Izvorni znanstveni članak
A Contribution to Understanding Bilingualism
Marta Ljubešić
; Fakultet za defektologiju Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Sažetak
The paper analyses a form of bilingualism which appears in conditions of economic migration and is typical for migrant children. Since these children are not schooled in the mother tongue and live in foreign surroundings, their linguistic development is very specific. In the introductory part of the paper the author reviews Cummins' hypothesis as a theoretic framework for understanding linguistic and cognitive difficulties, or else advantages in a bilingual educational development. The survey sample was composed of thirty children who had lived from their early childhood in the FR of Germany and had acquired parallely two languages: their mother tongue (Croatian or else Serbian), and the language of the wider social community (German). All the children surveyed were pupils of the third grade in the Yugoslav supplementary school in Mannheim and the third grade of regular German elementary school. At the time of the survey they were 9 to 10 years of age. The examinees had to translate into their mother tongue a short text written in German. The approach to the task and the writing errors were examined. The children (with three exceptions) approached the task in such a way that they literally translated into Croatian, even copying the word order. Although they had regularly frequented supplementary classes in the mother tongue, the results of the writing were crushing. Most common were errors which could not be listed as interference errors, but which rather indicate a low level of linguistic knowledge, a lack of vocabulary, and also a lack of the capability to grammatically formulate messages.
Ključne riječi
bilingualism; children of migrants; mother tongue; FR of Germany
Hrčak ID:
127297
URI
Datum izdavanja:
31.7.1992.
Posjeta: 1.308 *