Arqus Webinar: How Family, School and Society Shape Bilingual Development

The Arqus Alliance invites participants to attend the next session of the “9 Months, 9 Universities” series, organised within the framework of the Arqus Plurilingual and Intercultural Hub. The webinar, “How Family, School and Society Shape Bilingual Development: A French–Polish Case Study”, will be streamed live on YouTube on 24 March at 13:30 CET.

The session will explore how bilingualism develops in children growing up in multilingual environments, with particular attention to the interaction between family practices, educational settings and broader societal contexts.

The presentation focuses on the bilingual development of three French–Polish siblings raised in a mid-to-high socioeconomic family. The family follows a one-parent–one-language approach, and the children are enrolled in a state bilingual programme in France. Drawing on a detailed family language biography, the study examines how children experience and actively shape their bilingualism, highlighting the complexity of their linguistic environment.

Parental data were collected through semi-structured interviews based on a standardised questionnaire. In parallel, the children completed a series of tasks designed to capture their linguistic perceptions and abilities. These included an experimental questionnaire, a drawing activity illustrating how they perceive the distribution of languages in their minds at home and at school, a description of a family interaction at the dinner table, and a Rapid Automatized Naming test conducted in both languages.

Despite differences in early language exposure, the siblings demonstrate balanced bilingual profiles. Their development reflects dominant exposure to French alongside sustained use of Polish, with comparable performance in the naming task in both languages. The findings highlight the importance of both parental and children’s agency in maintaining the minority language within the family. More broadly, the study suggests that bilingual experience can be understood as a multi-level habitus – temporal, familial and institutional – supporting harmonious bilingual development.

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