Pilar Safont

The present paper deals with the requestive development of a consecutive trilingual boy from ages 3.6 to 5.6. To the best of our knowledge, no previous study has accounted for the requestive development (i.e. use of directives) of successive trilinguals in early childhood. Yet, in previous analyses of our data involving years 2.6–3.6, we identified an increase in the use of conventionally indirect forms and a decrease in the production of direct request types coinciding with the introduction of a third language.

As academic language skills develop, young learners are able to rise to the challenge of increasingly complex communication in increasingly formal settings (Snow, 2014; Uccelli et al., 2015). Studies suggest that CLIL contexts may favour the development of academic language skills (Dalton-Puffer, 2007; Nikula, 2007; Marsh, 2008; Pasqual Peña, 2010) to a greater extent than non-CLIL contexts. However, research that attempts to test this assumption has so far tended to do so from a pragmalinguistic perspective (Lorenzo & Rodríguez, 2014; Lorenzo, 2017).

This volume brings together the latest findings from research on multilingual language learning and use in multilingual communities. Suzanne Flynn, Håkan Ringbom and Larissa Aronin are some of the prestigious scholars who have contributed to this book. As argued by this last author in her chapter, although multilingualism has always existed, the important changes that research on this phenomenon has recently undergone, like that of adopting a multilingual perspective in its studies, should always be borne in mind.

The study examines early multilingual formulaic speech with a focus on the English classroom. We have followed a discourse-pragmatic approach in the analysis of our data, which comprises transcripts from eight 45-minute sessions. Transcripts from these sessions involved 184 participants from two different age ranges. In this analysis, we have considered formulas produced in three languages: Catalan, Spanish, and English.