Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

The impact of input on the Harmonious Bilingual Development in French-Russian children

Résumé

While input has been shown to play a major role in bilingual development (De Houwer, 2018; Unsworth, 2016), we do not yet have precise knowledge of the quantity and quality of input necessary to foster harmonious bilingualism in children growing up in a multilingual environment. When “subjective well-being is not negatively affected by factors relating to a bilingual setting”, the child experiences Harmonious Bilingual Development (De Houwer, 2020: 63). Several studies examined the relationship between children’s bilingual proficiency and their subjective well-being as well as the role of parental and school effort of promotion of dual language acquisition in social-emotional and behavioral skills (Han, 2010; Sun, 2022). However, the concept of Harmonious Bilingual Development still needs to be further explored through the collection of various personal testimonies. Therefore, we investigated the relationship between input and social-emotional and behavioral skills among 37 five-year-olds from French-Russian families residing in France.For this purpose, parent questionnaire and activity journal were used to assess children’s current language exposure as well as diversity of input (speakers, activities, media, reading). Children’s social-emotional and behavioral skills were assessed by parents with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Language proficiency was determined through oral fluency (speech and articulation rate, mean syllable duration) in a picture-story retelling task in Russian and French. The participants were exposed to both languages from birth and are all considered as proficient in French. Five children, though, expressed difficulties with the narration task in Russian. A series of variables were taken into account for the data analyses, e.g., SES, birth order, family size. We will briefly present the research procedure including the data collection conditions (COVID period) and discuss the data with respect to our major interrogation about the input’s impact on harmonious bilingual development. Preliminary results show the direct link between more balanced input in both languages and better social-emotional and behavioral skills in bilingual children. We will discuss how our findings might support more positive attitudes towards early bilingualism among the parents and concerned educators.De Houwer, A. (2018). The role of language input environments for language outcomes and language acquisition in young bilingual children. In D. Miller, F. Bayram, J. Rothman & L. Serratrice (Eds.), Bilingual cognition and language: the state of the science across its subfields (pp. 127-153). John Benjamins.De Houwer, A. (2020). Harmonious bilingualism: Well-being for families in bilingual settings. In S. Eisenchlas & A. Schalley (Eds.), Handbook of home language maintenance and development (pp. 63–83). De Gruyter Mouton.Han, W. J. (2010). Bilingualism and socioemotional well-being. Children and Youth Services Review, 32, 720–731.Sun, H. (2022). Harmonious Bilingual Development: The Concept, the Significance, and the Implications. In O. S. Tan, K. K. Poon, B. A. O’Brien, & A. Rifkin-Graboi (Eds.), Early Childhood Development and Education in Singapore (vol. 2, pp. 261 280). Springer Singapore.Unsworth, S. (2016). Quantity and quality of language input in bilingual language development. In E. Nicoladis & S. Montanari (Eds.), Bilingualism across the lifespan: Factors moderating language proficiency (pp. 103-121). De Gruyter Mouton.

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hal-04839327 , version 1 (15-12-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04839327 , version 1

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Ekaterina Tiulkova, Barbara Köpke, Vanda Marijanovic. The impact of input on the Harmonious Bilingual Development in French-Russian children. EuroSLA 32, the 32nd Conference of the European Second Language Association, Aug 2023, Birmingham, United Kingdom. ⟨hal-04839327⟩
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