Etapas de planificación del Diseño Curricular

At the start of the sampling period, Amy’s parents were asked to individually fill out a questionnaire, which was designed with the aim of gathering detailed information about her linguistic environment. The questionnaire focused on aspects that have been shown or suggested to affect the language acquisition process. Most aspects are of course peculiar to BFLA (e.g., child preferred language, family attitudes towards the minority language and bilingualism, child need for each of her languages), but others concern any type of first language acquisition (e.g., number of hours children sleep at night, care givers’ speaking rates). The following report is based on the answers that Amy’s parents provided. Some gaps in the questionnaire were filled with informal questions the researcher asked during the monthly visits.

Amy’s exposure to Italian and English started at birth. She sleeps ten hours per night from 9pm to 7am on average. In addition, she also sleeps for about one hour in the afternoon. In the thirteen hours that she has left for interaction, she is mostly exposed to English because she attends an English day care from 8am to 6pm every day. Before going to school and when she gets back home, she is exposed to both English and Italian in equal measure in direct interaction with her parents, because both parents are at home then and they consistently speak to her in their respective native language. However, when speaking to each other, the parents use English. As a result, during the weekdays, Amy hears Italian only from her mother for about one hour and a half each day. At the weekend, Amy is at home with her parents and, consequently, her exposure to the two languages becomes more balanced as she has access to both linguistic sources all day. She also goes to an Italian playgroup for one hour on Saturday mornings, but she equally takes part in activities, such as ballet classes, swimming lessons, which are conducted in English. Amy does not spend extended periods of time in Italy, not even during the summer holidays, because her mother works full time in Dublin. However, her family visits the Italian grandparents three times per year for about a week each time. Furthermore, the Italian grandparents come to Ireland twice a year and stay in an apartment adjacent to the family’s house for two to three weeks each time. The mother thinks that the higher exposure to English may explain the fact that Amy sometimes inserts English nouns in Italian sentences, uses English verb stems with Italian past participle suffixes in present perfect periphrases (e.g., ho pushato, I have

pushed, ho runnato, I have run), places the adjective before the noun (e.g., la rossa macchina, the red car) or places the conjunction anche (too) in utterance final position. The father says that Amy has a good command of both languages but, in English, she seems to stutter a little while she tries to formulate sentences. Both parents think that she appears to comprehend both languages equally well. However, they have different views about the language that Amy prefers to use when playing on her own. The mother says Italian, the father English. It could be that she is never really on her own and tends to use the language of the people who surround her while playing. Amy’s mother makes an active effort to create opportunities for Amy to use Italian. In Italian, they play together, cook and read stories. Furthermore, Amy watches Italian cartoons. She hardly ever uses English when addressing her mother and, on the very rare occasions in which this happens, the mother provides a translation equivalent or rephrases the utterance in Italian. Sometimes, she simply moves on and answers in Italian. Amy displays this same socio-pragmatic sensitivity also with other speakers and selects from her two languages depending on the language of her interlocutors. Amy uttered her first words when she was eleven months old and those were in Italian, possibly because, in the first year of life, she spent more time with her mother who was at home to mind her.

It has to be acknowledged that creating and maintaining a balanced linguistic input is certainly a challenging task, especially in a situation where the parents speak the majority language to each other. In this study, MLU values as well as subjective measures such as parents’ reports and the researcher’s own impression throughout the longitudinal language sampling period suggest that, despite receiving higher exposure to English, Amy is developing her two languages in a balanced fashion. However, it is possible that this is due to the fact that, at the time of the data collection, she was still enjoying the benefits of spending the first year of her life at home with her mother, who consistently spoke English to her.

When asked to rate the need that Amy has for her two languages, both parents recognise that Amy has a stronger need to speak English than Italian, because she lives in an English-speaking country. Surprisingly, it is only the father who points out that it is also almost equally important for Amy to speak Italian, because most relatives do not speak English on the Italian side of her family and because Italian is part of her identity. Her

mother argues that Amy does not have a real need for speaking Italian, because both parents have native-like command of English and she interacts with teachers and friends in English.