5th International Symposium on Bilingualism

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Forwarded from LINGUIST List 15.1913

From: helmut.daller <helmut.daller at uwe.ac.uk>


5th International Symposium on Biligualism
Short Title: ISB5

Date: 20-Mar-2005 - 23-Mar-2005
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Contact: Melissa Moyer
Contact Email: isb5 at uab.es
Meeting URL: http://isb5.uab.es


Call Deadline: 01-Sep-2004

Meeting Description:

The 5th International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB5) will be
organized in Barcelona (Spain) by the Universitat Autnoma de
Barcelona in collaboration with the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the
Universitat de Barcelona. This forum includes all areas of language
and linguistics related to the field of Bilingualism. For further
information contact isb at uab.es or check the web http://isb5.uab.es

CALL FOR PAPERS

COLLOQUIUM ON THE MEASUREMENT OF BILINGUAL PROFICIENCY ACROSS TWO
LANGUAGES: METHODOLOGICAL ASPECTS

At the 5th International Symposium on Bilingualism (March 20 - 23,
2005 Barcelona, see also http://isb5.uab.es)

Convenor: Helmut Daller (University of the West of England, Bristol)

Please contact helmut.daller at uwe.ac.uk if you are interested in
presenting a paper at this colloquium.


The focus of this colloquium will be on methodological issues when
comparing different measures of language proficiency across languages
with structural differences. Many studies on bilingual language
proficiency focus only on one language. This is a serious
methodological flaw since the complexity of bilingual proficiency is
not taken into account. The proposed colloquium will bring together
researcher who will contribute towards a better understanding of what
Grosjean (1997: 165) has called the complementarity principle: the
fact that bilinguals use their languages for different purposes and in
different domains of life. Therefore both languages have to be taken
into account. However, research on immigrant bilinguals in Europe face
the challenge that the language pairs under investigation show large
structural differences in many cases (e.g. French/ Arabic, Dutch/
Turkish, Russian/German and other pairs). How can we make sure that
the measures of proficiency in these language pairs are comparable?
We invite contributions of researchers who address this problem in
their work, be it within quantitative or qualitative research
frameworks.

Grosjean, F. (1997) The bilingual individual. Interpreting:
International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting, (1/
2), 163 -187.