Research perspectives and educational considerations: Bilingual Greek-speaking children's language skills and insights for the learning/teaching of Greek as a second language

Online Access Details

URL: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/85917126177?pwd=Ggw0BaRamB12WJXku4NVbnrLF31Hhr.1
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Meeting ID: 859 1712 6177

Passcode: 064174

Language underlies any human activity; it is the means for communicating with the environment, constructing and negotiating identity as well as acquiring and transmitting knowledge. The emergence of linguistically diverse academic environments has prompted growing attention to language education across learning and teaching situations (second, foreign, heritage, additional, bilingual language learning). Moreover, it is well established that the bilingual learner profile is dynamic and multifaceted shaped by a variety of intra-linguistic and extra-linguistic factors (see, e.g., Dorner et al., 2023; Freire et al., 2023; Grosjean, 2024), which poses further challenges.

In this presentation I will review research data from bilingual Greek-speaking children in contexts within and beyond the Greek territory where Greek is the socially dominant language (L2 Greek) and the minority language (heritage Greek) (e.g., Kaltsa et al., 2024; Peristeri, Prentza & Tsimpli, 2020; Prentza et al., 2019;) with a view to exploring insights and effective educational practices that may be transferable to other additional and heritage language learning contexts.

Selected References:

• Grosjean, F. (2024). On Bilinguals and Bilingualism. Cambridge University Press.
• Kaltsa, Μ., Prentza, A., Prela, L. & Tsimpli, IM. (2024). The interplay of lexical and grammatical development in Greek-Albanian bilingual children: evidence from the majority and the heritage language. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2024.2359408 
• Prentza, A., Kaltsa, M., Tsimpli, I. M., & Papadopoulou, D. (2019). The acquisition of Greek gender by bilingual children: The effects of lexical knowledge, oral input, literacy and bi/monolingual schooling). International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(5), 901–920. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006917733066