Multilingualism and Language Education: findings from projects in the UK, India & Greece and implications for the German context

Referent: Theo Marinis, Universität Konstanz & Konstantina Olioumtsevits, Aristoteles-Universität Thessaloniki

Research on multilingualism and cognition in western societies has revealed cognitive advantages and good learning skills under specific conditions but there is a current debate about which these specific conditions are. The interplay between language and cognition is less clear in countries from the Global South and in recent immigrants from countries of the Global South to Europe, including Germany. In this workshop I will present findings from three projects to highlight these issues and to discuss with the audience the implication of these findings for the German context.

1) The first project investigates language and reading abilities in Greek-English primary school children who live in the UK and is part of the PhD project of Theodora Papastefanou. The focus of this project is on how their language and reading skills in the two languages develop over time in the first four years of primary school, how language dominance changes over time and how the input and language use from the environment facilitates their development (Papastefanou, Powell, & Marinis, 2019).

2) The second project investigates how primary school children in India develop language, literacy, and mathematical skills. This project explores how the complex dynamics of social, economic and geographical contexts on the one hand and the availability of multiple languages in the home and in the school on the other hand affect the children’s learning outcomes (Tsimpli, Vogelzang, Balasubramanian, Marinis, Alladi, Reddy, & Panda, 2020).

3) The third project investigates language development in primary school children with a migration and refugee background who live in Greece and is part of the PhD project of Konstantina Olioumtsevits. The aim of this project is to find out which teaching techniques are best in supporting children’s language learning. It compares explicit with implicit teaching techniques for learning vocabulary and grammar. Konstantina Olioumtsevits will present her initial findings on vocabulary interventions and will lead an interactive part, in which participants will experience the material and teaching techniques and will discuss in groups about how these could be used in the German education context.

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References

Papastefanou, D., Powell, D. & Marinis, T. (2019). Language and decoding skills in Greek-English primary school bilingual children: effects of language dominance, contextual factors and cross-language relationships between the heritage and the majority language. Frontiers in Communication 4.65.

Tsimpli, I., Vogelzang, M., Balasubramanian, A,, Marinis, T., Alladi, S., Reddy, A., & Panda, M. (2020). Linguistic diversity, multilingualism and cognitive skills: A study of disadvantaged children in India. Languages, 5 (10). doi:10.3390/languages5010010.