Visualising Language Complexity and Language Monitoring in the DMM

Multilingualism is becoming a crucial issue in our society, especially in the European context. Furthermore, research shows that there is a tendency towards raising children with more than one language (Claire 2012). This brings many new aspects to education, theoretical concepts and approaches to multilingualism. Therefore, (multi-)linguists try to illuminate multilingualism from different points of view and try to explore and explain different paths of language development academically. The theoretical part of this thesis will present theories of multilingualism and language complexity. This theoretical background provides the basis on which the author of this thesis created suggestions on how to illustrate and visualise language complexity. The main basis for the created illustrations will be the Dynamic Model of Multilingualism by Herdina and Jessner (2002). Furthermore, theoretical information concerning language monitoring and possibilities to illustrate language monitoring will be presented. Finally, the last part of this thesis will show that it is possible to teach multilingual skills at school.