Cover not available
Part of
Plurilingual Education: Policies – practices – language development
Edited by Patrick Grommes and Adelheid Hu
[Hamburg Studies on Linguistic Diversity 3] 2014
► pp. 245–258

Developing a written lexicon in a multilingual environment

| University of Barcelona
| University of Barcelona

Children educated in Catalonia are growing in a multilingual environment. Catalan is their school language but not necessarily their home or social language. Our goal was to track the presence of such multilingual input in the written lexicon of 2,436 students throughout compulsory schooling. Participants were asked to write down as many names as they remembered of five semantic fields and to produce 6 types of text. The two corpora were tapped for the presence of non-Catalan and hybrid constructions. Unexpectedly, these accounted for only 3% of the total number of lexical forms in the corpora. The imperviousness of the corpora to multilingual influence is discussed in terms of the constraints placed by the written modality and by the school-situated conditions of task production.

Published online: 15 July 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hsld.3.16tol
References
Auer, P
1984  Bilingual Conversation [Pragmatics & Beyond V:8]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1998  Code-switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction, and Identity . London: Routledge.Google Scholar
August, D. & Hakuta, K
. (eds) 1997  Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda . Washington DC: National Academy Press.Google Scholar
Banks, J
1993  Approaches to multicultural curriculum reform. In Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives , J. Banks & C. Banks (eds). Boston MA: Allyn & Bacon.Google Scholar
Bates, E. & Goodman, J
1997 On the inseparability of grammar and the lexicon: Evidence from acquisition, aphasia and real-time processing. Language and Cognitive Processes 12(5– 6): 6–586Google Scholar
Berman, R.A. & Ravid, D
2008 Becoming a literate language user: Oral and written text construccion across adolescence. In Cambridge Handbook of Literacy , D.R. Olson & N. Torrance (eds), 92–111. Cambridge MA: CUP.Google Scholar
Biber, D
1995  Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-linguistic Comparison . Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cenoz, J
1997 The influence of bilingualism on multilingual acquisition: Some data from the Basque country. Actas do I simposio internacional sobre o bilinguismo, Universidade de Vigo, 21–25 October, 278–287. Vigo: University of Vigo.
Cunningham, A.E. & Stanovich, K.E
1997 Early acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later. Developmental Psychology 33(6): 934–945. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garrett, P.B
1999 Language Socialization, Convergence, and Shift in St. Lucia, West Indies. PhD dissertation, New York University.
Idescat
[URL]
Krashen, S
1996  Every Person a Reader . Culver City CA: Language Education Associates.Google Scholar
Leong, C.K. & Ho, M.K
2008 The role of lexical knowledge and related linguistic components in typical and poor language comprehenders of Chinese. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 21: 559–586. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Myers-Scotton, C
1995 A lexically based model of code-switching. In One Speaker, Two Languages , L. Milroy & P. Muysken (eds), 233–256 . Cambridge: CUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Olson, D.R
2004  The World of Paper . Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Payrató, L
1996  Català col·loquial. Aspectes de l’ús corrent de la llengua catalana . València, Espanya: Universitat de València.Google Scholar
Paugh, A. L
2001  Unp Creole Day is Every Day: Language Socialization, Shift, and Ideologies in Dominica, West Indies. PhD dissertation, New York University.
Perera, J. & Aparici, M
1999 Variedad y distribución de los movimientos retoricos entextos expositivas escvitos. XVII Congreso Internacional dela Asociación Espanola de Linguistica Aplicada, Alcala de Henares, 15–17 april 1999.
Perera, J., Aparici, M., Fité, M. & Busquets, J
2010 L’empremta del castellà en les produccions lingüístiques dels catalanoparlants: Una anàlisi evolutiva. In Actes del XIV Colloqui Internacional de Llengua i Literatura Catalanes , Vol. III, K. Faluba & I. Szijj (eds), 257–272. Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de MontserratGoogle Scholar
Rampton, B
1995 Language crossing and the problematization of ethnicity and socialization. Pragmatics 5(4): 483–513.Google Scholar
1998 Speech community. In Handbook of Pragmatics J. Verschueren, J. Östman, J. Blommaert & C. Bulcaen (eds), 1–34. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar