In this section special attention will be paid to the multilingual language acquisition process. In a bilingual situation afamily usually adopts an approach at which the child receives input in two languages (perhaps one language is spoken by the father and the other one by the mother, or one language by the parents and the other by a caretaker such as a nanny or at a day care centre) (Grosjean, 2010).
BFLA (Bilingual First Language Acquisition) focuses on the simultaneous acquisition of two languages spoken at home from birth (De Houwer 2009). BFLA children learn to understand two first languages concurrently. In a quarter of the cases, BFLA children will also speak two languages from early on, and quite a few BFLA children speak just one language (De Houwer, 2009). The central focus of BFLA studies is the compensation of discusses the development of a bilingual child and a monolingual child. Below an overview of the history BFLA is presented.
De Houwer (2009) claims that the first extensive, book-long study of a child growing up with two languages from birth was published almost 100 years ago. The French linguist Ronjat (1913) gives a good, global description of an individual child’s bilingual development, based on the model one person, one language. He studied his son as an example, who heard Dutch and French from birth on. Ronjat followed the German psychologists Wilhelm and Clara Stern (1907, republished as Stern and Stern, 1965), who are describing language development against the backdrop of children’s overall development.
The next large BFLA study is by the German-American phonetician and linguist Werner Leopold (1939, reprinted 1970). Much of his work was based on the linguistic development of Leopold's daughter Hildegard, and he described his findings in four volume studies. He is obviously convinced that learning two languages in early childhood had no negative consequences for the child’s development. Leopold also claimed that the best model for developing bilingualism in a child is the one person, one language strategy. He published one of the first exhaustive case studies on the simultaneous acquisition of two languages. Leopold also used the term ‘child languages’ for the first time (Hakuta, 1983).
When Leopold's daughter Hildegard said her first sentences, she combined words from two languages in one sentence together and was functioning as a monolingual. This (issue) has set the tone for the study of BFLA until today.
Further issues for research were parent’s and educator’s concerns about bilingual education: children are at risk of academic failure or delay (e.g. Macnamara, 1966), or BFL learners will be socio-cultural misfits and identify with neither language group (Diebolt, 1968).
Leopolds finding that bilingual children may mix their languages, sometimes more so in the early years than later on, gave rise to two opposing positions. Volterra and Taeschner (1978), on the one hand, concluded that bilingual children do not have any difficulties in comprehension and may have only one lexical system in the initial development of their vocabulary. On the other hand, the idea that bilinguals have a lower IQ still exists among some people. It is one of the persistent myths among monolinguals. Some believe that bilingual children develop a single, unitary language system at the start, which then slowly separates into two systems. This myth is hard to overcome, even though research comparing monolinguals and bilinguals has shown that they score the same on IQ tests (with the same gender, social class and age).
As Baker stated in the 1990s: “Far from making people mentally confused, bilingualism is now associated with a mild degree of intellectual superiority” (Baker, 1995: 49).
In 20011, De Groot (2011) describes: “Multilinguals have not mentally compartmentalized their languages in neatly separated sections, with solid firewalls between them, but all of the languages known interact with one another, both during acquisition and use” (De Groot, 2011: 339).
Until the 1960s, scientific discussions and positions were based on a limited knowledge of the working processes of the human brain. Since the introduction of the ‘Common underlying proficiency’ by Cummins (1979, 2000) these assumptions and positions can be considered as “old theory.”
Illustration 3.1: Separate underlying proficiency. Illustration 3.2: Common underlying proficiency.
The old theory, which remained in use until the late 1950s, was based on the idea that both languages as such have a place in the cognitive system of the child (figure 3.1) and that these two languages compete with each other in the development of the vocabulary, articulation, and quality of speech. Therefore it was said that bilingualism and bilingual upbringing of
children was not good for their intellectual development. In the 1970s, on the basis of new research results, linguists concluded, that there is no single language or several languages as such in the cognitive system of the child. Instead of there is common underlying proficiency for the language acquisition and development. Depending on the language or the languages which are spoken to the child, the child will acquire and learn one, two, three or more languages, either parallel and at the same time or the one after the other, sequentially. (illustration 3.2) (Cummins, 2001).
Cummins (1979) developed the "Iceberg" model, the theory of language interdependence. Instead of having two separate areas for two languages in the cognitive system, this model posits that the common features of languages are stored together and common knowledge is linked and can interact. This model shows that the two languages are kept separate only at the surface level, where they are used for listening, speaking, reading and writing.
Figure 3.4 Iceberg Model of Language Interdependence of languages (Cummins, 1979, 1981)
From 1970s onwards a number of research studies were published on BFLA quality and it was not always clear whether children were growing up in a BFLA environment or not (De Houwer, 2009). Volterra & Taeschner(1978) are opposed to the theory of Leopold. They argue that young bilingual children prefer the mixed language to speaking one of the languages separately; a position which is no longer upheld according to De Houwer (2009). However, Grosjean (2010) questions what is meant by “mixing.” Does it refer to interferences in language-dominant children or to code-switching and borrowings? These questions are currently (2011) a subject of research.
Some case studies were published in the 1980s. George Saunders (1983) wrote a book on his bilingual family: he raised his children in German, English, and Australian English. He spoke German with his children, and his wife spoke Australian English; they were living in Australian. Saunders described how a bilingual family is not an island, but part of a larger community, even if that community is monolingual. More recently, Stephen Caldas (2006)
described nineteen years of his bilingual family, his children’s bilingual language (English- French) and literacy development in a monolingual setting (Louisiana in the US). In de 1980s the focus was on language choice and morphosyntactic development: the development (in young children) of the ability to construct words and sentences in the two languages. The starting point of research was the relationship between the two languages. More and more research is done into early bilingual language learning. For example, phonological development and early speech perception in bilingual infants (Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 1997).
More research is done concerning another line of research concerns the different domains of language learning. Cummins (2000: 57-111) distinguishes two levels of language learning skills: BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills) and CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency). BICS are language skills needed in social situations, and CALP refers to formal academic learning. This includes listening, speaking, reading, and writing about subject area content material. This level of language learning is essential for students to succeed in school.
Since the 1990s about early bilingual development has been studied extensively. De Houwer (2009) remarks that: “There is simply too much of it, it is impossible to give a comprehensive review of most publicly available research on early bilingual acquisition” (De Houwer, 2009: 13).
Based on extensive research results, a large body of research suggests that bilingualism is good for an individual child’s linguistic development as well as for a child’s flexibility in intellectual and social
processes.
However, language is not an abstract vehicle but an instrument of human communication that needs to be used and further developed in two areas of language use. First, in the area of spontaneous communication between adults and children in the personal context of the family, the social environment of the work place, associations, sport activities, and cultural affairs. Second, by means of the training of the structures and expression of more abstract thinking processes. The older a person gets, the more abstract thinking is developed.
Today the number of and also the geographic diversity of the researchers studying BFLA has grown. Western Europe was the first continent that investigated BFLA; nowadays researchers are active across the world: Northern America, Australia, China, and Russia. That brings specific cultural issues into research design, in the sense that children across the world have not got the same socio-psychological development. When children grow older, different events in their lives can lead them to acquire an additional second or third language. Grosjean (2010) suggests that there are probably more bilinguals on earth today than monolinguals. Due to immigration and globalisation the number of bi- and multilingual and bi- and multicultural individuals will only increase.
In a couple of decades, the perspective of BFLA has reversed: first monolingualism was the norm and multilingualism the exception, nowadays multilingualism is the norm and monolingualism the exception.