Twenty-fifth International Conference on Learning

Abstract

Living in a multicultural environment full of people with several origins who speak different languages and coexist in the same country, it is necessary to research the young learners’ diversities. As the years go by, the amount of bilingual students increases. The current paper examines the language acquisition of bilingual students in Greece. First of all, we distinguish the types of children’s bilingualism. Depending on the type of bilingualism, children are expected to develop certain characteristics in their speech and to make specific errors. Taking into consideration the levels of acquisition of mother tongue, similar phenomena appear in the acquisition of two parallel languages. Both children and adults tend to demonstrate certain difficulties in perceiving different languages. “Code mixing” appears at any age, although it is not easy to determine it accurately, as many factors interfere. We refer on certain phonological processes, which facilitate the learning of a language, as well as mention few researches carried out about phonemic awareness in Greece. The structural particularities of the Greek language are widely presented. Finally, we propose several activities that aim at practicing and evaluating the students’ phonological awareness. Our target is to strengthen early childhood learning in the era of diversity.