Cognate Vocabulary in Language Acquisition and Use ― Attitudes, Awareness, Activation

This book brings together linguistic, psycholinguistic and educational perspectives on the phenomenon of cognate vocabulary across languages. It presents a large-scale, long-term research project focusing on Polish-English cognates and their use by bilingual and multilingual learners/users of English. It discusses extensive qualitative and quantitative data to explain which factors affect a learner's awareness of cognates, how adult learners can benefit from raised awareness and whether cognate vocabulary can be used with younger learners as a motivational strategy. The work shows how cognate vocabulary can be examined from a range of methodological perspectives and provides considerable insights into crosslinguistic influences in language learning. While the focus of the studies is Polish-English cognates, the research will be of interest to anyone teaching learners of different language constellations, levels, ages and backgrounds.

Agnieszka Otwinowska is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland. Her research interests include crosslinguistic influences, bilingual and multilingual language acquisition in children and adults, language teaching, bilingual education and CLIL. She is the co-editor of Teaching and Learning in Multilingual Contexts (with Gessica De Angelis, Multilingual Matters, 2014).