The present study aims at exploring: (a) the role of the educational setting in the acquisition of aspect and executive functions (i.e. updating) skills, (b) the acquisition of the aspectual features in Greek-German bilingual children and (c) the impact of updating on the acquisition of aspect. Imperfective aspect has been found to be acquired later than perfective in previous studies. Moreover, a bilingual educational setting seems to enhance not only cognitive but also linguistic abilities. The participants of the present study are Greek-German bilingual children, who attend a bilingual or a Greek dominant educational setting. They were tested in two baseline tasks, two linguistic tasks and an executive function, updating, task. The findings reveal that bilinguals who attend a monolingual educational setting performed similarly to the monolingual control group on aspect, whereas bilinguals who attend a bilingual educational setting scored lower than the monolinguals. In the updating task, the students of the bilingual educational setting scored higher than the other groups. Overall, our findings suggest that the bilingual educational setting seems to boost executive function (updating) skills, while the acquisition of aspect is affected by vocabulary knowledge.

This study examines the role of aspect in L2 acquisition within the framework of the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli 2003; Hawkins and Hattori 2006). Aspect in Greek is a grammaticalized, interpretable feature affecting the argument structure and the telic/atelic interpretation of manner-of-motion verbs. As such, aspect is relevant to the syntax-semantics and the syntaxdiscourse interfaces. Native speakers and L2 learners of Greek were tested on the comprehension and production of manner-of-motion verbs. The results show that aspectual distinctions are appropriately used by L2 learners, at both interfaces. However, unlike native speakers, L2 learners rely more on lexical properties of prepositions and verbs than on grammatical aspect to encode (a)telicity. Moreover, L2 grammars of Greek seem to involve a one-to-one correspondence between perfectivity and telicity.

Pedagogical translanguaging (PTL) refers to the use of educational techniques that incorporate learners’ entire linguistic repertoire. Recent studies indicate that PTL is efficient in the teaching of morphological awareness to bilingual children. The question remains whether it can be successfully applied in the highly specific context of adult forced migrants’ classrooms. This study describes a new protocol developed within the framework of PTL to teach derivational morphology to L2 French and Greek adults. We used questionnaires to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the feasibility of the protocol, teachers’ and learners’ attitudes, and learners’ emotions in the PTL lesson. A total of 141 migrant learners (79 forced migrants) and 13 teachers were involved in 23 2 h lessons. Teachers and learners gave high overall evaluations of the feasibility of the PTL protocol and of their pleasure from teaching and learning using PTL tools. Learners’ ease of learning and learning benefits were positively influenced by their perception of the proximity between their L1 and L2. Learners reported higher positive emotions and lower negative emotions during the PTL lesson, while forced migrants showed more hope and shame overall than voluntary migrants, as well as gained more benefits from PTL due to enjoyment. These findings suggest that the use of pedagogical translanguaging in migrants’ classrooms is feasible and develops positive attitudes and emotions, which are more pronounced in forced migrants.

The present study explores the effects of literacy support in the languages of the bilingual child on the linguistic and cognitive skills of (non-)heritage speakers. 70 children speaking Albanian (L1) and Greek (L2) are divided into three groups according to whether they receive literacy support in their L1, L2 or in both languages. To test the children's proficiency in Greek, we used an expressive vocabulary task, two working memory tasks, a non-verbal intelligence task and a sentence repetition task (SRT). The findings suggest that good levels of biliteracy established through bilingual education positively influence the child’s linguistic and cognitive performance. Furthermore, the lack of working memory effects on the children’s SRT performance emphasizes the importance of biliteracy development and its educational support, which together with vocabulary knowledge contribute to bilingual development.

This exploratory study aims to investigate the effectiveness of group dictation in primary school children with a refugee background. More specifically, running dictation was employed in the teaching of two grammatical phenomena in L2 Greek, tense and gender agreement. Two studies were conducted to investigate each grammatical structure separately. Each study consisted of a pre-test that investigated the pupils’ performance on the grammatical structure, the teaching intervention via running dictation, and a post-test that explored its efficiency on pupils’ accuracy. All pupils that participated in the studies were enrolled in formal Greek education and their L1s were Arabic, Farsi or Kurdish. According to the results from both studies, the children’s post-intervention performance did not improve significantly. However, the pupils’ accuracy on some of the grammatical forms tested as well as their error patterns indicated that running dictation helped the pupils notice the target grammatical phenomena and thus become more aware of them. Moreover, some data showed that older pupils benefited more from the target-activity than younger ones. Therefore, the present study provides evidence that running dictation may have a positive qualitative rather than quantitative impact on learners’ grammatical development and is dependent on the pupils’ age.