Bilingualism goes to school: The interplay of (extra)linguistic factors in successful bilingual development

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Migration is making Europe increasingly multilingual, and the United Kingdom is committed topromoting this linguistic diversity for reasons of cultural identity, social integration and cohesion(Social Mobility Commission, 2022). Heritage languages are the minority languages spoken athome in situations where these family languages are not a dominant language of the largersociety. For example, Polish, Punjabi, and Portuguese are widely spoken heritage languages in theUnited Kingdom. In 2021/2022, close to 20% of school pupils (1.6M pupils) spoke a languagedifferent than English at home (Department for Education, 2022). Speaking these languages athome permit migrant children to maintain ties to their parents' country of origin and to their cultural heritage. At the same time, it is clear that successful integration also requires a high levelof proficiency in the majority language of society (English) (Hutchinson, 2018).The key question, and one to be addressed in this PhD project, is how to promote thedevelopment of both languages so that these multilingual citizens can make use of theeducational and professional opportunities resulting from an increasingly integrated Europe. Inaddressing this question, we will work in close collaboration with a major non-academicstakeholder, Portugal's Camões Institute, which, as one of Europe's leading institutions promotingbilingual education, has a significant interest in understanding the factors that facilitate bilingualdevelopment.Several factors have been identified for successful bilingual development. These includethe age of acquisition, the amount of contact with the heritage language through different familyconstellations, socioeconomic status, formal schooling, and explicit grammar instruction in theheritage language (e.g., Bayram et al., 2021; Torregrossa et al., 2022). However, most studiesconsider variables in isolation, which means that the interplay of critical factors and their impacton bilingual language development are not fully understood. In addition, most studies observe theeffects of these factors on the acquisition of very specific aspects of the heritage language ratherthan a broader range of language properties. Finally, most studies consider the heritage languageindependent of the majority language. This is problematic as we need to study the conditions thatenable children to develop their two native languages, and this requires testing their competencein both. The objective of the proposed PhD project is to significantly advance our understanding ofthe factors that determine successful bilingual development by directly addressing theseshortcomings. First, rather than considering variables in isolation, we will examine the interplay ofthe critical factors above in bilingual development. Second, rather than focusing on just onedomain of language, we will observe the development of three linguistic domains (lexicon,morphology, syntax). And third, rather than observing the effect of these factors on just onelanguage, we will investigate their effect on both the heritage and the majority language. We willfocus on English-Portuguese bilingual development as a test case, but the insights from this PhDproject will apply to other language constellations.