Student Login

Positives and negatives of language learning

Sophia G

Language is a tricky thing. On one hand, it is given to us freely; on the other, we really have no choice in the language that we are given. Some of us are even gifted with multilingual families and learn many languages, others are gifted a small snapshot of one language.

Language and the composition of a person’s languages can largely impact their whole life. When asked to look at the positives and negatives of my language learning and my language composition, it came out strangely negative. I found this quite sad. First, let’s start out by explaining my language composition.

Continue reading “Positives and negatives of language learning”

What French do we learn in Quebec ?

Samuel Marticotte:

When I was growing-up, I remember that I had a very hard time in school when writing texts. I remember still today why this was the case. Perhaps this is true to a certain extent for all of you and all students. Writing is a difficult task because written language always departs to a certain extent from the variety that you speak where you grow up.

This makes me think of Maxime, who is a bilingual, but often complains that written French is so much more convoluted than the spoken French he knows. Having grown-up writing English, he gets the impression that writing English is easier because it is closer to the spoken language.

Continue reading “What French do we learn in Quebec ?”

Shopping for a dialect? You can have any one you wish!

Cynota

Many of my students ask me to work on pronunciation but it not feasible to address all students’ pronunciation problems of a whole class as each language speaker has specific problems. I usually suggest that students take one on one tutoring to work on their accents. Many language students are very self conscious of their accents.

If you want to pick out your own dialect of English, you can in fact make this wish come true! You can select any accent that you want: Australian, Cockney, Deep South, Dialects of British Isles and Ireland, Aafrikaans, South Boston, are amongst the offerings online. Paul Meirer has trained many people to speak with different accents and has a website that offers a wide range of English language services (http://www.paulmeier.com).

Continue reading “Shopping for a dialect? You can have any one you wish!”

Time for a change in the educational practice

Emmanouela Tisizi

Trying to differentiate between language and dialect is definitely not an easy task. While brainstorming in groups on the matter, criteria such as the proportion of a population that uses a language variety over another, the region where a language variety is most frequently used and the context of language use came to mind. The more our group tried to come up with examples of language use to determine whether these fell into the category of a language or a dialect, the more we started discussing issues related to power and the institutionalization of certain language varieties.

Continue reading “Time for a change in the educational practice”

Natalie’s Language Biography (or How I Learned Four Languages)

Natalie Lark

To begin with, I would like to mention that I was born and raised in Ukraine, where I learned Ukrainian and Russian at an early age, in addition to English, which was a part of the school curriculum. To better describe myself as a language learner, I would like to tell that I grew up in a bilingual family and community in the east of Ukraine, where everyone could easily switch the language of communication, if there was a need or to better understand each other; that is basically, similar to the way anglophones and francophones communicate in Quebec province, these days.

Continue reading “Natalie’s Language Biography (or How I Learned Four Languages)”

What is Standard English?

Ethan Xu

The charm of class discussion is that through brainstorming and collision of thoughts, we are able to quickly make connections with the knowledge and its reference; moreover, when you have time for reflection, it will lead your mind to wander even further from the topic.

The discussion about mutual intelligibility was an interesting one. Linguists use this criterion to determine whether people are speaking the same language. In real life, however, things seem to be much more complicated. When you speak to a Scot, as mentioned by my classmates, it is often not very easy to reach the sort of mutual intelligibility. I’ve made several acquaintances with some Scottish friends and couldn’t agree more. However, there is a fine line between the two terms ‘Scottish accent’ and ‘Scots language’.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/upe54vc7shhd51g/main-qimg-1c52701456c7be4ac3a4dadbfd415de3.png?dl=0

Continue reading “What is Standard English?”

Language vs Dialect

Kunyao Kuang

Inspired by the seminar and class discussion in class, I would like to share a similar case happened in China.

I was born in southern China, a city near Guangzhou, a Cantonese spoken area. All my family and neighborhoods speak Cantonese thus it seems that I was born to know it. Moreover, I grew up with the influential popular culture of Hong Kong since 1990s. Thus, the identity of Cantonese has rooted deeply in my mind.

When I was in primary school, Mandarin started to enter my life. The Mandarin promotion policy was carried out in 1980s, strictly adopted in 1990s among schools, administrations, transportations and all public areas. Since then, Mandarin became an official language and the others were all dialects. (An interesting point from my teammate is that she thought dialect is viewed as being subordinated to a language, containing the sense of discrimination to some extent. Language is regarded as paramount while dialects are secondary.)

Continue reading “Language vs Dialect”

Luxury Bilingualism

Dean Garlick

I would like to write my first blog post in response to Rydenvald’s (2015) article: Elite bilingualism? Language Use Among Multilingual Teenagers of Swedish Background in European Schools and International Schools of Europe.

In regards to the concept of ‘elite bilingualism’, it is exactly that. These children, both in European and International schools, have the luxury of keeping their Swedish identity while living in foreign countries. They speak Swedish with their Swedish-speaking friends and relatives, have classes in Swedish, and up to 86% of the students in European schools spend three weeks or more in Sweden in the summer, thereby maintaining a connection with their home culture (Rydenvald, 2015). Because English—the language of global economic power—is a significant language of instruction, it also becomes a common language amongst the students of different backgrounds, along with other languages which aren’t specified. Most significantly to me is the fact that these students exhibit “marginal use of the local majority language” (Rydenvald, 2015, p. 225). They are more-or-less cut off from the community surrounding their school. Their status protects them from the challenges of being a true immigrant wherein the individual has no choice but to conform to the local culture in order to survive. They stay comfortably within the elite culture-bubble and prosperous futures are all but guaranteed for them.

Continue reading “Luxury Bilingualism”

Language Biography

Aisha Abokraa

My native language is Arabic. There are many varieties of Arabic spoken in different regions and countries in the Arab world (Middle East). I speak the Libyan dialect, which I learned as my first language and which I use in everyday speaking situations. At school I also learned the standardized Arabic (Classical Arabic), which is used in writing and in formal prepared speech.

Formerly, the formal standardized Arabic was the norm; however, over time and for different reasons, different dialects started to appear in different regions. These different dialects make it a bit challenging for Arabic speakers to be clearly understood by speakers of different Arabic dialects. I tend to adjust my speech to communicate with people from different Arabic-speaking regions. For example, I tend to switch dialects or to avoid using unfamiliar words from my dialect, or attempt to communicate using a commonly understood dialect, such as Lebanese, Egyptian or Syrian. These dialects tend to be commonly understood because of their strong media presence in many countries in the Arab world.

Continue reading “Language Biography”

My accent is obviously not British or Australian!

Hi, my name is Samuel Marticotte.

I grew up in on the north-shore of Quebec, speaking French in an area where it is spoken by over 90% of the population. As I grew up, I picked up some English in school, in video games, on the internet, but only really learned it later when I started working in the navy in Halifax, N-S and Victoria, B-C. After a year of software engineering, I stopped my studies to go to Japan, where I became somewhat fluent in Japanese over the course of nine months; travelling, working in a restaurant and helping an elderly woman with her farm work. When I came back to university, I changed program for one in which I could study two modern languages. I decided to keep studying Japanese and chose Russian as a second language. On my second year, I did a nine-month exchange program in Russia where I had the occasion to improve my reading and listening abilities. Upon my return I was not perfectly fluent orally, but I could read novels and translate literature from French or English. Upon completion of my B.A and certificate in Russian Studies, I was chosen to participate in the JET program. I left for Japan and taught in an elementary school for two years. In Japan, I worked in Japanese, every week explaining to my coworkers lesson plans, and engaged with friends and the local community, sometimes in the local dialect (Kansai-ben), sometimes in standard “Tokyo” Japanese, a more polite variety of the language. When I returned to Canada, I moved to Montreal and started the M.A. in second language education I’m actually in. Being at McGill is an interesting experience, because it is my first long-term experience in an “English community” in Canada.

Continue reading “My accent is obviously not British or Australian!”