Receptive multilingualism and second language acquisition: the language transition process of adopted children

In this paper a context where receptive multilingualism represents a communicative strategy of adjustment in a context of second language acquisition is discussed. The traditional scope of receptive multilingualism has been extended to multilingual environments resulting from an experience of mobility, namely transnational adoptive families. Similar to other contexts of receptive multilingualism, this scenario involves asymmetrical language competences, but in this case language contact evolves quite rapidly in the acquisition of one of the languages involved. By means of 29 h of interactional data and discourse analyses, we investigated the family communication of three Italian families, one of them adopting in Russia and two of them in Chile. Unlikely for a lexically and structurally more distant language (Russian), in a framework of intelligible languages (Spanish-Italian), the adoption of receptive multilingualism leads adopted children to rely on a longer 'receptive stage'.