develop proficiency in the majority language and strive
to be recognized as skilled majority language users (Bernstein 2016, 2018).
As children in the peer group interactions negotiate social hierarchies
between the peer group members, including or excluding the others from
the friendship groups, they can refer to high level proficiency in the major-
ity language in order to invoke a desirable social identity as a competent

child and student. Being positioned as an inadequate speaker of the major-

ity language is clearly a disadvantageous social position, and even young
children have been shown to criticize and ridicule other minority peers for
lacking skills in the language of the societal majority (see Bernstein 2018;
Blum-Kulka & Gorbatt 2014; Cekaite & Evaldsson 2008).
Peer interactions are especially important for children’s development of
multilingual competencies in early childhood educational institutions,
where direct adult–child interactions may be relatively short and infre-
quent, and peers for this reason can provide crucial forms of majority
language exposure and opportunities for language practice (Bernstein
2016, 2018; Puskas & Björk-Willén 2017; Schwartz & Gorbatt 2016).
Playfulness, entertaining contributions, and jocular linguistic and
embodied acts have been shown to work as resources that young children
have to resort to in order to be accepted as entertaining social partners in
play that can provide affordances for sustained interaction and linguistic
feedback (Cathcart Strong 1986). However, participation in peer learning
activities is particularly vulnerable in linguistically, ethnically, racially and
religiously diverse contexts, where children have little knowledge of the
language of the majority society (usually, their lingua franca). Ethnographic
analyses demonstrate that language novices’ attempts to gain access to peer
play and social interaction can be rejected on the basis of the child’s
rudimentary uses of the majority language. Especially children who are
beginner learners can experience limitations in finding peers who are
willing to serve as communicative partners when their language knowledge
is still scant. In such cases, language novices may spend a considerable
portion of time alone, because their more competent peers can exclude
them from social interactions (Cekaite & Evaldsson 2017; Puskas & Björk-
Willén 2017). Exclusion from peer activities can be exercised by targeting
the child’s talk. Children can draw attention to formal features of the
others’ language production, correct, evaluate and criticize their pronunci-
ation, lexical and language choices, and highlight the other’s language
deficiencies (Cekaite & Evaldsson 2017). For instance, a study of a multi-
ethnic preschool in the USA showed that when conversing with multilin-
gual peers, some native speaking children faked difficulties in
understanding their nonnative peers’ talk (Bernstein 2016, 2018). In such
a way they were able to point out the asymmetry in knowledge between the
peers. By explicitly or implicitly criticizing the other’s language use, the
multilingual children’s peer group builds the peer group identities and
relations, simultaneously establishing norms for social conduct and mono-
lingual language use and social conduct (Goodwin & Kyratzis 2012; see also
Garrett 2012 for an overview).
Children can also enact monolingual norms by limiting their linguistic
landscapes to the use of their heritage language, rather than engaging in
the full range of multilingual practices available in linguistically diverse
educational settings. As demonstrated in an ethnographic study of a

658 ASTA CEKAITE
Swedish preschool in which three languages (Swedish, Romani and Arabic)

were represented in children’s group, teachers were reluctant to give clear
instructions concerning children’s language choices, especially during
prevalent peer play activities that, according to the curriculum, constituted
one of the main developmental environments (Puskas & Björk-Willén 2017).
Some children therefore were allowed to consistently choose play partners
who shared the same home language. These choices led the immigrant
children to limit the possibilities for partaking in social encounters where
the majority language was used, and where multiple linguistic competences
needed for schooling were exercised (Puskas & Björk-Willén 2017).
In all, research that investigates multilingual and multiethnic environ-
ments shows that children themselves, through their social activities,
create, sustain or challenge societal language policies and construct linguis-
tic landscapes that influence possibilities for their multilingual
development. Children can act as local language policy makers who estab-
lish clear boundaries between languages as separate and hierarchically
valued entities and curtail spaces for translanguaging. Notably, some edu-
cational policies (especially in early childhood education) put a considerable
responsibility on children’s peer interactions as core language learning
affordances in, for instance, peer play activities or group work interactions.
However, as demonstrated, these policies are not always successful because
they do not take into account the complexity of the social processes in
children’s peer groups.
28.6 Exploiting Linguistic Assets within Multilingual

Educational Environments: Translanguaging,
Learning and Peer Social Relations
Multilingual educational environments present children and teachers with

important linguistic assets, such as translanguaging with its potentials for
children’s linguistic explorations, learning and choreographing of activities
and peer relations. While research on translanguaging as it is used in
teaching and teacher-led instructions is extensive, research investigating
translanguaging in children’s peer talk in formal educational settings is
still growing. Especially interesting are studies that demonstrate how trans-
languaging between children and youngsters occurs spontaneously in their
off-task interactions, and in their work on classroom tasks and assign-
ments. Research shows that spontaneous translanguaging is important for
children’s organization of their social relations in the peer group. It is
conducive to children’s cognitive and personal development, and sociolin-
guistic awareness, exploration and enactment of local, institutional and
wider societal national linguistic ideologies (Evaldsson 2005; Kibler 2017;
Kirsch 2018; Lytra 2007, 2009; Madsen 2015; Rampton 1995; Wei 2014).
Even very young (2- to 5-year-old) children engage in translanguaging

and multilingual play that fulfill a variety of social purposes, including the
development of group membership (Björk-Willén 2007, 2017; Cekaite &
Evaldsson 2019; Theobald 2017). The necessity of meaning making with
different language skills constitutes a communicative challenge that
requires children’s linguistic ingenuity, the use of multiple modalities,
and the social drive to ensure a successful and sustainable interaction.
Children’s social concerns and wish to establish friendships are a crucial
factor in the type of linguistic practices developed among peers in multilin-
gual contexts (Blum-Kulka & Gorbatt 2014; Theobald 2017). However, get-
ting access to friendship groups and play is a complex matter that requires
considerable communicative skills, including linguistic and pragmatic abil-
ities to issue entertaining play initiatives (Corsaro 2017). Translanguaging
and crossing, practices that blur the boundaries between social actors’ and
their linguistic belonging, can be used in the pursuit of a status as a play
participant (Björk-Willén 2007; Kyratzis 2014, 2019).
As demonstrated in a study of a multilingual preschool in Sweden, 3-year-
old children in peer play artfully exploited multiple linguistic and multi-
modal resources (Björk-Willén 2007). They used both the lingua franca (the
majority language, Swedish), and the minority language Spanish, which
was not well-known by some of the peer group members. The child who did
not know Spanish repeated the others’ Spanish, using “crossing” to align
with the playmates’ language, and to maintain participation in play.
Notably, children’s language use and their selection between multiple
languages are fueled by children’s social concerns to achieve intersubjectiv-
ity, i.e., shared understanding (Blum-Kulka & Gorbatt 2014; Theobald 2017).
For instance, a study of the 4-year-old children’s multilingual group in a
preschool shows that they used multiple communicative resources, includ-
ing heritage languages and the majority language (Arabic, Farsi and
Swedish) and spoken and written forms (graphic representations and
images in Latin and Arabic alphabet charts), in their attempts to establish
intersubjectivity, i.e., mutual understanding, in peer interactions (Björk-
Willén 2017). In order to make friends and sustain their play, children used
translanguaging, attention-getters, intonation and screaming, nonverbal
modes such as pointing and gesturing, and the written mode (graphic
representations of multiple languages). Children’s desire to sustain social
interaction and have fun together accounted for the success of the situ-
ations in which only partial understanding between young children
was established.
School-aged children can also strategically mobilize multiple linguistic
repertoires, using them as resources for identity building in relation to
institutional expectations and social categories. As demonstrated in a study
of preadolescents’ translanguaging – their use of several local African
languages – in a primary school in a low-income neighborhood of Cape
Town, South Africa (Kerfoot 2016), in peer interactions, children were able
to restructure linguistic hierarchies, and reassign racial and ethnic

660 ASTA CEKAITE
categories associated with these languages. The children adapted to and

interpreted the linguistic ideologies that were entangled with discourses
and practices of ethnic and racial identity, assigning them new hierarchies
of meaning (Kerfoot 2016). Similarly, Wei (2014), in a study of multilingual
minority ethnic (Chinese) complementary classrooms, showed that chil-
dren’s translanguaging created a novel space for children’s social explor-
ations. Through spontaneously occurring translanguaging practices,
children engaged in the negotiation of linguistic and social meanings and
power relations, generating new configurations of language knowledge,
personal histories and social identities, and discussed cultural values
(Wei 2014).
Classroom studies show that children’s participation in classroom
activities is usually interspersed with their daily peer concerns, task work,
socialization and learning. Rather than being a distorting element in chil-
dren’s school life, switching between multiple languages and language
varieties during a school day can be used by children to organize and craft
different social activities in classrooms. In a study of 10- to 12-year-old
language learners of immigrant origin and locally born students’ inter-
actions in a school in Barcelona, Unamuno (2008) demonstrated that chil-
dren deployed multiple languages during the school day – Catalan (the
official language), Spanish (the language of communication among students
used for task-regulation and managing social relations) and English (the
foreign language, used with the purpose of working on the learning task).
The children skillfully deployed various languages to address issues that
went beyond learning: they negotiated their social concerns and organized
adequate participation in academic work on tasks. In linguistically diverse
classrooms, various educational activities, such as teacher-fronted versus
peer small-group work, serve as a social space where children can exploit
contrasting resources from multiple sociocultural and linguistic commu-
nities (Dorner & Layton 2014; Kirsch 2018). For instance, a study conducted
in a Spanish immersion school shows that first graders used Spanish in
teacher-structured whole-group activities, acting in ways that resembled
being teachers and translators (Dorner & Layton 2014). In contrast, during
small-group work – unscripted discourse activities – the children created
unique multilingual identities as helpers and entertainers of their peers by
engaging in translanguaging between English, Spanish, French, Pig Latin,
etc. (Dorner & Layton 2014).
There are some indications that translanguaging can decrease as chil-
dren’s majority language knowledge increases. As demonstrated in a study
from a school in trilingual Luxembourg, where children have to learn
Luxembourgish, German and French within the age span from 4 to 7,
younger children, who did not speak Luxembourgish at home, performed
peer work with the help of translanguaging, using their different home
languages (Kirsch 2018). Such translanguaging was viewed as a legitimate
practice that was not criticized by peers or teachers. Notably,

translanguaging decreased between older children, who had more

developed Luxembourgish proficiency; they drew less on their home lan-
guages and more frequently used the majority language. In all, research
shows that in multilingual classrooms, the unscripted discourse activities
in peer interactions, in addition to the teacher-led ones, can foster chil-
dren’s translanguaging and multilingual identities (Dorner & Layton 2014;
Wei 2014).
28.7 Exploiting Linguistic Assets within Multilingual

Families: Family Language Policies
and Sibling Interactions
Yet another area of children’s interactions where multiple languages are

used and where conflicting language ideologies meet concerns family
language policies (FLP) and practices (Curdt-Christiansen & Lanza 2018;
King & Lanza 2017). FLP, management and practices are considered to be a
critical domain for children’s multilingual development, heritage language
maintenance and cultural continuity in migration contexts (King & Lanza
2017). Both external – societal – and internal – family – forces can affect FLP;
parents can adopt an FLP based on variables such as practicality, the status of
the language, the size of the home language community in the country, etc.
(Spolsky 2009). However, research on FLP has been criticized for taking a top-
down approach, and examining a prescribed and planned policy (plainly
viewed as the top-down parental directives regarding their children’s lan-
guage use) rather than policy in the making (see King & Lanza 2017).
Consequently, children’s social and linguistic agency in FLP has been largely
disregarded (Kheirkhah and Cekaite 2015; Lyuxx 2005; Said & Zhu 2019).
Currently, however, “[r]esearchers are increasingly interested in how fam-
ilies are constructed through multilingual language practices, and how
language functions as a resource for this process of family-making and
meaning making in contexts of transmigration, social media, and technology
saturation, and hypermobility” (King and Lanza 2017: 32; see also Lanza &
Lexander 2019; Ortega 2019). This approach merits special attention to
siblings’ interactions in multilingual families. For instance, siblings have
been shown to frequently rely on the interactional repertoires and language
choices from their peer groups (Kheirkhah & Cekaite 2018; Obied 2009;
Said & Zhu 2019). Siblings experience and exploit multiple, at times diver-
gent/contrasting, socioculturally anchored language landscapes: the ones in
the informal, family contexts, and peer culture linguistic repertoires that
they establish in social spaces outside the home sphere (educational settings),
and in informal environments (afterschool programs, sports, etc.) (Obied
2009; Kheirkhah & Cekaite 2018). In multilingual families, siblings can form
social alliances and resist parental directives to use heritage language, using
the majority language between themselves. The older siblings, due to their

662 ASTA CEKAITE
linguistic expertise, can scaffold the younger ones’ multilingual practices,

acting as the experts who share their pools of language knowledge. They can
evaluate, correct, and model the younger siblings’ use of heritage language,
as well as the majority societal and school languages (e.g., global English). In
all, recent research suggests that siblings make a significant contribution to
family language practices and influence the development of multilingual-
ism, heritage language maintenance or shift.
28.8 Conclusions and Further Research
Research on children’s multilingual landscapes is often limited to the

educational settings and learning activities that take place within these
settings. It predominantly focuses on how teachers productively use the
children’s multilingual resources in order to further children’s linguistic
and identity development. However, studies reviewed in this chapter show
that peer group interactions are crucial for children’s multilingualism; they
can constrain or provide rich affordances for establishment of multilingual
or, in contrast, monolingual speech communities, multilayered identities,
acceptance of otherness, and expansion of social and communicative use
and expertise. Their relation to both micro- and macro-level phenomena
serves as a fruitful point of departure for understanding the social and
linguistic potentials of children’s peer interactions that can create unique
and new linguascapes. Multilingual peers can scaffold each other’s linguis-
tic performances in their informal interactions, and in peer talk in class-
rooms. In linguistically diverse contexts, language proficiency can easily
become a significant social asset, allowing for various hierarchical position-
ings in the peer group.
Despite the growing interest in children’s own experiences of multilin-
gualism, several aspects in the study of peer interactions and children’s
perception of multilingual landscapes deserve further attention. For
instance, studies can add to the understanding of how children of various
ages, through their ludic use of language, can destabilize the hierarchical
stratification of language varieties (majority versus heritage language), and
how they can construct multilingual, or, in contrast, monolingual norms
for peer group language use. Further studies are needed in order to develop
knowledge about multilingual learners’ expressive linguistic repertoires
and metalinguistic awareness. Longitudinal study design can help docu-
ment changes in peer interactions across different temporalities and devel-
opmental, spatial and social contexts. Moreover, children’s activities
outside educational environments harbor significant nonformal socializa-
tion circles, but they are still under-researched. New multilingual linguas-
capes constructed within online communities provide a pertinent venue for
detailed investigation. Methodologically, it is through documentation and
analysis of children’s interactions, and their temporal and spatial

characteristics, that research can highlight the complexity of children’s

multilingual repertoires and their perceptions of linguistic landscapes.
Such studies can highlight children’s linguistic agency and often conflicting
identity negotiations, embedded within the broader social, historical, polit-
ical and ideological contexts and discourses. By broadening the range of
multilingual social arenas, and methodological approaches, research can
gain insights into the role that peers play, which languages they use, and
how their influence may shift over time. This line of research contributes to
the conceptualization that children’s multilingual competence does not
result from the sum of the individual’s linguistic knowledge. Rather it is
better understood and explored as the ability to exploit the linguistic
resources that are available in situ, depending on practical activities and
communicative practices, the interactional partners and temporal and
spatial contexts.
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Subject Index
Accountability, 443–44, 451, 457 Agency, 4, 610–11, 616–17

Acquisition Alternation, 193, 198
age of (AofA), 61–62, 539, 561, 564 Assessments, 7
age related characteristics, 545 automated/digital, 456–57
bilingual, 13, 58, 60, 62, 71, 73, 76, 141, 144, classroom-based, 458, 461
156, 192, 197, 518 commercial, 446, 449, 456
bimodal, 52 content area, 441, 451–52, 455
incomplete, 537, 543–44, 549 culturally appropriate, 446
lexical, 28 cumunicative/interactive, 449
monolingual, 73–74 design, 453, 458–59
multilingual, 4, 13, 22, 39, 48, 52, 58–59, developmental, 444
68–70, 74–76, 142, 146, 280–81, 518, 528, diagnostic, 445, 456
580 dynamic, 441, 453, 459
of a foreign language, 2, 83, 117, 305, 416, 442, error, 457
494 formative, 445, 450, 455
of communicative skills, 30, 141, 146, 150, language proficiency, 441
152, 154–55 multilingual, 449, 455, 457, 459
of language, 29, 192, 260, 278, 280, 330, 394, norm-referenced, 444–45
427, 518, 539 of discourse abilities, 448
of language in early childhood, 13, 40, 48, 58, of metalinguistic awareness, 172
60, 83, 121, 141, 151, 539, 545 of modifiability, 459
of literacy, 7, 399, 415, 417, 421, 426–27, 433 phonological, 446
of sign languages, 39, 41, 47 purpose, 444
of vocabulary, 447 quality, 459
of vowel length, 25 score-based interpretations, 445
phonetic, 23 semantic, 447
protracted, 549 standardized, 445, 450
simultaneous, 46, 51, 62, 76, 151 state-mandated, 450
successive, 46, 62, 151 summative, 454
trilingual, 17, 58, 65, 73, 144, 147, 156, 293 syntactic, 448
Adaptive control hypothesis, 207 translanguaging, 461
Adolescents, 123–24, 172, 215, 449, 491, 507, translated, 446
550, 651 validity, 444, 457
Advantages, 310 Attitudes and beliefs, 477, 481
bilingual, 203 lerners’, 402–5, 472
cognitive, 2, 5, 17, 142, 150–52, 164–65, parental, 286, 288, 296, 406, 516, 520–21, 523,
168–69, 237, 589 546, 608, 610
communicative, 248 teachers’, 359–60, 363–64, 504, 566
creative, 237 Attrition of language, 537, 543, 549, 617
educational, 2 Awareness, 152, 154, 378, 475, 497, 624, 626
linguistic, 169 cross-linguistic, 16, 166, 170, 174, 180–81, 405
metalinguistic, 237 cultural, 507
socialization, 2 linguistic, 2, 165–67, 366, 505, 507, 584–85,
Affect, 304, 306, 308, 315, 317, 319, 526, 550, 583 592, 611, 632, 635, 638, 654
Affordances, 615 metacommunicative, 583

Subject Index 669
metalinguistic, 5, 14, 31, 53, 101, 128, 163, development, 3, 8, 113, 131, 227, 365, 476, 579,
165–68, 170–72, 174, 176, 180–81, 229, 258, 581, 585, 589, 607, 625
383, 385, 387–88, 445, 588, 613, 649, 654, interaction with parents, 150, 526, 614
662 monolingual, 378, 402, 417, 491, 542, 590, 624
multilingual, 3–4, 18, 29, 31, 166, 170, 363, multilingual, 4, 17, 21, 28, 115, 141, 146, 150,
653 152–53, 165, 174, 178, 181, 191, 204, 238,
of multilingual norms, 580 241, 246, 279, 287, 310, 331, 376, 378, 380,
orthographic, 177, 431 385, 387, 402, 407–8, 415, 423, 427, 433,
phonological, 176 452, 491, 507, 516, 527, 538, 541, 550, 572,
social, 586–87 574, 590, 613, 641, 651, 657, 662
sociolinguistic, 658 multilingual and bimodal, 38, 48, 52–53
peer interactions, 649, 651, 653–54, 656, 658,
Backflagging, 194–95, 198 661–62
Bilingualism, 4, 115, 258, 280, 402, 441, 579, 590, peer play, 649, 651, 655, 658, 663
607, 632–33 plurilingual, 357, 365–66, 475
acquisition, 13, 58–59, 71, 73, 144, 192, 197, research with, 221, 616, 638
518 trilingual, 17, 46, 120, 141, 143–44, 146–47,
balanced, 22, 118, 442, 537, 544, 550 149, 156, 199, 204, 235, 538
bimodal, 39, 49, 617 young, 151, 172, 174, 235, 312, 319, 329, 361,
development, 2, 13, 22, 62, 123, 145, 195, 197, 378, 380, 473, 481, 496, 516, 518, 522, 545,
200, 260, 335, 542 623, 634, 637–38, 651, 654, 656, 658
education, 83, 86–87, 92, 97, 101, 202, 383, Classroom activities, 660
519, 597–98, 638 elicited, 446
effects on cognition, 18, 113, 118, 122, 130 spontaneous, 446
emergent, 519, 640 Clinicians, 445
emergent, late-arriving, 461 Code
family, 114, 331, 334, 521 blending, 47, 49, 51
first language acqcuisition/development of, breaking, 637
144, 156 mixing, 64, 66–67, 70, 147, 192, 195, 205, 295,
of children, 5, 14, 116, 123, 128, 141, 204, 330, 582, 584, 587, 590
334, 383, 456, 479, 516, 550, 590 switching, 10, 14, 17, 49, 51, 62–66, 68, 70,
of infants, 14, 19, 25, 122 74–76, 148–49, 153, 156, 177, 191–92, 194,
of siblings, 27, 114, 331, 338, 342 201, 203, 205, 207, 247, 269, 380, 452, 460,
sequential, 24, 442, 537, 547 525–28, 560, 584, 586–87, 590, 592
simultaneous, 60, 442, 537, 548 switching, types of, 192
subtractive, 541 Cognition, 4, 16–17, 59, 150, 305, 453, 473
successive, 60 advantages of, 17, 164, 589
unbalanced, 540 development, 115, 542
Body, 219, 224, 227 load, 418
Boundaries, between languages, 53, 327, 579, of children, 5, 113, 115, 117, 130, 441
581, 592, 658 perspectival, 475, 477, 481
Braille, 617 social, 480
Brain, 17, 20, 25, 117, 124, 130, 169 Communication. See Acquisition of
cortical regions, 20, 125 communication skills; Advantages,
development, 16, 124–25 communicative; Competence,
plasticity, 116 communicative; Resources, communicative;
prefrontal areas, 20, 125–26 Repertoire, communicative
temporal regions, 20, 127 Competence
Brokering of language, 229, 270 communicative, 6, 153, 560, 568, 579, 593
cultural, 248
Child agency, 245, 268–70, 295–96, 316, 318, linguistic, 66, 144, 240, 252, 387
329, 472–73, 478, 482, 509, 606, 611, 616, metalinguistic, 252, 449, 497
649, 656, 661–62 multilingual, 141, 191, 568, 655
Childhood, 58, 325, 337, 491, 543, 550, 556, plurilingual, 359, 473
606 pragmatic, 449
bilingualism, 127, 197 social, 240, 568, 584
early, 3, 18, 31, 83, 127, 197, 306, 319, 378, socio-cognitive, 477
442, 492, 516, 518, 560, 568, 572, 574, 609, Components, linguistic, 443
638, 657 Content, academic, 451
multilingualism, 3–4, 31, 127, 347, 393, 400, Context, 71, 148, 150–51, 153, 200, 244, 447
572, 574, 580 bilingual, 149–50, 152, 452
Children, 63, 260, 311, 393, 496, 580 educational, 506, 516
bilingual, 5, 14, 21, 116, 118, 120, 125, 128–29, linguistic, 22, 497
141, 143, 146–47, 149–54, 156, 165, 191, monolingual, 25, 149, 293
195, 203, 286, 310, 330, 334, 383, 405–6, multilingual, 449, 659
456, 479, 516, 538, 541, 550, 590 of learning, 442
cognition, 5, 17, 113, 115, 130 sociocultural, 7, 260, 315
deaf, 38, 617 socioecomonic, 88, 91

670 SUBJECT INDEX
Context (cont.) formal, 83, 85, 357, 452, 594

sociolinguistic, 84–85, 115, 146, 260, 569 language, 360, 445, 628, 633
socio-political, 516 multilingual, 83, 85, 89–91, 94, 96, 98–99, 101,
trilingual, 292 519, 589, 597–98
Contrast of voicing, 24 of literacy, 7, 638
Conventions of storytelling, 445 of teachers, 368–69, 408, 459, 629
Cooperative science inquiry, 473, 481 plurilingual, 492
Creativity, 116, 129, 226, 327, 331, 336, 347, policies, 519, 580, 658
652 special, 457
linguistic, 235, 649, 651 submersion, 594, 596
Cues, 19, 652 Effects, mnemonic, 238
(para/non) linguistic, 152, 154 Emotion, 264, 304–6, 308, 315, 317, 319, 341,
Customs of child rearing, 17, 515 347, 441, 526
Environment
Daycare centres, 503, 509, 513 bilingual, 122, 124, 128, 152, 154
Daycare centres, multilingual, 513 home, 46–47, 119, 122, 145, 229, 267, 289, 294,
Destabilization, interlanguage, 239 308, 315, 360, 522, 524, 546–47, 561–62,
Development, 476 572, 581, 605–8, 612, 614, 616–17, 627
age-related characteristics, 118, 453 linguistic, 16, 19, 40–41, 52, 95, 114, 121, 145,
bilingual, 2, 14, 18, 22, 62, 123, 145, 154, 191, 147, 258, 396, 538, 608
195, 197, 200, 260, 335, 518, 542 multilingual, 30, 115, 148, 181, 203, 584, 636,
cognitive, 5, 31, 115, 164, 527, 542, 658 658
lexical, 27 multimodal, 636–37
linguistic, 2, 8, 13, 44, 51, 114, 155, 163–64, non-verbal, 458
202, 237, 249, 281, 363, 396, 404, 441, 459, school, 6, 238, 358, 365, 544, 547–48, 567, 572,
498, 515, 527, 539, 548, 606, 662 623, 627, 656, 658
metalinguistic, 163 trilingual, 156
monolingual, 18, 519 Essentializing concepts of identity, 492–93
multilingual, 4, 41, 43–44, 46, 58, 76, 141, 145, Event-Related Potentials (ERP), 25
154–55, 163, 169–70, 191, 271, 306, 309, Experimentation, linguistic, 240
315, 319, 377, 380, 442, 518, 559, 580, 607, Exposure, 16, 26, 46, 52, 155, 279, 657
654, 658, 661 bilingual, 19, 124, 540
neurobiological, 542 multilingual, 31, 124, 442, 581, 589
of children, 3, 8, 113, 131, 154, 227, 365, 579, parental, 19
581, 585, 589, 607, 625 simultaneous, 60
of literacy, 8, 338, 376, 386–87, 402, 404, 406, successive, 60
408, 433, 564, 566, 572, 609, 641 trilingual, 23, 540
phonological, 21, 23, 443, 447
plurilingual, 502 Family, 4, 52, 119, 146, 308, 311, 329, 365–67,
pragmatic, 30 482, 505, 515, 529, 546, 562, 588, 607, 614,
proximal, 609 661
rate, 22 bilingual, 30, 145, 202, 325, 327–28, 331, 334,
reading, 398–400, 404, 408, 565, 572 521, 523
trilingual, 144 intermariage, 264
vocabulary, 447, 565 language policy, 6, 44, 148, 271, 285, 497, 521,
Device, face-serving, 238 607–8, 610, 614
Dexterity,linguistic, 235 Latin American, 516
Difficulties of learning, 453, 455 migrant, 271, 312–19, 516
Discourse, 445, 492, 633 monolingual, 330
abilities, 448 multilingual, 6, 141, 146, 191, 263–64, 268,
educational, 505 271, 278, 294, 297, 328, 331, 334, 347, 507,
multilingual, 327–28, 345 517, 521, 523, 605, 610, 616, 661
of siblings, 327–28, 330, 332–33, 337 transnational, 258, 266
political, 520 trilingual, 147
strategies, 148, 246, 292 Filter, affective, 238
strategies, multilingual, 193, 200 Focus on form, 613
Discrimination, linguistic, 582 Force
Discrimination, of minority languages, 580 centrifugal, 239
Drawing, reflexive, 215, 217–18 centripetal, 239
Dual-language books, 613 Functioning
cognitive, 116, 123, 126
Education, 8, 355, 359, 362, 365, 367–68, 388, executive, 20, 113, 116–18, 120, 125, 128–29,
406, 441, 481, 491, 500, 508, 528, 558, 566, 131, 151, 154–55, 203, 477
573, 623, 628 Funds of knowledge, 247, 310, 316, 404, 607
accountability requirements, 457
bilingual, 83, 86–87, 89–90, 92, 94, 97, 101, Genocide, linguistic, 596
130, 202, 208, 383, 519, 597–98, 638 Genocide, linguistic, in education, 580
discourse, 505 Glorification, of dominant languages, 580

Subject Index 671
Heritage Interactions, cross-linguistic, 3

cultural, 453, 525 Interactions of children, 649, 651, 653–54, 656,
language, 7, 43–44, 52, 84, 114, 194, 228, 658, 661–62
259–60, 312, 319, 365, 395, 423–25, 429–30, Inventory, linguistic, 442
433, 443, 517, 522, 524, 528, 537, 548, 605, Involvement, parental, 612
609–10, 614, 617, 655, 657, 661
signers, 38, 45, 48 Jokes, 236, 242
speakers, 38, 423, 428, 538, 549–50
Heterogeneity, 442, 584 Kids of Deaf Adults (KODA)/ Children of Deaf
Hierarchy, linguistic, 580, 582, 585, 587 Adults (CODA), 38–53, 617
Home school relations, 48, 357, 360, 362, 365–66, Knowledge funds, 247, 310, 316, 404, 607
368, 482, 507, 565–66, 572
Homescape, 46–47, 119, 122, 145, 229, 267, 289, Landscapes, 624
294, 308, 315–16, 360, 522, 524, 546–47, Landscapes, linguistic, 7, 605, 607, 616
561–62, 581, 605, 607, 612, 614, 616–18, 627 Language, 444
Human rights, linguistic, 7, 358, 580, 583, academic, 7, 450, 508
596–98, 624 acquisition, 13, 29, 40, 48, 52, 59, 121, 170,
Hypercorrection, 28 227, 249, 260, 278, 280, 305, 330, 394, 427,
Hypothesis of adaptive control, 207 494, 539
attrition, 537, 543, 549, 617
Identity, 3, 88, 124, 148, 235, 241, 266, 268, 326, awareness, 2, 164–68, 180, 366, 505, 584–85,
364–65, 406, 491–92, 550, 569, 573–74, 592, 611, 624, 632, 635–36, 638–39, 654
595–97, 605, 629–30, 632, 634, 639–40, 651, behavior, 295
653, 662 boundaries, 579, 581, 592
as constructed in discourse, 492 brokering, 229, 270
bilingual, 333 classroom, 356, 362–63, 367–69, 504–5
construction, 7, 491, 505, 508, 653, 659 components, 443
cultural, 507, 522, 526 constellation, 287, 290
essentializing concepts of, 492–93 context, 27, 114–15, 146, 148
hybrid, 495 creativity, 226, 235, 649, 651
linguistic, 517, 589, 656 development, 2, 8, 13, 41, 44, 51–52, 114, 151,
multilingual, 239, 247, 327, 641, 660 191, 202, 237, 249, 281, 363, 396, 404, 441,
narrative, 494 444, 459, 498, 515, 539, 548, 550, 606, 662
plurilingual, 497, 502, 504, 507 dexterity, 5, 235
positioning, 501 discrimination, 19, 21, 144, 580, 582
socio-cultural, 508, 656 disorders, developmental, 443, 453, 455
Ideologies, 83, 89, 98, 100–1, 223, 270, 364, 416, distinction, 19, 50, 67, 121
492, 515, 580, 632 dominant/societal, 15, 45, 69, 84, 88, 91, 93,
of language, 493, 497–98, 660 100, 145, 196, 201, 259, 264, 395, 422, 442,
Immigrants, 47, 84, 88–89, 271, 309, 312, 316, 451, 455, 518, 540, 545, 578, 580, 592, 595,
319, 401, 423, 443, 451, 454, 493, 499, 504, 612
506, 516, 522, 529, 538, 541, 546, 590, 653 education, 360, 406, 443–44, 446, 495, 508,
Inequity, 85, 92, 100, 451, 546, 580, 594 628, 633
Infants, 14, 16, 18–19, 25, 121–22, 125, 130, emotionality, 264, 526
143–44, 476, 605 exlusion, 595
bilingual, 25 experimentation, 240
Influence, cross-linguistic, 14–15, 22–23, 51, exposure, 5, 16, 19, 26, 40–41, 43, 45–46, 52,
142–44, 169, 177, 199, 407, 589 60, 62, 117, 120, 124, 155, 283, 538, 657
Input, 17, 43, 51, 58, 62, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76, 84, fantasy, 225
143, 151, 278, 443, 521, 609 foreign, 85, 428
linguistic, 155, 290, 540, 637 foreign, early learning, 83, 87–88, 96, 120, 416,
management, 265, 294 442–43, 500, 541
measurement, 284 genocide, 596
of adults, 59, 63 genocide, in education, 580
parental, 15, 41, 44, 60, 63, 65–67, 69, 72, global, 443
75–76, 146–48, 249, 278, 280–81, 284–85, heritage, 7, 43–44, 48, 51–52, 84, 114, 194,
293, 296, 509, 521 228, 259, 261, 310, 312, 319, 365, 395,
patterns and strategies, 62, 75, 201, 285, 423–25, 429–30, 433, 443, 517, 522, 524,
289–95, 539 528, 537, 548, 605, 609–10, 614, 617, 655,
planning, 294 657, 661
practices, 295 heterogeneity, 584
proficiency-use cycle, 281 hierarchy, 580, 582, 585, 587
quality, 16, 26, 41, 45, 47, 279, 282–84, 548 homogenisation through education, 99, 363,
quantity, 16, 26, 41, 45, 73, 279, 283, 548 501, 520, 580, 599
supplements, 294 ideologies, 44, 223, 259, 270, 285, 364, 492–93,
trilingual, 156 498, 515, 517, 528, 546, 632, 660
Insertion, 193–94, 198, 202 ideologies, national, 519
Interaction, multiparty, 239 input, 5, 258, 521, 540, 637

672 SUBJECT INDEX
Language (cont.) Lexicalization

inventory, 442 congruent, 194, 198–99
landscapes, 7, 605, 607, 616 diversity, 26
learning, 3, 83, 163, 166, 170, 172, 180–81, Linguistics
305, 308, 337, 363, 396, 406, 442–43, 455, formal/generativist, 444
495, 508, 611, 635, 637–38, 653 functional/applied, 444
learning difficulties, 459 Literacy, 5, 334, 378–79, 393, 396, 415–16, 425,
loss, 539, 543, 545, 595, 597, 617, 638 428–30, 432, 434, 450, 501, 546, 563, 568,
maintenance, 2, 53, 120, 265, 539, 546, 608 606, 613, 623
majority, 46, 114, 289, 395, 443, 518, 537, 542, acquisition, 94, 231, 399, 415, 417, 421,
657 426–27, 433
management, 285, 289 development, 8, 338, 386–87, 402, 404, 406,
matrix, 50, 64, 71, 193, 198 433, 564, 566, 572, 609, 641
mediation, 7, 609 education, 306, 635, 638
minority, 46, 84–86, 88–90, 92, 94–96, 102, emergent, 376, 378, 383, 385–87, 421, 426,
224, 287, 289, 395, 443, 457, 505, 537, 550, 635
580, 590, 592, 594, 597–98, 628 learning, 308, 632
mixing, 14, 44, 47, 60, 62–63, 67–69, 76, 142, multilingual, 311–12, 335, 379, 396, 424, 428,
149, 153, 228, 286, 289, 525 565
multimodal, 5, 53 multimodal, 309, 311–12, 565
norms, 60, 202, 246, 417, 503, 581, 650, 657, practices, 387, 426, 565, 607, 612–13, 636
662 practices at home, 616
of mental state, 478–79 skills, 453
perception, 7, 14, 427 syncretic, 247, 332
planning, 257, 267 Load, cognitive, 16, 418
play, 229, 235, 237, 241, 247, 265, 329, 331, Loss of language, 539, 543, 545, 595, 597, 617,
348, 651–52 638
poetic function, 226
policies, 52, 101, 224, 259, 268, 368, 515, Maintenance of language, 2, 265, 539, 546, 608
557–58, 573, 638, 658 Materiality of multilingualism, 8, 605
policies in education, 83, 88, 97, 223, 262, Measurements, acoustic, 23
362–63, 369, 422, 450, 520, 528, 558, 566, Mediascapes, 609
580, 624, 633, 656 Mediation, linguistic and cognitive, 609
policies of family, 6, 44, 52, 64, 148, 264, 271, Mediators, 332, 334, 367–68
285, 453, 492, 497, 521, 529, 607–8, 610, cultural, 270
614, 661 Medium request, 268
policies, national, 262, 517, 573, 624 Memory, 16–17, 116
portrait, 216, 219–21, 225, 227, 229–31, 507 phonological, 24
practices, 6, 44, 86, 100, 202, 259, 263, 266, Metalinguistic comments, 269
285, 287, 295–97, 325, 328, 502, 523, 525, Metaphors, 219
613, 649 Methods
processing, 6, 15, 116, 124, 126, 143, 204 biographical, 217
proficiency, 118, 442, 444–45, 582 multimodal, 617
regional, 629 visual, 30, 215, 311, 319, 336, 614, 617
repertoire, 2, 6, 461, 495, 507, 560, 659 Mind, theory of, See Theory of Mind
resources, 460, 517, 659 Minorisation, 83, 105
secret, 225, 228 Minority, 631–32
shift, 537, 541, 545, 590 Minority, linguistic, 539, 628
socialization, 30, 68, 146, 148–49, 259, 266–67, Modality, 508
450, 526, 550, 579, 581, 583, 588, 592, 651–52 Monolingualism, 4, 442, 624
soundscape, 607 acquisition, 73–74
stigmatisation, 580 of children, 542, 590
support services/intervantion, 444, 547 paradigms, 455
switching, 17, 524 parallel, 578
systems of, 142, 145, 155, 177, 180, 477 resources, 605
use, 2, 59, 76, 445–46 societal, 578, 589, 593, 607, 656
veriety/registers, 442 Monolingualization, 223, 501
Latino/Latine/Latinx, 516, 521, 523, 528 Morphosyntax, 143, 145, 178, 443–44, 448, 537,
Learners, 83, 85–86, 100–1, 355, 358–59, 362, 542, 545, 548–49
366, 393, 397, 402, 418, 422, 427–29, 434, gender agreement, 547–48
495, 504, 507, 518, 541, 559, 568, 657, 660 mass/count distinction, 547
monolingual, 422 referring expressions, 548
multilingual, 398, 422, 426, 459, 572, 641 that-trace phenomenon, 547
of haritage language, 241, 269, 395, 615 Mother tongue, 47, 91, 93, 97, 100, 224, 262, 343,
plurilingual, 361, 367–69 365, 499, 501, 544, 598
young, 443, 450, 507, 623, 637 Motivation, 61, 397, 444
Learning difficulties, 453, 455, 457, 459 intrinsic, 239, 397, 407, 409
identification and diagnosis, 455, 457 of reading, 393, 407

Subject Index 673
Multicompetence, 2, 15, 29, 240 Object, transitional, 227

Multiglossia, 578, 593 One-person/parent-one-language (OPOL), 141,
Multilingualism, 28, 257, 286, 289, 296, 306, 319, 147, 156, 242, 245, 283, 289, 292, 294–96,
325, 331, 342, 376, 381, 388, 404, 415, 424, 498, 507, 521
426, 429, 434, 499, 556, 559–60, 571, 579, Orthography, 177, 415, 417–18, 426, 429, 432
590, 607, 632, 634, 650 Output, 443
acquisition, 4, 13, 22, 58–59, 68–70, 74–75,
142, 146, 281, 518, 528, 580 Parenting, 4, 521–22, 524, 526–28
additive, 288 bi/multilingual, 515
as a first language (MFL), 141, 579–80, 589 Pedagogy, multilingual, 567–68, 572, 628, 636, 639
as a lifestyle, 1, 588 Perception, 18–20, 427
assesment, 441, 449, 457, 459 patterns, 18
awareness, 2, 4, 580, 653 Personality, 444
balanced, 442 Phonemes, 19, 22, 446
bimodal, 38–40, 45–46, 48, 50, 52 Phonology, 444, 446
development, 4, 44, 46, 58, 76, 155, 163, 170, development, 447
271, 306, 309, 315, 319, 377, 442, 453, 559, Picture books, 610, 613
580, 607, 654, 658, 661 Play, 6
discourse, 345 homophone and tone, 243
discourse strategies, 247, 573 lexical-semantic, 243
dynamic model of, 15, 168–69, 178 morphological, 243
early, 3, 5, 16, 45, 163, 441 multilingual, 654, 659
education, 82–83, 85, 96, 98, 101, 181, 208, of children, 649, 651, 655, 658, 663
500, 519, 589, 597–98 of language, 247, 329, 331, 348, 651–52, 654
emergent, 4, 519, 640 phonological, 242
exposure, 31, 442, 581, 589 pragmatic, 244–45
family, 6, 334, 347, 497, 507, 517, 521, 605, syntactic, 244
610, 616, 661 Plurilingualism, 85, 355, 357, 359–60, 473, 480,
in childhood, 38–39, 58, 168, 181, 191, 287, 482, 491, 504, 507
327, 336, 347, 376, 385, 387, 393, 400, 402, development, 502
408, 415, 423, 427, 433, 556, 559, 572, 580 emergent, 358, 364, 367–68
in daycare centres, 499 Policies
landscapes, 40, 605, 649 educational, 450, 519–20, 558, 580, 633, 658
literacies, 379 of family language, 6, 607–8, 610, 614
materiality, 8, 605 of language, 44, 52, 148, 259, 262, 268, 285,
of children, 3, 28, 31, 141, 181, 231, 246, 331, 362, 368, 492, 497, 515, 517, 557–58, 573,
336, 441, 452, 491, 507, 515, 520, 527, 550, 633, 638, 656, 658
572, 574, 590, 613, 641, 651, 657, 662 Portrait of language, 216, 231, 507
of parents, 524, 526 Positioning, 215, 231
of siblings, 326, 328, 347, 661 Power asymmetries, 632, 634, 654
parallel, 599 Practices
pedagogy, 567–68, 628, 636 linguistic, 6, 100, 202, 266, 295–97, 325, 498,
play, 659 509, 523, 525, 613, 649
practices, 428, 652, 654, 661 multilingual, 429, 652, 654, 661
prdagogy, 572 of input, 295
repertoire, 5, 48, 560 of literacy, 387, 607, 612–13, 616, 636
resources, 605, 610, 614 of multiliteracy, 606
sequential, 3, 379, 442, 537 plurilingual, 507
simultaneous, 3, 46, 142, 235, 241, 379, 442, spatial, 229
537 Pragmatics, 445, 449
socialization, 584–85, 588, 651 Processing
societal, 578, 581, 583, 587, 589 cognitive, 5, 169
subtractive, 288, 591, 594 language, 5, 124, 143, 204
successive, 46 multilingual, 168
unbalanced, 540 neural, 18
Multiliteracy, 306, 319, 376, 379–81, 385–86, patterns, 18
388, 402, 422, 425, 565, 606, 609 phonetic, 20–21
development, 376–77, 380 skills, 22
practices, 606 words, 26
Multimodality, 39, 51, 215, 217, 231, 309, Proficiency, linguistic, 147, 445, 477, 582
318–19, 626–27, 640, 642 Programme for International Student
Assessment (PISA), 402, 451
Narrative, 448, 459, 475 Programs
Narrative identity, 494 bilingual maintenance, 452
Narrative, visual, 215 dual-language immersion, 452, 547, 551
Neurolinguistics, 14 educational, 84, 88, 519, 632
Norms of language, 60, 202, 223, 246, 417, 503, Psycholinguistics, 2, 7, 169
581, 650, 657, 662 Psychosocial factors, 393, 398, 400, 406, 408

674 SUBJECT INDEX
Rationalisation, of linguistic hierarchies, 580 Sound

Reading motivation, 393, 398–99, 405, 407, 409 of scpeech, non native, 18
Reading, development, 572 of speech, 21
Recognition of words, 25 of vowel length, 576
Repertoire vowel directory, 24
communicative, 219, 222, 231, 240, 593 Soundscape, linguistic, 607
heteroglossic, 220–21 Speakers of heritage, 423, 428, 538, 549–50
linguistic, 2, 6, 219, 310, 337, 363, 380, 460–61, Speech and language pathologist (SLP), 455
495, 507, 659 Status, socioeconomic, 17–18, 151, 453, 546–47
multilingual, 5, 48, 100, 178, 180, 220, 228, Stigmatisation of languages, 580
231, 508, 560, 662 Storytelling conventions, 445
plurilingual, 86, 497 Strategies
Research with children, 221, 616 non-verbal, 452
Resources of discourse, 68, 246, 292
cognitive, 387, 473, 477 of input, 292–95
communicative, 6, 48, 653, 659 of learning, 180, 444
cultural, 238 of multilingual discourse, 148, 193, 573
linguistic, 48, 52, 153, 178, 181, 216, 238, 268, of multilingual socialization, 588
388, 434, 452, 460, 473, 477, 517, 659 Supplements of input, 294
literate, 434 Support services/intervention, linguistic, 444
mixed, 605 Syncretism, 247
monolingual, 605 Systems
multilingual, 170, 180, 605, 610, 614, 642, 662 data management, 458
multimodal, 659 linguistic, 142–43, 151, 155, 177, 180
of accessibility, 451–52, 458 multilingual, 170
semiotic, 51, 53, 218, 227, 653 of writing, 453
sociocultural, 310 phonological, 22, 430
unitary vs. separated, 14, 21, 142, 144, 171, 197
Schooling, 3–4, 6, 83, 86–87, 90, 95, 97, 99, 123,
145, 167, 169, 174, 180, 220, 223, 336–37, Teachers, 7, 84, 97, 100, 336–37, 342, 348, 355,
342, 348, 357, 360, 366, 381, 395, 404, 422, 358, 361, 363, 365–67, 408, 455, 458, 461,
426, 434, 450, 452, 491, 500, 507, 520, 541, 504, 508, 519, 565, 573, 597, 629, 632, 658
547, 550, 557, 567, 569, 580, 585, 589, 594, cognition/attitudes and beliefs, 359–60,
634, 639 363–64, 504
bilingual, 220 education, 369, 481–82
early, 95, 623 Technology, 73, 441, 457, 611, 655
interrupted/inconsistent, 454 Theory of cognitive development, Piaget’s, 453
minority, 631–32 Theory of dynamic systems, 16
monolingual, 88, 582 Theory of mind, 116, 127–28, 248, 475, 480
multilingual, 83–85, 90, 92, 174, 181 Translanguaging, 6, 51, 100, 102, 208, 267, 269,
Riflessione Lingua class, 175, 179 325, 347, 379–80, 387, 441, 450, 453, 457,
trilingual, 84 460–61, 496, 507, 573, 613, 617, 640, 650,
Schoolscape, 8, 83, 94–95, 115, 123, 145, 229, 655–56, 658–60
267, 310, 312, 336, 360–61, 433, 447, 482, Translanguaging practices, 605
508, 544, 547–48, 567, 616, 627–28, 631, Translation equivalents, 26, 47
633–34, 638–39, 641–42, 656 Translations, 445
Shift of language, 537, 541, 545, 590 Trilingualism, 58, 60, 72, 84, 207, 287–88, 345,
Siblings, 201, 329, 331–32, 337 540
bilingual, 17, 27, 114, 331, 333–34, 338, 342 acquisition, 17, 65
discourse, 330, 332–33, 337 development, 155
multilingual, 242, 326, 328, 330, 347, 661 early, 17
trilingual, 241 first language acqcuisition/development of,
Sign languages, 38, 40–41, 46, 50, 227 141, 143
acquisition, 39, 47, 51 of children, 17, 46, 141, 143, 204, 235, 538
Signers, 227 of siblings, 241
of heritage, 44, 48
Signifying, 246 Utterances, mixed, 14, 60, 70, 75
Simplification, 22
Social cohesion, 555 Visual methods, 30, 215, 614
Socialization, 1, 4, 7, 308, 651 Visualization, reflexive, 216, 218
multilingual, 585, 588 Vocabulary, 26, 46, 118, 153, 283, 443–44, 448,
of language, 68, 146, 149, 259, 266–68, 450, 548
579, 581, 588, 652 acquisition, 447
sociocultural, 270 development, 447
Societies, monolingual, 578, 589, 593 Voice Onset Time (VOT), 23
Societies, multilingual, 579, 581, 583, 587, 589 Voicing
Sociolinguistics, 2, 7 double or role, 244
Sociology of language, 555 single, 244

Country Index
Australia, 311 Hong Kong, 69, 92

Australia, Arnhem Land, 297 Hungary, 17, 88
Austria, 89, 220, 623
Austria, Vienna, 219 Iceland, 98
India, 2, 90, 92–93, 99, 580, 582, 584, 594–95,
Basque, 99, 538, 541, 544 600
Belgium, 72, 89, 98, 261, 267, 269, 365, 499 India, Andhra Pradesh, 94
Belgium, Flanders, 283, 505 India, Delhi, 588
Bolivia, 264 India, Odisha, 94, 582
Brazil, 314 Iran, 401
Britain, 167, 266, 269, 394, 408, 454, 556 Ireland, 335, 541, 544
Britain, London, 337, 342, 480 Israel, 205, 260, 262, 386, 538, 543, 546, 656
Bulgaria, 88 Italy, 89
Burkina Faso, 224 Italy, South Tyrol, 174, 181
Canada, 62, 215, 286–87, 290, 295, 385, 443, 472, Japan, 145, 295, 454
482, 538, 590, 632, 636
Canada, Labrador, 544 Kenya, 382
Canada, Montreal, 114
Canada, Nunavut, 597 Latin American, 516
Canada, Ontario, 290 Luxembourg, 89, 98, 287, 499, 501, 660
Canada, Quebec, 538
Canada, Toronto, 114 Mexico, 382, 443, 506
Catalonia, 538, 541 Mexico, San Lucas, 288
China, 90, 93–94, 96, 242, 282, 287, 443, 454 Morocco, 424
China, Shanghai, 451
Cyprus, 98 Netherlands, The, 88–89, 263, 556
Czech Republic, 88 New Zealand, 40, 271
Nicaragua, 653
Dominican Republic, 652 Norway, 62, 262, 334, 541
Estonia, 629 OECD, 369, 416

European Union, 1, 85, 87–88, 98, 355, 359, 507,
624 Poland, 88
Portugal, 328, 636
Finland, 45, 89, 98, 215, 403
Finland, Sámiland, 635 Romania, 88
France, 88–89, 98, 190, 242, 357, 363, 424–25, Romania, Szeklerland, 630–31
499, 623 Russia, Siberia, 544
France, Alsace, 367
France, Brittany, 631 Scotland, 265
France, Strasbourg, 355 Singapore, 66, 202, 262, 266, 283
Slovakia, 88
Germany, 89, 196, 418, 429, 499, 623 South Africa, 90, 93, 96, 215, 379, 381–82, 555,
Germany, Hamburg, 62, 219 586, 656
Ghana, 202 South Africa, Cape Town, 653, 659
Greenland, 544 Spain, 89

676 COUNTRY INDEX
Spain, Barcelona, 660 United States, The, Alaska, 544

Sweden, 269, 296, 541, 544, 653, 658–59 United States, The, Arizona, 360
Switzerland, 98, 242, 267, 499, 623 United States, The, Arizona, Tucson, 638
Syria, 224 United States, The, California, 143, 190, 451,
515
Taiwan, Taipei, 637 United States, The, Los Angeles, 288, 635
Turkey, 224, 357 United States, The, Miami, 282, 523, 547
United States, The, New Mexico, 517
Uganda, Bombo, 560 United States, The, New York, 451, 634
United States, The, 64, 205, 242, 263, 271, 309, United States, The, Puerto Rico, 517
312, 316, 383, 394, 405–6, 442–43, 454–55,
506, 538, 541, 543–44, 590, 623, 655, 657 Wales, 544

Language Index
Afrikaans, 96, 381, 556, 558, 563, 572 English, Singaporean, 202
Akan, 202 Estonian, 64, 196, 199, 326, 337–38
Amharic, 263, 386, 538, 546
Arabic, 72, 86, 125, 129, 221, 262, 269, 295, 337, Finland-Swedish Sign Language (FinSSL), 43
386, 406, 424, 504, 542, 655, 658–59 Finnish, 43, 98, 403, 498, 636
Arabic Sign Language, 45 Finnish Sign language (FinSL), 43, 45
Arabic, Moroccan, 261, 424, 505 Flemish, 504
Assamese, 587 French, 59, 63, 71–72, 88, 114, 142, 147, 152,
Aymara, 264 173–74, 191, 203, 215, 222, 225, 228, 241,
243, 267, 269, 287, 337, 357, 385, 424, 478,
Bantu family, 558 499, 503–4, 507, 525, 538, 544, 660
Basque, 86, 406, 538, 631 Frisian, 198
Bengali, 337, 586–88, 593 Fula, 224
Berber, 72
Bosnian, 335, 655 Gaelic, 265
Breton, 86, 631 Ganda, 560
Bulgarian, 295, 337, 348 Garo, 21
Burundi Sign Language, 50 German, 18, 21, 59, 66, 68, 71–72, 89, 118, 125,
130, 142, 144, 173–74, 176–77, 195,
Cantonese, 69, 125, 241, 286, 478 199–200, 215, 221, 225, 228, 283–84, 293,
Catalan, 21, 121, 538, 660 337, 401, 416, 418, 420, 429–30, 432, 444,
Chichewa [or Nyanzha], 563 499, 503–4, 632, 660
Chinese, 61, 63, 95, 144, 147, 214, 229, 241–42, German, Viennese, 222, 228
266, 295, 337, 365, 385, 405, 451, 478, 503, Germanic, 444
516, 525, 538, 637, 660 Greek, 125, 337, 652
Creole English, 653 Gujarati, 588, 593
Cri, 203
Croatian, 199, 222, 337 Haitian, 451
Hawaiian, 517
Danish, 98, 174 Hebrew, 65, 129, 193, 205, 260, 262, 386, 543,
Dhuwaya, 297 546
Dutch, 72, 118, 142, 145, 147, 174, 198, 261, 362, Hindi, 92, 94, 538, 582, 585–88, 593
403, 505, 556 Hungarian, 17, 22–23, 27, 143, 326, 337, 343,
630, 632
English, 17–18, 21–23, 25, 59, 61–66, 69, 72, 83,
91–93, 95–96, 114, 118, 125, 129, 142–44, Indian Sign Language, 50
147, 149–50, 173–74, 191, 193, 195, 199, Inuktitut, 544, 597
205, 222, 241, 262–63, 267, 269, 282–84, isiNdebele, 557–58, 563
286, 288, 293, 295–97, 309–10, 312–13, 326, isiXhosa, 557–58, 563
333, 337–38, 348, 380–81, 383, 386, 403, isiZulu, 557–58, 563
405–6, 418, 442–43, 450, 455–56, 460, 478, Italian, 66, 70, 72, 118, 173–74, 200, 225, 499,
499, 504, 506, 515, 517, 519, 522, 525, 528, 503
538–40, 544, 547, 557–58, 560, 563, 570–72,
574, 580, 582, 585, 587–88, 591–95, 600, Japanese, 18, 63, 142, 144, 147, 149–50, 199, 222,
612, 632, 637–38, 652, 656, 660 229, 269, 284, 293, 478, 503, 538

678 LANGUAGE INDEX
Karenni (Burmese), 655 Saami, 43

Khoe family, 556 Sámi, 635
Kinyarwanda, 269 San family, 556
Korean, 96, 129, 451, 506 Sanskrit, 582
Kui, 582 Sepedi, 96, 557–58, 563
Kurdish, 221, 224, 296, 655 Serbian, 222
Kven, 262 Serbo-Croatian, 143
KwaZulu-Natal, 563 SeSotho, 96, 557–58, 561, 563
SeTswana, 96–97, 557–58, 563
Ladin, 118, 174 Shangaan [or Tsonga], 563
Latvian, 142 Shona, 563
Luxembourgish, 89, 499, 503, 660 siSwati, 96, 381, 558
Sotho, 381, 557, 563
Malay, 262, 267, 283 Sotho, Southern, 564
Malayalam, 593 Spanish, 21, 23, 63, 65, 72, 99, 118, 125, 142, 147,
Mandarin, 66, 262, 283, 286, 337, 385, 387, 442, 173–74, 193, 203, 205, 221, 263–64, 282,
456, 478, 548–49 287–88, 317, 334, 337, 380, 383, 405–6,
Marathi, 30, 588, 593 444–45, 449, 451, 460, 503–4, 506, 516, 522,
Mayan, 383, 538 525, 538–40, 545, 547, 591, 593, 631, 638,
Media Lengua, 203 653, 659–60
Michif, 203 Swahili, 560
Miskitu, 653 Swedish, 43, 98, 174, 296, 653, 655,
Mixtec, 517 658–59
Mòoré, 224 Sylheti, 24
Nahuatl, 383, 517 Tagalog, 23, 125, 143, 147, 516, 539
Navajo, 360 Tamazight, 424
Ndau, 563 Tamil, 125, 262, 270, 283, 337, 586
Ndebele, 96, 381 Telugu, 582, 592–93
Nepali, 593 Tigris, 538, 546
New Zealand Sign Language, 40 Tshivenda, 96, 558
Nguni, 557 Tsonga, 381
Nigerian Pidgin English, 565 Tsotsitaal, 97
Norwegian, 62, 334, 402 Tswana, 381
Nubi, 560 Turkish, 72, 86, 130, 221, 224, 263, 337, 357,
362, 401, 416, 420, 429–30, 432, 504–5,
Occitan, 424 652
Odia, 582, 586–88, 591, 593 Twi, 202
Tzotzil, 653
Patwa, Dominican Afro–French Creole, 652
Pedi, 381 Urdu, 125, 593
Persian/Farsi, 17, 22–23, 25, 144, 296, 401, 659
Pig Latin, 660 Venda, 381, 563
Polish, 287, 538 Vietnamese, 125, 287, 456
Portuguese, 296, 313–14, 326, 328, 333, 337, 499, Võro, 629
503, 538
Punjabi, 125, 228, 585 Welsh, 25, 73–74, 540
Putonghua, 92
Xhosa, 96, 381–82, 566, 653
Quechua, 203 Xitsonga, 96, 558
Romance, 68 Yiddish, 229

Romani, 43, 658
Romanian, 630, 632 Zapotec, 288
Russian, 96, 125, 129, 260, 267, 452 Zulu, 96–97, 381, 563

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The Cambridge Handbook of Childhood Multilingualism

anat stavans is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics in the English

ulrike jessner is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Genuinely broad in scope, each handbook in this series provides a complete

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Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

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List of Figures page ix

Multilingualism Is Not Bilingualism +1: An Introduction

Part I Becoming and Being a Multilingual Child

Part II Cognition and Faculties in Multilinguals

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Part III Family Language Policy

Part IV Language(s) and Literacy of Multilingual Children

Part V Socialization in Childhood Multilingualism

Part VI Multilingual Children’s Landscape

Subject Index 668

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7.1 MXL task: Two of the following three sentences have

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2.1 Examples of multilingual children acquiring sign

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Anat Stavans, PhD, is Professor in Applied Linguistics in the English

Ulrike Jessner, PhD, is Professor at the University of Innsbruck, Austria,

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Herdina, Multilingual Matters, 2002), which pioneered dynamic systems

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Alison L. Bailey, EdD, Department of Education, School of Education and

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Jessica Huancacuri, MA, Applied Psychology, New York University, New

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Baoqi Sun, PhD, Centre for Research in Child Development, Ofﬁce of

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The Cambridge Handbook of Childhood Multilingualism gestated during different

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patience in enduring our moments of absence (both mental and physical),

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Multilingualism in all its possible shapes plays an integral part in human

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international communication, and the readily accessible international

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multilingualism from internationally renowned scholars whose work has

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the different routes into different types of early multilingualism

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write in one language, multilingual children must learn to do that in all

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multilingualism. Most of the work conducted in the ﬁrst wave of research

Aronin, L., & Ó Laoire, M. (2013). The material culture of multilingualism:

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Heller, M. (2006). Linguistic Minorities and Modernity: A Sociolinguistic

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I acknowledge the ﬁnancial support of Széchenyi 2020 under the EFOP-3.6.1-16-2016-00015.

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contrast to monolingualism (Hoffmann 1991; Aronin & Hufeisen 2009;

1.1.1 An Overview of Infant Bilingualism Research

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