February 2019 – Page 2 – Educational Sociolinguistics

What’s the role of cross-linguistic influence in the process of first language attrition?

Cixiu Duan

I found an interesting phenomenon that some bilingual and multilingual speakers may experience the process of losing their first language or have the difficulty to recall certain words or grammatical rules (which is called first language attrition). Take my husband for instance, after living in the U.S. for about ten years, when he talks about finance-related topic, he unintentionally uses English rather than Mandarin. As far as I know, after reading several articles, many factors may have impact on the process of first language attrition, including the attitude (Cherciov, 2013), amount of contact and time elapsed (de Bot, Gommans & Rossing, 1991), the age when the bilingual is exposed to a L2 (Ahn, Chang, DeKeyser & Lee-Ellis, 2017), amount of exposure to the native language (Dragoy, Virfel, Yurchenko & Bastiaanse, 2017), and gender (Ellis, 1994). However, I haven’t found much information about the role of cross-linguistic influence in the process of language attrition. Let me explain it.

Do Canadians Close Their Mouths More While Speaking Because It’s Cold?

Brian

You have no idea how many hours I have spent in the classroom teaching, listening to, and analyzing American English pronunciation. Actually, I have no idea either. We would go over all of the sounds, especially vowels, figuring out the differences between bat, bet, and bit, and between bot and but.

As I corrected my students’ pronunciation, and attempted to model it myself, I started to realize something: while my students were repeating the sounds accurately, it didn’t sound natural. But it was me that didn’t sound like the recording. In order to teach the lessons, I had to speak differently, which meant moving my jaw and opening my mouth more than I was used to.

죄송합니다!

Victoria

I’d like to begin this post with a sincere apology to anyone I may have insulted tonight by calling South Korea “second world”. I’ve been replaying that moment since I got out of class and could kick myself. In an effort to express how much incredible change the Korean senior citizens had seen in their lifetimes, I somehow decided it was a good idea to regurgitate something a prof had once told me back in my Asian Studies undergrad days about the country not having “proper plumbing” and thus being a “second world country” (not attempting to pass the buck here, as I should have done my due diligence and independently verified this, which I did not.) This was almost 10 years ago, and a quick Google search reveals that this is well and truly untrue, but for some reason, I never reconsidered this “fact” or even word choice until today.

Reflecting on my experience and Kubota’s article—language is only a tool

Chingheng Chang

From my experience, I guess I have something to tell about the transcultural working context.

The first thing is about a person’s ability to accomplish a task. I am pretty sure that a person’s English language proficiency is not equivalent of the ability to do a good job in the workplace settings. I could still recall my experience working as a part-time server in a world trade centre in Taipei. When I was an undergrad, I grabbed every opportunity to work and learn something outside of the class because I knew it’s important to accumulate working experience and accommodate to the workplace environment. I will always remember one of the co-workers on my group, which consisted of more than 50 people. She was a student from the best university in Taiwan, and I overheard other co-workers’ conversation that her major was foreign language and literature. So, I guess her English was not a problem at all. However, she was the only person who got into big trouble, and our manager even yelled at her in front of everybody for her arrogance, awkwardness in doing something, and repetitive mistakes. To simply put, although English is definitely a must in such a workplace setting, a “pure linguist,” as mentioned in Kubota’s article, does not necessarily meet the demands of any job.

Code-Switching and English-only language-in-education policy

Kensaku Ogata

I’m doing a research assistantship in a project designing and implementing pedagogical strategies for addressing Sexual and Gender-based Violence in Agricultural Colleges in Ethiopia. Since I have found some articles relevant to code-switching, I would like to share one of them and to receive your feedback:

Opoku-Amankwa, K. (2009). English-only language-in-education policy in multilingual classrooms in Ghana.

This article is about English-only language-in-education policy in multilingual classrooms in Ghana. Let me briefly explain the context and participants, methodology, research questions, and main findings.

Passing

Lauren Schellenberg

I have no use for my anglophone accent. Late into the night I watch French television shows, whispering the lines over and over to myself. Piece by piece I am replacing my anglo turns of phrase with their French equivalents. The changes are usually small, for example:

J’aimerais un café, svp becomes je prends un café, svp

Ta sœur est belle changes to elle est belle, ta sœur

And je suis ici becomes je suis là

My French is an old car that I’ve been fixing up bit by bit – I’ve reached a point now where it looks pretty good if I drive by quickly. In short conversations I can pass as a francophone. Of course, the illusion decays as I continue to speak, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Shop keepers and waiters no longer switch to English when they hear me speak, even if I make a mistake. People don’t slow down when they talk to me or stop mid-sentence to define words for me. I feel like they’ve let me in.

SALE: português 70 OFF

Ana

I was driving my car one day in Brazil while listening to the radio. I don’t remember what exactly the host and the guest were talking about, but I was really shocked when one of the men mentioned downsizing a company by using the English word “downsize”. At that time, I had had lots of experience with English alread and was even teaching it at a language school. Despite that, it was the first time I was hearing that word. Due to the practicality of the English language, it was not hard to add 2 plus 2 and understand what he was saying: they were going to fire people. How infuriating that was… Have you ever heard about how confusing and vague corporate jargon is used to mislead people and even to hide corruption? (Check out this short video then.) Well, imagine that being done to you with words from a completely different language? That’s just evil… But that’s just one example of a recent trend in Brazil: importing English words that already exist in Brazilian Portuguese.

Paris is Burning, Polari, Drag Race, and the Decades-Long Journey for Queer Slang to Go Mainstream

Brian–Blog post #2

I first saw Paris is Burning a few weeks after 9/11, and the film had a tragic air to it. Though it had been released just eleven years earlier, in 1990, it seemed like a relic from a different era, right from the opening shot of the Twin Towers. The majority of the people who had participated in the documentary, primarily black and Latinx, were already dead then: the first before the film was even completed, murdered and abandoned beneath a dingy hotel bed, and the rest from AIDS-related illnesses. But it also seemed culturally irrelevant as flag-waving, the Patriot Act, and the War on Terror swept the US. It was exactly at this time, in fact, that the most famous drag queen, RuPaul, who I had seen in a recurring role on The Tonight Show, began a two-year sabbatical, knowing that there was little opportunity during such a conservative period.

Like Newfoundland English and Quebec French, there is “Yanbian Korean”

XIN

When talking about the variation of Korean language, people always firstly come up with the significant difference between North Korean language and South Korean language. For example, to me, the Korean language people speak in Pyongyang, North Korea sounds stiffer and more formal while the Korean language people use in Seoul, South Korea sounds milder, softer and more westernized. If you check the news broadcasting from North Korea and South Korea online, I bet you will be impressed by their huge difference. This is due to the fact that different vocabularies, expressions and tones have emerged and developed in different parts of the Korean Peninsula since it was divided at the 38th parallel in 1950 when Korean War began. But do you know that there’re other regions in the world where Korean community people speak Korean language that is neither the “standard Pyongyang Korean” nor the “standard Seoul Korean”?

How many languages do you need to speak as an immigrant in Montreal?

–Dantong

I know a Chinese immigrant family in Montreal, after participating several family parties with them, I discover some interesting and typical family language policies which are influenced by political, economic, and cultural factors, similar to what has been talked about by Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen (2009).

This Chinese immigrant family was from Taiwan, my friend Chen moved to Montreal with her parents when she was 10. Her father can speak Taiwanese, Mandarin, English, and learned a little bit of French after he came to Quebec. Her mother can speak Taiwanese, Mandarin, and a little English. And my friend Chen can speak fluent Taiwanese, Mandarin, English and French. Through several conversations with her, I realize that her language repertoire is closely linked to some “invisible language planning” (2009) which is embedded in a particular context of Montreal.