Session Information
31 SES 04 B, Interactions Between Multilingualism and Metalinguistic Awareness in Educational Sciences
Symposium
Contribution
There is little research consent about relations between multilingualism and metalinguistic awareness. In order to investigate this relation and answer this research question, measurement methods as well as assessment tools should be taken into consideration (see also Bialystok 2001, Wildemann et al. 2016). Current research brings evidence that multilingualism impacts metalinguistic awareness, as the global values of multilingual children were compared with those of monolingual German speakers. Analyses show that multilingual children produced a larger amount of metalinguistic expressions than their monolingual classmates, once German language skills, general cognitive ability and age were controlled for (Akbulut et al. 2017; Bien-Miller et al. 2017). Following these results, multilingualism can be – and is indeed – utilised as a resource for language reflection and language comparisons. Due to the assessment task and to the design method, it can therefore be assumed that children raised with more than one language are more capable of linguistic analyses than those who do not have recourse to a second, comparative language (Wildemann et al. 2018). What do these results intend to point out and what are the questions that arise from this research? To the moment, the research question “Could other languages also activate metalinguistic processes, despite the fact that they are not students’ heritage languages?” stays open. Multilingual competence, resumed as “mobilization ability” (Martinez 2015, pp. 10), is an action competence, which activates linguistic resources. Therefore, languages other than heritage languages may also be relevant for the multilingual practice and may lead to the enhancement of metalinguistic awareness (Spada & Tomita 2010). Other languages and/or knowledge elements related to foreign languages are usually available due to socialization processes that students run through. In the study “MoreLanguages” at the University Koblenz-Landau, we assess the metalinguistic awareness of N=504 primary school children with the elicitation tool M-SPRA (Wildemann et al. 2016, 2018). Thus, a big amount of metalinguistic statements (N=4000), some of them related to other languages (N=400) have been assessed, allowing insights in the frequency and quality of the activated linguistic resources. In the symposium presentation, we will outline the metalinguistic statements that the students express while activating other languages.
References
See above.
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