Educational Sociolinguistics

Mama + Louisiana

Max Jack-Monroe

Preparing to co-facilitate a group discussion on the connection between ethnicity and language brought up a lot for me. The readings helped me to think about how I situate myself in terms of ethnicity and language and how these intersecting forces have impacted my life.

I begin with my family history, specifically on my mother’s side. My mother was perhaps the first person in centuries on either side of her family to be born outside of the state of Louisiana (my grandfather’s side was from New Orleans proper and my grandmother’s side from the neighboring countryside). Before my mother’s birth, my maternal grandparents had moved to Nashville, Tennessee so my grandfather (Pop-Pop) could complete his medical residency at Meharry Medical College. A couple of years after my mother was born in Nashville, the family moved to a place, coincidentally, not too far from Montreal–Buffalo, New York. By the time the family made their way to Harford County, Maryland both of my aunts had been born. My grandmother (Meman) still lives in that house, which, despite going through many changes, still seems, in many ways, untouched by time.

**My brothers, grandparents, and I. Summer 2010**

Snow day

Mela

Yesterday McGill, as well as every other educational institution in Montreal and indeed in most of Quebec and eastern Canada, cancelled classes because of the major snowstorm that hit our part of the country. The snowstorm (a 40-cm dump over 18 hours or so) wasn’t all that unusual—it’s just that the dump was swift and the wind ferocious. “Visibility near zero” has such an ominous ring. The cancellations by other institutions were to be expected. But that ouruniversity would cancel classes because of the weather—THAT was a very rare event. Usually we hang in there, or try to, when all other schools admit defeat and let people stay home and safely off the roads.

So the Wednesday evening class for which this is the blog didn’t happen, and I was able to use the class time to reflect on how it’s been going, sociolinguistically speaking. Other people also thought about course-related topics—a couple of new posts and many new comments appeared.

Mirror, mirror, do my lexical choices reflect gender stereotypes?

John Narvaez

I recently watched a TED talk by Lera Boroditsky on how languages shape the way we think. One of her examples pointed out the relationship between grammatical gender and the perceptions that this notion creates in the minds of speakers of languages that use it. She mentioned how, for example, a Spanish speaker would associate stereotypically male words to describe nouns such as “bridge” (“puente”, a masculine noun) while German speakers would assign stereotypically feminine words to describe the same bridge because bridge in German is a feminine word.

I set out to test this idea and surveyed a few friends (5 male, 5 female) asking them to give me the first adjective or word that came to mind when I mentioned a mix of feminine and masculine nouns in Spanish. I chose 6 lexically-linked words: Puente (bridge), casa (house), iglesia (church), edificio (building), estadio (stadium) and piscina (pool). I have translated the results of my survey to share them with you and hopefully bring up some discussion on the implications of this issue in language teaching:

Men Explain Things to Me

Amelia

I am in a group chat, and have been for some time, called “Mansplains”. The group has 10 members, myself included, 5 of whom are men. Most of the discussion in the group is among the women, I think because the type of men who self-select to be in a group called Mansplains are there to learn how not to engage in the behaviour and are thus fairly good listeners. I did not know until I read the postscript to the titular essay in Rebecca Solnit’s 2014 collection Men Explain Things to Me that (after the essay was originally published in 2008, made the rounds, died down and resurfaced again, going viral in fits and starts) Solnit had been credited with the term Mansplain, which was one of the New York Times’ words of the year for 2010. She did not, in fact, coin it and explains in the postscript: “I have my doubts about the word and don’t use it myself much; it seems to me to go a little heavy on the idea that men are inherently flawed in this way, rather than that some men explain things they shouldn’t and and don’t hear things they should” (Solnit, p.13).

The essay describes, in beautiful concision and precise description, an instance of a man explaining something to a woman that seems so absurd as to be exaggerated to fiction… if you are a male reader. I discussed the story with a male friend who asked whether I thought at least some details were embellished, but reading the story as a woman, it only seems too familiar and utterly believable.

Sociolinguistics Goes to School

Béatrice

“My monolingualism dwells, and I call it my dwelling; it feels like one to me, and I remain in it and inhabit it. It inhabits me.”Jacques Derrida.

One of the major changes that I have witnessed in the time since I was last in school, is the overwhelming air of acceptance pervasive on almost every level of socio-cultural behaviour. The education system has evolved, there is hope for humanity.

I’m a firm believer in EDUCATION. My family, my upbringing, it was, and still is, all about getting an education.

This brings me to the troublesome issue of Quebec French monolingualism.

It is about NOT getting an education.

Why not Pinyin?

When I was searching the meaningful road signs for week 4 ‘s activity, I noticed a very interesting phenomenon in my hometown. The landmark “二七” are exhibited in Pinyin（Erqi ) and English (Twoseven ) respectively on one road sign. Besides, almost all road signs are shown in bilingual (Chinese and English) whereas Pinyin is hard to find.

Why Pinyin is absent? Is it necessary to show Pinyin on Chinese road signs? My answer is Yes!

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.