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This book investigates how bilingualism affects children's language, cognitive and narrative abilities. The data sample derives from 209 8-12 years old bilingual children, in three different targeted languages (Greek-English, Greek-German, Greek-Albanian) along with 100 monolingual Greek children. The children completed baseline and experimental tasks measuring their vocabulary, grammar, cognitive skills, and narrative production abilities. The outcome of this work reveals that learning to read and write in two languages is beneficial for the development of language and cognitive skills. A strong case can be made to the growing bilingual communities in Germany and beyond to provide literacy training in both languages within mainstream schools, afternoon classes outside of the curriculum or in community schools.
List of contents
Cognition - Dominance - Educational setting - Biliteracy - Narration - Micro-structure - Macro-structure - Classroom applications
About the author
Maria Andreou is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cologne, participating in the SFB Project 1252 "Prominence in Language". Her scientific interests include bilingualism and multilingualism, literacy, language and cognitive abilities in typical development and in (developmental and acquired) language disorders and narrative development.
