March 2019 – Page 3 – Educational Sociolinguistics

Pragmatics Disregarded

Lauren Schellenberg

I spent the last few days in Toronto with my brother. Walking down Queen street to meet him at a restaurant, I was approached by two young adults with clipboards. I say approached, but really, they converged on me. I felt the familiar wince of anxiety that precedes human interaction and tried to scoot around them, but the young woman was already speaking to me. I removed an earbud.

She asked what I had been listening to. Music, I replied. She asked me what music. I asked her if she needed something.

She introduced herself and her partner as representatives for Doctors Without Borders, then asked if I had heard that malnutrition was a leading cause of death in the third world. I said no, I hadn’t.

She asked me what my name was. I said Jane.

She asked me what I was doing with my time on Earth, and I said I was late for a meeting. I had to go. I’d look them up online. What were they called again? Doctors Without Boundaries?

Dialect shifting: Surviving linguistic prestige and status in Barranquilla, Colombia, 25 years later…

John Narvaez

When I finished high school, I moved from my hometown Cartagena to nearby Barranquilla to start my B.Ed in modern languages. Even though these cities are just two hours away from each other, they have distinctive dialectal and sociocultural features that make the Spanish spoken in them very different and particular. Cartagena had a long history as a slave port in colonial times, so the influence of the African slaves’ languages created a variety of Spanish that is unique in the context of Colombia. Elements of African phonology and prosody are evident in the way we speak with consonant duplication being a major feature. In Cartagena, words like “puerta” /pwerta/ (door), or “carta” /karta/ (letter) are pronounced /pwet`ta/ and /cat`ta/ for example. Lexical variation also offers distinct ways of naming things and pragmatic elements of the dialect may give the impression that people from Cartagena are rustic and “more rural” than their counterparts from Barranquilla.

Cartagena, Colombia. The old city surrounded by the Caribbean sea and the modern Cartagena in the background.

The Barranquillero dialect, in contrast, tends to be a more standardized version of Spanish with a marked emphasis or the trilled /r/ and common features of Caribbean Spanish such as the aspiration of /s/ (/kosta/ = /kohta/). It also received influence from the waves of European and middle eastern immigrants who settled in the city and who have somehow shaped the city’s identity as a cultural and economic hub of Colombia’s Caribbean region.

Dear Jose,

Shayne

ubication

NOUN

rare

The fact or condition of occupying a certain place or position; the place in which a person or thing is; location. (Oxford Dictionary)

Interaction in ESL classrooms

Zahra Zamani

A community of learners can be defined as a group of people who interacts positively through sharing values and beliefs and actively engaging in learning from one another—learners from teachers, teachers from learners, and learners from learners. They thus create a learning-centered environment in which students and educators are constantly and intentionally interacting with each other and thus constructing knowledge together. Learning communities are connected, cooperative, and supportive. Peers are interdependent in that they have joint responsibility for learning and share resources and points of view, while sustaining a mutually respectful and cohesive environment.

Do we have an alter ego when speaking a different language?

Yating X

Oral English class was one of my favourite courses when I was pursuing my undergraduate studies in China, because this was the only course where we were supposed to talk only in English. Back then, I enjoyed speaking English more than my native language, Mandarin, because when speaking the former, I could always see a different side of me, a more confident and outgoing self. And the comment I received most from my classmates at that time was “You look so different when you speak English.”

I have noticed this phenomenon very distinctly in myself. Even though English is my second language and sometimes I even had some difficulties expressing myself very fluently and clearly due to my limited language proficiency, I still found myself being more expressive and passionate when speaking it, which intrigued me to ponder the question: Do we really have a secondary personality when speaking another language?

My round, red face.

Chris

Sometimes I wish I was a trim, proper looking chap from the European continent, who could be a native speaker of any number of languages. The type where people paused and wondered, “I wonder what language he speaks ? Could it be French, German, Portuguese ? Could it be Dutch ?” I wish there was something ambiguous about my appearance that didn’t shout my native language from a mountain top. However, I’m a burly, ginger bearded man (the unfortunate genetic makeup of someone from Northern England), whose round, red face screams SPEAK TO ME IN ENGLISH. Since the majority of native English speakers don’t speak a second language, it’s fair to look at me and think I don’t either. Except that I do. I grew up speaking French, and I’ve spent years learning Spanish.

On the education of the Chinese immigrant children in Quebec

Chingheng Chang

As an international student with a Chinese cultural background, I have always been attentive to Chinese immigrant children’s education in Quebec or other places in North America. Since my main field of interest is language education, the language use of immigrant families is an issue that has always been one of my greatest concerns. According to an ethnographic study involving ten Chinese immigrant families in Quebec, Curdt-Christiansen (2009) discovered that society, economy, parents’ experiences, and cultural beliefs are factors that have heavily influenced the language use of a family (the invisible language planning) and expectations of their children. After reading Curdt-Christiansen’s study, I have a bad feeling for the Chinese immigrant children: Some of them are probably going to sacrifice most of their childhood time learning at least three languages (Chinese, English, and French) and cramming for many other extracurricular subjects.

Why “no”?

Yiling

According to Van Herk, “People evaluate an interaction and decide which way of speaking is the best suited to it, and change their language (and expectation) accordingly. Sociolinguists use the term styleto describe this kind of intra-speaker(within the speaker) variation.” (p104)

During the class activity with our guest lecturer, when I received a text message from Fangzhe, inviting me to skip my class on Thursday and go to a hockey game with him, my impulsive answer was “no”, which was literally what I typed back. Would I have replied differently to a different person? Or would I have replied differently if he had asked me in person or by phone? Sorry, but NO. I would have replied the same in different contexts and to different people. This is my language styleto my friends, which is rooted in my personality and also reflects the degree of closeness between me and my friends.

Translating Journey Part 2 – Enlightening your brain

Lucía Ringuelet

Originally from Argentina, I arrived in Montreal with a very basic knowledge of French. While I used the translation dictionary a lot, particularly in the beginning, I also learned a great amount of vocabulary in a fully immersive context: attending high school in French, surrounded by francophones. In other words, the majority of my knowledge of French was acquired in a naturalistic way.

As a consequence, at some point I started to have tiny moments of revelation. These came when I made a connection between a French and a Spanish word, often while talking with my family and looking for the Spanish translation. Although many words share the same etymology in French and in Spanish, some do not. My episodes of revelation consisted thus in matching two words that were etymologically different in each language, yet shared the same meaning. Having learned the equivalents in different contexts and societies, I understood them in slightly different ways. Making the connection would bring a new level of comprehension (ex. “Oh! ‘Handicap’ means ‘deshabilidad’!”).