1,720,986 research outputs found
Family Language Policy: Parental Discourse Strategies and Child Responses
No full textUsing transcribed data from six Spanish-English bilingual children (1;8 to 3;3) from the Perez corpus in the CHILDES database, this thesis examines Parental Discourse Strategies (PDS) used to influence child language use in a minority language context (Spanish in the United States). PDS (Lanza, 1992; 1997) are situated within a language socialization framework (Ochs & Schieffelin, 2011) and can be viewed as part of the emerging field of family language policy (King & Fogle, 2013; Schwartz, 2010). This study looked at the overall language use, including the frequency and complexity, of English, Spanish, and mixed utterances by each parent and child in the corpus. The presence and rate of use of the PDS was calculated, as well as their successfulness in encouraging the children to use the minority language, as measured by the language of response to each PDS found. These strategies have been placed on a monolingual to bilingual continuum (Lanza, 1992) based on their expected success in influencing a child to use the language preferred by their parent. Results from a descriptive quantitative analysis of the data at the group and individual levels generally support the Parental Discourse Hypothesis, that is, the claim that certain strategies are more effective than others. Interestingly, it was found that the more successful strategies were used less frequently by the parents, while the less successful ones were more common. This apparent contradiction can be explained by conflicting pressure on parents to promote minority language use while also keeping fluid communication and preserving family harmony. This is discussed and further supported by some qualitative observations of child responses within discourse samples, highlighting children’s role as agents capable of negotiating their own linguistic socialization
More than one first language? Ontario school boards' understanding of bilingual first language acquisition
No full textLinguistic Risk-Taking: A New Pedagogical Approach and a Research Program
No full textLinguistic risks are situations in which learners are pushed out of their comfort zone to use the target language in meaningful and authentic settings. This article outlines a novel pedagogical and research approach to language learning through linguistic risk-taking. I review the construct of linguistic risk from interdisciplinary perspectives and describe the context, rationale, and development of an innovative initiative for supporting French and English language learning at the University of Ottawa, the largest bilingual (English-French) university in the world. Data from 554 participants collected through a Linguistic Risk-Taking Passport, a tool allowing learners to self-report risk-taking patterns, propose additional risks, and add qualitative comments are analyzed to validate the approach. Avenues for transformation of the tool into a digital app and its relevance to other contexts and other languages are also discussed.Les risques linguistiques sont des situations dans lesquelles les apprenants sont poussés à sortir de leur zone de confort afin d’utiliser la langue cible dans des contextes significatifs et authentiques. Cet article présente une nouvelle approche de la pédagogie et de la recherche concernant l'apprentissage des langues par la prise de risques linguistiques. Nous examinons la notion de prise de risques linguistiques d'un point de vue interdisciplinaire et décrivons le contexte, la raison d'être et le développement d'une initiative innovante visant à soutenir l'apprentissage du français et de l'anglais à l'Université d'Ottawa, la plus grande université bilingue (français-anglais) du monde. Afin de valider notre approche, nous analysons les données recueillies auprès de 554 participants par le biais d'un passeport de prise de risques linguistiques. Cet outil permettant aux apprenants de rendre compte de leurs pratiques concernant la prise de risques, de proposer des risques supplémentaires et d'ajouter des commentaires qualitatifs. Nous discutons également des pistes pour la transformation de l'outil en une application numérique et de sa pertinence pour d'autres contextes et d'autres langues
Sociocultural Theory, the L2 Writing Process, and Google Drive: Strange Bedfellows?
No full textThis article draws on sociocultural theory and the process approach to writing as familiar and widely used elements of second language pedagogy that can be leveraged in interesting new ways through the use of digital technology. The focus is on a set of affordances offered by Google Drive, a popular online storage and document-sharing technology. On the assumption that dynamic collaboration with peers, teacher feedback, and authentic computer-mediated tasks contribute to the development of writing skills, Google Drive can be seen as an effective tool for meaningful and cost-effective technology-enriched instruction that entails po- tential advances in pedagogical practice. An overview of the app’s user-friendly interface is provided from a nonspecialist perspective, followed by a discussion of how one may go about organizing a writing course using the tool in a language lab or online. Specific examples of tasks used in ESL courses at a North American postsecondary institution are included. Cet article puise dans la théorie socioculturelle et l’approche à l’écriture par pro- cessus, des concepts bien connus et répandus en enseignement L2 et dont on peut tirer parti de façons innovatrices grâce à la technologie numérique. Notre étude porte sur les capacités de Google Drive, une technologie populaire qui permet le stockage en ligne et le partage de documents. Tenant comme acquis que la colla- boration dynamique avec les pairs, la rétroaction de la part des enseignants et les tâches authentiques assistées par ordinateur contribuent au développement des compétences en écriture, nous présentons Google Drive comme un outil tech- nologique efficace et rentable qui vient enrichir la pédagogie de l’enseignement authentique. Nous offrons un aperçu de l’interface conviviale de l’application du point de vue d’un non-spécialiste pour ensuite discuter de la façon d’organiser, dans un laboratoire d’informatique ou en ligne, un cours d’écriture avec Google Drive. Des exemples spécifiques de tâches employées dans des cours d’ALS dans une institution post-secondaire en Amérique du Nord sont présentés.
The acquisition of complex wh- questions in the L2 English of Canadian French and Bulgarian speakers: Medial wh-constructions, inversion phenomena, and avoidance strategies
No full textThis dissertation examines the development of long-distance wh- movement questions in the L2 English of (Canadian) French and Bulgarian speakers. The main phenomenon under investigation is medial wh- constructions (wh- scope marking and wh- copying). Such constructions are of particular interest because they are unattested in both the L1 and the L2 of the two learner populations; at the same time, they are licensed options in a number of other typologically distinct languages, of which the participants report no knowledge. As such, medial wh- constructions pose a learnability problem in L2 acquisition: how can a learner "know" something that is not supported by either the native language or the target input, but is attested in other languages?
Two experiments, a written grammaticality judgment multiple-choice task and an oral elicited production task, were carried out with the two different learner populations and with English native speaker controls. The written experiments showed that medial wh- constructions co-exist and compete with the target English long-distance structure at the early and intermediate stages of acquisition of both the French and the Bulgarian speaking participants; at the advanced stages of acquisition, both populations showed evidence that medial wh- representations had been successfully eliminated from the interlanguage grammar, and the L2 data converged with that of the native speakers. In the oral elicitation experiments both the French and the Bulgarian speaking participants resorted to medial wh- and a number of other strategies aimed at avoiding long-distance wh- movement; I argue that such strategies are due to both the derivational complexity and the high processing load associated with long-distance wh- movement.
The account developed to address the findings of the dissertation incorporates insights from both nativist and domain-general views on acquisition. The proposal is that L2 grammars have to be UG-constrained in order for the learnability problem to be resolved. In addition, the acquisition process has to be strongly driven by the input, allowing learners to make extensive use of a general probabilistic learning mechanism; this mechanism helps them to gradually eliminate the competing representations unsupported by the L2 input and to converge with the grammatical target. This approach is in principle applicable to both L1 and L2 acquisition and accounts for some relevant similarities between the two
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