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Part of
Bilingual Cognition and Language: The state of the science across its subfields
Edited by David Miller, Fatih Bayram, Jason Rothman and Ludovica Serratrice
[Studies in Bilingualism 54] 2018
► pp. 15–36

Chapter 2
Bilingual child acquisition through the lens of sociolinguistic approaches

| Meertens Institute & Maastricht University

This paper entails a perspective on bilingual child acquisition through the lens of sociolinguistic approaches. A discussion of the concepts of monolingual language ideology and power dynamics is undertaken in order to reveal their important consequences on studying bilingual child acquisition, in particular, which (parts of) language(s) and children are important to study with which kinds of methodologies, concepts, and analyses. This paper discusses ethnographic fieldwork as a methodology to dive deeper into the whole envelope of bilingual child use in situated interactions with parents/care-takers, teachers and other children at home and in the classroom. The emphasis on language ideologies and power dynamics has helped sociolinguistic enquiry to move away from existing monolingual bias in bilingual child acquisition research.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. The history and the many faces of sociolinguistics
  • 3.Monolingual language ideology
    • 3.1Bilingual uses
    • 4.Sociolinguistic methodologies
      • 4.1The focus on the child’s linguistic meaning-making practices in the classroom
      • 4.2Focus on linguistic variation in bidialectal care-giver and child interactions
    • 5. Beyond monolingual ideology: Fluidity, crossing and languaging
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.54.02cor
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