LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY OF A BILINGUAL CHILD: A CASE STUDY

Cavide Demirci, Ahmet Güven

Abstract


In this study, it is aimed to analyse, evaluate and define the Turkish and English communication skills and vocabulary levels of a bilingual Turkish child. According to Houwer (2007), although they are grown in a bilingual environment, in some cases, the process of acquiring two languages is not successful. It is quite interesting why the language skills of children who grew up in similar environments in a natural process such as language acquisition sometimes differ, and why some children are not bilingual while others are. In this study, communication skills in both languages of a child who grew up in a bilingual home environment and successfully learned both Turkish and English, were examined and receptive language levels in both languages were defined. Within the scope of the research, the language development process and the vocabulary levels in the two languages are assumed to be in the normal development characteristics of the individual and similar qualities with his peers. The child lives in Turkey in a big city. This study sought to answer the following questions:
1. How is the productive language level of the individual who grew up bilingual?
a) How is the child's productive language ability in English?
b) How is the child's productive language ability in Turkish?
2. How is the receptive language level of the individual who grew up bilingual?
a) How is the English receptive language level?
b) How is the Turkish receptive language level?

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Keywords


bilingualism, bilingual kid, language proficiency, OPOL

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejel.v6i1.3373

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