| Project Detail |
A closer look at language-crossed youths
The linguistic journey of immigrant children has come under a fresh spotlight. Many young minds traverse a complex linguistic terrain as heritage speakers, embracing a minority language at home while immersed in a society dominated by a different tongue. However, these bilingual heritage speakers exhibit a diverse range of proficiency levels in their heritage language (HL), far beyond what is observed in their monolingual counterparts. With the support of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions programme, the REBUILD project will focus on returnees, a lesser-explored group who transition from foreign majority language schools to their native HL environment. It explores the factors shaping their HL outcomes. By dissecting grammar, cognition and environmental influences, REBUILD sheds light on the intricate tapestry of bilingual heritage.
Many (immigrant) children are heritage speakers (HSs; bilinguals who acquire a minority language at home, different from the majority societal language in which they are growing up). Ultimate attainment of the heritage language (HL) varies considerably amongst individual HSs—much more profoundly that what can be noted in monolingual counterparts—despite being naturalistic natives from birth. Understanding what factors explain/predict such differences in HS outcomes is a necessary first step in assessing and, ultimately, being able to meet the educational/interventional needs for bilingual HL development. Re-exposure Effect in Bilinguals Under Language Development (REBUILD) propose a novel approach that combines offline and online methods and focuses on a severely understudied, yet crucially important group of heritage speaker bilinguals, namely returnees. Returnees are children of immigrant families who spend a significant portion of their formative developmental years (school age) in a foreign majority language context, a typical HL scenario, yet return to their native HL environment, often as older children or teenagers. This research is important for the global reality in which HL bilingualism proliferates and HL returnees increase year-on-year. Examining the development of returnee’s native HL from the point of re-exposure to the native environment opens up new directions. While research shows that HL bilingualism (HLB) grammatical outcomes vary significantly, findings are largely limited to contexts in which children grow up and stay in an environment where the native HL is a minority language. Environment transitions—as in the case of returnees—open an exciting opportunity to tease apart internal (grammatical structure, non-linguistic cognitive abilities) and external factors (input, use) accounting for HLB. |
