Receptive multilingualism and second language acquisition: the language transition process of adopted children

ABSTRACT

In this paper a context where receptive multilingualism represents a communicative strategy of adjustment in a context of second language acquisition is discussed. The traditional scope of receptive multilingualism has been extended to multilingual environments resulting from an experience of mobility, namely transnational adoptive families. Similar to other contexts of receptive multilingualism, this scenario involves asymmetrical language competences, but in this case language contact evolves quite rapidly in the acquisition of one of the languages involved. By means of 29 h of interactional data and discourse analyses, we investigated the family communication of three Italian families, one of them adopting in Russia and two of them in Chile. Unlikely for a lexically and structurally more distant language (Russian), in a framework of intelligible languages (Spanish-Italian), the adoption of receptive multilingualism leads adopted children to rely on a longer ‘receptive stage’.

KEYWORDS:

• Receptive multilingualism
• language strategies
• second language acquisition
• mutual intelligibility
• transnational adoptees
• adoptive parents

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to the children and their families who generously participated in this research and gave me their time and attention. I would also like to thank Professor Antonella Sorace for offering her ideas and suggestions. Additional thanks go to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All participants, including their family names, have been given pseudonyms.

2 The Giuliani have agreed to keep on recording during the first year after the adoption of Juan. The data are currently being analyzed and they will be the object of future publications.

Additional information

Funding

The research leading to these results has received funding from the EU 7th Framework Programme [grant agreement number 613344] (Project MIME).

Notes on contributors

Alice Fiorentino

Alice Fiorentino obtained her PhD from the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne in 2018. Her thesis was an analysis of the use of Receptive Multilingualism as a strategy the communication in settings of international mobility. Her specific focus was the early communication of transnational adoptive families. She is currently a Post-doc researcher at University of Verona, Italy.