Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
Loading next page...
/lp/de-gruyter/balance-and-dominance-in-the-vocabulary-of-german-turkish-primary-OHIcvWQY5Y
- Publisher
- de Gruyter
- Copyright
- © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
- ISSN
- 2192-953X
- eISSN
- 2192-953X
- DOI
- 10.1515/eujal-2018-0003
- Publisher site
- See Article on Publisher Site
Abstract
AbstractBalanced bilingualism has inspired debates on bilingualism for a long time, but several questions related to this discourse remain unanswered. How common are balanced bilinguals? Does balance have a positive impact on language proficiency? More specifically, when children begin to frequent schools and thus have a lot of oral and literal input in the school language, how do balance and dominance develop? The present paper discusses the following research questions with respect to vocabulary: Do balanced test results in two languages correlate with a better proficiency than unbalanced results? Moreover, is a balanced use of two languages accompanied by a balanced vocabulary? We used a picture naming task to test the expressive and receptive vocabulary of 98 German-Turkish speaking schoolchildren in a cross-sectional design. To determine balance resp. dominance, we used a combined score of the values in the German and the Turkish testing. The balance/dominance scores show a continuous shift to dominance in the majority language. Consistent use of Turkish has an effect on Turkish vocabulary, but not a negative impact on vocabulary in German. There was no overall positive influence of balanced bilingualism.
Journal
European Journal of Applied Linguistics – de Gruyter
Published: Feb 28, 2019