Assessing child bilingualism in plurilingual families. A case study
Assessing child bilingualism in plurilingual families. A case study

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the assessment of the level of bilingualism of a Britain-born Polishspeaking girl, as well as to explore ways of expressing emotions by her. The study participant was a 13-year-old bilingual (Polish-English) girl who lived with her parents in the UK from birth. We have assessed her language proficiency in the Polish language, situations in which there is code-switching and code-mixing, and situations in which each of the two languages becomes dominant when expressing emotions. The results showed that the dominant language in everyday situations is English, while Polish is used mainly at home, in the company of the closest family. What’s more, the frequency count of code-switching, and code-mixing showed that these two phenomena are largely dependent on the interlocutor, the topic of conversation, language skills in a given language and emotions being expressed. When it comes to emotions, it has been demonstrated that positive emotions are expressed mainly in English because of the joy and willingness to share pleasant experiences with others, while expressing negative emotions and sad experiences the dominant language becomes Polish because of the sense of belonging to a Polish family and a sense of trust and security among its members.

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