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21 - Building a Plurilingual Identity

from Part Five - Socialization in Childhood Multilingualism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2022

By
Adelheid Hu
Edited by
Anat Stavans  and
Ulrike Jessner
Anat Stavans
Affiliation:
Beit Berl College, Israel
Ulrike Jessner
Affiliation:
Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, Austria
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Summary

In an increasing number of families and communities, children grow up in multilingual and multicultural environments. Children thus negotiate their identities while navigating across linguistic practices and ideologies at home, in school, and in community spaces. This paper has two main aims. First, it develops a clearer understanding of developments in the research domain of plurilingualism, identity, childhood and education. Second, it provides insight into the nexus between children’s’ identity construction and larger societal discourses and practices. In the first part, the focus lies on the concept of identity itself and the way it relates to language(s), discourse(s) and societal language ideologies. In the second part, the focus is on some contexts that are especially relevant for the development of children’s linguistic identities and agency, such as family language policies, early childhood education in nurseries, language regimes and pedagogical traditions of language teaching in schools. The important role of educational institutions with regard to the lingua-cultural identity development of children and adolescents in a globalized world becomes more than evident.

Keywords

plurilingualismidentitychildhoodeducationlanguage ideologies
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Childhood Multilingualism , pp. 491 - 514
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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