Arabic-L:PEDA:What is a bilingual?

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Mon 30 Dec 2002
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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-------------------------Directory-------------------------------------

1) Subject:What is a bilingual?
2) Subject:Bilingualism
3) Subject:Proficiency Standards Beyond the Native Speaker

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1)
Date:  30 Dec 2002
From: Mona Diab <mdiab at umiacs.umd.edu>
Subject:What is a bilingual?

Salam everybody,
i actually agree with David it all depends on your definition of native
like? I myself am a bilingual in Egyptian Arabic and English. I was
educated in MSA in Egypt and attended American schools... I am
considered native in both languages in terms of linguistic judgements
and
I am in a linguistics department. I have lived half of my life in
English speaking countries and the other
half in Egypt. I read, write, think and dream, use idioms and metaphors,
you name it, in both languages (I don't dream in MSA though maybe
sometimes reciting some quran but never really
MSA). I am currently in France and I speak some French and I paid
attention to the kind of mistakes I make in French and they seem to
pattern with bot Egyptian Arabic and English...
SO my point is there are true bilinguals but maybe access to
linguistic information is contextualised, depending on the situation or
context...
Just my $0.02
Cheers
Mona Diab

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2)
Date:  30 Dec 2002
From: Nimat Hafez Barazangi <nhb2 at cornell.edu>
Subject:Bilingualism

If you look at bilingualism from a cognitive point of view, then it
becomes simpler to assess the "true level" if its facility.

The issue is not only to speak in the same level of the "native
speaker," but mainly to be able to perform the same cognitive processes
almost equally well in the two languages.

When I was raising my daughter to be a bilingual, that was my
criterion, but in separate environments; inside the home and outside
the home.

  I think I managed, to a certain extent, to provide the morphological
and syntactical structures as well as exposure to a vocabulary-rich
envo. in both English and Arabic in parallel to each other. By
providing her with the opportunity to hear, speak, read, and write both
at the same level from early childhood, she grew up able to function in
both languages well, and without mixing words, as we learners of FL
often do.   She is able to understand, comprehend, analyze, critique,
joke, etc. in both languages, equally well.  She tells me that she
dreams in Arabic when dreaming of us, her parents, or relatives. The
only problem is that now, with little time to read in Arabic, and by
being outside the home envo., she is not gaining enough new vocabulary
to keep up with comprehending the more recent and more complicated
cognitive processes within the Arabic environment.

Nimat  Hafez Barazangi

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2)
Date:  30 Dec 2002
From: Ola Moshref <Ola.Moshref at zu.ac.ae>
Subject: Proficiency Standards Beyond the Native Speaker

What/Who are the standards for proficiency in a language?

All the arguments or examples Dr. Wilmsen used seem to put native
speakers as the standard, by comparing his performance in speaking and
writing to theirs and feeling satisfied that with their poor Arabic
education he may even outstand their "educated upper class elite".

Because a lot of what he said was true, and hurting, it made me
reflect.

Since we do not only speak of the proficiency of non-natives in a
foreign language, but natives themselves are also rated in their
proficiency of the language they formally speak and write, then why do
we talk of natives as a model for proficiency?

I know this may lead us to philosophic talk about language not being
independent of the people who produce and comprehend it. I agree,
because blood is functionless without a being, and the being cannot
dispense with blood.

We Arabs are nowadays anaemic, nevertheless, this does not change the
facts about a healthy person's blood picture. Likewise, language must
have standards on its own premises for proficiency. I realize that many
factors will produce continuous alterations in this picture, but these
should be acknowledged only through updating the grammar of this
language.

Ola Moshref

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