The Cleveland project: A study of bilingual children in a nursery school

This paper presents the findings of an ethnolinguistic study conducted in the north‐east of England on the language behaviour of a group of twelve children—six boys and six girls—during their first term in school. The informants, aged between three years and four months (3.4) and three years and seven months (3.7), are third generation British born into families of Pakistani origin, Moslems from the Mirpur region who speak Mirpuri, vernacular Urdu‐Panjabi, and English. The study draws on two theoretical perspectives: the Hallidayan tradition of language as socio‐semiotic (Halliday, 1975, 1978) which describes discourse as semantic choice in social contexts, and Le Page & Tabouret‐Keller's (1985) description of the ways in which individuals reveal their perceived ethnic identity through their language choice. The paper combines these perspectives in an analytical description of the linguistic behaviour of the children. Data were collected from two complementary sources: naturally occurring discourse data were gathered using audio‐taped recordings of the children's language use, and these were combined with 'thick' (Geertz, 1975) contextual data to provide a descriptive account of the ways in which the young informants were learning to be 'communicatively competent' (Hymes, 1972) in their new social context. In this paper three levels of data analysis will be presented together with observations on the education of primary schoolteachers based on insights gained from this study.