WA Distinguished Professors' Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with WA faculty and students. The Faculty of English welcomes everyone to a lecture Are multilinguals the better academic EFL users? Evidence from a questionnaire study measuring self-assessed proficiencies by Prof. Dr. Peter Siemund from the University of Hamburg. The lecture will take place on February 27 (Wednesday), 2019, at 6:30 p.m. in room 109A, Collegium Novum.
Wednesday, February 27, 6:30 p.m.
109A Collegium Novum
The question of putative multilingual advantages is still being hotly debated. Following some initial euphoria regarding increased executive control, cognitive reserve, cognitive development, metalinguistic awareness, and language learning abilities, the field is currently characterized by a wave of critical sobering, as key findings fail to be replicated. I here offer a summary of the current controversy followed by a discussion of new evidence drawn from a questionnaire study amongst 1252 students and 290 instructors at the University of Hamburg. This study measures self-assessed proficiencies in English amongst subjects who regularly use English as a Lingua Franca in the context of tertiary education. I compare self-assessed English proficiencies between monolingually and multilingually raised ELF users in five CEFR domains, namely listening and reading comprehension, spoken interaction, as well as spoken and written production. The results attest slightly higher scores for multilingually raised ELF users, of statistical significance in some domains, which I interpret in terms of a multilingual advantage. However, I wish to be cautious about generalizing these findings, as they need to be substantiated by tests that objectively measure proficiencies.
Peter Siemund has been Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Hamburg since 2001. He pursues a cross-linguistic typological approach in his work on reflexivity and self-intensifiers, pronominal gender, interrogative constructions, speech acts and clause types, argument structure, tense and aspect, varieties of English, language contact, and multilingual development. His many publications include, as author, Pronominal Gender in English: A Study of English Varieties from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Routledge, 2008), Varieties of English: A Typological Approach (CUP 2013), and Speech Acts and Clause Types: English in a Cross-Linguistic Context (OUP 2018), and, as editor, Linguistic Universals and Language Variation (Mouton de Gruyter 2011) and Foreign Language Education in Multilingual Classrooms (with Andreas Bonnet; John Benjamins 2018).
