The effects of balanced biliteracy on Greek-German bilingual children’s secondary discourse ability

ABSTRACT

Several studies have revealed the cognitive and linguistic benefits of balanced bilingualism, but the research on balanced biliteracy is still in its initial stages (Marinis et al. submitted. “Biliteracy Education Impacts on Cognition Selectively.”). This study investigates the positive effects of balanced biliteracy on the development of secondary discourse ability involved in narrative production. The analysis is based on narratives told by 30 Greek-German bilingual children (9–12 years) in both their languages. The children are divided in three groups, differing in language proficiency in each respective language and features of the educational setting (in terms of balance of teaching hours dedicated to each language). The results reveal that the features of the educational setting are the most reliable predictor of children’s narrative skills. Moreover, balanced biliteracy has the effect of evening out imbalances in language proficiency. The study contributes to identifying the factors that affect secondary discourse ability and motivate variation in the development of literacy skills (Francis 2006. “The Development of Secondary Discourse Ability and Metalinguistic Awareness in Second Language Learners.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics 16 (1): 37–60; Bongartz 2016. “Bilingual and Second Language Development and Literacy – Emerging Perspectives on an Intimate Relationship.” Proceedings of the 21st International Symposium of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics 2013, Thessaloniki, April 5–7, 2013).

KEYWORDS:

• Narrative
• secondary discourse
• balanced biliteracy
• bilingual proficiency
• story grammar
• referential strategies

Acknowledgements

The data presented in this paper have been collected and analyzed within the CoLiBi project – Cognition, Literacy and Bilingualism in Greek-German speaking children (principal investigators: Christiane Bongartz and Ianthi Tsimpli), jointly founded by IKY (Greek State Scholarship Foundation) and DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). We thank Maria Andreou, Eva Knopp, Ianthi Tsimpli, our anonymous reviewers and the audience of the BALED workshop (23–24 April 2015, University of Thessaloniki) for their precious feedback. All remaining errors are ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Christiane Bongartz is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Cologne. Her research covers a range of theoretical and applied issues in language acquisition in various contexts (L1, 2L1 and L2), with particular reference to the interaction between language-internal factors and acquisitional context(s).

Jacopo Torregrossa is Professor of Romance Linguistics at the University of Hamburg. His research interests focus on monolingual and bilingual acquisition of linguistic phenomena at the syntax-semantics and syntax-phonology interface and the interaction between language and cognitive abilities. Christiane Bongartz and Jacopo Torregrossa are Principal Investigators of the project “Reference management in bilingual narratives” of the SFB 1252 “Prominence in Language” at the University of Cologne.

Notes

1 The analysis of the questionnaires shows that KRE children are Greek dominant in early literacy. It is thus likely that early literacy interacts with balanced biliteracy in enhancing secondary discourse. In particular, we showed that in all measures of syntactic complexity (story length and use of subordinate clauses) with the exception of the production of complex DPs, KRE children perform in Greek similarly to their peers in DUS. This suggests that early literacy has a positive correlation with syntactic complexity abilities, in line with what has been proposed in the literature (cf. Scarborough et al. 1991; Walker et al. 1994).

2 The only exception to this generalization is lexical diversity, for which language proficiency plays a key role. We propose that the reason for this is twofold. First, in this study language proficiency is assessed based on vocabulary knowledge. Second, among the indicators of secondary discourse, lexical diversity may be the less ‘abstract’. In other terms, even if the child knows that a good narrative involves variation in the lexical choices, his performance in lexical diversity is constrained by proficiency to a greater extent than with the other indicators of narrative skills.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst; BALED: [grant number MIS377313]; IKY (Greek Scholarships Foundation).