The Blackwell Guide to Research Methods in Bilingualism and Multilingualism

Li Wei, Melissa G. Moyer

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119492214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

As globalization has increased awareness of the extent of language contact and linguistic diversity, questions concerning bilingualism and multilingualism have taken on an increasing importance from both practical and scholarly points of view. Written by leading experts and practitioners in the field, The Blackwell Guide to Research Methods in Bilingualism and Multilingualism:

• Highlights the interdisciplinary nature of research on bilingualism and multilingualism and offers a practical guide to the procedures and tools for collecting and analyzing data
• Specifically addresses methodological issues, discussing research topics, core concepts and approaches, and the methods and techniques available
• Links theory to method, and to data, and answers a real need for a know-how volume on bilingualism and multilingualism that deals with its methodology in a systematic and coherent way

Part I
Researching Bilingualism and Multilingualism

1
Research Perspectives on Bilingualism and Multilingualism

Li Wei

1.1 Introduction

For many people, bilingualism and multilingualism are a fact of life and not a problem. Contact between people speaking different languages has been a common phenomenon since ancient times. Increased international travel and modern information and communication technologies provide even more opportunities for people of different tongues to get to know each other. Even if one was born and brought up as a monolingual, the opportunity to learn other languages is no longer a luxury for the elite. Nevertheless, some regard bilingualism and multilingualism as an issue of concern, and raise questions such as: Can learning more than one language at a time affect children’s intellectual development? Do bilingual and multilingual children present special educational needs? Can bilingualism and multilingualism result in schizophrenia, split or confused identity, or mental illness? Do bilingualism and multilingualism lead to social disorder between communities? These are legitimate questions, the answers to which depend on one’s experience, knowledge of the phenomenon, and point of view. They are also worthwhile research questions that need to be addressed scientifically. Findings from scientific research on bilingualism and multilingualism can provide strong evidence for answering these questions.

1.2 Societal and Individual Bilingualism and Multilingualism

Fishman (1980) made a useful distinction between bilingualism or multilingualism as an individual phenomenon and as a societal phenomenon. A quick look at the statistics will tell us that most of the countries in the world are multilingual – there are 193 countries and over 6,000 different languages. This does not mean, however, that the individual citizens of multilingual countries are necessarily multilingual themselves. In fact, countries which are officially multilingual, such as Belgium and Switzerland, may have many monolinguals in their population, while officially monolingual countries, such as France and Germany, have sizeable multilingual populations. Several questions arise here: Why are some countries officially multilingual whereas others are officially monolingual? What rights do different languages have, in government, in education, or in social interaction? What are the effects of the language policies of a country on its citizens? What are the effects of bilingualism and multilingualism on the country’s economic and social development?

A multilingual individual is anyone who can communicate in more than one language, be it active (through speaking and writing) or passive (through listening and reading). Multilingual individuals may have become what they are through very different experiences: some may have acquired and maintained one language during childhood, the so-called first language (L1), and learned other languages later in life, while others have acquired two or more first languages since birth. What is the relationship between the languages in the process of language acquisition? Are early and late bilinguals and multilinguals different kinds of language users? Are some languages more easily learned and maintained than others? These are some of the questions that could be researched with regard to bilingualism and multilingualism as an individual phenomenon.

Whenever two people meet, they need to decide whether they want to interact with each other and in what way. When bilingual and multilingual speakers meet, an issue for consideration and negotiation is which language should be used. Most bilingual and multilingual speakers seem to know which language is the most appropriate for a given situation, but how do they know it? Most bilingual and multilingual speakers switch from one language to another in the middle of a conversation, but why do they do it? Bilingual and multilingual interaction can also take place without the speakers switching languages. In certain areas, it is not uncommon for speakers to consistently each use a different language. This phenomenon is found, for example, in Scandinavia, where speakers of Swedish and Norwegian can easily communicate by each speaking their own language. To what extent are these speakers aware of the differences between their languages?

Individual and societal bilingualism and multilingualism are by no means entirely separate. Multilingual speakers in officially monolingual countries often find themselves constrained by official policies and unable to utilize their full linguistic repertoire, just as monolinguals in officially multilingual countries find it difficult to cross linguistic boundaries to make full use of the opportunities and resources available. Can these kinds of tensions be resolved through legislation? What would be the long-term effect of tensions of this kind?

1.3 Research Perspectives

Research on bilingualism and multilingualism has a very long history. Detailed documentation of societal language contacts in Europe, for example, dates back to the seventeenth century; Whitney’s analysis of the grammatical structure of bilingual speech was published in 1881; and Cattell’s experiments, which compared word associations and reaction times of bilingual and monolingual individuals, were published in 1887. Nevertheless, bilingualism and multilingualism became a major focus of scientific research only in the last century, especially from the 1970s. Three broad research perspectives can be identified: linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic. Each of these perspectives has its distinct themes and research methodologies.

1.3.1 Linguistic perspective

Research on bilingualism and multilingualism is central to the contemporary linguistics agenda. Chomsky (1986) defined three basic questions for linguistics:

1. 1 What constitutes knowledge of language?
2. 2 How is knowledge of language acquired?
3. 3 How is knowledge of language put to use?

For bilingualism and multilingualism research, these questions can be rephrased to take into account knowledge of more than one language (see Cook, 1993):

1. 1 What is the nature of language or grammar in a bi- or multilingual person’s mind, and how do different systems of language knowledge coexist and interact?
2. 2 How is more than one grammatical system acquired, either simultaneously or sequentially? In what respects does bi- or multilingual acquisition differ from monolingual acquisition?
3. 3 How is the knowledge of two or more languages used by the same speaker in bilingual interaction?

With regard to the first question (the nature of multilingual knowledge), a key issue is whether and how the different languages in the multilingual person’s mind interact with one another. One important characteristic of the multilingual is their ability to move between different languages: they can speak one language at a time, behaving more or less like a monolingual; or mix languages in the same sentence, clause, or even word, resulting in a linguistic phenomenon known as code-switching. There is a very large body of literature describing the structural patterns of bilingual code-switching. It is clear that code switches take place at specific points in an utterance; they are structurally well formed and seem to conform to the grammatical constraints of the languages involved. Muysken (2000), for example, offers a typology of code-switching: “insertion” of material (lexical items or entire constituents) from one language into a structure from the other language; “alternation” between structures from languages; and “congruent lexicalization” of material from different lexical inventories into a shared grammatical structure. Linguists have developed various models specifying the grammatical constraints of these processes. For instance, models of the insertional type of code-switching view the constraints in terms of the structural properties of some base or matrix language, e.g. the Matrix Language frame model of Myers-Scotton (1997), while models departing from alternation see the constraints on code-switching in terms of the compatibility or equivalence of the languages involved at the switch point, e.g. Poplack (1980).

As is often the case in linguistics, counter-examples are reported as soon as a new model or constraint is proposed. More recent linguistic studies of code-switching question the theoretical value of the various grammatical constraints, arguing instead for the application of the basic principles already afforded by Universal Grammar. MacSwan (2004: 298), for example, goes as far as to say that “Nothing constrains code switching apart from the requirements of the mixed grammars.” Put differently, the generative-universalist position is that all of the facts of bilingual code-switching may be explained in terms of principles and requirements of the specific grammars used in each specific utterance. MacSwan also questions the status and explanatory power of the matrix language, a concept that is widely believed to exist by code-switching researchers and is central to models such as the one proposed by Myers-Scotton. While it is generally accepted that the two languages involved in code-switching tend to play different roles – one providing the morphosyntactic frame while the other provides specific items, usually open-class content morphemes – the concept of matrix language is not theoretically motivated and probably not needed for explaining the structural patterns or constraints.

The second major area of linguistic studies of bilingualism and multilingualism concerns the acquisition of linguistic knowledge. Earlier studies of bilingual acquisition attempted to chart the developmental paths and stages of the bilingual child. Volterra and Taeschner (1978) suggested that bilingual acquisition went through three key stages:

Stage I:	the child has one lexical system comprised of words from both languages;
Stage II:	the child distinguishes two different lexicons, but applies the same syntactic rules to both languages;
Stage III:	the child speaks two languages differentiated both in lexicon and syntax, but each language is associated with the person who uses that language.

Although some studies both before and after Volterra and Taeschner’s had evidence supporting the model, there has been much criticism particularly of the claims made regarding the first two stages. This is generally known as the “one-system-or-two” debate; i.e., do bilingual children begin with a fused linguistic system and gradually differentiate the two languages, or do they start with a differentiated system? Part of that debate centers around the question: What counts as evidence for differentiation or fusion? Volterra and Taeschner (1978) and Taeschner (1983), for instance, based their decision on whether the child made appropriate sociolinguistic choices, i.e., whether the child spoke the “right” language to the “right” person. It was argued that awareness of the two languages as distinct plays a crucial role in deciding the issue of differentiation, and a child’s ability to make appropriate language choices reflects that awareness. However, as McLaughlin (1984) points out, the argument that bilingual children separate the languages when they are aware there are two systems is circular unless some criterion is provided for assessing what is meant by awareness other than that children separate the languages. In any case, we need to bear in mind that a child’s apparent (in)ability to choose the right language for the right addressee is a rather different issue from whether the child has one or two linguistic systems. Part of the problem is the familiar one of what we can infer about competence from performance.

In a longitudinal study of a girl named Kate who was acquiring Dutch and English simultaneously, De Houwer (1990) provided strong evidence for the separate-development argument. De Houwer reported that Kate used only Dutch with monolingual Dutch speakers, but would occasionally switch to English when interacting with Dutch-English bilinguals. Thus, the child seemed aware of the linguistic abilities of the interlocutors. De Houwer further suggested that Kate used English and Dutch in the same manner as do children monolingual in one of her languages. She was, according to De Houwer, already fully bilingual by the age of 2;7. Although lexical mixing was not a focus of De Houwer’s analysis, the phenomenon was discussed. In the majority of Kate’s mixed utterances, a single-word item, most often a noun from one language, was inserted into an utterance that was otherwise completely in the other language. These mixed utterances were well formed, that is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part I: Researching Bilingualism and Multilingualism
• Part II: Procedures, Methods, and Tools
• Part III: Project Ideas, Dissemination, and Resources
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement