As the number of young multilinguals continues to grow globally, there is a parallel need for fair and effective assessment of multilingual development. This chapter aims to provide a state-of-the art picture of the critical and unique needs of assessing multilingual children from ages 3 to 11. We first define the “multilingual” population and survey two domains of assessment: language proficiency and content area knowledge. We then address the challenges of assessing multilinguals in three key areas: (1) the heterogeneity in the young multilingual population, (2) the articulation of connections between language and content, and (3) the difficulties in differentiating between typically developing multilingual development and language learning difficulties (also known as developmental language disorders) or learning difficulties. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the future of multilingual assessment practices, considering the roles of technology in multilingual assessments, dynamic assessment, and the application of translanguaging in assessing multilinguals.

Chapter 5 describes the four chief domains of linguistic politeness in Korean: speech style, honorifics, terms of address, and gendered language. Based on characteristics of those four areas, the chapter proposes different variables governing when and how to use different components of polite language, in addition to two exceptional subcases of honorifics. The term “politeness” is used in this chapter in a broad sense to denote any linguistic expression that shows respect. Honorifics are a major component of linguistic politeness in this sense, but far from the only one.

Korean has emerged as an important world language both for an expanding constituency of learners and teachers of Korean as a foreign/second language, as well as for scholars and students of general and Korean linguistics. Thousands of heritage schools, elementary, intermediate and high schools, colleges and universities, private institutes and government agencies around the world offer Korean language instruction at a range of levels. The number of institutions offering Korean and, consequently, the number of students learning Korean is constantly on the increase in Australia, Europe, China, Japan, New Zealand, the former Soviet Union, and the United States. An ever-growing number of general and Korean linguists, linguistics students, and language educators are interested in the structure and use of Korean and its universal and typological features from diachronic, synchronic, and dynamic perspectives.

Chapter 14 examines several sets of person-denoting nominals that show interesting patterns in terms of how they participate in compounding and how they take arguments and modifiers in the syntax. Using a few key exemplar nominals such as ‘writer’, ‘author’, and ‘passenger’, the chapter argues that the different structures in which the nominals appear relate to whether the denotation of a given use of the nominal is fundamentally dispositional, relating to a long-term property, or fundamentally episodic, relating to a particular event or situation. It illustrates several morphological and syntactic differences which it then accounts for in terms of these semantic properties. The last part of the chapter examines NP-internal syntax and develops an account for structures involving modifiers which are marked with genitive case, and those which lack genitive marking.

Children have an intuitive predilection to play with language and respond to language play. Multilingual children may demonstrate additional talents and characteristics in using language playfully as a result of being able to access multiple cultural and linguistic resources. This chapter provides an overview of the effects of multilingualism on children’s language play by first addressing how language play is used by children who are learning a new language in the classroom environment. It then presents a case study of how two simultaneous trilingual siblings displayed their dexterity in the use of ludic language in the everyday context. The evidence suggests that multilingual children tend to use language play to transcend the linguistic norms of their ambient languages to negotiate meaning, leverage their communicative intents, and develop their unique multilingual identity. The chapter suggests that multilingual children tend to use language play to synthesize hybrid elements from their languages and cultures and create a wide variety of new meanings that no single linguistic system can offer. This syncretic nature of multilingual children’s language play enables them to develop a nuanced and creative manner of communication.

The vast majority of children grow up in bilingual or multilingual households, but the extent to which they develop advanced linguistic abilities and even literacy in all their languages depends on many factors. These include age of acquisition of the two languages, the amount of exposure to and use of the languages daily and in specific or diverse contexts, and the status of the languages in the society, including access to schooling. For some simultaneous and sequential bilingual children, one or more of their languages is a minority language not widely spoken outside the home and with little cultural, educational, social and political status. In some other circumstances, the language or languages can be minoritized, available beyond the home but considered lower in status in the society. In this chapter, I discuss research on the development of the minority/heritage language(s) in simultaneous and sequential bilingual and multilingual children, with specific focus on the school-age period. I focus on how bilingual balance and language shift in these children and in many cases lead to language attrition and incomplete acquisition of morphosyntactic aspects of the minority language.

Chapter 8 examines the typologically rare three-way laryngeal contrast found in Korean. As also noted in Chapter 2, the manner contrasts in the Korean obstruent inventory have been the point of departure for many descriptive and theoretical contributions to the typology of laryngeal contrasts and related issues, such as feature theory. More recently, a diachronic change characterized by the redistribution of cue weights from the consonantal to the vocalic portion of the signal, mirroring the common historical process of tonogenesis, has sparked renewed interest in the Korean laryngeal contrasts. The opportunity to observe such a change in vivo, and to compare its progression across different dialects, provides an ideal testing ground for theories of sound change. This chapter provides a review of the literature on the phonetic and phonological characterizations of the stop-laryngeal contrast, as well as a survey of dialectal and diachronic variation in its phonetic realization. The chapter closes with an apparent-time study documenting dialectal variation and change in the use of three acoustic cues to the contrast (VOT, f0, and H1-H2) in three dialects of Korean.

This chapter explores the integral role that siblings’ multilingual discourse plays across diverse family lives and sites of learning. In discussing key concepts in the field of family studies, young children are viewed as spending as much if not more time with siblings than their parents. This chapter looks at siblings as agentive in shaping the language environment in multilingual families and reflects on research in the area of siblings’ language choices, humour and intimacy as well as sibling rivalry in multilingual discourse. A distinctive feature of sibling relationships is their seriality, and research on the ‘niche’ of each child is looked at in relation to a child’s emerging multilingualism. Siblings’ multilingual discourse is viewed as dynamic and their language practices as in flux as the family grows, moves, or separates. Research on siblings as literacy mediators and studies on their creative multilingualism are examined. This chapter recognises the key role of digital technology in children’s lives and examines siblings’ multilingual discourse in these new digital spaces. New research is shared that investigates how multilingual siblings worked together on an international digital storytelling project.

Chapter 11 shows how linguistic experience plays a vital role in the perception and production of L2 speech sounds. The study presented in this chapter examines the differences between advanced English-speaking heritage language (HL) and non-heritage language (non-HL) learners of Korean by looking at their cross-linguistic categorization patterns and their degree of accuracy in identifying Korean stops. As predicted, based on the SLM, HL learners’ performance was more similar to the Korean native speakers than was non-HL learners’ performance. The results suggest that early exposure to the HL does indeed give an advantage to HL learners over their advanced non-HL counterparts, and that longer exposure to the target language for non-HL learners has a positive but limited role in obtaining a native-like perception of the three-way contrasts in Korean stops.

Chapter 26 aims to rationalize and discuss how a genre-based approach is best applied as a guiding principle for different levels of the Korean language curricula. The chapter showcases the application of the genre-based approach to intermediate level language teaching using a story genre, that is, folktales. After presenting the theoretical basis for the genre-based approach in foreign language education, the chapter highlights the empirically attested benefits of applying this framework. It then discusses issues pertaining to developing such courses – practical issues to consider, activities and tasks to be used in classroom instructions with examples, assessing learning outcomes, and so on. The proposal made in this chapter is an attempt to expand the horizon beyond what most previous research on this topic has achieved and to maximize the benefits of the genre-based curriculum in a lower level course with the popular genre of folktales.