Entwicklung der mündlichen und schriftlichen Kompetenzen in der Erst- Zweit- und Fremdsprache bei mehrsprachigen Kindern und Jugendlichen mit türkischem Hintergrund in Frankreich und Deutschland

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christoph Schroeder
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2009 to 2013
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 156985372

The project deals with language abilities of multilingual children and adolescents with migrant background in France and Germany, in particular, those with Turkish (and Kurdish) as home language(s). Recent studies of such children in European countries converge in the view that difficulties with the majority language play a major role in their problems at school. However, there are few comparative investigations of the development of pupils multilingual development in later childhood and adolescence. Nor are there studies of oral and written text production abilities and other literacy-related skills of these children, whose family background, culture, and language differ markedly from the bulk of the children in the mainstream school system. Even less attention has been given to the acquisition of the tertiary language English by immigrant minority children and adolescents.The broader purpose of the project is to examine the linguistic development in light of the psycho-linguistic and sociolinguistic factors in learning home languages, the languages of the country of residence (French and German) and the first foreign language (English) and to discover how and when competence in academic registers is achieved. The findings will facilitate not only language learning and teaching but also the integration of the children with migration background into the school and in their later working and social lives.The present proposal builds on our previous work on bilingual and monolingual children and adolescents in France, Germany and Turkey. Pupils aged 9 - 20 produce monologic oral and written texts in two genres, personal narrative and expository, in each of their languages, including their foreign language. We will also obtain samples of group conversation. We will examine linguistic features including lexical expression (lexical density, lexical diversity), syntactic complexity (syntactic and discursive packaging), as well as phonology in the oral texts and orthography in written texts, with the aim of investigating the pupils growing control of these features in academic and in-formal registers.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Participating Person: Professor Mehmet-Ali Akinci