Questions of language acquisition and usage in a bilingual situation in the presentations of the participants of the conference “Problems of ontolinguistics - 2017”. 26-28 June 2017 Herzen State Pedagogical University (Saint Petersburg)

Conferences “Problems of Ontolinguistics” devoted to the questions of children’s acquisition of Russian as a first and second language have been held in Herzen State Pedagogical University annually since 1993. Researchers of child speech from Russia, Europe, and the USA attend the conferences. In 2017, language acquisition and usage in a bilingual situation were discussed. The article devoted to the analysis of the main trends in the modern studies of the speech of bilingual children speaking Russian as one of their native languages: patterns of acquisition of Russian as a second native language in the situation of mass bilingualism; specific linguistic features of heritage language and mechanisms of language conservation and transfer in the situation of emigration; problems of teaching Russian as a second language in national schools; specific character of language acquisition by migrant children in the largest cities in modern Russia. The presentations at the conference were based on the analysis of speech of Russian-speaking monolingual children, Russian-Kazakh, Russian-Udmurt, Russian-Yakut, English-Russian, French-Russian, German-Russian, and Dutch-Russian bilinguals, including preschoolers, school and university students. The author of the article also analyses studies dedicated to the various aspects of development of child language, metalanguage, and communicative competence, such as phonetics and grammar acquisition, individual lexicon formation, development of written speech, acquisition of different speech genres and culture codes, as well as works on the speech diagnostics of bilingual children and methodology of teaching children Russian s a second language.