Summer School of Psycholinguistics

Ferenc Bunta

Ulrike Jessner-Schmid

ulrike picture 

Is multilingual education successful? 

Whereas in many European countries multilingual education has been questioned as a useful means of learning languages there are some exceptional contexts where trilingual education has been practiced for many years. In South Tyrol in the Ladin kindergartens children are taught German, Italian and Ladin from an early age on. 

In the MELA (mehrsprachig ladinisch) study which was carried out in the Ladin kindergartens and primary schools the complexity of multilingual development involving all three languages and their interactions have been studied. The study is based on the theoretical framework of the Dynamic Model of Multilingualism (Herdina & Jessner 2002) which presents the first book publication applying a Complexity Dynamic Systems Theory Approach to multilingualism. It works with a holistic approach linking the linguistic, the cognitive and the social level of exploration (Jessner 2023).   

Following up on my plenary lecture in 2019 in which I presented the results of the kindergarten study in this talk the results of the large scale longitudinal study involving the same children on their way from kindergarten to primary schools in two Ladin valleys will be discussed.

Marjolijn Verspoor

Margaret Deuchar

20220212 190149

The development of research on code-switching during the last 75 years

 In this paper I will trace the evolution of research in code-switching during the last 75 years. I will show how the work of a series of scholars has allowed us to understand not only what code-switching is, but also how its use can vary from community to community.   We shall see how our current understanding has developed from pioneering early work on the notions of the speech community and linguistic repertoire, as well as on initial and subsequent attempts to formulate ‘rules’ of code-switching.  We shall explore how a particularly influential structural approach based on the Matrix Language Frame model (Myers-Scotton 2002) has been developed to provide a method of describing the contrasting community norms prevalent in specific bilingual communities. I shall argue that these norms will be transmitted to the next generation in the form of linguistic input to be acquired by children. 

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