Topics:

Over the past fifty years, mobility in all its forms, whether economic (UN, 2022), academic, professional, cultural or study-related (Campus France, 2021), has continued to grow. Furthermore, globalisation and technical development of communication, such as Internet, has contributed to the contact of languages and cultures. Thus, the Council of Europe and the European Center of Modern Languages emphasized the development of a multilingual society. In that respect, border regions, such as Alsace in France (Geiger-Jaillet, 2013) or the Aosta Valley in Italy (Cavalli, 2017), have set up bilingual education in order to promote the acquisition of the neighbouring language and/or minority languages.

Far from being homogeneous, language contacts generated by these phenomena of mobility, globalisation and the promotion of bi/multilingualism are rich in their diversity. The learners, who often are bi/multilingual, are exposed to different forms of input in a variety of language acquisition situations, which can be categorised on a continuum from L2 immersion in an informal context to guided learning in a formal situation, in a society that is itself multilingual. Each language contact situation generates a complex dynamic of L2 acquisition where a range of factors – external and internal to the learner – are impacting the language appropriation (Castellotti, 2017).

Researches of L2 acquisition have initially modelled the acquisition situations as the learning of a single L2 by monolingual speakers. The development of research on bilingualism, multilingualism, heritage languages, cross-linguistic influences and attrition phenomena invites us to make this bipolar model more complex: is the nature of the processes involved in language learning and transmission similar in the different situations of language contact? What are their commonalities and differences? The social status of L1's (Hélot, 2007, 2004; Lüdi and Py, 2003; Deprez, 1994; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1981), such as "the quantity and quality of exposure to languages, but also the consideration of structural features of languages in contact" (Duguine & Köpke, 2021: 41), affect the process of L2 acquisition and bi/multilingual development. L2 acquisition depends on learners' motivation, migration experience (Diskin & Regan, 2015; De Fina & Tseng, 2017), language learning experience (Forsberg-Lundell & Arvidsson, 2021), language use, but also on their identity and attitudes towards languages.

In the school context, L2 acquisition may result from bilingual education, from the enrolment of allophone pupils in specific structure (e.g. the UPE2A in France) or, for children with immigrant backgrounds in an ordinary class. According to the theory of interdependence developed by Cummins (1979, 2014), and the Threshold Hypothesis (Cummins, 1991), students should reach a minimum level in their L1 in order to transfer their skills to the L2. In their study of language transfer in German-Portuguese or French-Portuguese bilingual children, Lambelet and his collaborators show that "Portuguese scores at T1 predict German scores at T2 to the same extent that German scores at T1 predict Portuguese scores at T2. In terms of bidirectional language transfer (i.e. home language to school language and school language to home language), these results raise a number of important questions: what is the knowledge and skills that bilinguals use in one language at one point in time but do not fully apply in the other language until the following year? Why does there seem to be a gap between the application in another language of skills and resources used in one language? And why is the degree of language transfer from home language to school language comparable to the degree of language transfer from school language to home language" (Lambelet et al., 2020: 14; see also Berthele & Vanhove, 2020; Berthele & Lambelet, 2017; Moser et al., 2008).

In situations of minority/reduced (bilinguisme minoré) bilingualism (or folk bilingualism), speakers of heritage languages (Polinsky, 2018) develop unequal skills in their two languages. Studies on heritage languages (Montrul, 2016) could make possible the examination of the impact of (socio)linguistic influence on the (re)appropriation of a heritage language which, depending on 'the family's language policy' (Hélot, 2007: 73) may or may not have been passed on to the second and third generation. While for political and economic migrants, in conjunction with their settlement in the host country, L2 acquisition takes place in the "natural environment" (Tyne, 2012), often in informal situations (Adami, 2012; Véronique, 1981), the cultural migrants (Forsberg & Bartning, 2015) or the internationally mobile students (Howard, 2019) voluntarily plan to learn the L2 in a more formal contexts. Their respective motivations influence the development of their skills in L2 (Adami, 2011; Dewaele & Dewaele, 2020; Edmonds & Gudmestad, 2021). Furthermore, Cummins (1981, 1984, 2000) emphasizes the diversity of language skills by distinguishing the Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS), necessary for contextualized communication with low cognitive demands, and the Cognitive Academic Language Skills (CALP), necessary for decontextualized communication with high cognitive demands. Thus, children with a migrant background, allophone pupils, pupils in bilingual classes as well as international students or refugee researchers need to acquire, both, communicative and academic skills in L2.

This 3rd international biannual colloquium of the GIS RéAL2 aims to question the characteristics of bi/plurilingual appropriation by considering diverse situations of linguistic contact, from different points of view: socio-psycho-linguistic, (socio)cognitive and didactic, and according to the following topics which are certainly not exhaustive:

-L2 acquisition in a mobility context

-acquisition of communicative and/or academic skills in L2

-acquisition of heritage languages

-acquisition of the neighbor’s language/neighboring language in a transboundary region

-the impact of different types of input in bi/multilingual acquisition

-the influence of socio-biographical characteristics

Bibliographical references:

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Berthele, R., & Lambelet, A. (Eds.). (2017). Heritage and School Language Literacy Development in Migrant Children: Interdependence or independence? Clevedon: Multilingual Matters

Berthele, R., Vanhove, J., (2020) « What Would Disprove Interdependence? Lessons Learned from a Study on Biliteracy in Portuguese Heritage Language Speakers in Switzerland. » International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 23, no. 5, pp. 550–566.

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