Understanding the diversity of pupils' bilingual experiences

On average, a fifth of pupils in England are recorded as "having English as an additional language". The reality is much more complex and diverse than this summary statement seems to suggest. Using data from Yorkshire, I will illustrate this multi-faceted diversity, touching upon factors such as the age at which a child becomes bilingual, active or passive bilingualism, language dominance, family language practices, the loose relation between language and ethnicity, and the predictors of English language proficiency at KS1 (primary school) and KS3 (secondary school). I will also present a free, new tool which schools can use to document the language profile of their multilingual pupils.  

Cecile de Cat is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Leeds.  Most of her research focuses on language development in monolingual and multilingual children and in multilingual adults. Questions she is interested in include: What aspects of language are more difficult to acquire (or easier to lose)? What predicts better/faster language outcomes in children? How does the Heritage Language (or Home Language) of bilingual children scaffold their acquisition of English? She is currently leading on projects (i) to create online tools to document bilingual children’s language experience (q-bex.org), (ii) to assess core language skills at KS3 and KS4 (caer.org) and (iii) to understand individual variation in Heritage Language acquisition and maintenance (uit.no/research/acqva).