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Supporting All Students With Labor-Based Grading
No full textIn 2021, I introduced a labor-based method for grading in my language courses that eschews summative performance assessments. No assignments are graded beyond the recording of whether they were completed as assigned; instead, I provide regular and substantive feedback and hold conferences with students in which we discuss their progress and set goals based on individual needs, deficits, and motivations. Students earn final grades by completing assignments according to a contract signed at the beginning of the semester. The default grade for a course when students generally complete all expectations is a B; those students aiming for an A may demonstrate exceptional effort in a variety of possible ways, for instance by doing work multiple times according to feedback, coming to office hours for additional support, or regularly attending our conversation group. Labor-based grading reduces student anxiety, makes the content more accessible to all by allowing individuals to acquire language at paces appropriate for their abilites, and redirects the focus in the classroom back to the joy in learning for its own sake. In addition to benefits such as fewer violations of academic integrity, my retention from semester to semester has increased, particularly among enthusiastic but anxious students and those who find learning a language difficult. By eliminating reliance on testing, I am better able to include the methodological variety and student choice in summative assessments that universal design requires. My strongest students begin to shed the perfectionism that years of seeking the highest grade had trained in them and take more risks to make the errors through which we learn. And in an atmosphere that celebrates the joy in curiosity, the excitement of acquiring language, and the power of working hard at something one enjoys, my program has gained energy and comradery
Modalidad Epistémica y Evidencialidad en el Discurso testimonial
Get PDFLa Modalidad se ha abordado desde tres perspectivas: 1) la semántica, asociada con aspectos como la verdad, la posibilidad y necesidad y 2) la pragmático-discursiva que se interesa por el grado de compromiso asumido por el hablante con lo que enuncia. Un tipo particular de modalidad que llama nuestra atención es la modalidad epistémica, la cual se refiere a la proposición que se sabe o se cree como verdadera, de ahí a que el hablante se comprometa directa o parcialmente con la verdad del enunciado (Ruiz, 2006), pero también echa mano de distintas fuentes para construir dicho conocimiento, esto es, la Evidencialidad. En este trabajo, desde un enfoque mixto (cuantitativo y cualitativo), hacemos un vínculo entre las tres áreas (Semántica, Pragmática y Discurso) para alcanzar los siguientes objetivos: a) identificar los recursos lingüísticos que utilizan las hablantes, mujeres víctimas del conflicto armado en Colombia para configurar su grado de conocimiento y compromiso al narrar sus testimonios de experiencias como víctimas de reclutamiento forzado y violencia sexual por parte de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP) en Colombia y b) presentar las fuentes evidenciales en las que se apoyan para configurar el conocimiento de los hechos acontecidos durante esta etapa de su vida. El corpus analizado fueron diez testimonios en extenso extraídos del texto: Testimonios de la Rosa Blanca del Centro de Memoria Histórica en Colombia (2022). Para el análisis y la clasificación de elementos de Modalidad Epistémica partimos de las categorías expuestas por Bravo (2017), y para los recursos de evidencialidad nos basamos en las propuestas de Willet (1988) y Kotwica (2018). Los resultados muestran que las hablantes se posicionan directa e indirectamente con el conocimiento expresado empleando construcciones en primera persona sin atenuar, pero también hacen uso de expresiones como supongo que, recuerdo que, creo que, las cuales las comprometen menos con la verdad expresada. En cuanto a las fuentes utilizan la evidencialidad visual y reportativa o indirecta acompañadas de elementos temporales. Dichos recursos nos permiten analizar el posicionamiento asumido por las hablantes y los elementos para darle credibilidad a su discurso, pero también coadyuvan a la caracterización del Discurso testimonial desde una perspectiva lingüística.
Palabras clave: Modalidad epistémica, Evidencialidad, Discurso Testimonial, mujeres, víctimas, conflicto armado, Semántica, Pragmática, Discurso, posicionamiento discursivo.
LINK DRIVE CON EL RESUMEN: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OPWyyczAeHqP-YGe9LEb7gQdK7m9xVZr/view?usp=sharin
The Phonological and Sociophonetic Perception of Devoiced Vowels in Mexican Spanish by Learners and Speakers of Other Dialects
No full textThis study seeks to identify the phonological and sociophonetic status of devoiced vowels typical of phrase-final speech in multiple varieties of Spanish (e.g., Dabkowski, 2018; Delforge, 2008; Gordon, 1980; Lipski, 2021). Vowels are characterized by lip rounding and the position of the tongue, often called the vowel quality (Davenport & Hannahs, 2020), though much less frequently do they have a phonological contrast in terms of voicing (Gordon, 1998). Despite vowel devoicing being a relatively rare phenomenon in Spanish, even in the varieties that have it (Delforge, 2008, 2012), that vowel devoicing occurs raises the question of how speakers of Spanish perceive devoiced vowels. To test this, L2 speakers (n = 27) and native speakers (n = 3) of Spanish living in the Midwest completed a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task that compared words with voiced and devoiced vowels phrase-finally and a matched guise task. Results show that native speakers easily recognize that devoiced vowels are allophones of the voiced phoneme. Moreover, learners are also able to perceive this categorization, but proficiency, study abroad experience, gender, knowing another language, preceding sound, and order of devoiced and voiced vowels in the audio played significant roles. In general, it was also found that devoicing is associated with positive social attributes like competence, attractiveness, and education, but not with trustworthiness. Devoiced vowels were also rated as more feminine and urban for most speakers. These findings highlight that while native speakers can correctly perceive devoiced allophones of voiced vowels, learners gain the ability to recover the quality of devoiced vowels over time. Moreover, this study contributes to the sociophonetic literature on devoiced vowels in Spanish (Bland, 2023; Dabkowski, 2020; Delforge, 2012), showing that learners of Spanish associate vowel devoicing in Mexican Spanish with mostly positive social attributes.
Keywords: Vowel Devoicing, Social Attributes, Mexican Spanish, L2 Spanish, Heritage Spanish, Perceptio
Dialect change in a Salvadoran family in the Twin Cities: cross-generational changes in /s/ weakening
No full textNegative language attitudes toward Salvadoran speech (Hart-Gonzalez, 1985) have led to changes in the Spanish of many Salvadorans who immigrate to the United States resulting in lower levels of /s/ weakening (Hernandez, 2020). Even within El Salvador, /s/ weakening, which occurs most frequently in the eastern region in both onset and coda positions, is oftentimes associated with low social prestige and limited education (Rivera Orellana, 2014; Iraheta, 2021, Brogan and Yi, 2022; & Brogan et. al, 2023) When Salvadorans in the U.S. are in close contact with speakers of central and northern Mexican dialects, lenition rates typically decrease among first-generation immigrants, and by the second generation /s/ lenition no longer occurs (Aaron & Hernandez, 2007; Hernandez & Maldonado, 2012; Parodi, 2004; Raymond, 2012; Villareal, 2014). Nonetheless, Tseng (2019) notes that some Salvadorans in the U.S. resist dialect change and express covert pride in their way of speaking. To further explore the issue of dialect change in Salvadoran immigrants to the U.S., this study focuses on 7 members of a Salvadoran family from the eastern region of the country who now reside in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Using PRAAT, occurrences of /s/ were segmented and classified into four allophones: [s], [ɵ], [h], and [Ø]. A total of 1400 tokens of /s/ were analyzed, and a logistic regression of both linguistic and social variables will be carried out. Initial findings show the continued presence of high weakening rates in the first generation, diverging from some previous research findings that have shown a shift to the sibilant. In addition, second generation speakers alternate between the sibilant and weakened allophones. The role of social networks, together with language attitudes, will be explored as important factors in understanding dialect maintenance and shift across generations
What role does social context play in Spanish-Valencian bilingual language processing?
Get PDFResearch shows that bilinguals share one lexicon for all their languages, which is accessed in a non-selective manner (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2012). And while linguistic and contextual factors affect the activation and retrieval of bilinguals’ languages (Altarriba, 2003; Pallier et al., 2001), the impact of social factors on bilingual lexical retrieval remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by investigating whether the social context ‘family/home’ triggers the activation of the language associated with it among bilingual speakers in the Valencian Community (Spain).
Sixty-two Spanish-Valencian bilinguals aged 15-17 (27F, 34M, 1Other) participated in a picture-word verification task conducted in the language not used in their ‘family/home’ context. The experiment began with participants reading a priming text describing a family-related event. Following this, they were shown 28 images (7 family-associated words, 7 control words [not family-associated], and 14 filler words), each accompanied by a label. After seeing each picture, they had to decide whether the label matched the picture while their response time was measured.
Preliminary results from the linear regression analysis indicate that participants responded faster to family-associated words than to control words. This was observed despite matching control and family words for various linguistic factors (e.g. word frequency, word length, orthographic and phonological neighbors, imageability, concreteness). These initial findings suggest that the social context evoked by the priming text can influence the retrieval of items related to this context, even when the experiment is conducted in the language not used in that context.
Factors such as participants’ self-reported frequency of language use, self-reported proficiency in Valencian and Spanish, and the importance of each language to their identity will be examined to shed light on the influence of social context in bilingual language processing. Findings will be discussed within the complex sociolinguistic and cultural context of the Valencian Community, especially considering recent political changes impacting language policy and planning.
This study contributes to our understanding of bilingual memory and language processing, particularly in communities where Spanish is in contact with another Romance language. Furthermore, it underscores the importance of incorporating social contextual factors in psycholinguistic research
Variación de las estructuras condicionales (no)prototípicas en español
No full textEl periodo condicional en español aparece normalmente estructurado en torno al esquema de prótasis-apódosis mediante la partícula si. La hipótesis, condición y causa están relacionadas y se manifiestan en las estructuras condicionales en mayor o menor medida. La clasificación tradicional entre distintos tipos de construcciones condicionales se sustituirá en este trabajo por la de condicionales prototípicas y no prototípicas, ya que da cuenta de los distintos valores que generan estas construcciones. Esta investigación estudiará la variación en el uso de las construcciones con si en el marco teórico funcional-cognitivo, más concretamente sobre la base teórica de la construcción de espacios mentales. Partimos de la hipótesis de que la conjunción si construye un espacio mental de asertividad que genera diversos significados que, al mismo tiempo, establecen un punto de vista discursivo. Se utilizarán los textos del Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA), de los cuales se han extraído 865 construcciones con si. Tales textos se clasifican en magazines, conversaciones espontáneas, entrevistas, documentales, emisiones deportivas, debates y noticias. El análisis será cualitativo mediante el estudio discursivo-cognitivo de la conjunción si y de los elementos lingüísticos con los que coaparece, como los tiempos verbales. La cuantificación se ha realizado mediante el programa estadístico Rbrul (Johnson 2009), que proporciona los porcentajes de cada categoría analizada. Se concluye que las construcciones con si dan lugar a distintos significados en función de las distintas formas lingüísticas con las que se combina y, especialmente, dotan al enunciado de un punto de vista asertivo. En el caso de las construcciones prototípicas, normalmente tal punto de vista asertivo se concreta en nociones como las de condición, la evidencialidad, la epistemicidad, entre otras. Por lo que respecta a las no prototípicas, y debido a la ausencia estructural de apódosis, tienden a constituir recursos de cortesía en la interacción, por lo que los valores van encaminados a la expresión de variados valores, y buena parte de ellas constituyen estructuras ya gramaticalizadas.
Johnson, D.E. (2009). Getting off the GoldVarb standard: Introducing Rbrul for mixed-effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3, (1), 359-383
“Los murlacos somo[z] inconfundibles”: Variable intervocalic /s/ voicing in the Spanish of Cuenca, Ecuador
Get PDFPrevious production studies of intervocalic /s/ voicing ([kasa] ~ [kaza] ‘house’) show a diverse set of linguistic and social conditioning factors depending on dialect. For example, while /s/ voicing is in stable variation in the Spanish of San José, Costa Rica (Author 2016), it is more prevalent among young speakers in Barcelona (Davidson 2020) and Loja, Ecuador (Author 2020). Highland Ecuadorian Spanish provides fruitful ground to study this variation given the dialectal diglossic situation within this macro-dialect (Gómez 2022). The present study systematically examines /s/ voicing in Cuencano Spanish, complementing previous impressionistic studies (Robinson 1979; Calle 2010).
Our data come from sociolinguistic interviews with native Cuencanos from 2013 (15 interviews) and 2023 (24 interviews), including 20 females and 19 males ages 19-73. Sixty tokens of intervocalic /s/ per speaker (20 per word position) were measured for fricative duration and percent voicing. Voicing is analyzed as both a continuous and a categorical dependent variable (‘unvoiced’, ‘partially’, and ‘fully voiced’ following Campos-Astorkiza (2014)). In the analyses, we include the following independent variables: word position, syllable stress, speech rate, preceding/following vowel, and participants’ age and gender, with speaker as a random effect.
Acoustic analysis is ongoing, but preliminary results from 13 interviews demonstrate that voicing in Cuencano is a gradient and variable phenomenon, rather than categorical as Robinson (1979) claims, and is more prevalent than in Lojano. Our results show that duration and voicing are highly correlated but conditioned somewhat differently. Shorter fricative duration is found in word final compared to medial or initial contexts, at higher speech rates, and before an /a/. More voicing is found in word final and medial as opposed to initial context, when /s/ is between unstressed vowels, and at higher speech rates. Examination of individual differences illustrates that while speech rate has the same effect on duration for all speakers, the effect of speech rate on voicing is not uniform among speakers, as previously found for Quiteño (Strycharczuk et al. 2013). The absence of social conditioning of /s/ voicing in Cuencano may suggest stable variation in this variety; however, this hypothesis needs confirmation with the full dataset
The Linguistic Landscape of ‘Little Portugal’ neighborhood in Toronto, Ontario, Canada
No full textTorontonian ‘Little Portugal’ is nowadays a multicultural neighborhood with heritage speakers of many different languages, and less ‘Portuguese’ than the traditional ethnic neighborhood, that it was in the mid 20th century (Teixeira/Murdie 2009). At the same time, the recent migration of Brazilian Portuguese speakers to Canada brought also new speakers of Portuguese varieties to Greater Toronto, including ‘Little Portugal’ (Goza 1999). With this contribution we want to analyze the presence of European and Brazilian Portuguese varieties as heritage languages in the linguistic landscape of the Torontonian neighborhood ‘Little Portugal’. We examine this landscape, going beyond the analysis of the societally dominant language in Toronto (English) and other minority heritage languages of the multicultural neighborhood (e.g., Italian) to shed light on a particular heritage language, here: the Portuguese varieties.
While spoken Portuguese varieties as heritage languages are only highly studied for European or Azorean varieties in Canada (da Silva 2015), there is significantly less research regarding Brazilian Portuguese varieties in Canada, written language, and in particular, visible language in (Canadian) outdoor public spaces, or the linguistic landscape (Leimgruber/Fernández 2021).
Using a corpus of over 400 signs from ‘Little Portugal’, we consider the number of languages and linguistic varieties per sign, the preferred (multimodal) code or dominant language/variety of each sign, and the extent to which the landscape reflects the Portuguese varieties. Overall, our results point to a dominance of European Portuguese and a marginal presence of other varieties, like Brazilian, in the landscape, not only on a top-down-level, but also on a bottom-up one
Semantic network topology in L1 and L2 Spanish
No full textVocabulary size is one of the strongest indicators of second language (L2) proficiency. L2 learners are exposed to large amounts of vocabulary, yet they may struggle retrieving words for spontaneous communication. This difficulty may not be strictly related to number of words known, but rather to the organization or topology of the lexicon. Lexicon topology underlies how the lexicon is searched, how words are associated and how easily they can be retrieved. Since lexicon topology seems essential for communication, one of the main objectives of L2 instruction should be to teach vocabulary in a way that favors meaningful semantic connections. The goal of this project is to explore how different types of vocabulary exposure shape the connections formed in the L2 lexicon. During L2 acquisition, words are often presented in thematic lists (e.g., food), favoring a lexicon organized by shared features (burger-hot dog). This approach is not necessarily wrong, because words that belong to the same themes tend to co-occur. However, thematic lists offer only a partial picture of how words interconnect. For example, beer and football do not share any features and do not belong strictly to the same theme (food and sports, respectively); however, they co-occur frequently and are associated in the lexicon (e.g., when talking about sports).
A word-association task was conducted to assess semantic network topology in two groups with different types of language exposure, native Spanish speakers and L2 Spanish learners. Network modeling was used to explore the semantic connections in each network and to detect communities formed around the different prompts. The results indicate that the L2 semantic network included more generic associates (e.g., bueno ‘good’), and it was more influenced by thematic relations, compared to native speakers. Additionally, the L2 semantic network appeared to be at an intermediate stage between a parasitic network, exploiting the L1 connections, and an effective L2 network, capturing some semantic nuances of the target language, which in turn highlights the dynamic nature of the lexicon. These findings have pedagogical implications, and directly relate to the importance of considering usage-based and experimental evidence when designing L2 classroom materials
The Combined Effects of Study Abroad and Phonetics Instruction on L2 Spanish Pronunciation Development
No full textBoth study abroad (SA) and pronunciation instruction (PI) are intuitively appealing for promoting second-language (L2) pronunciation development. Studies in second language acquisition (SLA) have challenged the notion that SA categorically provides an ideal context for L2 pronunciation development, contributing to a more detailed picture of both its potential and its limitations. In the same vein, considerable research has investigated the potential and the limitations of PI across a range of elicitation tasks, features, and measures. There has been little research, however, on the combined effects of SA and PI. The current study investigates the effects of SA on L2 pronunciation development while also comparing it to the effects of SA paired with concurrent, pronunciation-focused phonetics instruction. 20 advanced, L1 English-L2 Spanish participants took part in a six-week SA program in Ecuador. 8 students took a pronunciation-focused Spanish phonetics course during the program, while the remaining 12 did not. Participants produced recordings of themselves completing reading and oral diary tasks throughout the course of the program, and these recordings were evaluated by a diverse group of raters in terms of comprehensibility and foreign accent. Recordings were also analyzed acoustically to determine the average voice onset time (VOT) of the voiceless velar stop /k/. Repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed that while neither SA nor the combination of SA and instruction had any effect on participants’ perceived comprehensibility or foreign accent, the instructed group significantly improved their VOT production over the course of the SA program. Participants’ comprehensibility ratings, foreign accent ratings, and VOT production were comparable across both reading and oral diary tasks. These results challenge the assumptions surrounding the efficacy of SA while also shedding light on the potential for PI to contribute to learners’ pronunciation gains during SA