Portuguese as an Additional Language: Domains Use among Young Learners

Three key concepts will make up the pillars of this paper: second, foreign and heritage languages. Whenever appropriate “additional language” will be used as an umbrella term. A study of the domains of language use will be applied to these three different sociolinguistic contexts. To date, there are not many empirical studies on the domains of language and, more specifically, among young learners in different areal contexts, as it is the case of this study. The target language of this study is Portuguese as an additional language: a second language in Cape Verde, a heritage language in the Portuguese-speaking community of Switzerland, and a de facto foreign language in Macao. The main purpose of this paper is to identify to what extent language policies promote the language use among young learners and their language choice. In order to do so, we will identify the domains of language use of Portuguese by primary school children in these three different contexts, while we have a look into the different layers according to which the policy-making is organized within the three sociolinguistic contexts. A questionnaire considering three selected domains of language use adapted to young learners, namely private, public and educational, was ministered to 591 pupils. The findings that emerge from this study show three different models based on the three fore-mentioned domains of language use: the II-model for a foreign language, the V-model for the heritage language and the X-model for the second language.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-75963-0_6