ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the interface of language acquisition/proficiency and immigrant identity in Russian-Hebrew and Russian-German preschool children. Both language and identity are viewed here as complex and dynamic. Linguistic structure is traditionally divided into phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and lexicon, but investigation of language also includes more speaker-based phenomena such as proficiency, and attitudes. Language-identity relations have been widely investigated with tasks adapted from social psychology and sociolinguistics. In the language domain, people focus on language proficiency as assessed by standardized tests for acceptance and placement of preschool children in educational programs which test expressive and receptive language abilities; for identity, people are concerned with ethnicity, ethnolinguistic identity, social preferences, and attitudes to speakers and languages, none of which are explicitly used as gatekeepers in schools, but all of which influence policy decisions in subtle.
