Bilingual Children: From Birth to Teens

Abstract

Part 1 Bilingualism: what is it? is it an advantage or disadvantage? Part 2 Establishing bilingualism in the family: motives for creating bilingualism infant bilingualism. Part 3 Communication in the family - how it works: stages of linguistic development the children's communication strategies the children addressing both parents simultaneously addressing father plus monolingual child to child and brother to sister communication private speech dreams communication with animals and toys. Part 4 Departures from normal language choice in the family: role play the mother's knowledge of German privacy storytelling by the parents code switching and triggering quotational switching - in storytelling. Part 5 Influences from outside the immediate family: attitudes of monolingual English speakers peer group pressure German-English bilinguals. Part 6 Further problems: reluctance to speak the home language effect of the father's not being a native speaker of German. Part 7 Measuring proficiency in both languages: vocabulary, fluency, accuracy, storytelling syntactic, lexical, phonological and semantic transference. Part 8 Biliteracy. Part 9 How the children view bilingualism. Part 10 Two varieties of German meet - a family language and a national language. Part 11 Other aids to the development of bilingualism: books, magazines, records, games, outings, shops etc schools and playgroups camps and clubs visits to and from the linguistic homeland language maintenance for parents.