PhD student Kaisa Pankakoski tells us about her research and why we should invest in multilingual children’s language skills in the UK.
Globalisation, superdiversity and policies promoting minority languages have led to an increasing
PhD student Kaisa Pankakoski tells us about her research and why we should invest in multilingual children’s language skills in the UK.
Globalisation, superdiversity and policies promoting minority languages have led to an increasing number of potentially multilingual children growing up across the world. However, not all children born into multilingual families grow up speaking two or more languages. While some families manage to transmit the home languages others struggle to do so, resulting in the children having only a passive or limited knowledge of the heritage language.
There are a variety of psychological, social and educational factors that determine how children acquire and use their languages. Several aspects can influence the transmission of minority languages – local language policies, families’ language transmission strategies, the societal context, attitudes, the education system, support, family type or family mobility all play a role in the language acquisition process.
Why promote multilingualism in the UK?
Despite generations of immigration and promotion of language learning in schools, the UK population is largely monolingual. According to Eurobarometer over half of the UK population (65.4%) were unable to speak any foreign language and children in the UK were behind their continental peers in terms of learning modern foreign languages.
The British economy, financial growth and exports are suffering as a result of the citizens’ poor language skills. Language skills are crucial for large multinational companies but also smaller enterprises: not having a language in common is a significant barrier to trade.
Research from Cardiff Business School’s Professor James Foreman-Peck’s shows that Britons’ lack of language skills is costing the UK economy £48 billion a year, or 3.5% of GDP. With the overall decline of GCSE and A-level modern foreign languages uptake this number may increase considerably.
Linguistic skills go hand in hand with the formation of a child’s cultural identity. The United Nations Convention on the Rights article 30 states that each child has the right to a heritage or a minority language. Many researchers agree that giving the children their birthright of home languages will have a positive impact on their welfare and our country’s future prospects. The lack of support for heritage