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ERIC Number: EJ1032220
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2014
Pages: 14
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1367-0050
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
From Bengali to English: Sequential Bilingualism of a Second-Generation British Bangladeshi
Al-Azami, Salman
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, v17 n4 p484-497 2014
The paper discusses sequential language acquisition of the researcher's daughter Safa who transformed from a monolingual Bengali speaker to an almost monolingual English speaker in a few months after moving to the UK. Safa was born in Bangladesh and was a monolingual Bengali speaker until she was three years and nine months when the family moved to the UK. Unlike most research on sequential bilingualism, Safa's transition from Bengali to English went through a period of an invented language, which she developed and used for a few months. Safa then underwent language shift as Bengali became her passive language. Safa's loss of fluency in Bengali was mainly due to the absence of Bengali linguistic environment, because her family lived outside the community. Safa's mother's indifference to Bangladeshi ethnicity and her parents' positive attitude towards Britishness meant that her decline in Bengali did not cause them much concern. Despite the lack of proficiency in Bengali, Safa still retains a strong ethnic Bangladeshi identity. Tabors and Snow's four-stage developmental process of sequential second-language acquisition has been applied to find the similarities and differences in Safa's case, while language maintenance and shift theories have contributed to the analysis of the process of her language shift.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Bangladesh; United Kingdom
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A