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

该项目的目的是调查年轻的传统儿童如何面对三个具有挑战性的任务，如：保持他们的少数民族语言（波兰语），发展新的语言能力，在多数语言（英语）中找到自己的身份，作为社区的双文化和双语成员，谈判过渡到学校。这篇论文将涉及调查这些说话者的语法可能发生的变化，并研究在学校的第一年里，幼儿的语言发展是如何展开的，以及这些是否可以与特定的社会实践和在这一关键年份建立的社会网络类型联系起来。我们需要了解传统语言使用者每天在课堂上接触到的内容，以便为语言理论提供新的经验食粮，并重新思考为传统语言使用者提供支持的方式，并更好地了解他们的语言特征。希望该项目将通过采用多学科方法来了解少数民族语言和多数民族语言在早期上学时期的发展，从而解决高民族研究中的一个重要差距。至关重要的是，这项研究还将试图理解，在父母不是孩子（语言）信息的主要来源的情况下，开学如何影响双语儿童作为新语言社区（学校）成员的身份。

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.