For this episode, we invited Dr. Sharon Unsworth, who is a lecturer and researcher on second language acquisition at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on how to best raise children bilingually and which factors play a role in this process and best predict success. She is involved in various projects on early foreign language acquisition and bilingual primary education. More specifically, on the role of age and environmental factors such as the quality of the input, and she is currently leading a project on how the two languages of bilingual children influence each other. While Sharon is based in the Netherlands now, she is originally from England and moved to the Netherlands while completing her PhD. Before starting at Radboud, Sharon held positions at Utrecht University, Leiden University, and the Meertens Institute. Outside of her academic duties, Sharon, as a mother of two bilingual children, regularly gives workshops for parents about raising bilingual children for example.
Sharon has also started a podcast about child bilingualism called Kletsheads - which is in both Dutch and English. You can find more about it on their website, social media pages (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and even LinkedIn!) and on all podcast platforms!
And together with her colleagues at Radboud University and the Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, she founded the first child language festival in the Netherlands, Kletskoppen, which took place for the first time in 2017.
Go to our website to read the transcript!
MLST is brought to you by volunteers at Bilingualism Matters Edinburgh. The views of our guests don’t always reflect our own, as we hope to provide an accessible platform for the findings of current research and the perspectives of experts. For more resources like definitions of linguistic terms, episode transcripts, and information about the team, go to our website at www.mlstpodcast.com.
Recorded on 29/10/2021
Music: Arc of the Sun by The 126ersssssss
