Research Perspectives on Bilingualism and Bilingual Education
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RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES ON BILINGUALISM AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION
INTRODUCTION
This chapter outlines various research perspectives on bilingualism and bilingual education. Three broad perspectives within this interdisciplinary area are identified: linguistic, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic. The chapter focuses on theoretical questions and methodological approaches within each of the three broad perspectives, highlighting the differences and links across each. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
Bilingualism and bilingual education became a major focus of scientific research only in the last century, especially since the 1970s. Two disciplines that have influenced much of the research on bilingualism and bilingual education are linguistics and psychology. The research agenda of much of modern linguistics was defined by Chomsky (1986) as consisting of three basic questions: 1. What constitutes knowledge of language? 2. How is knowledge of language acquired? 3. How is knowledge of language put to use? For bilingualism research, these questions can be rephrased to take into account knowledge of more than one language: 1. What is the nature of language or grammar in a bilingual person’s mind and how do two systems of language knowledge co-exist and interact? 2. How is more than one grammatical system acquired, either simultaneously or sequentially? In what respects does bilingual acquisition differ from monolingual acquisition? 3. How is the knowledge of two or more languages used by the same speaker in bilingual interaction? Linguists and psychologists working on bilingualism have addressed these questions with a variety of methods and types of data. Concerning bilingual knowledge, for example, Weinreich (1953) proposed three types of bilinguals (see Figure 1) representing three types of relationships between the linguistic sign (or signifier) and the semantic content (signified). In Type A, the individual combines a K. A. King and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 10: Research Methods in Language and Education, 137–149. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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Figure 1 Three types of bilinguals.
signifier from each language with a separate unit of signified. Weinreich called such individuals ‘coordinative’ (later often called ‘coordinate’) bilinguals. In Type B, the individual identifies two signifiers, but regards them as a single compound, or composite, unit of signified; hence ‘compound’ bilinguals. Type C refers to people who learn a new language with the help of a previously acquired one. They are called ‘subordinative’ (or ‘subordinate’) bilinguals. His examples for each type were from English and Russian. Weinreich’s typology is often misinterpreted in the literature as referring to differences in proficiency in each language. But in fact the relationship between language proficiency and cognitive organisation of the bilingual individual is far from clear in Weinreich’s model. Weinreich argued that some ‘subordinate’ bilinguals demonstrated a very high le
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