Jens Normann Jørgensen

Ideologies, norms, and practices in youth poly-languaging:

The theme of this paper is the relationship of language ideologies as they may be uncovered in public discourse and as they are mediated through language users, for instance in minority families, to linguistic practices as observed among young speakers in a superdiverse environment in Copenhagen. We build on data from the Amager Project, a longitudinal study of the development of polylanguaging among adolescents, and analyze both explicit statements about language norms and observed and recorded language practices. We find that the young speakers encounter different norms for language use in their everyday life and that they themselves have a quite sophisticated sense of variation, both in their explicit statements on language use and in their actual behavior we can observe.

Multi-Variety Code-Switching in Conversation 903 of the Køge Project

This article documents some of the ways in which the languages, or varieties, are taken into possession by the young speakers and made their own. It is illustrated how they play with language, in particular switches between codes, both as contributions to social negotiations and as pure performance. The material comes from a group conversation between four male bilingual students in the last grade of the Danish public school system. The young people have Turkish as their mother tongue, and Danish is their L2. By grade 9, they have had several years of experience with English, and almost all of the students have had two years of German. The conversation is a part of the Koge material (see Turan 1999). The four boys were asked to create a collage or a picture series with free post cards and glue them on a large piece of cardboard. The theme of the collage was to be “My worst nightmare”. The conversation lasts about half an hour, and all four boys participate actively in the conversation. The conversation has been transcribed according to the CHILDES conventions (MacWhinney 1995), but have been simplified slightly for the excerpts given in the article. In the excerpts, Turkish is italicized. The lines beginning with %eng give translations into English. Lines beginning with %com give background information or comments to the transcript.

Second Language Learning

The article presents a broad outline of the history of second-language learning from behaviorism with its emphasis on habit formation and the normative view of errors, through cognitive approaches focusing on language learning as skill learning and information processing to sociocultural theories of interaction and strategies. Furthermore, the article introduces specific topics within the field such as the relation between age and second-language acquisition, the differences between second- and foreign-language learning, and finally the key issues of school education and second-language learning in relation to minority children.

Introduction: Multilingual Behavior in Youth Groups

This introduction reviews some of the major work on bilingual and multilingual children and adolescents in Scandinavia, from Kotsinas (1985) and Boyd (1985) to the present. The introduction was originally published in J. N. Jorgensen (ed.) 2001: Multilingual behavior in Youth Groups , Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism, The Koge Series, Volume K11, Danish University of Education.