The missing link: language and heritage, identity and belonging project proposal

该项目的目的是调查年轻的遗产儿童如何面临三项挑战性任务，如：保持他们的少数民族语言（波兰语），发展新的语言能力，在多数民族语言（英语），并找到自己的身份，作为双文化和双语社区成员，谈判过渡到学校。本论文将涉及调查这些发言者的语法可能的变化，并研究如何在整个学校的第一年语言发展在幼儿中展开，以及这些是否可以联系到特定的社会实践和社交网络的类型建立在这关键的一年。我们需要了解遗产发言人每天在课堂上接触到什么，以便为语言学理论提供新的经验性思考，并重新思考如何为遗产发言人提供支持，并更好地了解他们的语言概况。希望该项目将通过采用多学科方法来了解HS在其早期学年所讲的少数民族和多数民族语言的发展，从而解决HS研究中的一个重要空白。至关重要的是，这项研究还将试图了解开始上学如何影响双语儿童作为新语言社区（学校）成员的身份，在这个社区中，父母不是孩子（语言）信息的主要来源。

The aim of this project is to investigate how young heritage children who are faced with three challenging tasks such as: to maintain their minority language (Polish), to develop new linguistic abilities in the majority language (English) and to find their own identity as bicultural and bilingual members of the community, negotiate the transition to school. This thesis would involve investigating possible changes in grammars of these speakers and studying how linguistic development unfolds in young children throughout the first year in school and whether these can be linked to specific social practices and the types of social networks established during this critical year. We need to understand what heritage speakers are exposed to on a daily basis in a classroom in order to provide new empirical food for thought for linguistic theory and rethink the way in which support could be possibly provided to heritage speakers and provide a better understanding of their linguistic profile. It is hoped that project will address an important gap in HS studies by adopting a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the development of both the minority and majority languages spoken by HS in their early school years. Crucially, the study will also seek to understand how starting school affects the identity of bilingual children as members of a new linguistic community (the school), one in which parents are not the main source of (linguistic) information to their children.