Minority Language Acquisition and Retention: A study of Canadian-born Romanian Speaking Bilingual Children

Preserving a minority first language has been found to be very important for the overall personal and educational development of immigrant children. However, successful bilingual development involving a minority language is often challenging in situations where the majority language dominates communication not only provincially and nationally but also internationally. This dissertation investigates the conditions under which a first language (Romanian) can be acquired and maintained in an English-dominant setting as well as any impact that the L1 has on the L2 (English), to which the children are formally introduced upon entry to junior kindergarten. Three children participated in this longitudinal study from the commencement of junior kindergarten (~ 4;0) until the start of grade 1 (~ 6;0). For the purposes of charting development (or possible attrition), language proficiency was assessed in Romanian and in English through separate measures of lexical (PPVT and Romanian-adapted PPVT), phonological (CTOPP and Romanian-adapted CTOPP), and syntactic and narrative (picture-story based instruments) abilities. In addition, the children's communicative competence in the two languages was evaluated more holistically through audio recorded data of the children's interactions in various naturalistic situations. Information about the children's home language practices was also obtained through interviews conducted with their parents.The data collected allowed for a unique, psycholinguistically rich, and culturally well-rounded account of the bilingual development of Romanian-Canadian children. The results demonstrated that the children continued to develop their minority language alongside the majority language. However, the lack of formal schooling in Romanian seemed to have impeded the growth of the children's academic vocabulary and, possibly, narrative skills in Romanian. This could be rectified through formal minority language education. The findings also demonstrate that two years of schooling in English narrows and, in some respects, even erases the gap between the English-as-L2 children and their monolingual counterparts. This study provides unique data on bilingual Romanian-Canadian children. The specially adapted vocabulary and phonological tests in Romanian make it possible to examine the development of the minority and majority languages side by side. Also, the longitudinal design allows for capturing change over multiple points in time within each of the two languages.Ph.D