Browsing by Subject "Sociolinguistics"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Impact of Interlocutor and Task on Second-grade One-way Chinese Immersion Students’ Language Use
    (2021-08) Liu, Mengying
    This case study explores patterns of first language (L1) and second language (L2) use by three second graders attending an early total one-way Chinese immersion program in the U.S. as they carried out classroom tasks and activities with different interlocutors in the classroom. Their naturally occurring verbal interactions in the classroom were audio-recorded all day long for six near-consecutive days. Data were transcribed and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitatively, Rbrul was used to model each of the three children’s choice between Chinese and English to identify which contextual factor(s) consistently contributed to their choices. Qualitative analysis was then performed to provide contextual information for their verbal interactions that cannot be captured by the quantitative results, and to explore possible explanations for the quantitative patterns. Findings show that the three children differed from one another considerably in their overall use of Chinese: one child almost always spoke Chinese, and the other two children used more English, depending on contextual variables. The contextual factor that most affected all three children’s use of either Chinese or English was their interlocutor. The teacher, researcher, and particular student (Filip) as interlocutors strongly promoted the children’s use of Chinese; other students as interlocutors variably promoted their use of English. The different social roles that each of the three children played in the classroom also seemed to relate to their use or non-use of Chinese. A leadership role that involved a child’s identification with the teacher appeared to promote that child’s L2 use, while another child’s resistance to the teacher’s authority tended to promote that child’s L1 use. Peer leaders, either emulating or resisting the teacher, appeared to exert strong impact on language behavior of other children who played the role of follower. Such followers tended to accommodate to the language preferences of peer leaders moment to moment in oral interaction. Other contextual factors also affected the three children’s language use. Academic contexts overall promoted their use of Chinese while non-academic contexts promoted English. Within academic contexts, the content areas of Chinese language arts and math promoted Chinese and the content areas of science and health, while less well represented in the data base, seemed to promote English and Chinese respectively. Teacher-fronted activities promoted Chinese for all three students, while writing activities and interactive activities impacted different children’s language use differently. When the children were on-task, they spoke significantly more Chinese than in off-task situations. Theoretical and pedagogical implications of these findings are explored. In particular, the social role a child plays is an important and useful construct to understand language use in immersion classrooms. These findings suggest that when teachers assign children to small groups, they need to pay attention to the roles that the children are playing and try to strategically alter group membership to maximize the children’s use of the immersion language. Pedagogically, the findings support the use of inductive teaching approaches, rather than just lecturing, to promote children’s use of the immersion language.
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    "I‘ll get by with a little help from my friends": peer response groups in the composition classroom.
    (2011-05) Witikko, Neil Bryan
    Peer response groups in the composition classroom have become a standard part of the writing process for many teachers. However, some teachers maintain that the results of peer response groups are uneven at best, noting that students do not stay on task or that the quality of the student response itself is superficial. These concerns and others led researchers to a great deal of study on this topic during the 1980s and 1990s. There is, however, a gap in current research about the students' discourse in peer response groups, how that discourse affects students revisions, and students' thought processes as they make their choices during the revision process. This qualitative study helps to fill this gap by taking a look inside eight writing groups of a College-in-the-Schools / AP composition class in northern Minnesota. Using an ethnographic and sociolinguistic analytical framework and the constant comparative method for the data analysis, this study examines the discourse of peer response groups and how that discourse relates to the revision of student writing. Findings of this study include observations of the intertextual nature of peer response, the collaborative generation of ideas in response sessions, and how the peer response process allows students to examine new perspectives. This study also includes implications for researchers and for teachers who are interested in using peer response groups in their classrooms.
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    Moroccan Immigrants in Granada, Spain: Negotiating language, culture, and identity
    (2020-05) Ready, Carol
    Analyzing multilingual situations from a sociolinguistic perspective has traditionally involved characterizing where, when, and how languages are used, utilizing constructs that characterize language use as stable and domain-specific, which references static social categories or bounded ethnolinguistic identities. These long-standing constructs in sociolinguistics are unable to account for language use within the complex social realities of Moroccans in Spain. In addition, current conceptualizations of identity foreground the central role of language in the relationship between the individual and the social such that language can be used to construct a sense of self. Questions remain regarding how subject positions may be negotiated through language use in a context where individuals' (like Moroccans') subjectivities and language practices are highly contested and surveilled. Furthermore, it is unclear to what extent speakers' own subject position and language practices are contingent upon processes of differentiation (i.e. broader ideological frameworks). To address these issues, I examine the relationship between the sociopolitical realities of the Moroccan community in Granada, Spain and the role of language use, identity negotiation, and language attitudes and ideologies in Moroccan immigrants' participation in Spanish society using a linguistic ethnographic approach to language which maintains that language and the social world are mutually shaping. The data include 95 hours of recordings from sociolinguistic interviews which elicited narratives and small stories, 55 questionnaires, and 77 observation and reflection entries that were collected from 30 first and 28 second generation members of the Moroccan community as well as eight interviews over the course of ten months with six focal participants. First, in regard to the language practices of Moroccans in Granada, the findings show that these practices are relational or social as opposed to a-temporal and structural. The social relationship itself thus plays an important role in the way speakers negotiate their language practices. While first generation speakers tend to use Dārīža more frequently and second generation speakers use Spanish, both groups used features from both Dārīža and Spanish more overall. In addition, speakers from both groups used features from French (for first generation speakers) and English (for second generation speakers). Speakers from both groups employed code-switched practices more frequently than any one language alone. However, the surveys were unable to account for such fluid language practices, thus demonstrating the importance of employing qualitative methods like observations, in addition to quantitative methods like surveys. Furthermore, the linguistic practices that do not fit into the idea of strict functional or domain separation point to a need to examine the relational and interpersonal aspects of language use. By placing the individual at the center for understanding larger social processes of language use, the approach taken in the current study transcends the micro- and macro- level distinctions that characterize sociolinguistic research. The findings presented here serve as a catalyst for re-examining other traditional constructs in sociolinguistics that are based on macro- and micro- distinctions of linguistic phenomena. Second, in an analysis of social identities as constructed in small stories, the findings demonstrate how first and second generation speakers are able to leverage fluid language practices to negotiate their positions as members of various communities. While Moroccan identity continues to be highly contested within Spanish society, first and second generation Moroccans utilize their multilingual repertoires to align themselves with specific identities and positions in sophisticated ways. These positions facilitated access to social spaces where Moroccans may have been denied entry. For example, speakers' multicultural positions helped them to access job opportunities that had been previously out of reach. Throughout this analysis, I argue that small stories should be treated as rich sites for understanding social identity constructions like narratives. Third, while the language practices can be characterized as fluid and dynamic, Moroccans hold diglossic and monoglossic views of their language practices. However, pluralist ideologies, which valued multilingual practices, were also present and were often in tension with monoglossic ideologies, which require speakers to engage in monolingual language practices in certain settings, despite their multilingual repertoires. The scope of influence of these ideological frameworks is limited as Moroccans' fluid language practices frequently challenged their monoglossic and diglossic perspectives. This finding serves as a caution against directly linking language ideologies and attitudes with language practices as they may only be one aspect that affects speakers' language choices. This study provides the first comprehensive study of language practices among Moroccans in Spain outside of educational institutions. The current work contributes to the sociolinguistic literature on multilingualism and social identities in migrant communities by challenging and refining long-standing traditional constructs in sociolinguistics, namely, structural approaches in characterizing multilingual language use. In this work, I argue for characterizations of multilingual practices that transcend micro- and macro- level distinctions. Finally, the findings from this work have implications for European and Spanish policymakers in the areas of education, community relations, international affairs, and public opinion. As the governments at each level seek to address the needs of individuals and groups, they must take into account that identities are not static and bounded categories that determine an individual's success, or lack thereof, in their participation in society. Moroccans demonstrate that it is precisely the contested linguistic practices and identity positions which allow them to successfully participate in a Spanish and global society.
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    Receding or resurgent? On the use of cantase (and cantara) in Galician Spanish
    (2017-06) Anderson, Ana
    Predicting the outcome of language contact situations is complicated by the fact that the primary agents of linguistic change—individual speakers—are unpredictable (van Coetsem, 2000; Thomason, 2001). My dissertation examines the variety of Spanish spoken in Galicia, Spain, where individual language choices are often motivated not by utility but by complex identitary and ideological factors. Specifically, I employ both spoken and written data to investigate the distribution of two verb constructions that have parallel forms, but differing functions, in Galician and Spanish. I seek to determine the role of linguistic and social factors in conditioning the distribution of these forms in the contact variety of Spanish. Results indicate that, while language contact is likely at play in the region, both historical and more recent social factors such as education and mobility practices (i.e. Britain, 2010) must be taken into account in determining the impact of Galician on the Spanish spoken in the region.
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    Socially stratified phonetic variation and perceived identity in Puerto Rican Spanish.
    (2009-08) Mack, Sara Lynn
    This dissertation examines the interaction between phonetic variation and perceptions of speaker identity in Puerto Rican Spanish. Using an interdisciplinary approach, three experiments were designed and carried out: (1) an descriptive study of stereotypes about sexual orientation and male speech, (2) an observational study examining the relationship between acoustic parameters and perceived sexual orientation, perceived height, perceived social class, and perceived age, and (3) an implicit-processing experiment examining the influence of social stereotypes on memory for voices. The study was carried out in the San Juan, Puerto Rico, metropolitan area and included ninety-six participants. Results of the first experiment indicate that there is considerable uniformity in notions of speech variation associated with the gay male speech stereotype for the participants in the study, and that the most cited stereotypical markers of sexual orientation are related to stereotypical notions of gender. However, a majority of the respondents explicitly stated that although they realize a stereotype exists, they do not believe there is necessarily a correspondence between stereotypes of gay men's speech and real life production. Results of the second experiment show that listeners do evaluate speakers' voices differently in terms of perceived sexual orientation, and that perceptions of sexual orientation are most strongly predicted by one acoustic measure of vowel quality (the second resonant frequency of the vowel /e/, which relates to tongue position in the anterior-posterior dimension). An examination of the relationship between perceptions of sexual orientation and perceptions of height, age, and social class revealed that perceptions of height were correlated with perceived sexual orientation. The third experiment showed that listeners responded more quickly to speakers previously rated as more gay sounding than they did to speakers rated as more straight sounding, and the slowest mean responses were for the deleted variant. Most significantly, a d-prime analysis showed the strongest signal detection in the case of the sibilant ([s]) when produced by stereotypically gayer sounding speakers. The results suggest a relationship between /s/ variation and listener perceptions of sexual orientation as well as a possible effect of perceived sexual orientation on speech processing. Taken together, these results underscore the need for methods that measure both conscious and subconscious effects of stereotypes in speech production and perception.
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    Sociophonetic perception of African American English in Minnesota
    (2014-05) Abdurrahman, Muhammad Ibn Abdullah
    Although it can be authentically spoken by people who don't share their lineage, African American English, a variety of American English, is primarily spoken by the descendants of forced immigrants from Africa to North America. An assumption underlying most work on African American English (AAE) is that the variety is not subject to regional variation. Despite this assumption, some studies have found regional variation in AAE (Hinton and Pollock, 2000; Thomas, 2007). This variation is typically explained as assimilation toward or away from local varieties spoken by European Americans. Some studies have suggested that it assimilates with other dialects in less segregated areas or where blacks have greater access to educational opportunity (Hinton and Pollock, 2000). Other studies show that AAE speakers are less likely to produce mainstream regional variants and even less likely in cases of greater racial segregation (Labov and Harris 1986; Bailey, 2001.) This dissertation studies listeners' associations between regional variation and ethnicity. The study focuses on the influence of the regional features of Minnesota English on the perception of talker ethnicity. Hinton and Pollock (2000) begin their study of regional AAE phonology with the understanding that that the Midwest is less segregated than the south, and consider that this may imply that AAE in the Midwest is more likely to assimilate with regional European American varieties. Hence, we would predict that listeners in Minnesota would expect some tendency on the part of African Americans to use Minnesotan English (MNE) features, and hence said listeners would have little hesitation labeling speech containing Minnesotan variants as having been produced by European Americans even if it were produced by an African American. This study examined this topic with a perception experiment. Previous research has shown that listeners can ascertain a speaker's race from audio-only samples of content-neutral speech (Buck, 1968; Roberts, 1966; Walton and Orlikoff, 1994; Plichta, 2001; Thomas and Reaser, 2004). We examined listeners' judgments of the likelihood of particular speaker-listener comparisons. We paired the speech of African Americans and European Americans from Minnesota with pictures of African Americans and European Americans. We were particularly interested in whether listeners would be less likely to judge the speaker-picture pairs to be a match when the tokens contained variants that were characteristic of the 'mainstream' regional variety spoken in Minnesota, and the pictures were of African Americans. Listeners were more likely to rate actual matches between voice and face ethnicity as matches than they were to rate them as mismatches for male voices, but not for female ones. The unwillingness to rate voices produced by European Americans with local Minnesotan features as matches to African American faces suggests that listeners do not believe the local variant of AAE to incorporate Minnesota English features, at least for male speakers. Implications for models of sociophonetic perception and for studies of variation in AAE are discussed.