3 Children – 3 „Genglishes“: A Linguistic Case Study with Bilingual Children: A Linguistic Case Study with Bilingual Children [1 ed.] 9783954896134, 9783842864757

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Katharina Hirmer

3 Children – 3 „Genglishes“

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A Linguistic Case Study with Bilingual Children

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Hirmer, Katharina. 3 Children – 3 „Genglishes“: A Linguistic Case Study with Bilingual Children : A Linguistic Case Study with Bilingual Children, Diplomica Verlag, 2014. ProQuest

Hirmer, Katharina: 3 Children – 3 „Genglishes“: A Linguistic Case Study with Bilingual Children. Hamburg, Anchor Academic Publishing 2014 Buch-ISBN: 978-3-95489-113-9 PDF-eBook-ISBN: 978-3-95489-613-4 Druck/Herstellung: Anchor Academic Publishing, Hamburg, 2014 Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Bibliographical Information of the German National Library: The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography. Detailed bibliographic data can be found at: http://dnb.d-nb.de

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Hirmer, Katharina. 3 Children – 3 „Genglishes“: A Linguistic Case Study with Bilingual Children : A Linguistic Case Study with Bilingual Children, Diplomica Verlag, 2014. ProQuest

Table of Contents 1.

2.

3.

Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 9 1.1

The Meaning of Bilingualism in the 21st Century ............................................................ 9

1.2

What Is Exactly Meant by “Bilingualism”? .................................................................... 10

1.3

Reasons for Choosing Bilingualism as the Topic of my Thesis.................................... 10

1.4

Introduction of the Family and Their Special Situation ................................................ 11

1.5

Outline of the Paper ........................................................................................................... 14

Theoretical Background of Bilingualism .............................................................................. 15 2.1

Current Status of Research ................................................................................................ 15

2.2

Categorization of Bilinguals.............................................................................................. 17

2.2.1

Categorization According to the Age of the Speaker ............................................ 17

2.2.2

Categorization According to Skills .......................................................................... 19

2.2.3

Other Possibilities of Categorizing Bilinguals ........................................................ 22

2.3

One Person – One Language and Other Strategies ....................................................... 25

2.4

Interferences and Code-Mixing in Bilingual Acquisition ............................................. 26

2.4.1

Different Types of Interferences ............................................................................... 27

2.4.2

Code-Mixing or -Switching ....................................................................................... 28

The Case Study .......................................................................................................................... 30 3.1

3.1.1

Aim ............................................................................................................................... 30

3.1.2

Methodology and Material ....................................................................................... 31

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3.2

4.

Design of the Case Study ................................................................................................... 30

Results of the Case Study Related to Linguistic Theory ............................................... 32

3.2.1

Categorization of the Children ................................................................................. 32

3.2.2

Abilities in the Four Basic Language Skills ............................................................. 33

3.2.3

Interferences and Code-Mixing ................................................................................ 49

Findings with Respect to the Four Questions and Further Thoughts ............................. 57

Hirmer, Katharina. 3 Children – 3 „Genglishes“: A Linguistic Case Study with Bilingual Children : A Linguistic Case Study with Bilingual Children, Diplomica Verlag, 2014. ProQuest

5.

List of Works Cited ................................................................................................................... 61

6.

Appendix ..................................................................................................................................... 64 Audio Recordings Sorted by Children and Categories ................................................. 64

6.2

The Children’s Reading Texts ........................................................................................... 69

6.3

Son1’s English Test ............................................................................................................. 78

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6.1

Hirmer, Katharina. 3 Children – 3 „Genglishes“: A Linguistic Case Study with Bilingual Children : A Linguistic Case Study with Bilingual Children, Diplomica Verlag, 2014. ProQuest

Copyright © 2014. Diplomica Verlag. All rights reserved.

With special thanks to my family, my boyfriend and, of course, my supervisor.

Hirmer, Katharina. 3 Children – 3 „Genglishes“: A Linguistic Case Study with Bilingual Children : A Linguistic Case Study with Bilingual Children, Diplomica Verlag, 2014. ProQuest

Copyright © 2014. Diplomica Verlag. All rights reserved. Hirmer, Katharina. 3 Children – 3 „Genglishes“: A Linguistic Case Study with Bilingual Children : A Linguistic Case Study with Bilingual Children, Diplomica Verlag, 2014. ProQuest

1.

Introduction

1.1

The Meaning of Bilingualism in the 21st Century

Due to the fact that more and more people migrate or have partners of other languages these days, many children are brought up with two or even more languages. This phenomenon is also known as bilingualism (or multilingualism). For a very long time, people believed that this phenomenon would have a negative and decelerating effect on the child’s first language acquisition and overall development (Genesee, 2008: p.65/Grosjean, 2010: p.179). Bilingualism was long thought to be an “oddity or abnormality” (Meisel, 2001: p.12). But as research has shown in the last decades, bilingualism is anything but negative (Cummins, 1976: p.2/Auer/Wei, 2007: p.165). Particularly in the field of neurolinguistics, many positive effects of bilingualism have already been shown, for example in fields like problem solving or attention tasks (Grosjean, 2010: pp. 223-224/Karbalaei, 2010: p.275). Not only has it been proven that bilingually raised children really develop their language abilities in an almost analogous way like their monolingual peers (Genesee, 2008: p.73), it is also obvious that children growing up with two or more languages have special opportunities in their future. Since foreign languages are not only needed in school nowadays, but also play a very important role in the field of employment – e.g. in tourism, business or marketing – being raised bilingually seems to be advantageous by all means. What is more, children are frequently confronted with foreign languages in the new media nowadays. The internet provides the opportunity to surf on web pages from all over the world. So, the more languages one is able to master, the more possibilities one has to get hold of information. Here it plays a prominent role, however, whether bilinguals can only understand their second or third language or if they are also able to communicate with it, to wit speaking or even writing or reading in the second or third language. But before we come back to this crucial

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feature of bilingualism in chapter 2 (Theoretical Background of Bilingualism), the term bilingualism itself will be briefly defined and explained initially, followed by a short statement about the choice of bilingualism as the topic of this paper. Additionally, the family used for my study and their special situation will be introduced and a short outline of the paper will be given.

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1.2

What Is Exactly Meant by “Bilingualism”?

The term ‘bilingualism’ has several definitions and levels of meaning. On the one hand, it occurs in the context of impersonal coherencies such as bilingual schools, bilingual toys or bilingual dictionaries. On the other hand, bilingualism is to be found in relation to humans. It can either be related to the context of a whole community using two or more languages or it denotes a single human’s ability “to use two or more languages […] in their everyday lives” (Grosjean, 2010: p.4/Baker, 1996: p.5). One could argue whether the term bilingualism does not only refer to people who are able to use ‘just’ two languages – referring back to the Latin origin of the word, consisting of ‘bis’, meaning twice and ‘lingua’, meaning tongue or language. People who are able to use more than two languages, should hence be called ‘multilinguals’. But as the term bilingualism is used more often and even in linguistic research it denotes people using two or more languages (Grosjean, 2010: p.4), it will be used in this paper for both “real” bilingualism and multilingualism at the same time.1 Of course, there is no absolute definition of being bilingual or not. There are various gradations of bilingualism (Kessler, 1984: p.27). But this relatively complex subdivision will be explained in detail in section 2.2 – Categorization of Bilinguals.

1.3

Reasons for Choosing Bilingualism as the Topic of my Thesis

As a matter of fact, I have been interested in this topic for quite a while already. Even if I personally do not have any experience with bilingualism myself – except for the fact that I am studying English Education and have spent half a year in the U.S. in a semester abroad program2 – there is bilingualism in my environment. A couple I am closely acquainted with raises their children bilingually English and German, even though neither of the parents is an English mother-tongue. The mother has already spent more than two years in English

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speaking countries and is therefore a very proficient speaker of the English language. She is the one talking in English, while the children’s father is talking in German to their children. It has always fascinated me that the children seemed to have been able to understand the two languages simultaneously from the very beginning on, when they were still not even

1

for a more detailed definition of the term ‘bilingualism’ see chapter 2 (Theoretical Background of Bilingualism) Grosjean would also call teaching a foreign language a special form of bilingualism (2010: 146ff.), based on his definition of bilingualism on p.4, which does not necessarily imply that only children can be bilinguals. 2

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able to “produce” language by themselves. Moreover, the fact that the children spoke English and German when they spent a year in the U.S., but now they do not speak English anymore – they subconsciously even refuse to speak English – was even more interesting. I read upon bilingualism and got more and more excited about it. Finally, I held a presentation in an advanced linguistics seminar and that is when and why I decided to write my state exam thesis about this topic and with this family.

1.4

Introduction of the Family and Their Special Situation

After having stated the reasons for choosing bilingualism as my topic, the family used for my study shall now be introduced. It consists of the two parents, married and living together – which is not implicit nowadays – and their three children. The mother of the family is 44 and her husband is 41. Both of them are native Germans, but the mother only speaks English with the children, while the father speaks German, respectively German with a Bavarian, Upper Palatinate accent. When the couple talks to each other, they both speak German with a Bavarian accent, as to relatives and acquaintances (except for one acquainted couple who also raises their children bilingually German and English, but whose children are attending an international school). The reason why the mother is talking English to the children is the following: The couple has lived in London for one year, seven weeks after the eldest son (12;63 and called Son1 in the following), was born and that is when the mother first started to speak English with her firstborn. She continued to do so when they returned to Germany. Thus, she produced ‘unnatural bilingualism’ – speaking English without being a native English speaker. Nevertheless, some of Son1’s first words were then even English, e.g. when the mother (or anybody else) was holding keys in her hands, he always said ‘keys’. With five years of age, Son1 spent a year in the U.S, where he attended elementary school. One has to add here that the mother had already spent two years in the U.S. beforehand, one time six Copyright © 2014. Diplomica Verlag. All rights reserved.

months as an au pair girl after school in Atlanta, Georgia and the other time together with the father in Austin, Texas for one year. So she is actually a German mother-tongue, but she is also a very proficient speaker of the English language, respectively the American English language. She only reads English books and if there is the possibility, she also watches

3

12;6 means that he was 12 years and 6 months at the time I surveyed the family. The same applies to the other two children. 10;3 means 10 years and 3 months, 8;1 means 8 years and 1 month.

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movies in the original version and tries to keep up to date with the language as well as possible. She learned to speak the American English accent first and that is what she has maintained, even though she lived in London for a year. The other two children, a daughter (10;3) and another son (8;1 and referred to as Son2) have also already spent a year in an English speaking country, namely the U.S., when they were 3 and 1 year old, respectively. The father worked at Stanford University for one year and that is why the whole family was living in California. There, Son2 was still too young to speak, but in contrast, the daughter started to speak English very soon and did not even speak much German anymore. Not even when she talked to her German grandparents on Skype© did she speak German, even though the father never stopped speaking German to his children. As the daughter visited pre-school three times a week, her environment was predominantly English and she simply adjusted to it. And according to Grosjean (2010), it is quite typical that children adjust themselves to their environment and the necessity of language (see figure on p.13). Since the family has come back from the U.S., they have moved three times within Germany so far. First, they were living in a town next to Bonn, when they came back from the States, where they had already lived before they left Germany. After three years they moved to a town next to Heidelberg in Baden-Wuerttemberg and stayed there for three and a half years. Last year, the father got a new job in Bavaria and that is why the family moved again, this time to a town in this federal state. So, the three children were not only confronted with the two different languages American English and German, but also exposed to different dialects of German, namely High German mixed with Cologne, Baden and Bavarian. Therefore, according to Grosjean’s definition of bilingualism (2010: p.4), these three children are hence definitely bilingual, no matter which abilities they have in English and German. Copyright © 2014. Diplomica Verlag. All rights reserved.

The language experiences and acquisition processes of all three children are hence quite different. Son1 has already spent two years in an English speaking country, but was only confronted with the English language from his seventh week on, while his siblings were confronted with English and German from their very day of birth on, but have only spent one year in an English speaking country. Furthermore, the exposure to the English speaking environment took place at various stages of brain and language development. Son1 was not

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exposed to the English language before he was seven weeks old, while the two other children were exposed to English and German from their very first day on. So their language acquisition processes could be evaluated differently (for more details see section 2.2.1). To get a better overview of the language development history of the three children, here is a chart including the children’s exposure to the different languages and corresponding ages:

Son1 (*1999)

Exposure to English

Exposure to German

0;2 to 1;0 (London, UK)

0;0 to 0;2 (NRW, Germany)

5;0 to 5;11 (California, USA)

1;0 to 5;0 (NRW, Germany) 5;11 to 9;0 (NRW, Germany) 9;0 to 12;0 (BaWue, Germany) 12;0 up to now (BY, Germany)

Daughter (*2001)

2;9 to 3;8 (California, USA)

0;0 to 2;9 (NRW, Germany) 3;8 to 6;9 (NRW, Germany) 6;9 to 9;9 (BaWue, Germany) 9;9 up to now (BY, Germany)

Son2 (*2004)

0;7 to 1;6 (California, USA)

0;0 to 0;7 (NRW, Germany) 1;6 to 4;7 (NRW, Germany) 4;7 to 7;7 (BaWue, Germany) 7;7 up to now (BY, Germany)

Chart 1: Explanation of the three children’s language exposure

What should be considered here as well is that the two boys had a hard time getting into the Bavarian school system. When the family was still in Heidelberg, Son2 had not such huge problems in school (except for slight, but yet undiagnosed dyslexia due to genetically determined difficulties in hearing and seeing). But here in Bavaria, he had to go back to first grade after five months in second grade, because he was not able to cope with the tasks in time, particularly in German lessons. Mathematics is, for example, no problem for him at all. One has to add here that Son2 also started to speak very late. Perhaps it was the wrong time Copyright © 2014. Diplomica Verlag. All rights reserved.

for him to come back from the U.S. and live in a completely German environment, but on the other hand, this hypothesis cannot really be proven. After all, Son2 has attended speech therapists regularly since he was three and this has already helped him a lot. The logopaedic treatment had been interrupted for a short time, but because of his problems in school, he is now doing speech therapy again.

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Son1 even had to change the type of school. Back in Baden-Wuerttemberg, he had attended Realschule with average performance. Here in Bavaria, however, he was not able to keep up with the Bavarian Realschule at all and that is why he switched to Mittelschule after Christmas break, which has had only positive effects until now. He did not have only good grades in his last annual report, but he managed the progression to the next grade. The daughter is the only one who does not have problems with the Bavarian school system at the moment. She had got above-average grades in fourth grade and even attends Gymnasium now since September. Considering now all the factors contributing to the three children’s language acquisition processes, four questions arise: 1) Which type of bilinguals are the three children according to the possibilities of categorization given in 2.1? 2) Do they use code-mixing and interferences (these terms will be explained in section 2) even though they do not even use the English language in their daily lives (except for usage in school)? 3) Does the fact that their mother produces ‘unnatural bilingualism’ contribute to the children’s attitude of denial towards the usage of the English language? 4) Are the problems the children have in school related to the fact that they have been raised bilingually? These questions are to be clarified in the course of this paper including theoretical background and practical examples.

1.5

Outline of the Paper

First of all, a general overview about the theoretical background of bilingualism will be given. Important sub items of this chapter will be the current status of research, the ways in Copyright © 2014. Diplomica Verlag. All rights reserved.

which bilinguals can be categorized, the ‘one person – one language principle’ and interferences and code-mixing as important components of bilingualism. In the next chapter, the case study will be presented. Here, the aims, methodology and materials of the study will be described. Subsequently, the results of the case study will be brought into relation with the underlying linguistic theory. At the end of the paper, the four questions will be answered and further implications of bilingual language acquisition will be made.

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2.

Theoretical Background of Bilingualism

2.1

Current Status of Research

As already mentioned in the introductory part, bilingualism has been quite an active research area in the last decades (Meisel, 2001: p.11). Started off by Ronjat in 1913 (Meisel, 2001: p.11) and the landmark study of the American linguist Werner Leopold about his two daughters4, (Pressley/McCormick, 2007: pp.207-208), no other ground-breaking results have been detected – only works being very general – until the late 1980’s (Cenoz/Genesee, 2001: p.1). Only then, more and more researchers became interested in bilingual language acquisition again due to the fact that also more and more children and adults were becoming bilingual for reasons already mentioned in the introduction: migration, international partnerships etc. Bilingualism had arrived on the screen again and still today, many linguists devote themselves to the study of bilingualism in most diverse subcategories. Children growing up bilingually have often been compared to their monolingual peers concerning differences in their language acquisition processes. In so doing, it turned out that “when looking beyond specific instances […] and focusing on the major developmental stages, there are no significant differences between monolingual and bilingual children” (Genesee, 2008: p.73). Also Grosjean (2000) supports this thesis by stating “One should keep in mind that bilingual children, because they have to deal with two or more languages, are different in some ways from monololingual children, but definitely not on rate on language acquisitision.” Other linguistic studies put their focus on the development of morphology, syntax and phonology within bilingual children or on the way parents interact with their children. Moreover, the effects of and reasons for language mixing or the question whether bilingual children work with one language system or two systems – independent of each other – from the very beginning on were examined. Referring to the

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latter, there have been two different hypotheses concerning this matter: The “Unitary Language System Hypothesis” given by Volterra and Taeschner in 1978 and the “Dual Language System Hypothesis” by Fred Genesee in 1989. According to the first hypothesis by Volterra and Taeschner, bilinguals develop their languages simultaneously in one single system and only later start to distinguish the different languages from each other in three steps. First of all, bilingual children have one mixed 4

especially the study of his older bilingual daughter Hildegard, which was published in four books in 1949

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system of lexicon and grammar in their minds. As a next step, the words differentiate into two lexicons, but their mixed grammar still remains the same and in a final step, also the system of grammatical structures becomes differentiated. The “Dual Language System Hypothesis” on the other hand assumes that bilingual children develop two separate linguistic systems from the very beginning on. (Genesee, 2008, p.66-68) Unitary Language System Hypothesis (Volterra/Taeschner, 1978)

Dual Language System Hypothesis (Genesee, 1989)

Figure 1: Comparison of the two Language System Hypotheses (taken from Genesee, 2008: p.66)

Current research still cannot prove that the “Unitary Language System Hypothesis” is wrong. But at the moment, there are strong tendencies towards the “Dual Language System Hypothesis”, since “if the Unitary Language System Hypothesis is correct, then we would expect bilingual children’s early language productions to be quite different from productions of monolingual children acquiring either language” (Genesee, 2008: p.68) and it has already been proven that there are no huge differences between monolingual and bilingual language acquisition processes (see above). And that is why research mainly supports the Dual Language System Hypothesis (Genesee, 2008, p.68). Present studies, however, already go beyond this kind of differentiation when scrutinizing bilingual children (Cenoz/Genesee, 2001: p.3). But most of them concentrate on bilingual language acquisition

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in its early stages, least of them deal with later ‘consequences’ of bilingualism with children at school age. In addition to the already mentioned linguists Volterra and Taeschner, Fred Genesee and Jürgen M. Meisel, Francois Grosjean, Colin Baker, and Ellen Bialystok should be men-

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tioned here as well. Those linguists are some of the world’s leading researchers in the field of multilingualism nowadays and that is why they are worth mentioning in person.5

2.2

Categorization of Bilinguals

For many people, bilinguals are all people who are able to speak two or more languages native-like, but bilingualism does not only denote people who are perfect speakers of two (or more) languages. There are most diverse gradations of bilingualism, but there is no real consensus in research on how various situations of acquiring two or more languages at the same time can be categorized. Bilingual language acquisition processes can either be categorized by the age of the speaker, by his/her skills in the two languages, the representation of the languages in his/her mind or by his/her cultural affinities, all of which will be explained in the following. 2.2.1

Categorization According to the Age of the Speaker

Talking about the categorization of bilinguals according to the age of the speaker, bilinguals can be differentiated into early and late bilinguals. While the latter are persons who acquire their second language in adolescence or adulthood, early bilinguals are children who acquire their two (or more) languages either simultaneously or successively (Grosjean, 2010: p.178). Simultaneous bilingualism denotes the acquisition of two (or more) languages from the day of birth on, while successive bilingualism (or sequential bilingualism, cf. Montrul, 2008: p.17) is the acquisition of two (or more) languages consecutively as it is the case when children learn a new foreign language at school, for example (Grosjean, 2010: p.178ff.). However, if one follows the ideas of Kielhöfer and Jonekeit, one can only speak of bilingualism in general

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after the so called “critical period” has been overcome: “In the developmental stages between the ages of 6 and 12, one can repeatedly realize that the weak language is a tough act to follow. […] One can thus talk about the (relative) state of being bilingual only after puberty. The weak language has, so to speak, to be carried across the ‘critical period of language acquisition’. (Own translation of: Kielhöfer/Jonekit: pp.65-66)”

5

There is, of course, a huge amount of further researchers in the field of bilingualism, but as it would go beyond the scope of this paper mentioning them all, name by name, I have included some of them in the rest of the paper, but certainly not all. For a survey see “The Handbook of Bilingualism”.

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Related to bilingual children, the denomination ‘successive bilingualism’ is normally used for children who acquire their second language from the age of 4 or 5 on until the age of 11 or 12 (Hammer, 1999: p.17). This group can once again be subdivided into early and late L2 acquisition (Montrul, 2008: p-18).

bilingualism

simultaneous

successive/sequential

early

4-6: pre-school

7-12: elementary school

late

post puberty and adulthood

Figure 2: subdivision of bilingualism according to the age of the speaker (taken from Montrul, 2008: p.18)

De Houwer (1995: p.223), however, narrows down the categorization of simultaneous bilinguals even further. She states that only the language acquisition process of children, who are confronted with two (or more) languages immediately after birth, should be called Bilingual First Language Acquisition, BFLA, after Meisel (like it is the case with Son2 and the daughter in the case study) whereas the language acquisition process of children who are confronted with the second language from their first month until their second year of age should already be referred to as Bilingual Second Language Acquisition, BSLA (like Son1). But as there is no clear evidence yet which exact age plays which role with children growing up with two or more languages, the term Bilingual Acquisition (BA) will be used in this paper to refer to bilingual first language acquisition in general. It should, however, be kept in mind that exactly these varying experiences and points in time with different dominances of Copyright © 2014. Diplomica Verlag. All rights reserved.

one language could be possible reasons for upcoming diversities in the language development processes of various children. Thus, it might not be particularly important how one calls the different ways of becoming bilingual, but that one differentiates at all the manners in which BA is happening and takes into account the distinct premises of different children. (Deuchar/Quay: pp.1-2)

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2.2.2

Categorization According to Skills

In addition to categorizing bilinguals according to their age, one can also categorize them referring to their skills. Language skills are normally subcategorized into the four fields reading, writing, understanding and speaking, and thus, also the proficiency of a bilingual can be evaluated according to these four basic language skills. Since the fewest bilinguals learn to write and read in their second language as well6, reading and writing can only partially be taken into account at the point of categorizing bilinguals. Thus, depending on how proficient bilinguals are in the two categories, speaking and understanding, bilingual children can be categorized in the following way (Baker, 1996/Grosjean, 2010/Hammer, 1999): •

passive bilinguals

•

dominant bilinguals

•

balanced bilinguals/equilinguals, and

•

semilinguals. Passive bilinguals are (almost) native speakers in one language, while they are only

capable to understand their second language. Virtually, this is the minimal requirement for bilingualism, but it plays a prominent role in the following case study (see section 3.3) and therefore it has to be mentioned in particular. Dominant bilinguals are more proficient in one of their two languages (Baker, 1996: p.8). This is the case with most bilinguals (Hammer, 1999: p.19). Usually, bilingual children have one ‘weak’ and one ‘strong’ language. In their ‘weak’ language, they normally have troubles finding the right words and use code-mixing or code-switching7 more often than in their ‘strong’ language. The ‘strong’ language is the dominant language (Genesee, 2008: 80), but depending on the situation a child lives in, this dominance can also shift. Especially

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when the environment of a child is heavily dominant in one language and the second language is not supported well enough or not really needed anymore, children are even prone to no longer use one of the two languages (Grosjean, 2010: p.172). The following figure is very helpful to understand the coherences of special factors in the acquisition or maintenance process of languages within a bilingual child. 6 7

except when they learn this language in school or their parents take care of this factor both of these terms will be explained in chapter 2.4

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NEED FOR LANGUAGE X

LEVEL OF DEVELOPMENT

To communicate with family

OF LANGUAGE X

members, caretakers, friends (some/all may be monolinguals) To take part in day-care/school activities To interact with people in the community To watch television, do sports, etc.

• • • • •

amount of input type of input role of the family role of the school and the community attitudes (e.g. toward the language and culture, bilingual-

Figure 3: Factors in acquisition or maintenance process of languages within a bilingual (taken from Grosjean, 2010)

Here, the common prejudices that bilingual children do not learn their two languages properly and that they are stutterers (Kielhöfer/Jonekeit, 2002: p.10), come into play. Due to the fact that bilinguals most of the time do have a ‘weak’ and a ‘strong’ language, they certainly show some deficiencies in their nondominant language But usually, as soon as they are exposed to their ‘weak’ language, e.g. when they are on vacation in a country where this language is spoken exclusively, they will certainly master their nondominant language well enough to use it as a means of communication If this exposure endures for a longer time, even the ‘weak’ language can eventually become stronger. Of course, there are children who follow the prejudices of stuttering and not being able to use their ‘weak’ language properly. But with these children, there has to be either a break within the principles of bilingual parenting or they suffer from speech impediments anyway. (Kielhöfer/Jonekeit, 2002: pp. 9091).

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Balanced bilinguals have equally proficient abilities in both languages, but but will not necessarily pass for a native speaker in both languages (Karbalaei, 2010: p.279). Should this be the case, nevertheless, this type of bilingualism can also be called equilingualism and is the most perfect form of balanced bilingualism. But since the concept of balanced bilingualism or equilingualism id rather idealized and actually only exists very rarely in reality, these terms should not be overestimated and one should rather see it as an extreme position

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in opposite to the other extreme – dominant bilingualism – with many levels in between (Hammer, 1999: p.19):

Figure 4: Degrees of balanced and dominant bilinguals (taken from Butler/Yakuta, 2005)

Semilingualism is the more negative way of balanced bilingualism. It denotes the state of a bilingual who has deficiencies in both of his/her languages and whose languages did not reach a proficient level at all (Genesee, 2008: p.225), but the term itself has led to heated discussions. According to Cummins, “the term [semilingualism] has no explanatory or predictive value but is rather a restatement of the equally ill-defined notion of ‘limited proficiency in two languages’” (Cummins, 2000, p. 104). If one takes ‘limited proficiency’ literally, normally merely children who suffer from language disorders anyway are affected by this type of categorization. For example, it has been proven that with children suffering from SLI (Specific Language Impairment) and growing up bilingually, the “SLI cannot be caused by a multilingual context” (Auer/Wei, 2007: p.229). The reasons for the emergence of problems with language development are diverse. Social, congenital, psychological, and biological factors have to be taken into account here. But it has definitely been shown that

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certainly not merely the fact of growing up with two or more languages is responsible for any kind of difficulty with language acquisition (Grosjean, 2010: p.227). Hence, the predominant prejudice that children growing up with two or more languages are automatically suffering from language disorders and are therefore all “seminlingualists”(Grosjean, 2000), should really be reconsidered, since “bilingualism does not cause any type of language disorder […]” (Döpke, 2006: p.5). But rather “the (narrow or wide) social circumstances”

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(Auer/Wei, 2007:p.165) of an individual and – as already mentioned – diverse and complex factors in various fields of human sciences. 2.2.3

Other Possibilities of Categorizing Bilinguals

Cognitive Models of Categorization One can categorize bilinguals not only according to their proficiency or their age, but also by considering the way in which both languages are represented in a bilingual’s mind, for example. In this connection, one comes across the following terms: compound and coordinate bilingualism. According to Bechert (1991: p.54), compound bilinguals learn their languages in the same contexts and therefore learning and usage overlap. These bilinguals have the same concepts for words in both languages, e.g. a German-English bilingual child has the same association for the two words “Familie” and “family”. In contrast, a coordinate bilingual child would have two different types of mental representation for “Familie” and “family”. In such a case, the two words also have two different meanings for the child, which can be traced back to the fact that the child learned the two words in different environments and/or contexts (Hammer, 1999: p.20).

compound bilingual

Semantic system

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English

German

coordinate bilingual

Semantic system1

English

Semantic system2

German

Figure 5: A Bilingual’s Mental Lexicon

According to Grosjean (2010: p.29), different domains are covered by different languages within bilinguals anyway. This principle is called the “complementary principle” and will play a role with Son2 in the evaluation of the case study’s result (p.26/27). In addition to these two concepts of compound and coordinate bilingualism, a new model which unifies both concepts – the “Bilingual Dual Coding Model” of Baker and Prys 22

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Jones – came up in 1998.8 This model takes into account both the idea of uniformity of

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concepts, but at the same time separation.

Figure 6: The “Bilingual Dual Coding Model” (Baker & Prys Jones), taken from Hammer (1999, p.21).

8

cf. Baker’s Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education or Hammer’s diploma thesis (1999).

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As shown in the figure above, here, the bilingual mind on the one hand has to separate systems, one for each language. Both of these language systems contain concrete words, abstract words and associations. However, there are also connections between these two systems, which combine certain elements of L1 and L2, for example vocabulary. At the same time, there is a non-verbal system, which contains images perceived by our sensory organs and shared by both languages. And this is the important element of this model: Both languages share certain components in this system, which allows active translation activities between L1 and L2. But they are also separated at the same time. (Hammer, 1999: p.21/22)

Categorization According to Cultural Affinities Another way to categorize bilinguals is to judge them according to the degree to which they are also bicultural, monocultural or accultural (Hamers/Blank, 2000). At this, however, high bilingual competence is not automatically connected with biculturality (Butler/Hakuta, 2005). If one takes for example a look at a bilingual migrant child living in Germany, you can assume that this child will not only acquire the language from its migrant parents or grandparents, it will most probably also learn a lot about this particular culture. At the same time, it will learn a lot about German culture in German kindergarten or in school as well. This child would then be called a bicultural bilingual. According to Grosjean (2010: p.109), bicultural people have the following characteristics: “first, they take part, in varying degrees, in the life of two or more cultures. […] Second, they adapt, at least in part, their attitudes, behavior, values and languages to their cultures.” Hence, biculturals will always adapt their behavior depending on the situation they are in. In other words, to take the migrant child as an example again, when it is talking to its mother, it will probably behave and react differently from a situation where it interacts with her German friends and their parents. One could add multiple other ways of categorizing bilinguals9, for example, the Copyright © 2014. Diplomica Verlag. All rights reserved.

amount of persons who talk in the one language or the other language with the child or how good a bilingual child performs in standard language tests etc. But the most important thing is, as already mentioned in the introductory part, not to categorize bilinguals perfectly. One should rather take into account all the circumstances and premises of every individual bilingual, because bilingualism takes place in so many different places and manners that it is 9

for more detailed information about other ways of categorizing bilinguals see Butler/Hakuta, 2000, chapter 5.2.1.

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hard to generalize. At the same time, it is important as well not to demand too much and not too little of the bilingual child. And therefore, a certain principle has to be established within a family in order to allow for best possible conditions for the bilingual child rearing.

2.3

One Person – One Language and Other Strategies

There are different manners in which parents (can) raise their child(ren) bilingually. First of all, there is the ‘one person – one language principle’, which is also applied in the following case study (see chapter 3 ff.). This principle, in its original language called une personne – une langue, plays an important role in the language acquisition process of a child. Brought into prominence, but not invented by Ronjat, this theory implies that children who are brought up bilingually should be confronted with one language exclusively by the mother and with the other language only by the father (Grosjean, 2010: p.206). Even though this strategy of bilingual child rearing is the most famous and still most common strategy, it is not really the best solution. As Grosjean (2010: p.208) puts it in his most recent book, it can even be problematic: “The problem, though, is that one language will eventually have less and less input unless the parents take very clear action. As soon as the children go out into the outside world (unless they live in a minority community with the minority language), the will hear and use the other, majority language much more. In addition to the problem of decreased input in the minority language, children will want to be like other children and not be singled out. So, little by little, the majority language will start taking over, much to the distress of the parent who uses the minority language.”

Thus, the ‘one person – one language approach’ is a good possibility to use within the first months of language development, but parents raising their children bilingually should also consider other strategies. Another possibility would be the ‘home – outside the home strategy’, where both parents speak the minority language at home. Even though both

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parents are forced to speak the minority language in doing so, this approach offers the children the opportunity to get more minority language input. Additionally, this method is even more successful than the ‘one person – one language principle’ of Ronjat, as demonstrated by Annick De Houwer in a survey (Grosjean, 2010: p.209). In addition to the ‘home-outside home strategy’ there are other strategies which can be applied in bilingual child rearing: the ‘one-language-first approach’, where L1 is to be fully acquired before L2 intervenes into L1. This is thus a matter of successive bilingualism.

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Usually, parents teach the minority language first and then, at the age of four or five, the dominant or environment language. Furthermore, there is the ‘free-alternation strategy’, where two (or more) languages are used interchangeably, “letting such factors as topic […] dictate the language to be used” (Grosjean, 2010: p.207). Lastly, there is the ‘language-time strategy’, where the parents set certain times for L1 and certain times for L2. To refer to the following case study: German – the environment language – would be spoken in the morning at breakfast until the children leave the house for school and English – the minority language – would be spoken as soon as the children return home after school until bedtime. This strategy, however, needs a regulated daily routine and is therefore hard to perform on weekends, bank holidays or in vacations, when this routine is broken. Hence, this strategy is quite confusing and hard to carry out in general. But still it represents one method of raising children bilingually. (Grosjean, 2010: p.207-209) However, if a certain system of bilingual parenting has already been established within one family and bilingualism already takes its effects, the parents should stick to this strategy in order to not confuse the bilingual (language) development of a child (Kielhöfer/Jonekeit, 2002).

2.4

Interferences and Code-Mixing in Bilingual Acquisition

As well as the strategies a family uses to raise their children bilingually, interferences and code-mixing/-switching play a very prominent role in BA, especially in a bilingual’s ‘weak’ language. They are important parts of the early language development and should even later not be judged too negatively either by parents or teachers. These ‘problems’ should rather be accepted to a certain degree, since there is the danger of mental overload in a bilingual child, if the claims for correctness in the ‘weak’ language are too high (Kielhöfer/Jonekit, 2002:

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p.90). Hereafter, different types of interferences and definitions of code-mixing, respectively code-switching will be given.

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2.4.1

Different Types of Interferences

According to Grosjean (2010: p.68), interferences are “deviations from the language being spoken (or written) stemming from the influence of the deactivated languages” and they belong to bilinguals “however hard they try to avoid them”. There are two types of interferences: static and dynamic interferences. Static interferences are persistent marks of one language in the other language such as an accent or the broadening of a word’s meaning, while dynamic interferences depict temporary ‘mistakes’ in the other language like, for example, the momentary usage of a certain grammatical structure or a wrong stress pattern. According to Grosjean (2010: p.69), these two kinds of interferences are usually hard to be kept apart from each other and therefore there will not be a distinction between them in this paper as well – except for an accent, which is always a static interference. The more important thing is that interferences are delimited from other types of language mistakes, which can be traced back to the level of proficiency in one language. (Grosjean, 2010: pp. 68-69) Interferences can take place at all levels of a language, i.e. in phonology, at the lexical level and in syntax. Interferences in pronunciation can be just temporal or else persistent, just as interferences on other levels of language. Examples for interferences at the level of phonology are having an accent or just temporarily pronouncing words in the wrong way with consonants or vowels from the respective other language. At the word level, one can instance lexical borrowings, loanshifts or “false friends” or the wrong usage of proverbs and idioms. Moreover, using the wrong prepositions and word order structures belongs to the interferences at the syntax level. I will go into more detail concerning these types of interferences when describing the actual case study in chapter 3. (Grosjean, 2010: pp.70-72) In this context, it remains to be said that there is also a difference between three major

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types of interferences in the sense of the degree in which they have an impact on communication. According to Weinreich (1953), interferences can 1) have no negative effects on communication, 2) have a slight impact on communication, in the sense that communication/comprehension is still possible, but the utterance is not made according to the rules of the actually used language, and 3) make communication impossible, when the expression used by the bilingual causes confusion in his/her monolingual interlocutor. (Grosjean, 2010: p.73)

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Concluding this section about interferences, it is important to add that even adult bilinguals still make interference ‘mistakes’ and most of the time they do it unconsciously. Therefore, bilingual children should all the more be allowed to make interference mistakes. If not corrected too much or too enthusiastically, they will then even learn from these ‘mistakes’ by themselves, since situations, where interferences interrupt or hinder communication normally linger in the memory. 2.4.2

Code-Mixing or -Switching

Apart from interferences, code-mixing and code-switching are two phenomena one encounters very often when reading about bilingualism. Before actually talking about these two very similar concepts of language mixing, in other words utterances or conversations “containing features of both languages” (Meisel/Köppe, 1995 : p.277), there will be given short definitions of the two terms in order to distinguish them from each other. While codeswitching is the bilingual speaker’s ability “to select the language according to external factors like the particular interlocutor, the situational context, the topic of conversation etc.” according to Meisel and Köppe (1995: p.277), code-mixing means that a bilingual speaker violates the rules of one of his/her language when he/she makes mixed utterances. Other authors like Grosjean or Genesee, however, use the two terms interchangeably, as the following definition from Genesee’s book Dual Language Development and Disorders (2008) shows: According to the author, code-mixing “is also sometimes referred to as codeswitching.” (Genesee, 2008: p.216). Therefore, in this paper the term code-mixing will be used to refer to both, code-mixing and code-switching. It will not be distinguished between code-mixing containing errors in the actually spoken language while code-switching does not. It will only be referred to the term code-mixing as “the use of elements from two

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languages in the same utterance or […] stretch of conversation” (Genesee, 2008: p.91). Often referred to as intersentential and intrasentential, two different kinds of codemixing can be described. Genesee (2008: p.91) uses slightly different terms for these two phenomena and as there was already reference to this author earlier, it will be stuck to his definitions once again. Therefore, this paper will use the two terms intrautterance and interutterance code-mixing, since people rarely talk in whole sentences (Genesee, 2008: p.91). Intrautterance code-mixing is used “when elements occur in the same utterance”, whereas

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interutterance code-mixing denotes code-mixing occurring “in two different utterances in the same conversation” (Grosjean, 2008: p.91). Code-mixing in general does not only refer to using single words in certain utterances, but also whole phrases, clauses and yet pragmatic patterns can be code-mixed (Genesee, 2008: p.92). There are, of course, the most divergent types of intrautterance and interutterance code-mixings, but I will go more into detail here in the next chapter, when describing the results of the case study. However, the myth mentioned by Grosjean (2010: p.52) that bilinguals code-mix out of pure laziness has to be contradicted very clearly. Even if sometimes code-mixing occurs more often when a bilingual is tired, angry or in another emotional extreme, there are many good reasons for using code-mixing in ‘normal’ situations. Sometimes, it is just easier to say a word or a phrase in the respective other language, or there is a so called “lexical gap” in one language and so this gap is filled with a word of the respective other language (Auer/Wei, 2007: p.23). But if the interlocutor knows both languages well, there is no problem at all (Grosjean, 2010: pp. 53-54). What remains to be said is that code-mixing is a very natural incident for bilinguals. They sometimes do not even notice by themselves that they have switched between their languages, only when their attention is drawn to it by monolingual friends or family members, as it is with interferences. But before coming back to the different characteristics of bilinguals relating to the three children, the aim, method and materials used for the case

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study will now be described.

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3.

The Case Study

3.1

Design of the Case Study

I have thought about which method to use for a long time – reaching from an opinion poll about bilingualism to experiments with students visiting a bilingual school – but finally I opted for a case study. Within this type of research method, one certain case is scrutinized thoroughly and described and evaluated afterwards. Here, this was done with the above introduced family and it was a very interesting experience. Case studies belong to the qualitative methods in linguistics and, as Deuchar and Quay (2000) write in their book Bilingual Acquisition, “the case-study approach is common not only in studies of child language, […] but also in the social and behavioral sciences in general” (Deuchar/Quay,2000: p.2). Therefore, it is nothing new nor is it nonscientific to work just with one case (Flyvberg, 2006). Also the fact that even unforeseen features are revealed as the case study takes its course is very likely and makes this kind of study so interesting to work with. Platt (1988: p.20) puts it in the following way: “Case studies […] are more likely to uncover unanticipated findings as the details are explored. This openness to surprise and availability for multiple purposes is a real strength”. That was another reason for choosing a case study. 3.1.1

Aim

The aim of this case study is to show the effects of three children growing up with the two languages English and German and their current usage of and abilities in these two languages. Of course, there have been many case studies with bilingually raised children – the study of Werner Leopold and his daughter Hildegard being one of the landmark studies. But most of the published studies about bilingualism deal with children who only start to develop their language skills and are still in the process of learning their languages, when Copyright © 2014. Diplomica Verlag. All rights reserved.

they are observed and studied intensively. Only very few of these studies have to do with bilingually raised children and their later problems and/or abilities in their two languages, e.g. in school. The older the children get, the more complicated the circumstances of bilingualism are. But that is what made this case study particularly interesting. The children I dealt with have already or should already have completed their language acquisition processes (except for the increase in lexicon which is still taking place according to Pinter,

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2011: p.47). Therefore, they will have more trouble correcting mistakes in their languages which have already consolidated. It was my intention to find out how proficient the three children are in their two languages and if they use English – which they rarely do – in which context they use it and if they have problems with German grammar due to interferences. Moreover, I wanted to figure out whether they have problems understanding, reading, writing and speaking their “weak” language English and if they are prone to use codemixing and in which context they do so. 3.1.2

Methodology and Material

As it is usual in most case studies, I based my conclusions on audio recordings and notes. On eight days of a two week period, I observed the three children communicating with each other, me and their parents within their daily life. I made audio recordings trying to get hold of each of the three children evenly. These recordings contain seven hours and 54 minutes (6:47 made with the recording device and 1:07 made with a cell phone, where unfortunately the quality was sometimes too bad to use it as materials) and they cover various situations. In detail, the audio recordings consist of 1) family conversations at lunch and dinner, 2) the children doing their homework with their mother, 3) me and the mother playing a game with all three children or only one or two of them, 4) me being alone with Son2 and, 5) the two older children, the daughter and Son1, reading out an English text for me. Almost always, I was right in the middle of the happenings, I was hence a part of the case study myself. I tried to use this opportunity to test the reactions of the children speaking sometimes English and sometimes German to the children depending on the situation. Normally, I only speak German throughout with all of them. But as I wanted to find out how they react when I talk to them in English, I just gave it a trial in situations when they were alone

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without their siblings – namely, when the mother and I were playing games with Son2 and when I read the texts with the children. The recordings were evaluated in the following way: After the observation period, the recordings were listened to once again. Every single recording was examined carefully and edited for useful and useless parts. Afterwards, the usage of the English language, interference mistakes and code-mixings were noted down and transcribed.10 The notes, 10

for all recording details see file on CD

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which were made during the observation period when the recording device was not running, were taken into account as well. Subsequently, for each child a synoptic table was created containing utterances sorted by type of language usage (see appendix, section 6.1).These tables were then used to draw the now following conclusions. Further materials used in this thesis are Son1’s English test from school and two texts, which the daughter and Son1 read out for me in order to find out details about their reading skills and pronuciation. They can also be found in the appendix (sections 6.2 and 6.3).

3.2

Results of the Case Study Related to Linguistic Theory

The explicit results of the case study will now be presented in detail. They are subdivided by means of the following aspects: categorization of the children according to linguistic theory and the children’s abilities in the four basic language skills speaking, understanding, reading, and writing. Next, the frequency and types of interferences the children made will be portrayed and last but not least, the same procedure will be made with respect to codemixing. 3.2.1

Categorization of the Children

How can the children now be categorized according to the different theories and terms mentioned in section 2.2 – Categorization of Bilinguals? After scrutinizing the results of the tests and the audio recordings, it was definitely possible to categorize the three children as bilinguals with the following characteristics: all three of them are early, simultaneous and dominant bilinguals with English as their nondominant or ‘weak’ language (for details see pp.11-14). Nevertheless, one could describe Son1 as a different type of simultaneous bilingual than the other two children, because he

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was only confronted with the English language from his seventh week on, whereas the other two children were confronted with English from the womb on. Moreover, all three of them could be categorized as passive bilinguals, since all three of them do not really speak English, but they understand basically everything. It is hard to say whether the three children are compound or coordinate bilinguals, as I did not have the means to measure this element (for details see p.15). But there are at least some hints that Son2 sometimes may have two different concepts of the same words in his

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mind. When I was reading a Dr. Seuss book, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (1960), with him, for example, I asked him whether the animals , that we were talking about were sleepwalkers. His answer was: “Nein, Nacht…ähm… Schlafwandler.” Consequently, one could conclude that this is a little hint for Son2 being a coordinate bilingual since he has two different associations for the translation equivalents “sleepwalkers” and “Schlafwandler”, but it could also be counted as some kind of comprehension problem, which I will refer to in the next section. Also the situation when he only reacted after his mother said (when playing pantomime) “Vogel” after she had already twice said “bird”, can be a hint for two different concepts for “bird” and “Vogel” in the mind of Son2. As to the daughter and Son1, there are unfortunately no hints concerning the matter of compound or coordinate bilingualism. To answer the question whether the children are bicultural as well, it remains to be said that the three children are growing up quite monoculturally. They have spent a year in the U.S. where they were certainly exposed to the U.S. American way of life and culture, but they were probably still too young to absorb the cultural life actively. The fact that the mother is also not U.S. American, but originally German, contributes to the predominant ‘German’ upbringing. After having categorized the three children by means of the underlying theory according to the categorization of bilinguals in section 2.2, I will now go into detail scrutinizing the children’s abilities in their ‘weak’ language English.

3.2.2

Abilities in the Four Basic Language Skills

In the first instance, the results of the audio recordings relating to the children’s abilities in the four basic language skills understanding, speaking, reading and writing are presented. The order of these terms was chosen on purpose, since in this order, children normally

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develop their language abilities. First, they learn to understand their parents, then they learn to produce language by themselves and at the latest when they enter school, they also learn to use their language to produce words and texts and read them. I will, therefore, start with the basic skill in a language, namely understanding and proceed afterwards with the other three skills, speaking, reading and writing. In the examples, the following abbreviations are used: M = mother, F = father, S1 = son1, D = daughter, S2= son2, I = myself.

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Understanding As far as I could find out and like it has already been mentioned in section 3.2.1, all three children are almost unrestrictedly able to understand all English utterances made by their mother. There were, however, some situations in which the children were or only one of them was not able to understand some content words. For example in a conversation about the food in Schullandheim, the mother mentions the term ‘snap peas’ and has to translate it for Son1 (and Son2) with the German word: D: Erbsen, halt in dieser Schale drin… [Peas in this hull] M: Ah, snap peas. S1 looks baffled M: Zuckererbsen. [Snap peas]… 11 In this context, even a misunderstanding of content comes up, which is very interesting: S1: Ja, des hab ich mir mal ausgedacht. [Yes, that’s what I invented once] M: What? S1: Bohnen in Speck eingewickelt. [Beans wrapped in bacon.] D: … wir reden nicht hier über des. [… we’re not talking here about this.] S1: Des is doch des Gleiche. [That’s all the same though.]12 As one can realize here, the concept of a ‘snap pea’ is not really clear to Son1 and so it even causes comprehension difficulties. In this context, however, this misunderstanding occured probably not due to the fact that Son1 did not know the word ‘snap peas’, but the reason was rather the fact that he did not have an overall concept of either the English word snap peas or the German equivalent ‘Zuckerschoten/-erbsen’. This fact, among others, could indicate that Son1 has a limited vocabulary in German, as many bilinguals do (Genesee, 2008: p.79), but this is just a suggestion.

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Another situation, this time a conversation with Son2, shows very clearly that there is some kind of comprehension problem, but this in turn does not influence conversation in such a great degree that conversation cannot take place anymore. This time, the mother reads aloud a number from IKEA’s children’s paradise and Son2 is confused by the pronunciation of the number: 11 12

cf. audio recording STE – 010, 11:02 min. cf. audio recording STE – 010, 12:00 min.

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M: Number forty-seven. S2: Nein, siebenundvierzig. [No, seven-and-forty] M: Ja, forty-seven.13 Here you can see that Son2 has a different concept for numbers than the English one, namely the German system: The mental image of the number 47 is for him first the 7, then the 4, because in German you say “seven and forty”. As soon as his mother then mentions the number in English, he gets confused because she says first the 4 and then the 7. It was also nice to observe Son2 doing his math homework. He also writes the number first which you say first. So if we take the 47 again, he writes the 7 on the right side and then the 4 to its left. According to Grosjean (2010: p.33) this is quite usual among bilinguals. He states that “counting and mathematic computations are usually done in the language in which they were learned (Grosjean, 2010: p.33)”, attributable to the “complementary principle” (for details see section 2.2.3), which explains why Son2 is confused when his mother makes math homework with him in English. Even though sometimes, he counts in English by himself or together with other English speaking persons – at least from 1 to 10 or 11 – it is very confusing for him that in the English language, you say the left digit first and then the right digit. This leads to the conclusion that this fact can after all be counted as an incident closely related with understanding in the broadest sense. Unfortunately, I was only able to record this phenomenon once, but most probably this happens more often and it is certainly worth looking further into. The other two children did not show behavior patterns like this, but probably I would have to make further investigations to find out whether the two of them have similar ‘problems’. To support the statement that Son1 understands English utterances/conversations very well, I have copied one of Son1’s English tests, in which he got a 3 with 1 point distance from a 2, particularly thanks to the listening comprehension part.

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As to the children’s abilities in understanding their ‘weak’ language, there were no further incidents of special interest. One could add here the conversation I had with Son2 about the animals in Dr. Seuss’ book who were sleepwalkers (p.19/20), but one cannot exactly say that this is a case of misunderstanding, it is actually rather a case of Son2 struggling to find the German equivalent for the word ‘sleepwalkers’. As to the daughter, she neither showed any problems understanding her mother’s utterances, nor just single words. 13

cf. audio recording STE – 010, 20:05 min.

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She is rather the ‘interpreter’ for the two boys just like in English lessons in school, which her mother told me. Thus she seems to have a relatively large passive treasury of English words compared to her brothers. Speaking When it comes to speaking, it can be justifiably affirmed that all three of them do not really use English as a means of communication. One could say they – consciously or not – refuse to speak English. Hence the matter here is language denial. For this behavior, there are three main reasons in general, according to Kielhöfer and Jonekeit (2002, pp. 70-71): •

Emotional reasons: The child has a rather disturbed relationship to one of his parents (which does not come into question with the three children of the mother and the father) or the child’s environment has a negative attitude towards the language (which could be the case here, since members of the family have often tried to put the mother off speaking English to their children and they have of course noticed this)

•

Social reasons: One of the languages has less social prestige than the other language (which is almost impossible in this case either, since almost all German school children do have to learn English in school) or the bilingual child wants to be like the other children and therefore stops speaking his/her second language. But probably the children of the case study rather deny their mother’s language due to the next reason.

•

Command of language: The non-dominant language has become so weak that the child does not have the courage anymore to speak it. Due to various circumstances the bilingual child falls in his ‘weak’ language below the average threshold of language use and that is why the effort to use it gets higher and higher and a certain predicament and hence language denial arises. Kielhöfer and Jonekeit state that this

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type of language refusal occurs, when the children exactly know that their interlocutor is also able to understand their dominant language, which is the case with the mother and their children by all means. Precisely because of this, one could argue that the children’s command of language is most probably the reason for them not using their second language in their daily lives anymore. To now show some examples, where the children nevertheless used the English language, it will be started here with the daughter since she is the one using English in her daily life least

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of all, even though she was the one speaking English the most when the family still was in California. There were actually only three situations in which she spoke English – at least at the times I made my recordings and notes. The first situation was the following: The daughter asked her mother for sweets in German, but I asked her to say it in English, which she (and Son1) did immediately afterwards and it was a correct English sentence. D: Mama, kann ich bitte was Süßes haben? [Mama, can I have some sweets?] I: Wie war des nochmal auf Englisch? [How do you say this in English?] S1: Can I have three toffifees* (see p.20)? D: Can I have three toffees?14 Of course, one has to add here that the daughter has already had English lessons from first grade on (so it is now already her fourth year of studying English at school), but exactly with these types of examples, one recognizes that she would actually be capable of using English as a means of communication, but she just does not do it because it is not obligatory, respectively necessary. Another situation was relatively similar (except for the fact that this time the mother asked her to say it in English again) and in the third situation, the daughter even spoke English voluntarily. M: How about we play a game? D: How about I’m going, thank you, adio.15 Indeed, this is not a perfectly correct English sentence – since she uses the verb ‘to go’ instead of ‘to leave’, as the German word ‘gehen’ also means ‘to leave’ in German, which is an obvious interference16 between the two languages English and German. But with that said one can realize once again that she would actually be able to speak English, but since there is no need to do and she is out of practice. Two situations, which were reported to me by the mother (they happened during times when I was not recording), were though very interestCopyright © 2014. Diplomica Verlag. All rights reserved.

ing. One time, when the mother asked her daughter at breakfast which type of bread she wanted, “Do you want Vollkornbrot or the other?”, the daughter spontaneously answered: “The other.”. The second situation was the following: The mother was watching biathlon one afternoon alone in the living room. The daughter came into the living room and said: “Oh 14

cf. audio recording STE – 003, 3:23 min. cf. audio recording STE – 011, 15:50 min. 16 chapter 3.3.3 will be solely dedicated to the children’s interferences 15

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cool, biathlon” (the English pronounced word). This shows that the English language is not completely denied by her. It is still ‘hidden’ inside and would most probably come to the surface if she was exposed to the English language for a longer time. Probably it plays a big role that I as the observer participated actively in the family life. The children are used to speaking German with me and that is why they tried to avoid it as much as possible as soon as I was with them. I could hence have been some kind of intruder for their natural language use. On the other hand, the mother told me that these situations are very rare and that most probably the daughter would have uttered the same answers if I had been present. But this question will remain unresolved, since I was not present in these two situations and not even the recording device. Son1 actually showed the same behavior patterns as his sister. He only used English more often in the sense that he included ‘trendy’ Anglicisms like cool, fuck or Looser in his utterances. But as Anglicisms are not a real and deliberate usage of English but rather temporary fashion in youth language, Son1 even showed less usage of English than his sister during the time I recorded. There is only the same situation that was already reported beforehand, where also Son1 asked his mother for sweets in English, but also only because she called on him saying his question in English* (see p.31). With him, there are, however two situations, where he also uses English voluntarily, but once again, he does not utter whole sentences, only sentence fragments, respectively code-mixing to which I will refer in section 3.3.3. The first situation was the following: M: Do you have English words to learn? S1: No.17 He answers an English question from his mother with the English negation form. Probably he does so because this question bears upon English as a school subject and that is why also his answer is English. Many researchers like Grosjean, Kielhöfer and Jonekit or Genesee state Copyright © 2014. Diplomica Verlag. All rights reserved.

that bilingualism is often dependent on certain situations (cf. chapter 2.3, the ‘freealternation’-strategy). Since the target is his English homework here, he probably also answered in English. In the second situation, the mother and I were playing Chutes&Ladders with Son1 (they bought it in London, that is why it is not called “Leiterspiel”), when Son1 uttered the 17

cf. audio recording STE – 003, 7:40 min.

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English word ‘cookies’. He did not say it in any context or sentence. He just read it aloud from a painting on the game, where the token had to go down the chute because it had eaten too many cookies. The term ‘cookies’ was only written on the cookie box and that is why Son1 used this word, not really because there was the need or the intention to speak English. The third situation emerged, when we were playing a game again, this time a card game called DaCapo. Actually one has to get rid of your deck, but as Son1 is a good poker player and when it was his turn, he showed his cards and said: “Flash and Full House”. I am pretty sure he did not notice that he used the English conjugation instead of the German one, but here one can see that also with him, the English language has not been ‘switched off’ completely, but only its usage has been limited. Of the three children, Son2 is the child using English the most. Not only does he count in English (at least from 1 to 11) every now and then, whether with his mother, me or by himself when moving his token in Chutes&Ladders. He also addresses his mother as “Mum” and gives at least short English answers like “yes”, “no” or single numbers to many English questions (continuing afterwards with German sentences). It is very interesting, though, that he does not use it all the time. But it struck me that, as soon as I talked to him in English, he also answered my questions with “yes” or “no”. Thus, he still reacts to somebody speaking English with at least partly English utterances. Like Son1, also Son2 read a word from the game board, namely “movie”. But as he does not really use it in an utterance, let us rather turn to a more interesting situation. This time, Son2 does not understand a special situation in the Chutes&Ladders game and asks intuitively in English for the reason, but unfortunately does not continue his sentence: S2: Hä? [Huh?] Hey, Mum, but why…? I: Why was? S2: Egal… [Whatever.]18

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Son2 either realized here that he talked in English and did not want to or was not grammatically able to continue in English or he just forgot what he was about to ask and that is why he stopped talking. Nevertheless, this situation is very interesting because one could conclude hereof that Son2 is not really denying English, but that he only does not use it because he 1) is either not sure enough to dare to speak or 2) does not want to speak English in the

18

cf. audio recording STE – 000, 23:00 min.

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presence of his siblings. It seems as if Son2 is most likely to still like English very much and tends possibly to speak it with pleasure once he will attend English lessons in school. But at the moment this is hard to say since he still struggles to cope with the German language and that is why one should not place too much value on his English abilities now. Moreover, it could also play a big role that I asked Son2 a question, which contained intra-sentential codemixing (see chapter 2.4.2 for details). Perhaps since I ended the question with the German word “was” and not the English equivalent “what” instinctively and he is also used to talk German to me anyway, I made him use German in his answer. So he probably did not really deny English, he just applied the right language to the right person, exactly according to the one person-one language principle (see chapter 2.3). Additionally, Son2 knows all the colors as well as some words in English. He is also very good at translating sentences and words from English into German. He was even able to translate the word ‘concussion’ into the German word ‘Gehirnerschütterung’, which is really quite complicated. But when I made a short vocabulary test with him, he was not able to ‘translate’ whole sentences or idioms the other way round, from German into English. For that, he probably still lacks abstract knowledge about languages in general. What should still be mentioned is that when Son2 hears mistakes in familiar words or sentences, he notices them and even corrects them. There was one situation, where Son1 was reading out one of Son2’s favorite books. He read “beer hunt” instead of “bear hunt”. Son2 corrected his brother immediately after he had read out the mistake even though he was watching TV at this time. That is really fascinating and speaks for his feeling for language and emphasizes once again the benefits of being bilingual. To sum up, the three children do almost not use their second or ‘weak’ language English in their daily lives. If they do so they either do it because they are told to do so (here one can clearly see that there could have been real bilingualism if the mother would have been a Copyright © 2014. Diplomica Verlag. All rights reserved.

bit stricter concerning the language of their children’s language choice for answers) or they speak English unconsciously, which does, however, not occur too often. Grosjean (2010: p.168), however, denominates the behavior pattern of the three children as normal. If you take a look at the figure on p.14 again, you see that there is no need for the three children to use English. They all know that their mother is a German native speaker and unfortunately, she has never insisted on the children only talking in English to her – as she told me. Thus,

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there is no need to use the language at home and certainly not outside the home. The children do not have English speaking friends or relatives either (except for one family, who they do not meet regularly, however) so they make minimal efforts and only use German, since this is then the minimal effort – maximum effect principle. Hence, it would be very interesting to find out how the children reacted to a native English speaker who does not understand German at all. But since this would go beyond the scope of this thesis, I will postpone this idea to a possible additional study in the near future. Reading Precisely since the three children do not use their nondominant language too much in their everyday lives, except for English school lessons and homework, I asked the two older siblings, who are already able to read quite fluently to read aloud an English text for me. In this way I was able to see how they pronounce different sounds and words. It was also interesting to refer to Son1’s English test in the field of reading comprehension (see Appendix 6.3, task 8). Obviously, he is able to read in English, but he does not really understand what he is reading, since he got only 6 out of 14 possible points in the reading comprehension part. This could allow the cautious conclusion that children who grow up bilingually do not automatically have an easy time learning one of their languages at school. As to the youngest’s abilities in reading, I could not really test him, since he still struggles to learn to read in German and therefore is not yet able to read in English. That is why I read one of his favorite English books to him and let him fill in gaps orally. Thus, I unfortunately got least input from Son2 here, but nevertheless at least some conclusions could be made with him. On the whole, one can say that all three children have similar problems in pronouncing English sounds and words and they all make quite typical German ‘mistakes’. Starting

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with the pronunciation of the ‘th’, they all do not pronounce it properly, which can easily be explained by comparing English and German fricatives19 with the help of this chart:

19

Fricatives are those kinds of consonants where “a continuous airstream forces its way through a very narrow opening between the articulators and thereby produces audible friction” (Becker/Bieswanger: p.45)

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labiodental

apicodental20 alveolar

postalveolar dorsal

English

f

v

7

'

s

z

6

(=)

-

German

f

v

-

-

s

z

6

(=)

&x;

glottal -

h

-

h

-

Chart 2: English and German fricatives (taken from König/Gast, 2007: p.12)

By means of this chart, one can recognize very easily that the (apico)dental /th/-sound in its voiced and voiceless form simply do not exist in German. Since the children’s dominant language is German, they have a hard time, as all other Germans do when they have to speak English, to pronounce the /th/-sound properly, which was not surprising at all. All three of them pronounce the English sound /7/ like the German /f/ and the voiced counterpart /'/ like a German /d/. According to Mair (1995: p.15), especially South German speakers substitute the voiced /th/-sound by a /d/, which is applicable here. However, it is surprising that the three of them never used the wrong version of the /th/-sound. They exactly know when to use which type, the voiced or the voiceless version in opposite to average German students who have to learn English in school and partially mix up the two different varieties of the /th/-sound. Continuing with the remaining fricatives, especially the daughter rarely used the voiced version of the /s/-and the /v/-sound. This – like the contribution of voiced and voiceless /th/-sounds in the English language – does not really make a difference in the meaning of words and is hence not mandatory. Nevertheless, it simply exists and immediately identifies a non-native English speaker. Therefore, it should not be ignored. When the daughter read out her text about Winnie the witch and her cat Wilbur21, she pronounced the following words with voiceless fricatives: ‘lives’ Æ /l,fs/ instead of /l,vz/, ‘eyes’ Æ /D,s/ instead of /D,z/, ‘closes’ Æ/klo8s(s/ instead of /klo8z,z/, ‘waves’ Æ /v(,fs/ instead of

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/Z(ǰY]], ‘stays’ Æ /st(,s/ instead of /st(,z/, ‘is’ Æ /,s/ instead of /,z/ etc. Son1 does this in the same way, with words like ‘balls’ Æ /bols/, ‘is’ Æ /,s/ or ‘friends’ Æ /fr(nds/ instead of /fr(ndz/ (for details or contexts see the charts in section 6.1).

20

Apicodental = dental in other linguistic books, meaning that the sound is “produced with the tip of the tongue placed against or near the upper teeth, or between the front teeth” (Becker/Bieswanger: p.44) 21 cf. audio recording STE – 014

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Not only do the two of them pronounce voiced fricatives voicelessly, they do also use the German w /v/ instead of the English equivalent /w/ in words like ‘well’, ‘winter’ (D), ‘why’ (S1) or ‘witch’ (D). And so does Son2. Unfortunately, for him there is only one example, namely does he pronounce the word ‘way’ with the German w /v/. This can be reduced to the fact that in German, there is no respective form of the English /w/ and since the children are out of practice in speaking English, this is the reason why the English /w/-sound is simply replaced by its German equivalent. For a complete overview of the consonants of English and German, see König/Gasts’s chart on p. 14 (2007). All three children do also have difficulties pronouncing the English /r/-sound properly. When they pronounce it, it rather sounds like a mixture of /w/ and /r/ but most of the time anything other than like the English /r/-sound. Again, this matter does not make any differences in meaning nor does it cause conversation problems, but it is worth mentioning since it contributes to the question whether the children have a strong German accent or not. Examples for this purpose are the following: •

very Æ /v4:w,/ instead of /ver,/, red Æ /w(d/ instead of /r(d/ (D)

•

Sharon Æ /6(wn/ instead of /6(rn/, friends Æ /fw(nds/ instead of / fr(nds/ (S1,

•

see above) three Æ /fwi:/, instead of /7ri:/ (S2)

The interesting thing here is that all three children do not always replace the English sounds by their German equivalents. For example, when Son1 read aloud the name Claire, car and are, he clearly pronounced the English /r/-sound in the General American way.22 Since we have now already touched upon the difference between British and American English, it has to be mentioned that the daughter and Son1 switched between the British and the American pronunciation of several English words, when they were reading out their texts for me. When the daughter read the words and expressions where, bat, got, floor, Oh dear,

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whiskers, four, warm, hears, are and their, she pronounced them BrE, namely without the rhoticity of the /r/-sound within words and in word final positions. Moreover, she pronounced the /a/-sound in bath like British speakers do (/ba:7/), but she also pronounced two words in the American English way: bath like /b47/ and can’t like /c4nt/ according to the rule 22

GenAm or AmE, meaning he even pronounces the r as /r/ at the end of a word, which is called rhoticity, in opposite to Received Pronounciation (RP = British English (BrE)), where an /r/-sound is usually left out at the end of a word, like in ‘work’ (BrE [w­:k], AmE [w­:rk]), or pronounced as // when there is a vowel following, like in ‘Claire’ (for more details see Fischer, 2006: p.98-99).

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“a ‘flat a’ before fricatives and before n followed by certain consonants” (Fischer, 2006: p. 99). Son1 proceeded very similar. Most of his words are pronounced in the BrE way, e.g. got, scared, were, card, 30, are, here, four, laughing (see appendix, section 6.1). These words can again be categorized, like the daughter’s words, according to the pronunciation of the /r/sound and the use of /a:/ for the long /a/-sound. What comes into addition with Son1 is that he has completely borrowed the British pronunciation of ‘got’. No matter if in ‘have got’ or ‘got’ alone, he always pronounces it like this: /got/, not like his mother says /g£t/ in her typical AmE accent. In opposite to his British ways of pronunciation, he says e.g. the time like Americans do it (“nine-thirty” for 9.30, not “half past nine”), because he learned it from his mother and especially in American elementary school like that. Furthermore, he pronounced some /r/-sounds in the AmE way (see above: Claire, are, car). But most probably the British or sometimes even wrong pronunciation of English words (like e.g. the daughter pronounces Winnie’s cat Wilbur /vilb8r/ and not /wilb³/) can be traced back to the fact that Son1’s and the daughter’s English teachers prefer the British accent. It can also be the case that the teachers sometimes unintentionally mispronounce words and children in general are prone to imitate teachers, especially when it comes to foreign language pronunciation. Also Son2 switched between the British and American pronunciation, when we read the Dr. Seuss book together, which is relatively surprising because he does not yet have English lessons in school at all. The reason for his behavior could be that he does not even know that there is a difference between British and American English, which certainly is the case. But then, one has to accept the same ‘excuse’ for Son1 and the daughter because they are not that proficient in English yet either that they already can decide whether they speak British or American English. They also do not have to. I can remember very well that I realized how to distinguish between BrE and AmE only at university and all the more

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during my semester abroad. One could, indeed, assume that children who grow up with American English at home automatically use the American pronunciation when they have to learn English in school, but obviously this is not the case. Probably this would change as soon as they have finished their language acquisition process, which normally takes place around the age of 12. And Son1 is actually already at this stage. But one had to make further investigations in this subcategory to find out more details.

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Some more things that stroke me during the children’s readings have still to be mentioned. They are not related to British or American English, but they show typically German accent characteristics, which are really textbook-like: The first thing I want to mention is the very obvious typically German final devoicing. This means that actually voiced consonants are pronounced voicelessly as soon as they occur at the end of a syllable or a word (König/Gast, 2007: p.15). This phenomenon normally affects all obstruents23, but with the children I will only refer to the sound pairs /s/-/z/ and /t/-/d/, because I was able to collect examples for these sounds from all three children. Starting with the youngest, Son2 has in almost all cases, where obstruents were located in syllable-final positions, used final devoicing. His examples are the following: old Æ /o8lt/, sad Æ /s4:t/, bad Æ /b4:t/. Thus, he used this phenomenon mainly related to the sound pair /d/-/t/. With Son1, I noticed him doing final devoicing with the same sound pair like in mud Æ /m£t/ or good Æ /gu:t/, which can be related to the text he read aloud. On the contrary, the daughter almost exclusively used final devoicing with the respective other sound pair /s/ and /z/. Like already mentioned above, she pronounced words with an s in final positions in the following way: lives Æ /l,fs/, stays Æ /st(,s/ or noise Æ /no,s/, to mention only a few once again. One important further indicator of having a German accent is not distinguishing between clear and dark l, since there is not such a distinction in the German phonemic system. Unfortunately, I could only record this phenomenon once, when the daughter was reading her text. But that is enough to prove its existence. When she read aloud the word animals, she did not use the dark l but instead the ‘normal’ German /l/-sound. Thus, it can be stated again that German is definitively the daughter‘s ‘strong’ language and that is why it affects her English pronunciation in this way. The last phenomenon I want to mention in this section is the fragmentary utterance of

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words within a sentence, meaning a clipped way of speaking, which is normally simply not the case within English sentences. In the English language, words within a sentence are interconnected and in contrast to the German language no glottal stops () are inserted between single words. It is rather the opposite. Words are unified so that a continuous flow of language develops. In spoken language, linking r’s are inserted, words ending in consonants are connected to their ‘neighbors’ starting with vowels, articles are adjusted if the next 23

„the class of obstruents comprises fricatives, plosives and affricates” (König/Gast, 2007: p.15)

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word starts with a vowel etc. When the two older siblings read out their texts, quite the opposite happened. When the daughter, for example, read out a sentence, it sounded in the following way: “with his eyes open” Æ /v,f h,se,so8p(n/. Instead of connecting the words “withe hise eyese open” with each other, she made a glottal stop between almost every single word. Son1 showed this behavior in the same manner. For example the expression “the idea” was not interconnected nor was the definite article adjusted to the following vowel. Here, one can clearly notice that reading in English has not been practiced that much yet with both the daughter and Son1. But that is nothing they have to be ashamed of nor has their mother to be blamed for that, it is quite normal. Bilinguals do have to learn reading (and writing) in their second language just like their monolingual peers. In different languages, there are different rules for pronunciation and that is what (also bilingual) children have to discover during their process developing reading (and writing) skills. The mother once told me that Son1 never wants to learn vocabulary in English because he thinks he is able to write them anyway, because he hears them regularly. But since he has fallen on his face with this attitude, he learns his vocabulary – especially how to write it – voluntarily (at least every now and then). But parents should not be too strict either, since the two different orthographic systems of German and English and the two different spellings could also cause total confusion (Kielhöfer/Jonekeit: p.61). In sum, the various difficulties with pronouncing English words show that even though Son1, Son2 and the daughter are confronted quite a lot with the English language, they still have a strong German accent, Son1 even stronger than the daughter. As to Son2, one cannot really judge this matter since he did not give me enough input. But an accent is nothing bad nor is it to be judged negatively, but rather quite the opposite. Quite contrary to the myth that bilinguals do not have an accent in either of their languages, “having a foreign accent

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[…] is, in fact, the norm for bilinguals [and] does not make someone more or less bilingual.” (Grosjean, 2010: p. 77). Of course, there are bilinguals who do not have an accent at all, but that is rather an exception (p.77). One has to add here that even though the father is a very proficient English speaker as well – he even uses English at work regularly – he has a heavy German accent as well. This could be an indication for the fact that probably also his children have a hard time pronouncing English words determined by genetic factors. But to prove

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this statement, one would have to delve into the field of neurolinguistics or even genetics very deeply. Writing When it comes to writing, one can hardly compare the three children’s abilities (which is a complex issue anyway, since all three of them are situated at a completely different level when it comes to language development). Son2 is still in first grade and therefore still struggles to learn how to write properly in German. The daughter is already in her fourth year of studying English at school (she already had English lessons from class 1 on in BadenWurttemberg), indeed, but they are not really writing much in school and there are no grades for English yet. That is why one cannot really count her English materials from school either. The only one for whom English already plays an important role in school is Son1. To go into detail, I will refer to Son1’s English test once again, this time relating to his mistakes in spelling and grammar (see Appendix 6.3, tasks 2 to 7). Except for little spelling mistakes in ‘factory’ Æ *fucktury, ‘enjoyed’ Æ *enjojed, ‘ahead’ Æ *a had and ‘excuse me’, which he spells *excise my (see task 7), there are no further serious spelling mistakes in his test. His other mistakes are to be traced back to the following grammatical uncertainties: First of all, Son1 is not really sure yet how to frame simple past forms of different verbs. He knows the irregular verb forms which he should know and also how to frame simple past forms of regular verbs (see task 3), but he is not sure yet how to form the negative form with did + not + verb form in infinitive or the question in the simple past. For example in task 4 he writes ‘bought’ after ‘didn’t’, in task 5b) he writes ‘fell’ after ‘didn’t’ (even though the teacher did not notice that) or in task 6, where he writes ‘took’ after ‘Did you’. Moreover, he is not really sure yet when the simple past form has to be used. This is evident from the mistakes in task 4, where Son1 writes in a story about last Saturday ‘I go by

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train’ or ‘Then we walk round the town centre.’ When it comes to translating from German into English (in task 7), it becomes clear once again that Son1 is a dominant bilingual in German with English as his ‘weak’ language, respectively that he makes many interference mistakes in writing. If one takes the sentence “I wasn’t in the school last week” as an example, it becomes quite obvious that Son1 simply translates the German equivalent sentence “Ich war nicht in der Schule letzte Woche” word by word without taking into account any grammatical differences between the word order

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rules of the two languages. But since this actually belongs to the field of interferences, it will

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be taken up in the next section again and explained in detail.

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3.2.3

Interferences and Code-Mixing

Frequency As far as interferences and code-mixing are concerned, it has to be stated that there occurred quite a lot of them with Son2 and Son1, but only very few with the daughter. This fact, however, could once again result from the fact that she is simply more talented with languages than her brothers are. interferences code-mixing

Son2 4 5 (3) Hi, byebye

Son1 4 3 (2) Anglicisms

Daughter 2 (1) 0

Chart 3: Frequency of interferences and code-mixing (The numbers in brackets ( ) signify the actual amount without certain phenomena explained below each number, detailed information can be looked up in 6.1)

As shown in the chart and diagram above, it only happened twice that the daughter made errors in German which could be traced back to interferences, and she never code-mixed. This could, however, be the case, because except for the reading, I did not get much input from the daughter, since she most of the time did not join us when playing games or in similar situations. But it is also likely that she simply does not do language mixing all too often. After all, she has above average grades in German, which pleads for her better ability to separate her two languages from each other. Of course, one could also trace back this incident to the common prejudice that girls are better in language learning, while boys are the better mathematicians. But since this thesis has been discussed again and again and no real consensus has been established yet, this matter shall not be included here. One should only memorize that the daughter is very clever with languages not letting her weak language English interfere with her dominant language German except for two little interference mistakes, of which only one can be counted as a real interference ‘mistake’.

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Son1 made quite a lot of mistakes in the German language which can be traced back to interference problems and so did Son2. They both made 4 different interference ‘mistakes’.24 The details and types of interferences will be explained in the following section. Code-mixing occurred mainly within Son2’s utterances. Indeed, Son1 sometimes switched to the English language but he did that either because he used Anglicisms (which cannot be 24

Here it has to be added that these absolute numbers represent the occurrence of different phenomena, not considering the quantity how often one single phenomenon occurred.

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counted as code-mixing) or one time he answered in English ( “No.” to the question “Do you have English words to learn?”) or he uttered a full row of English words strung together (. In the next section it will be shown which types of interferences and code-mixings the children uttered, starting with interference mistakes. Types of Interferences To give some examples of interferences, the daughter’s interferences are instanced first. One time she said “und wie er reagiert ist…”, but she corrected herself immediately afterwards to “reagiert hat, als…”. She hence made a mistake in forming the German Perfekt. This particular German time (not to be confused with the English present perfect) can be formed either with the inflected form of the modal verb ‘to be’ or ‘to have’ adding the past participle of the verb. Even though there are rules for when to use which form25, there are exceptions to the rule and then, it is hard to say whether you have to use ‘be’ or ‘have’. Especially for children it is always hard because they cannot really apply rules yet, they just use language and if they make mistakes, they are corrected by their teachers or parents or – as the present case – they become aware of it themselves. But since the English perfect can also not be formed with an inflected form of ‘to be’, this is not really an interference, it is rather a common difficulty within the German language. Therefore, this will not be counted as an interference at all. Rather the next example could be counted as an interference, but only if one does not consider the Upper Palatian variety. The second example is the ‘wrong’ inflection of “geben”. When the daughter asked her dad for money, she said: “Papa, geb mir die 10 Euro!”. Of course, this utterance could have been wrong unintentionally or can be contributed to the Bavarian, Upper Palatian dialect. But this utterance could also have been made due to the fact that in the English sentence “give me (the) 10 Euros” the vowel in the verb “to give” is not changed when you

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conjugate it in the ‘you-form’ and for that reason this could also be an interference on the syntax level, which once again does not have an impact on communication. But this is only a cautious conclusion. Since these two situations were the only ones where the daughter made ‘mistakes’ in the German grammar – except for her clearly German accent, which clearly belongs to the

25

Be is used with some intransitive or intransitively used verbs and have with the most other German verbs (for more information see Bibliographisches Institut GmbH 2012).

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group of static interferences – the focus will now be put on the two boys. To summarize, they made the following ‘mistakes’ in the German grammar, which can be defined as interferences (each followed by an explanation and example(s)):

Error in the Translation of the ‘you’-Form When the mother, the daughter and I were laughing in the living room, Son1 appeared and asked us “Warum sind Sie/sie alle so witzig drauf?”, although he should have asked “Warum seid ihr alle so witzig drauf?”. It seems as if he had had the English pronoun ‘you’ in his mind and ‘translated’ it mistakenly into the German “Sie” or “sie” (3rd person plural) instead of “ihr” (2nd person plural). This is a typical case of a dynamic interference on the syntax level and it belongs already to the second class of Weinreich’s division of interferences (for details see section 2.4.1). But since this construction is possible in German and it is still understandable, this utterance still has only a slight impact on communication.

Problems with Accusative and Dative This type of interference on the syntax level occurred with both, Son2 and Son1, five times within Son2’s utterances and two times within those of Son1. Based on the fact that the English language simply does not make a distinction between accusative and dative in the form of the article, pronoun or noun, the two boys – especially Son2 – had a hard time using the correct forms in their German utterances. To better understand what is meant here, this statement will now be accompanied with examples. As part of a conversation with me, Son2 uttered the following sentence: “Du verfolgst mir.” Or to quote Son1: “Sag mich, was ist duschen?”. Here, one can easily notice that both of them used the respective wrong ‘translation’ of the English pronoun me, which is a direct influence of the English language on their German utterances and therefore certainly an interference. Since cases as such do not longer Copyright © 2014. Diplomica Verlag. All rights reserved.

exist in the English language, but have been replaced by a certain word order or prepositions in the English language (König/Gast, p. 103), the same problem occurred with nouns and their determiners. Examples for this are “Wieso nimmt die Blondine Ketchup mit auf den Klo?”or “Nur mit langes Geweih”(both Son2) where in German accusative or dative has to be used and Son2 is not sure at all how to adjust articles or adjectives. Even though this type of interference is quite striking to a German native speaker, it does not hinder communica-

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tion and therefore it once again belongs to the second class of interferences having only a slight impact.

Word Order Problems These types of interferences, once again on the syntax level, occurred mainly in written language, even though there is one example for Son2 when he was talking: He said “Ich hab schon heute was gemacht” with the time adverbial “heute” in the wrong position26 But since this is not the correct position in English either, this utterance is not counted as interference; it is rather an indicator for Son2’s problems with the German language in general. By contrast, it was quite striking that in written language interference mistakes were made in English and German word order. With this type of mistakes, communication is still possible, but the impact here is more serious than the interferences mentioned before. But since this only touches upon written language now, there is no immediate impact on communication. Son1, for example, wrote in his English test: “I was last year…” But when the mother and I read it out to him, he noticed by himself that this sentence structure was incorrect, which speaks again for his distinctive language feeling. Another example from Son1 is the sentence “He drinks every day coffee”, where the direct ‘translation’ from the German sentence in his mind (“Er trinkt jeden Tag Kaffee”) into the English sentence is quite obvious. Not only does the English language influence German, but it is also happening the other way round. An example of this can be found in Son2’s German homework. He had to write sentences with certain vocabulary and this was the result: “Nico sich schon freut”, which is a tricky case, because there is no real equivalent for the German reflexive word ‘sich freuen’. But that is the case most of the time and hence translating word by word is never easy for bilinguals.

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Problems with the Gender of Words and Their Articles Like the above mentioned example, both boys often did not know exactly which gender certain words have and were hence not able to frame their correct form. Some more examples are: “Aber dazu muss doch nicht die Krankenwagen […] da sein.“ (Son2) or “Ich muss 26

This construction would be possible, if the stress was on “heute” and the meaning of the sentence would be that he already did something today, which he could also have done tomorrow, but since stressed the “schon”, he wanted to say that he already did something today, meaning that he was not lazy, but he did something.

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einen runterlegen” (die Karte, feminine; Son1). Since König and Gast argue that „gender has a semantic basis in German, but it is not fully predictable” (2007: p.60), also the two boys have a hard time using always the correct article. But the mother tries to correct them as often as possible and both time and English and German lessons will probably contribute to avoiding these mistakes in the near future. These interference problems once again belong to Weinreich’s second group of interferences.

Problems with Modal Verbs One cannot generalize that that the boys have problems with all modal verbs, but since the phenomenon has even been mentioned in the introduction of König and Gast’s Understanding English-German Contrasts as a typical example of German-English interference (2007: p.527), this section just has to be added. In a conversation with me, Son1 once said: “Du musst das nicht vergessen” [You don’t have to forget that], actually meaning “Du darfst das nicht vergessen” [You must not forget that] translating the English sentence word by word without noticing that he made some kind of mistake. Once again, this type of interference does not have too much impact on communication, but it is also not completely irrecognizable. There are even some more examples of interferences, but for those no explanation is provided with the examples since the reasons for the interferences are self-evident or they have been explained already. Furthermore, all four groups belong to the class of interferences on the syntax level: •

Problems with the correct formation of the German perfect: “Da bin ich volle Pulle eine Arschbombe […] gemacht.” (S2, explanation see p.43, where the daughter’s interferences are described)

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•

Direct ‘translation’ problems: “Ich wundere, warum…”, “Ich weiß nicht wie hoch ich bin“ (English height Æ choosing the German equivalent of “high” as the respective German equivalent) (both S2) or “Ich muss einen runterlegen“(S1) instead of

27

„The English sentence You must not smoke in here differs in meaning from the completely parallel sentence Du musst hier nicht rauchen in German.” (König/Gast, 2007: p. 5) While the first sentence means that smoking is not allowed, the second German sentence means that rather the advice of a parent or a friend not to smoke here now.

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„ablegen“ (which has already been mentioned above as an example of not knowing which gender a word has). •

Formation of a nonexistent German word parallel to the English model: E.g. *Aufwärmung (English warming, Son2), which seems to be a German noun because of the ending “ung”, but this word simply does not exist within German lexis.

•

Wrong usage of prepositions: “In Winter kann Sommer werden” (like its English equivalent “In winter,…”) instead of “Im Winter…” or “In Deutsch heißt des Nilpferd.” instead of “Auf Deutsch…”(both Son2).

With all these examples it is hard to say whether the interferences that occurred were static or dynamic but since also Grosjean (2010: p.69) states that these two terms are hard to distinguish, I will not elaborate on this matter. Let me rather state that all these examples are very interesting, since I did not think that English as their weak language would have so much influence on their German. Based on these examples, no general conclusions can be drawn about their general abilities in German, but it can clearly be stated that they do have certain weaknesses in their dominant language German. Son2 made mistakes in the German grammar 15 times, while Son1 made 8 mistakes (taking into account the utterance “Ich hab euch alle gezockt”, cf. chart in section 6.1) and the daughter only 2 (for details see p.43 ff.) . 30 25 20

Daughter

15

Son1

10

Son2

5 0 Mistakes in German Grammar

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Figure 7: Mistakes in German Grammar in General

This could, however, be traced back to genetically determined factors and that is why I cannot make a final judgment about the question whether their poor performances in German lessons are to be associated with the fact that they have grown up with two languages. All in all, it has to be said that the two boys make more mistakes in both languages than their sister– regarding German Son2 even more than Son1. But certainly, this is not to be

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blamed on the fact that they were raised bilingually, since “bilingualism does not cause any type of language disorder”, quoting Döpke (p.5) once again, but rather the social circumstances (the moves, the school changing etc.) and the genetic make-up for handling languages in general. But before summarizing and concluding finally, the types of code-mixings which were discovered in Son2’s and Son1’s utterances will be listed first. Types of Code-Mixings First of all, there will be comments on Son1’s code-mixings (definition see chapter 2.4.2), which occurred – apart from his Anglicisms – only very rarely compared to Son2, to be exact quite accurately twice as much. One situation, which has already been mentioned in the section about speaking, is the sentence “Flash and Full House”, which Son1 uttered in the course of a card game. It actually sounds like a perfectly English sentence, but since it was uttered in a German context, the words Flash and Full House are to be seen as German(ized) words and therefore, this usage of “and” instead of the German conjugation “und” is clearly a case of intrautterance codemixing. The other code-mixing I recorded from Son1 is the following: His mother told him to shuffle in the meantime, while she was gone, and Son1’s answer was “Ich kann doch nicht shufflen”. This time, one can talk about intrautterance code-mixing all the more, because Son1 even conjugated the word “shufflen” as if it was a German verb. He probably Germanized an English word because he did not know the German equivalent and that is hence a typical case of code-mixing. After Son1’s code-mixing, the now following code-mixings stem from Son2: •

While counting, he said at one time “acht, nine” (=intrautterance mixing)

•

Before leaving the living room, he said “dann sag ich mal byebye” or the very similar utterance “Ich sag immer hi und byebye”, when we talked about how one should

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greet and say goodbye to one’s teachers (both intrautterance mixings) •

When I was talking in English to him, he often answered my questions with “Yes, aber…” or similar utterances (intrautterance mixing)

•

When he was angry because he had to make more German homework, he answered to the mother’s question “Which colors do you wanna have?” with “Keine. No, no, no.” (which can be traced back to the fact that bilinguals sometimes use the respective other language in emotionally extremes) (interutterance mixing)

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With five different situations of code-mixings, Son2 is thus the one who still mixes his two languages, English and German the most. As already mentioned, this may be due to his genetically determined delay in language development and his possibly existing dyslexia. It could, nevertheless, also be a hint that he has the highest affinity for the English language compared to his siblings. But even though he had to go back to first grade again and also Son1 had several problems in school which caused him to switch to Mittelschule, this does not necessarily mean that the mother should stop talking English to their children. It is rather quite the contrary. This break would all the more cause confusion and would probably not help the children at all. Psycholinguist Johanne Paradis, who made experiments with children with SLI (specific language impairments) for example, supports this opinion and “finds no empirical support for advising parents to give up speaking one of their languages to a child who has SLI” (Grosjean, 2010: p.228). The boys do not suffer from SLI, indeed, but the mother should still not stop speaking English with her children. The only thing that the family could perhaps change is that they try to stick to another strategy like the “homeoutside the home” methodology, but here, perseverance would be needed and since the two older children are already quite prepubescent, this could be a hard project. Furthermore, also the father would have to switch to his ‘weak’ language then, but perhaps this would be worth a try. On the other hand, as already mentioned on p.19, an already established system of bilingual parenting should not be changed and so, the parents could at most cautiously approach to another method and see what happens and if there is any confusion, immediately return to the original approach. But the best solution is probably to stick to the ‘one person-one language’ strategy and give the children more time to settle down in their new environment. One could also give the advice to the parents to probably send their children to an International School with English as the teaching language and see what happens. By now, Copyright © 2014. Diplomica Verlag. All rights reserved.

these schools really have good reputations even in Regensburg, so, most probably all three kids would be in good hands there. The closest school, RIS – Regensburg International School in Pentling/Großberg– is not even far away from their place of residence. One would “only” have to persuade the parents of this idea, since this is, of course, a quite expensive matter.

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4.

Findings with Respect to the Four Questions and Further

Thoughts To put it in a nutshell, the questions raised at the beginning of the paper can hence be answered in the following way, based on the findings described in section 3: 1) Which type of bilinguals are the three children according to the possibilities of categorization given in 2.1? The children are early, simultaneous and dominant bilinguals with German as their dominant language. Apart from the contact with the American culture for one year in their childhood, they have been raised almost monoculturally. It is hard to say whether they are compound or coordinate bilinguals but it is obvious that all three are almost exclusively passive bilinguals. Probably this has happened due to the fact that the mother has not insisted on the children speaking to her in English only. However, it has not been like that ever since: The daughter was already an almost monolingual English speaker, when they were in the U.S. But since there is no need for using the English language anymore, none of the three children uses it, they almost deny it. One could give the parents the advice to visit an English speaking country for a longer time once again, but at the same time, this would not encourage an improvement in German either. However, the disadvantages can hardly be judged appropriately here. The only thing which is still worth mentioning is that all three children will definitely have advantages should they ever make a longer stay abroad in an English speaking country again. 2) Do they use code-mixing and interferences even though they do not even use the English language in their daily lives (except for usage in school)? The answer to this question is relatively simple. Yes, they do. And particularly with the two

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boys, these two types of language mixing appear relatively often. With Son2 almost exclusively influences of from English come into his German languages, actually not the other way round. But this can be contributed to the fact that he is not yet using English in school. However, it has to be mentioned here again that the daughter does not really make interference mistakes nor does she use code-mixing. But this incident could be traced back to her individual ability for languages in general and it does not necessarily have something to do with the fact that she is raised bilingually.

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3) Does the fact that the mother produces ‘unnatural bilingualism’ contribute to the children’s attitude of denial towards the usage of the English language? First of all, one cannot really talk about ‘unnatural bilingualism’. It was always the purpose of the parents to prepare their children for another stay abroad, but due to various reasons, they have not been able to manage it yet. Moreover, the children’s denial of the English language is most likely to be attributed to the facts that 1) English is their weak language, 2) they are out of practice and do exactly know that their mother also understands and speaks German, and 3) they do not need the English language aside from English lessons in school. The denial is, hence, only indirectly related to the fact that the mother produces ‘unnatural bilingualism’. It is certainly not up to her abilities in the English language, that the children do not speak it. It is only connected with the fact that there is no real need for the children to speak English, since there are no monolingual English speaking friends or relatives due to the fact that the mother and the father both are Germans. Probably it really would be a good idea to confront the children more often with the English language and ‘force’ them to use it as a means of communication, e.g. by hiring an English speaking au pair or sending the children to a bilingual, respectively international school.

4) Are the problems the children have in school related to the fact that they have been raised bilingually? For this question the answer is quite likely no. Like already mentioned in previous sections, there are as many children with language disorders (or dyslexia) among monolinguals as among bilinguals (Grosjean, 2010: p.227). One can hence not blame bilingualism for causing any type of language disorder. Since research has not been able to prove that bilingualism has a negative effect on a child’s intelligence either, there have to be other reasons for the

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poor performances of the two boys in school. On one hand, one has to keep in mind that they just switched from the school system in Baden-Wuerttemberg to the Bavarian system. On the other hand, it was already brought up that Son2 suffers from a certain type of genetically determined language problem and Son1 is prepubescent and therefore, one could argue that he is just lazy. But to prove these statements, one would have to delve deeper into the fields of psycholinguistics.

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Generally speaking, one can still not say whether the three children are eventually bilingual or not since all three of them have not yet overcome the “critical period” (for details see section 2.2.1). Hence, it certainly would be worth to make another visit to the children in a .

couple of years, when they all have overcome puberty (in the sense of language development). Son1, indeed, is now already 13 years old and one could therefore say that he has already gotten over the ‘critical period’ and has intentionally reverted to monolingualism. But since he always had problems in German lessons in school, one should give him another one or two years to ultimately determine whether he is a ‘real’ bilingual in English and German or not. As to his siblings, there is definitely room to rise relating to language development in their current ‘weak’ language English. As the interviews of Claire Thomas (2012) prove, which were conducted with adult bilinguals who were questioned about their bilingual lives, there are also bilinguals who only start to speak their second language again at the age of 16 or later. What can be concluded nevertheless is that the daughter is definitely more able to separate her two languages than her brothers, which can be confirmed by looking at her sparse mistakes in German and also her above average school grades in German in contrast to the two boys’ performances in German. One has to add here, however, that all three children do have a very pronounced feeling for the English language, even though they do not use it too much. But as I already mentioned earlier, further investigations in a few years would be very interesting in order to find out how all three of them develop their English abilities and whether one of them eventually starts to speak English with their mother again. A general advice for bilingual parents is, however, never to give up bilingual education. No matter what family members, other acquaintances or even professionals may say against it (see Kielhöfer/Jonekeit’s advices on p.103, 2002), leading linguists and speech therapists

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specializing in multilingualism from all over the world nowadays support bilingual parenting as well as possible. Therefore, whether the three children become bilingual eventually or not does not really matter. In any case, the parents really gave their best enabling their children an easier access to a second language than their peers will ever have. Probably the best solution is at the moment to stay for a longer time at the same location so that the children can settle down properly and have the possibility to care about their social lives. Perhaps one of the children

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is going to make a High-School-Year in the U.S. or will spend a semester abroad in an English speaking country, as it often happens with bilinguals even though they have refused to speak this language for a long time (Thomas, 2012: p. 173 ff.). By then at the latest, this child will have big advantages because he/she has grown up with English already. Since it was always the intention of the parents to prepare their children for another stay abroad, I

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am sure it was and definitely will be worth all the complications.

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5.

List of Works Cited

Auer, P & Wei L 2007 (eds.), Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication, Handbooks of Applied Linguistics, Vol. 5, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York. Baker, C 1996, Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Multilingual Matters, Clevedon. Bechert, J 1991, Einführung in die Sprachkontaktforschung. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt. Becker, A & Bieswanger, M 2006, Introduction to English Linguistics, A. Francke Verlag, Tübingen/Basel. Bibliographisches Institut GmbH 2012, Perfektbildung mit haben oder sein, viewed 25 September 2012, http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/perfektbildungmit--em-haben--em--oder--em-sein--em-. Butler, Y G & Hakuta K 2005, ‘Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition’, The Handbook of Bilingualism, Bhatia, T K & Ritchie W C (eds), Blackwell Publishing, Blackwell Reference Online, viewed 22 September 2012, http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/tocnode?id=g9780631227359_chunk_g 97806312273599 (restricted access only) Cenoz, J & Genesee, F (eds.) 2001, Trends in Bilingual Acquisition, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia. Cummins, J 1976, The Influence of Bilingualism on Cognitive Growth: A Synthesis of Research findings and Explanatory Hypotheses, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto. Cummins, J. (2000). Language, Power and Pedagogy: Bilingual Children in the Crossfire, Multilingual Matters, Clevedon.

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De Houwer, A, ‘Bilingual Language Acquisition’, in: Fletcher, P 1995, The handbook of child language, Blackwell, Oxford (et al.), pp.219-250. Deuchar, M & Quay S 2000, Bilingual Acquisition: Theoretical Implications of a Case Study. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York. Döpke, S 2006, Understanding Bilingualism and Language Disorder, viewed 25 September 2012, http://www.bilingualoptions.com.au/consTXTDelay.pdf. Dr. Seuss 1960, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Random House Books for Young Readers, New York.

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Fischer, R 2006, Tracing the History of English: A Textbook for Students, 2nd edn., Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt. Flyvbjerg, B 2006, Five Misunderstandings About Case Study Research, viewed 25 September 2012, http://qix.sagepub.com/content/12/2/219.full.pdf+html. (restricted access only) Genesee, F (et al.) 2008, Dual language development and disorders. Brooks, Baltimore (et al.). Grosjean, F 2000, Myths about Bilingualism, viewed 24 September 2012, http://www.francoisgrosjean.ch/myths_en.html. Grosjean, F 2010, Bilingual Life and Reality, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Hamers, J F & Blanc, M H 2000, Bilinguality and Bilingualism, 2nd edn., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hammer, M 1999, Zweisprachige Kindererziehung (Diplomarbeit zur Erlangung des Akademischen Grades einer Magistra der Philosophie), Karl-Franzens-Universität, Graz. Karbalaei, A 2010 ‘Who is in advantage: a Balanced or Dominant Bilingual’, The modern journal of applied linguistics, volume 2, no. 33, viewed 26 September 2012, http://www.mjal.org/Journal/Who%20is%20in%20advantage%20a%20Balanced%20or %20Dominant%20Bilingual.pdf. Kessler, C 1984, ‘Language Acquisition in Bilingual Children’, in: Miller, N (ed.) 1984, Bilingualism and Language Disability: Assessment & Remediation, College-Hill Press, Inc., San Diego, pp. 26-54. Kielhöfer, B & Jonekeit, S 2002, Zweisprachige Kindererziehung, Stauffenberg Verlag, Tübingen. König, E & Gast,V 2007, Understanding English-German Contrasts, Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin. Mair, C 1995, Englisch für Anglisten, Stauffenburg Verlag, Tübingen.

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Meisel, JM & Köppe R 1995, “Code-Switching in Bilingual First Language Acquisition”, in: Milroy, L & Muysken, P, One Speaker, Two Languages: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Code-Switching, Cambridge UP, Cambridge. pp. 276-301. Meisel, JM, 2001 ‘The simultaneous acquisition of two first languages: Early differentiation and subsequent development of grammars’, in: Cenoz, J & Genesee, F (eds.) 2001, Trends in Bilingual Acquisition, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, pp. 11-41. Montrul, SA 2008, Incomplete Acquisition in Bilingualism: Re-examining the Age Factor, Studies in Bilingualism, Vol. 39, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.

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Pinter, A 2011, Children Learning Second Languages, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (et al.), viewed 24 September 2012, http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/langling2011/browse/inside/9780230302297.html (full text: restricted access only) Platt, J 1988, “What can case studies do?”, in: Studies in Qualitative Methodology. 1: 1-23. Pressley, M & McCormick C 2007, Child and Adolescent Development for Educators, The Guilford Press, New York. Thomas, C 2012, Growing Up with Languages: Reflections on Multilingual Childhoods, Multilingual Matters, Bristol (et al.). Weinreich, U 1953, Languages in Contact, Mouton, The Hague.

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Williams, R 2006, New Highlight, Cornelsen, Berlin.

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6.

Appendix

6.1

Audio Recordings Sorted by Children and Categories

abbreviations used: B= Son1, C=Mother, V=Son2, F=Daughter, I=myself underlined words = errors bold printed words = sources of error “words in quotation marks” = quotes (words in brackets) = context, comments * non existing words

Son2 English B counts in English together with C (several times, is able to count at least to 11)

„Mum“ (several times)

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reads „movie“

translates „concussion“ with Gehirnerschütterung

Mistakes in German Syntax written: “Nico sich schon freut.” Æ “Nico…schon…sich freuen.” (B can’t make a German sentence without the help of C) word order problems „Des is hinter des grüne Sofa“ (C corrects B) problems with accusative/dative „Aber dazu muss doch nicht die Krankenwagen und die Feuerwehr da sein“ problems with gender „Da bin ich volle Pulle eine Arschbombe in den Bällebad reingemacht“ gender /accusative+ past

Interferences/ Code-Mixing “…acht, nine”

Pronunciation Problems “three” Æ pronounced “fwee” (problems with th)

Translation Problems “In Deutsch heißt des Nilpferd.” C “And in English”? “Weiß ich doch nich” Æ “Oh, sure you do.” Æ “Hictomus?” (G-E-translation)

“dann sag ich mal byebye”

old Æ „olt“ , sad, bad, … final devoicing aber: „bed“ richtig!

C translates “snap peas” for the kids (esp. V + B, F understands it)

C „Which colors do you wanna have?“ B “Keine. No, no, no.” (sauer)

new, fat, hat (AmE) car, four, more, ear (BrE)

B reacts only when C translates „bird“ with „Vogel” (pantomime) coordinate bilingual

C „Number 47.“ B “Nein, Siebenundvierzig.” (interference)

way (dt. „w“)

(almost) no idea how German words are called in English, but the other way round! (test)

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in conversation with me (when I was talking only English) Æ often code-switching, e.g. “Yes, aber…” I „They are sleepwalkers, right?” B “Nein, Nacht…Schlafwan dler.”

counts in English together with me

“Wieso nimmt ne Blondine Ketchup mit auf den Klo?” accusative

answers “yes” and “no” to English questions (not always)

“Ich hab gar nich mal n Joker” word choice

counts in English quietly

“In Winter kann Sommer werden" (tv series) „In Deutsch heißt des Nilpferd.“ prepositions “Für die Haare zu schneiden” word choice “Nur mit langes Geweih” dative problem “Wir gehn immer auf den anderen Weg” dative problem “Ich hab schon heute was gemacht” word order „Du verfolgst mir“ accusative problem Aufwärmung*

„Ich sage immer hi und byebye“ (greeting of the teacher)

Mistakes in German Syntax “Warum sind Sie alle so witzig drauf?” error in the translation of „you”

Interferences/ Code-Mixing “Snowstorm” Æ “Snowschtorm” (but rhotic r!)

“Hey mum, but why…” (doesn’t continue) “Please, Mum”

C “One, two or three?” B “Three”

“Hi, Mum.” (when he overtakes C in a game) colors: yellow, red, blue, pink corrects V: „Bear hunt!“

red Æ “wed”, right, (problems with English r)

G-E: gehen – go9, Guten Appetit - ? E-G: dessert Nachspeise9, desert - ? I „…ink.“ B „Was is des?“, knows German translation for “kite” only after I`ve shown him the picture B „Everythere“*

„Ich weiß gar nicht wie hoch ich bin.“ (height) „Ich wundere, warum…“

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Son1 English says “cookies”, but only because he reads it off the game

Pronunciation “bear hunt” Æ “beer hunt” „your“ pronounced like „you“

Translation problems “Can I have a *toffifee, please?” (C asks him to say it in English) wrong word choice

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“Ich muss einen runterlegen” (die Karte) problem with gender

“I was last month in Manchester…Last month, I was in Manchester!” word order problem

“No.” as answer to C’s question “Do you have English words to learn?”

“Jetzt hab ich euch alle gezockt” rather youth language than mistake

Anglicisms

“Flash and Full House” (playing DaCapo)

“Sag mich, was ist duschen?” problem with dative

He drinks every day coffee” word order problem

“pro jeden Schlag” word choice

“Ke” für K

“Du musst das nicht vergessen” problem with modal verb

“Ich kann doch nicht shufflen.“

“Ich hab bei sie übernachtet” dative problem

“Ich muss einen runterlegen” Æ “to put one down”

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“Looser” “Fuck” “Fucking” (rather Anglicisms)

“In der USA gibt es doch den Feiertag…” gender problem/plural word

“We going to the…” (without are) “We got to go…” (without have) “We not going on a…” (without are) got, scared, were,[birthday] card, 1.30, 9.30, are, here, four, laughing (BrE) 1.30, 9.30, Claire, car, are (AmE) through, birthday card, Northgate, think, 1.30, 9.30(f) the, them, they (d) problems with th, but knows when to use wich th “We’re going to…” Æ pronounced like were

“Narrow, was is des?” I “Eng.” V “Auf Deutsch?” I “Eng.” V “Achso.” -

doesn’t know the words swirling, narrow and can’t read it out aloud

[nose (while reading): noise]

I “Was heißt besuchen?” V “Hm….visit?”(nur mit Hilfe) mistakes in mud, good, final devoicing written English Grammar: “there are lots of newspaper were for the models” “lots of they had fun” (but corrects himself) problems with problems with r: Sharon, very, Terry, spelling English words (e.g. I laugh) friends , write – wrote (pronounces it like w) video pronounced like German word

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“the idea” (pronounced like two different words)

C translates “snap peas” for the kids (esp. V + B, F understands it)

glottal stop between words when reading

Daughter English „Can I have three toffees?“ (but only after C had asked her to say it in English) “How about I’m going, thank you, adio” (goes to her room)

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“Can I have some sweets please?” (again only after C asked her what it’s called in English) C “Do you want Vollkornbrot or the other?” F “The other.”

Mistakes in German Syntax “…und wie er reagiert ist…reagiert hat, als…” problem with past (but self-correction) “Papa, geb mir die 10 Euro.” wrong inflection of „geben“

Interferences/ Code-Mixing “…und wie er reagiert ist…reagiert hat, als…” problem with past (but self-correction) How about I’m

going?

Pronunciation Problems three, with, th = f then, th=d

Translation Problems -

where, bath, got, floor, Oh dear, whiskers, four, warm, hears, are, their (BrE) bath, can’t, (AmE) lives, eyes, closes, waves, climbs, stays, loves, reads, noise, is voiceless three, ridiculous , red, very, reads,(r)

“there is”, “there are” no linking-r “her eyes” linking r “with-his-eyesopen” “when-he-sleepson-a-chair” 67

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“it-is” fragmentary sentences/glottal stops well, winter, German w “get off” stress (correct) “Winnie has a idea” animals no dark l animals wrong a-sound

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6.2

The Children’s Reading Texts

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(Text 1 taken from the daughter’s exercise book, Text 2 taken from New Highlight 2)

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Son1’s Eng S glish Test

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6.3

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