What factors determine success in childhood bilingualism?

On November 9, 2022, this was the theme of a webinar offered by Professor Patrick Rebuschat (Linguistics, Lancaster) and Professor Cristina Flores (University of Minho) for parents and pupils of Portugal’s Camões Institute in the United Kingdom.

The webinar featured a short presentation on bilingualism and was followed by an interactive Q&A session during which participants asked questions about bilingualism and shared their experience in bringing up children bilingually in the UK.

The event was organized the Camões Institute, the branch of the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs that is responsible for the promotion of Portuguese language and culture overseas.The Camões Institute was established in 1924, is headquartered in Lisbon and active in 84 countries.

In the UK alone, the Camões Institute currently employs 27 teachers who offer Portuguese as heritage language to over 3,500 students, ages 6 to 17.

Dr. Cátia Verguete, the Director of the Camões Institute network in the UK, said about the event: “The Bilingualism Q&A session was very interactive and allowed researchers, teachers and parents to discuss and reflect collaboratively about research, practice and experiences around raising and educating the bilingual children and pupils in our network. This is invaluable. We look forward to the development of the broader project which will further our understanding of the factors behind bilingualism in childhood."

Lancaster University, the Camões Institute and the University of Minho are founding institutions of the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C), a strategic international partnership of leading European institutions that seeks to promote research on multilingualism and to make the results of this research available to the key stakeholders in the language learning process, from pupils, parents and teachers to school administrators and policy makers.

The three institutions are also collaborating on a British Academy project that studies linguistic development in heritage language bilinguals, i.e. in young children growing up in a home in which they speak a minority language that is different from the majority language dominant in larger society. A news item on the British Academy project can be found here.

The Consortium is directed by Professor Rebuschat, with Professor Flores serving as Vice Director. For more information, or to get involved, please email heritage-language@lancaster.ac.uk.