GRANNY, LOOK HERE: ИНИЦИИРУЮЩИЕ РЕПЛИКИ НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ В КОММУНИКАЦИИ ДЕТЕЙ-БИЛИНГВОВ

Abstract

The authors deal with English initiating moves in the dialogical interaction of two monoethnic bilingual children with their parents and grandparents. The objective of the paper is to describe structural and pragmatic features of initiating moves in the dialogues of the children for six years - at the age period between one and six years old. The authors argue that the quantity of English dialogical initiating moves as well as their structural and pragmatic characteristics can show the ways of childhood bilingual development and the attitude of the children to their weak language. The results of the research demonstrate that the children maintain a positive attitude to English in their interaction with adults; however, the lack of lexical and grammatical diversity of their initiating English moves is the evidence of slow development in the weak language competence and performance. Moreover, all these results clearly show that the children’s bilingualism has been gradually developing as highly unbalanced, accompanied by the traits of L2 attrition.