Page 92 - Compétences plurilingues : perspectives et actions / Plurilingual competencies: perspectives and actions

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L. Krahula Dolezı́, K. Mullerova: Plurilingual Competence in a Child: A Case Study
were gathered, the length of the recordings is approximately four hours and thirty min-
utes. The communication was spontaneous, usually connected to typical activities the child
was indulged in, such as reading books, drawing and playing. Some recordings also con-
tain conversations between parents and the child or between child and other members of
the family, including a nanny, nevertheless, most of them capture dialogues between the re-
searcher and the child. Data transcription was inspired by conversation analysis by Harvey
Sacks, Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson (Sidnell, 2010). In the dialogues we use the
irst letter only to refer to its participants, i. e. K (Katka), A (Adele, the child and subject of
this study), M (mother) and B (babicka – Czech word for grandmother). The dialogues con-
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tain not only the linguistic material in square brackets but also the non-verbal, pragmatic or
contextual information in double round brackets. The transcriptions of Hebrew recordings
were Romanized.

Subject
The data we are presenting in this paper come from aresearch focusing on a four-year-old
child born in 2017. Her family comes from Israel and has been living in the Czech Republic
since 2014. Subject’s younger sister and the subject herself were born in the Czech Republic.
Her mother speaks Hebrew, English and Russian, her father speaks Hebrew and English.
Both parents know a little Czech. The family visits their country of origin three times a year
to see their relatives for two or three weeks. The grandparents speak Hebrew and English,
however, they speak only Hebrew with their granddaughter. At home mainly Hebrew is
spoken, only sometimes English to gain more practice in it. The subject had nannies that
spoke Czech and English, they were both native speakers of these languages. At the time
of the research the subject had a Spanish speaking nanny. When the subject was one-and-
half-years old she started to attend a nursery school every day for six or seven hours where
only Czech was spoken. English songs were sung on a daily basis too, sometimes the subject
was confronted with object naming in English, for example when describing pictures. The
child continued in a similar way in her kindergarten that she was attending at the time of
the research.

Even though the aim of this paper is not to give an account of an overall linguistic devel-
opment of the child observed², we would still like to present some pieces of information
concerning the development of the multiple languages before the research started to get
a context for our observations. The subject’s irst word was Hebrew, although her mother
confronted her with Russian too via reading Russian books. The subject started to speak
Czech at the age of 13 months. So, before the age of one year this child was in touch with four
languages – Hebrew, Czech, English and Russian. At the age of three the subject started to ac-
quire Spanish through being in touch with a Spanish speaking nanny and through a Spanish
teacher. Ten months later the subject started to learn French. Her mother stated, neverthe-
less, that she had not heard her speak French so far. Parents estimate that the strength of
the languages goes as follows – Hebrew (50%), Czech (20%), Spanish (15%), French (10%)
and English (5%). Parents observe some in luence of the strongest language – Hebrew – on
2. In the context of multiple language acquisition we believe in a highly individual approach to observed subjects
as in Purkarthofer and Flubacher (2022).

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