Jeanine Treffers-Daller

Aims: This study aims to provide new insights into the creativity of nominal compounds in multilinguals. We ask whether mixed and unmixed compounds in Malay-English language contact follow Malay or English rules for the headedness of compounds and how pluralisation rules are applied to compounds across both languages. We also ask whether any innovative forms qualify as examples of rule-governed or rule-changing creativity. Design/Methodology/Approach: We analyse data from the existing literature on compounding in Malay and English, as well as data from a corpus of over a thousand utterances with intrasentential code-switching, collected by Majid (2019) among teachers of English in Malaysia. Data and Analysis: A qualitative analysis is made of the headedness of different nominal compounds and of the way in which these are pluralised. Findings/Conclusions: We found that Malay compounds in the data were generally left-headed and English compounds right-headed, but the directionality of mixed compounds depended largely on the language of the clause in which they appear: in Malaysian English short stories and newspapers, mixed compounds were right-headed, while they were left-headed in Malay clauses in the speech of teachers. Originality: The study brings together insights from the literature on creativity and insights from studies on nominal compounding. As in most studies of compounds, the constructions are studied in isolation, the current study is novel in that the language of the clause in which the compounds appear is also analysed. Finally, we bring together insights from the study of compounding in children as well as young adults, showing that the data from young adults are more likely to lead to rule-changing creativity. Significance/Implications: The study makes a contribution to our understanding of the ways in which language contact affects variability in compounding and can provide new insights into the separability of grammars in language contact.

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In his update on Basic Language Cognition (BLC), Hulstijn formulates a number of predictions derived from BLC Theory, and explains how BLC differs from Extended Language Cognition (ELC). BLC is used to refer to an individual’s capacity to process spoken language productively and receptively in everyday life, while ELC is defined as control of the written standard language, as taught in school. In the literature on heritage speakers, so far surprisingly little attention has been paid to the differences between BLC and ELC, despite the relevance of the distinction between oral and written language for our understanding of heritage speakers’ language profiles. In this commentary, I argue that BLC Theory can be used to inform studies of heritage languages, and conversely, how insights from heritage languages can be used to develop BLC Theory further. By way of example, I revisit some of the literature on subordination in Turkish as a heritage language. I also point to issues that need to be clarified and future directions in the study of these phenomena.

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It is well established that verb-noun collocations are difficult for L2 learners, but little is known about the extent to which such collocations are vulnerable to attrition under conditions of reduced input. The study is novel in that we focus on L2 attrition rather than L1 attrition, and because we focus on Saudi Arabian returnees, who have so far hardly been studied. These are compared to child, adolescent and adult heritage speakers in the US. Receptive knowledge of English collocations was measured with a novel online acceptability judgement task and an online gap-filling task. We found that child returnees experienced more difficulties than the adolescent returnees, because the child returnees had not acquired collocations to the same extent as the adolescent returnees, and they experienced more crosslinguistic influence from Arabic. The current study also provides some counter evidence against the claim that every bilingual is an attriter.

After two years in the job of Editor-in-Chief, it is my pleasure to welcome Professor Anthony Pak-Hin Kong from The University of Hong Kong (HKU) as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Languages

Since the launch of the term translanguaging in 1994, the multiple discursive practices that are grouped under this label have been explored in over 3000 papers, covering a variety of contexts, both within and outside education. While the term has clearly resonated with researchers and practitioners, here it is argued that it is unclear what it means exactly, because there are no diagnostic criteria specifying what it is. Extensive criticism has also been put forward in the academic literature, showing that central claims are untenable in the face of overwhelming counter-evidence from a range of fields, including studies on code-switching, bilingual education, bilingual first language acquisition, language contact and language processing. However, translanguaging can become a useful instrument for researchers and practitioners if the concept is narrowed down to what it was coined for, namely pedagogical practices that are beneficial for multilingual learners. In order for this to happen, clear diagnostic criteria need to be provided for the identification of translanguaging, and research evidence from neuroscientific, structural, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic studies on multilingualism needs to be integrated into its conceptualization.

In a highly multilingual country like India, challenges and opportunities arise in education and language policy. Although multilingualism is often associated with developmental advantages, Indian primary school children generally show low learning outcomes, specifically on literacy. Here we examine the influence of mother tongue education and multilingualism on the reading skills and reading comprehension of 1272 Indian primary school children from low SES homes. The children performed the ASER literacy task in both the regional, majority language and in English, which was followed by newly developed reading comprehension questions. The results show that minority language speakers from monolingual households—who do not receive mother tongue education—underperform compared to majority language speakers when reading in the majority language. When reading in English, growing up in a multilingual household improves children's performance. Finally, in sites which have a larger proportion of mother tongue‐educated children, children perform better in literacy in the regional language and worse in English. Overall, these results provide insight into the influence of mother tongue education and multilingualism on reading abilities and show that more support is needed for minority language speakers to develop literacy in the majority language, and for all children to develop literacy in English.

The present study investigates narrative microstructure in the English oral retellings of primary school children from disadvantaged backgrounds in India. For these children, the combination of rich linguistic diversity and English as the medium of instruction is a challenge since exposure to English is almost exclusively in the school context. Measures of microstructure include syntactic complexity and finiteness marking as well-known indices of English language ability. Microstructural properties are examined in relation to literacy performance in order to identify possible links between the two modalities. Participants’ language background was included to investigate a possible (dis)advantage associated with minority language speakers exposed to English as the medium of instruction. Our findings suggest that finiteness errors and number of function words are associated with performance on reading comprehension. English input in the classroom selectively predicts performance on complex syntax but not other aspects of microstructure measures. Children speaking minority languages at home are not disadvantaged in their English performance compared to children speaking the majority language (Telugu). Finally, error analysis suggests similarities between types of errors found in other studies of child L2 English. This study sheds light on English L2 narrative skills in a multilingual and underprivileged context with learners exposed to low levels of English language input.