How do bilingual children acquire and maintain their languages?

A BPS-funded 3-part seminar series

Growing Up Bilingual: Researcher and Practitioner Synergies

Seminar 1: How do Bilingual Children Acquire and Maintain their Languages?

This series brings together academics and practitioners specialised in bilingual development for knowledge exchange and developing meaningful synergies. Bilingual development is an important topic that spans multiple subdisciplines within psychology and beyond and eclipses various areas of practice, with the large and growing population that use additional languages besides English in the UK. We expect participation in this series to: raise the profile of this topic; help to identify overlapping interests, needs and goals between academics and practitioners; and lead to collaborative partnerships developing further projects on the topic.

The three seminars aim to address three interrelated questions:

1. How do bilingual children acquire and maintain their languages?
2. How can growing up bilingual impact developmental outcomes?
3. How may we use our understanding to help bilingual children towards optimum development?

This first seminar will focus on areas such as sources and means for language acquisition, language group variations, and how individual and environmental factors may impact outcomes including language proficiency and maintenance. Our invited speakers include both distinguished academics and established practitioners:

Antonella Sorace [Keynote]
Professor of Developmental Linguistics, University of Edinburgh; Founder of Bilingualism Matters
Caroline Floccia
Professor of Developmental Psychology, University of Plymouth
Cate Hamilton
Founder of Babel Babies and The Language Revolution Podcast
Meesha Warmington
Senior Lecturer of Educational Psychology, University of Sheffield
Eowyn Crisfield
Founder & Director, Crisfield Education Consulting; Senior Lecturer of TESOL, Oxford Brookes University
Hamish Chalmers
Director, Applied Linguistics, Oxford; Vice-Chair, National Association for Language Development in the Curriculum (NALDIC)
Eva Eppler [Chair]
Reader of Linguistics, University of Roehampton

Attendance is free. 

This series is organised by Virginia Lam (University of Roehampton) and Layal Husain (University of East London) with funding awarded by the BPS Research Seminar Competition 2021-22.
For details about our eponymous ESRC-funded research Growing Up Bilingual (GUB project), please visit our site and blog.