Prof Theo Marinis Seminar

Date: Tuesday 24th July 2018, 2.00pm - 3.00pm
Venue: The Australian Hearing Hub, Level 3, Room 3.610, Macquarie University
Speaker: Professor Theo Marinis, University of Konstanz
Topic: The development of phonological awareness and reading decoding in bilingual children: effects of bilingualism and language dominance

Abstract

Previous research has shown that growing up bilingually and acquiring two languages in their spoken and written form influences literacy development positively (Durgunoglu, Nagy and Hancin-Bhatt, 1993; Niolaki and Masterson, 2012). However, bilinguals do not use both their languages for the same purpose (Grosjean, 2006). Language use may change over time as a function of experience, and therefore, language dominance may also change. However, it is unclear if language dominance changes during the school years and whether it differs across different domains of language and literacy. This study aimed to investigate the effects of bilingualism and language dominance on the language and literacy skills of primary school children in the UK, acquiring Greek as a minority and English as a majority language compared to monolingual English children in Years 1 and 3.

The results show that cross-language transfer of phonological awareness and reading decoding skills could result from reading instruction and/or learning to read in a language with a transparent orthography (Greek) alongside a language with opaque orthography. Moreover, our study confirms that language dominance changes when children enter school and affects language and literacy skills equally: children have better skills in the majority compared to the minority language in both Year 1 and 3. A strong relationship between language use and performance of the minority language suggests that parental effort should be directed towards the minority language because schooling levels out differences in the majority language.

Bio
Theo Marinis is Professor of Multilingualism at the University of Konstanz. His research focuses on language acquisition and processing across populations of typically and atypically developing learners and aims to uncover the nature of language processing in typical and atypical language development. His research has been funded by research councils, like the ESRC (Real-time processing of syntactic information in children with English as a Second Language & children with Specific Language Impairment), ESRC-DFID (Multilingualism & Multiliteracy https://www.mam.mml.cam.ac.uk/) and the NWO (Cross-linguistic study of the production and processing of grammatical morphemes in L2 children compared to children with Specific Language Impairment), but also from the British Academy, the Nuffield Foundation and the Onassis Foundation. He was part of the COST Action IS0804 and led the development of the LITMUS Sentence Repetition tasks for multilingual children across a large range of languages. He is currently leading the ESRC-GCRF project ‘ProLanguage' that addresses the protective role of language in global migration and mobility [https://research.reading.ac.uk/prolanguage/] and the EU project 'MultiMind' that provides multi-disciplinary training on multilingualism to early stage researchers in Europe https://www.multilingualmind.eu/).

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