Past Event

Bilingualism and Multilingualism: Socialization, Input and Schooling

Dr. Nikolay Slavkov
(Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute, University of Ottawa)

This talk explores questions of bilingual and multilingual acquisition and maintenance from the perspective of a) family language planning and b) choice of main language of schooling. I will first focus on a recent case study with a young bilingual child (English-Bulgarian) and use diary data and spontaneous speech recordings to highlight the dynamic nature of bilingual language development (i.e. shifts between active and passive bilingualism). An analysis of the proportion of utterances in the child’s two languages, code-mixing, utterance length, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and choice of language in narrating stories will serve as the backdrop of a discussion of bilingualism and minority language maintenance during the pre-school stage. In the second part of the talk, I will report on work in progress that looks at bilingualism and multilingualism beyond the pre-school stage. This work draws on survey and interview data illustrating several combinatorial patterns of family language use (various languages) and choice of main language of schooling (English or French); the effects of such patterns on whether a child develops as a monolingual, bilingual or multilingual speaker will be examined. The general discussion of the two projects will be situated within the broader Canadian context of two official and numerous minority languages.

About the Speaker

Dr. Nikolay Slavkov’s current research explores bilingual and multilingual child language development and adult second language acquisition from linguistic, cognitive, social and pedagogical perspectives. He also has interests in Slavic linguistics. Some of his work has been published in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (IJBEB), Second Language Research (SLR), Lingua, and the Journal of Slavic Linguistics (JSL). He earned his MA in Applied Linguistics at York University and his Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Ottawa. He has taught in Canada, the United States, China and Bulgaria.