(Meta)linguistic abilities of bilectal educators: the case of Cyprus

ABSTRACT

The present study examines whether bilectal Greek Cypriot educators are able to identify dialectal (Cypriot Greek) elements superimposed on the standard language (Standard Modern Greek) in a written variety-judgment task. By doing so, (meta)linguistic skills of bilectal teachers from Cyprus were put to the test and later compared to the results of monolingual native Standard Modern Greek-speaking teachers from Greece on the same task. The findings revealed important differences between the performance and the linguistic profiles of the two groups across all levels of linguistic analysis, pointing out to a sharp discrepancy between what counts as ‘standard’ in Cyprus and what the performance in the standard variety really corresponds to. The implications of these findings for classroom language instruction in bilectal contexts are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilectalism
• Cypriot Greek
• metalinguistic awareness
• schooling factor
• Standard Modern Greek

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Evelina Leivada is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at UiT-The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø and a member of the Cyprus Acquisition Team. She got her PhD in Cognitive Science and Language from Universitat de Barcelona in 2015. Prior to joining UiT, she taught linguistics at the Cyprus University of Technology and held a postdoctoral research & teaching position at the University of Cyprus in 2016–2017. She has published principally in the areas of language variation and development.

Maria Kambanaros is Associate Professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at the Cyprus University of Technology. She is a certified bilingual English-Greek Speech Pathologist with over 25 years of clinical experience and academic appointments in Greece and Cyprus. She received her bachelor degree in speech pathology and later on her PhD qualification from Flinders University of South Australia (Australia), School of Medicine. She is the author of a highly successful book on diagnostic issues in speech therapy (ΔιαγνωστικάΘέματαΛογοθεραπείας) which has been adopted as the standard university textbook in Speech and Language Therapy programs in Greece and Cyprus. She is highly committed to developing valid diagnostic measures for assessing language impairments in multilingual individuals.

Loukia Taxitari is a post-doctoral Research Associate at the Cyprus University of Technology, Department of Rehabilitation Sciences. Her research areas focus on L1 acquisition in typical and atypical populations. She is mainly interested in the acquisition of semantics at the early stages of word learning and the interaction with other cognitive and linguistic abilities, such as categorisation and grammatical development respectively.

Kleanthes K. Grohmann is Professor of Biolinguistics in the Department of English Studies at the University of Cyprus (UCY) and the Director of CAT, the Cyprus Acquisition Team (CAT Lab). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland (2000) and has published widely in the areas of syntactic theory, comparative syntax, language acquisition, impaired language, and multilingualism. Among the books he has written and (co-)edited are Understanding Minimalism (with N. Hornstein and J. Nunes, 2005, CUP), InterPhases (2009, OUP), and The Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics (with Cedric Boeckx, 2013, CUP). He is founding co-editor of the John Benjamins book series Language Faculty and Beyond and editor of the open-access journal Biolinguistics.