Analysing child writing in multilingual contexts: Combining corpora, computational tools, and methods for crossing the borders of monolingual studies on communicative competence

Working as a computational corpus linguist in a multilingual area, my research aims to analyse communicative competence as shown in writing not only across different languages but also within multilingual students. I have been working with corpora that contain comparable and/or multilingual – partly longitudinal, partly cross-sectional – data for L1 and L2 students of German and Italian with additional data for English as a foreign language. My research investigates plurilingual competences and questions traditional concepts of L1 and L2 categories when researching students from multilingual areas. In my work, I combine data-driven analysis frameworks, quantitative corpus linguistic methods and qualitative investigations in collaboration with my colleagues, relating language features with detailed sociolinguistic metadata on students’ language backgrounds. This article brings together some of my work in the area of non-adult writing, presenting the various corpora I have worked on and how they have been used to analyse communicative competence in both German and Italian children’s writing moving from the assumption of clearly separated L1 and L2 contexts towards observing multicompetence in young writers. While the studies presented here show some attempts to uncover the complexity of different learning contexts in a multilingual society, combining various resources as well as quantitative and qualitative research methods, the article will also discuss challenges, potentials and limitations of combining data, as well as methods and tools borrowed from different disciplines, with an outlook for future research in the field.