Diana Guillemin

The Importance of Literacy in the Home Language: The View From Australia

While advantages of literacy in the home language have been widely documented, the Australian education system has not been proactive in providing institutional support for its development. This paper investigates the impact of (il)literacy in the home language on the academic, affective, and social development of bilingual/multilingual children and proposes principles that home-language-literacy programs should meet to be effective. It discusses programs that, although designed to develop literacy or second-language proficiency mainly in classroom contexts, could be easily adapted to address the needs of the linguistically and culturally diverse Australian context. We argue that the cost of not investing in successful home-language-literacy programs will be higher in the long run than their implementation costs and recommend that Australia should consider supporting grassroots home-language-literacy programs in a push to improve overall literacy outcomes for Australian home-language speakers.

The Syntax and Semantics of a Determiner System: A case study of Mauritian Creole

Within the framework of Chomsky’s Minimalism and Formal Semantics, this work documents the development of the Mauritian Creole (MC) determiner system from the mid 18th century to the present. Guillemin proposes that the loss of the French quantificational determiners, which agglutinated to nouns, resulted in the occurrence of bare nouns in argument positions. This triggered a shift in noun denotation, from predicative in French to argumental in MC, and accounts for the very different determiner systems of the creole and its lexifier. MC nouns are lexically stored as Kind denoting terms, that share some of the distributional properties of English bare plurals. New MC determiners are analyzed as ‘type shifting operators’ that shift Kinds into predicates, and serve to establish the referential properties of noun phrases. The analysis provides evidence for the universality of semantic features like Definiteness and Specificity, and the mapping of their form and function.

Multilingualism and assimilationism in Australia's literacy-related educational policies

Australia is a country of high linguistic diversity, with more than 300 languages spoken. Today, 19% of the population aged over 5 years speak a language other than English at home. Against this background, we examine government policies and prominent initiatives developed at national level in the past 30 years to address the challenge of offering ‘Literacy for all’, in particular focusing on minority language speaking children. Across the examined policies and initiatives, a distinct negative correlation can be observed: the more multilingual Australia has become, the more assimilationist the policies, and the more monolingual the orientation of the society that governments have sought to establish through policy. We argue that to enhance literacy outcomes more generally, this orientation needs to be reversed. We explain why policy understanding and approach need to instead promote the maintenance of home languages and support literacy acquisition in these languages.

Multilingualism and literacy: attitudes and policies

In this special issue we shine light on the relationship between multilingualism and literacy and on dominant forces that shape it. Here we present a selection of peerreviewed papers presented originally at the Multilingualism and Literacy workshop held at the 19th International Congress of Linguists in Geneva, 21–27 July 2013. That workshop explored the impact of multilingualism on the literacy development of both children and adults, seeking to identify how literacy skills or lack of them in one language can affect development of literacy in other language(s). This special issue focuses on two particular factors that strongly affect achievement of literacy in multilingual contexts – educational policies and societal attitudes – and therefore also considers community responses these may generate. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Multilingualism and Literacy workshop’s International Program Committee for their assistance in helping us to select the abstracts for presentation and thank workshop participants and audience for constructive comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to the editors of International Journal of Multilingualism, Professor Danuta Gabrys-Barker and Professor Eva Vetter, for the opportunity to share these papers with a wider audience. Last but not least, we express our gratitude to the papers’ peer reviewers, whose expertise and assistance have helped make this special issue possible.

Multilingualism and literacy: practices and effects

Ensuing from such linguistic diversity in modern societies are multilingual speakers who display a range of proficiency levels across their languages. Often, one language of a multilingual speaker is considered their ‘strongest’ or most ‘dominant’ language. Yet, speakers develop different proficiency levels in each of the four macroskills of listening and speaking (‘oral skills’) and reading and writing (‘literacy skills’), for each of their languages. Research to date, however, has tended to focus on oral (and cognitive) skills of multilingual speakers or to explore the effects of multilingualism on the acquisition of literacy more generally (Baker 2011; Bialystok 2001). In this context, literacy is seen – quite rightly – as a general transferable skill. This perception has often, however, steered inquiry to focus on literacy in the speakers’ mainstream language (or language of schooling), while neglecting literacy development and maintenance in their other language(s). This special issue aims at slightly shifting the focus of inquiry. It refracts the research lens to explore multilingualism and literacy through inquiry into literacy in the nonmainstream language(s) of multilingual speakers. It also considers different notions of literacy – from emergent literacy skills and narrative creation to digital media and marketing literacy – and different bilingual populations – from young learners via high school and university students to adult speakers. As the following introduction to the papers reveals, authors of each contribution have selected the combination of features best suited to their line of inquiry. This has produced a set of papers that are mutually complementary and thus en bloc present a valuable source of insights on multilingualism and literacy. We argue that if high levels of proficiency in a minority language (including the mother tongue) are to be achieved, literacy in this minority language is essential – if a written form of the language exists (Eisenchlas, Schalley, and Guillemin 2015). Research indicates that initial literacy in a familiar language (i.e., the mother tongue) facilitates, rather than impedes, the acquisition of literacy in additional languages (e.g., the