The present thesis set out to inquire and gain an understanding of how multilingual individuals with long-term sojourns abroad negotiate and construct their identities, particularly in terms of their language expertise and national or ethnic subject positions. Globalisation prompted more people to go abroad to work, study or search for a better way of life. Each move to a new country entails linguistic and socio-cultural adjustments and over a period of time, it becomes difficult for some people, known as expatriates in this context, to answer the question of ‘Where are you from?’ and who they are. Their multifaceted and complex identities require a narrative form to be answered. Poststructuralist and social constructionist approaches to identity were adopted in the research design for their theoretical and methodological capacity to facilitate the analysis of the complexity and multiplicity of individuals’ identity negotiation and construction process in discourse, social relations and positioning. Nine participants living in different regions and socio-economic sectors in Thailand for different reasons representative of personal agency and globalisation were recruited. Two semi-structured interviews were individually conducted and the recordings were transcribed and analysed using discourse analysis and narrative framework in three chapters, focusing on indexicality issues in their national subject positions, the significance of family and friends, and critical experiences abroad. The participants’ identity negotiation was seen in different types of positioning in ideologically-imbued discourses and their identity construction mechanisms utilised linguistic tools of exclusion and belonging such as accent and code-mixing. Different languages were also used as discursive and cognitive resources of identity negotiation and construction. The participants were aware of their subject position shifts and viewed their identity as a ‘mixture’ or product of different cultures and heritage. The teller-audience co-construction of identity narratives was important due to the present researcher’s position of being an insider.

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In the last decade, bilingualism research has focused on areas of executive function (EF) as being enhanced through the bilingual and immersion education experiences. This thesis examined EF development in a group of 147 monolingual and bilingual children in Ireland using a longitudinal design over a three-year period. A battery of EF tasks and controls including non-verbal IQ and English receptive vocabulary were employed and the three testing phases were spaced an average of 1 year apart with a 96% retention rate of participants. Previous bilingual research often controls for socioeconomic status (SES) in their studies. This thesis decided to examine issues of (SES) by comparing low- and mid-SES monolingual and bilingual children across time. At Time 3 of testing a second cross-sectional study was carried out, comparing children from Gaeltacht or Irish-speaking areas of Ireland who were presumed to have higher levels of exposure to and experience with the second language (Irish) than the immersion bilingual children in the longitudinal study. Results indicated that EF advantages for bilingual children may emerge over time, particularly for the unified EF rather than the specific functions. Furthermore, mid-SES Gaeltacht children had the highest levels of performance on the most complex EF task (the Wisconsin Cart Sort Test) while the low- SES Gaeltacht children had the lowest levels of performance. These findings indicate that children's EF development can be enhanced through the bilingual and immersion education experience although factors such as SES and linguistic environments may be more influential on children's cognitive development than immersion education and bilingualism alone.

No description available.

Η παρούσα έρευνα συνιστά μια κριτική βιβλιογραφική επισκόπηση της Διγλωσσίας και της Δίγλωσσης Εκπαίδευσης έτσι ώστε να καταφανούν μέσω μιας συστηματικής περιγραφικής αξιολόγησης οι διεπιστημονικές θεωρήσεις αυτού του ερευνητικού πεδίου. Μια μεθοδολογική ποιοτική καταγραφή εκατό αγγλικών άρθρων αποτελεί μια βάση δεδομένων η κριτική παρουσίαση και ερμηνεία της οποίας καταδεικνύει εκείνους τους κοινωνικο-πολιτισμικούς και γνωστικούς παράγοντες που αλληλεπιδρούν έτσι ώστε το δίγλωσσο υποκείμενο έρευνας, ο δίγλωσσος μαθητής, να κατασκευάσει νόημα για έναν κόσμο που ως συνεχές υπόκειται σε μια ποικιλία κοινωνικών αλλαγών. / This paper constist a multifactorial research on Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. A Critical Review of an electronical basis of data, a hundrend of English articles, demonsrate the qualitive aspects of a multicultural phenomenon which is characterized by the notion of the interdisciplinarity. The interaction between cognitive and sociocultural factors by which bilingual student try to construct meaning for a world that as a continuum subject to a variety of social changes.