This book investigates the acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge in the early elementary school years of a Mandarin-English two-way immersion program in the United States. Using ethnographic observation and quantitative analysis of data, the author explores how input from teachers and classmates shapes students’ language acquisition. The book considers the different sociolinguistic messages conveyed by teachers in their patterns of language use and the variety of dialects negotiated and represented. Using analysis of teacher speech, corrective feedback and student language use, the author brings together three analyses to form a more complete picture of how children respond to sociolinguistic variation within a two-way immersion program.
This book investigates the acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge in the early elementary school years of a Mandarin-English two-way immersion program in the United States. Using ethnographic observation and quantitative analysis of data, the author explores how input from teachers and classmates shapes students’ language acquisition. The book considers the different sociolinguistic messages conveyed by teachers in their patterns of language use and the variety of dialects negotiated and represented. Using analysis of teacher speech, corrective feedback and student language use, the author brings together three analyses to form a more complete picture of how children respond to sociolinguistic variation within a two-way immersion program.
Sociolinguistic Variation and Acquisition in Two-Way Language Immersion: Negotiating the Standard
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Sociolinguistic Variation and Acquisition in Two-Way Language Immersion: Negotiating the Standard
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Overview
This book investigates the acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge in the early elementary school years of a Mandarin-English two-way immersion program in the United States. Using ethnographic observation and quantitative analysis of data, the author explores how input from teachers and classmates shapes students’ language acquisition. The book considers the different sociolinguistic messages conveyed by teachers in their patterns of language use and the variety of dialects negotiated and represented. Using analysis of teacher speech, corrective feedback and student language use, the author brings together three analyses to form a more complete picture of how children respond to sociolinguistic variation within a two-way immersion program.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783096398 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2016 |
| Series: | Bilingual Education & Bilingualism , #102 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 179 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Rebecca Lurie Starr is an Assistant Professor of English Language at the National University of Singapore. She researches sociolinguistic variation in English, Mandarin and other languages, focusing on children’s acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge in schools and multilingual settings.
Rebecca Lurie Starr is an Assistant Professor of English Language at the National University of Singapore. She researches sociolinguistic variation in English, Mandarin, and other languages, focusing on children’s acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge in schools and multilingual settings.
Read an Excerpt
Sociolinguistic Variation and Acquisition in Two-Way Language Immersion
Negotiating the Standard
By Rebecca Lurie Starr
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2017 Rebecca Lurie StarrAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78309-639-8
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Aims and Scope
'It's just our accents.'
It's a Thursday afternoon at the Meizhang school, and Miss Alice is teaching her first-grade students how to tell time. In this lesson, she is explaining the notions of 'half-past five' and 'five-thirty'. The students are arranged on the carpet facing Miss Alice, who is holding a model of a clock face, turning the hands to demonstrate various times. I am sitting behind the children, thinking to myself, 'oh, this is going to be interesting'.
I am thinking this because, while Miss Alice is from England, we are in an American classroom, and this particular lesson topic means we have a linguistic perfect storm on our hands: first, Miss Alice will pronounce each of the words in 'half past' with an 'ah' sound (indicated in the International Phonetic Alphabet as [?]), in contrast to the [æ] sound used in the United States. On top of that, she will pronounce 'thirty' with no [r] and with a [t] instead of the d-like flap sound (written as [?]) used in American English. Let's check in to see how this lesson is going:
Example 1.1
Miss Alice: Five thirty, or could we say, h[a]lf p[a]st five.
Cynthia: H[æ]lf p[æ]st five.
Miss Alice: It's gone h[a]lf the way round the clock, here's five o'clock, and it's gone h[a]lf-way round, so it's h[a]lf p[a]st five.
Nicole: H[æ]lf p[æ]st five, not h[?]lf p[æ]st.
Miss Alice: I say it different to you, you say h[æ]lf.
Nicole: Yeah, h[æ]lf.
Miss Alice: I say h[a]lf.
Nicole: Because it's h[æ]lf.
Miss Alice: I say h[a]lf p[a]st, you'd say h[æ]lf p[æ]st. It's a — it's just our accents.
(1 minute later)
Miss Alice: What time is this one?
Ellie: H[æ]lf p[æ]st eleven.
Miss Alice: H[a]lf p[a]st eleven, or, eleven—
Cynthia: Th[3:r]y!
Miss Alice: Eleven th[3:t]y, there's two ways to say it.
Cynthia: You say th[3:t]y and we say th[3rr]y.
Miss Alice: Yeah. You can say h[a]lf p[a]st eleven or eleven th[3:t]y.
Although these first-graders are only six and seven years old, it has not escaped them that Miss Alice has an unusual way of speaking; in fact, they find this phenomenon endlessly fascinating. We also notice that Miss Alice appears to have developed strategies for dealing with student comments about language differences. In a classroom where the teacher speaks quite differently from the students, every lesson carries a subtext of linguistic negotiation.
We might say that Miss Alice's class is unusual – American children don't generally have British teachers. On a smaller scale, however, this same phenomenon of negotiating language differences occurs whenever children enter a school environment. For children, starting school means encountering new speech situations and new ways of speaking. And in many communities around the world, teachers either do not natively speak the same language variety that the school is meant to be promoting, or do not speak the same variety as their students. In this sense, the situation of Miss Alice and her students is a magnified version of the typical early elementary school experience.
There is something else that is special about Miss Alice's students: they are participating in a Mandarin-English two-way immersion program. This means that about half of these students speak Mandarin Chinese at home, while the other half speak English, or some other language. The students in this class spend more than half of their school day learning in Mandarin, and the rest of the day learning in English with Miss Alice, with the goal of becoming bilingual, biliterate and bicultural. This combination of students from different language backgrounds is brought together by design, based on the notion that having native speakers of each language in the classroom will reinforce language learning and improve student outcomes.
The sensitivity of the students in Example 1.1 to Miss Alice's pronunciation differences is all the more impressive when we consider that many of them do not have parents who speak American English, or indeed any sort of English, at home. Do children enrolled in two-way language immersion, who must learn to balance multiple languages in school, develop a heightened awareness of variation within languages? When Miss Alice tells them 'it's just our accents', what does this teach them about how languages and accents work? How will these children end up speaking, given that they have teachers and classmates from a range of language backgrounds? These are the questions I had in mind when I began my research on two-way language immersion.
Aims of this book
The primary aim of this book is not to determine whether students in two-way language immersion are learning English and Mandarin successfully in terms of how they score on achievement tests. Previous studies of two-way language immersion have consistently found that students perform well in these programs (Christian, 1996; Cummins, 1998; Lindholm-Leary, 2001, among others). Rather, using ethnographic observation and quantitative analysis of data collected over a year of fieldwork at the Meizhang school, I will address several questions related to student acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge in the early-elementary school years of Mandarin-English two-way language immersion:
(1) What sorts of sociolinguistic messages are conveyed by teachers in their patterns of language use?
(2) How are dialect differences negotiated and represented in discourse about language?
(3) How does input from teachers and classmates shape students' language acquisition?
Although these questions involve a range of classroom phenomena that might normally be relegated to separate volumes, when combined together they help us form a picture of what children are learning about language in school from the various resources available in their environment. In my analysis, I will first address what patterns children are hearing from their teachers, who are generally the most significant source of second language input at school. Then I will consider what indirect information about language children might pick up from the school environment via corrections and other 'metalinguistic' discourse, and how these messages differ among the two languages used at school. Finally, I will examine student language use, looking both at native-speaker children and their learner classmates, to consider how the usage patterns of the former influence the latter's language-learning outcomes.
The Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Knowledge
This study of students in two-way language immersion will be approached from a sociolinguistic perspective, meaning that the goal is to further our understanding of how language functions in society. Of central interest in sociolinguistics is the phenomenon of variation: different ways of expressing a particular meaning (for example, the difference between h[a]lf and h[æ]lf from our time-telling lesson). The study of variation in sociolinguistics seeks to account for differences in language use across social groups, contexts and time. Competent adult native speakers have mastered the interpretation and use of sociolinguistic variation, in the sense that their knowledge of language includes not only what is grammatical, but also what sort of language is appropriate in different scenarios and what variants are likely to be used by different types of speakers (Hymes, 1972). In order to understand how sociolinguistic variation functions and is transmitted within a community, we must also examine how, and when, individuals acquire the skills necessary to becoming competent interpreters and users of socially meaningful features of language.
While some sociolinguists have argued in the past that children do not begin to exhibit patterns of variation until early adolescence (e.g. Labov, 1970), scholars have come to accept that young children can and do engage in consistent and meaningful variation (Andersen, 1990; Kornhaber & Marcos, 2000; Roberts, 1994, among others). Indeed, although children's patterns of language use often do not exactly match those of adults, a consensus has been reached that the acquisition of communicative competence is an integral part of the language acquisition process (Romaine, 1984: 261). More recent studies have provided a window into how children acquire sociolinguistic variation as they acquire language, mirroring the variation patterns of their caregivers (Smith et al., 2007).
When children first enter school, however, they encounter new patterns of variation, new social categories and perhaps a new language (or two). Students who do attend school in a new language are generally dependent upon the linguistic input they receive at school in their acquisition process; crucially, they are also dependent upon the sociolinguistic input available in school in order to develop their communicative competence in that language. Given the wide range of linguistic situations a native speaker encounters outside of school, acquiring sociolinguistic knowledge comparable to a native speaker via a restricted school setting is a daunting task. Previous work suggests that acquiring casual speech styles through school is particularly challenging, even for students in full-day language immersion (Mougeon et al., 2010; Swain, 1985).
Acquiring a new language in a school setting becomes more complicated when multiple varieties of a language co-exist within a single school. This situation can arise not only in the case of non-standard varieties used along with a prestigious standard variety promoted by the school, but also when multiple standard varieties come into contact; the latter scenario is particularly common in settings where immigration has caused populations from different countries or regions to attend a single school. In dialectally heterogeneous settings, members of the school community must negotiate between varieties, as well as between languages. To successfully navigate this complex landscape, students learning a language in a school environment must take cues from available sources of sociolinguistic information to develop a picture of the social meaning of linguistic variants. Such sources might include patterns of language use by different members of the school, metalinguistic discourse relating to language or particular linguistic features, and other metalinguistic behaviors, including corrections. Not much is known by sociolinguists, however, about what sort of sociolinguistic information is present in the linguistic and metalinguistic patterns found in elementary school, or how children in these settings take advantage of this information in their acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge.
Language Immersion, Mandarin and Dialect Variation
In the conventional language immersion education model, students acquire a new language by being taught school content (e.g. math and science) entirely in that language, rather than by studying a second language as a separate subject. The phenomenon of learning school content via a second language has a long history in regions where formal education was introduced by a colonial presence; due to this colonial legacy, around the world today it is still very common for children to attend school in a language that they do not speak at home (Cummins, 1998). The term 'language immersion', however, is most commonly used today to refer to specialized programs in which the language being taught is not a dominant language of the community or the normal language of education. Language immersion education in this modern sense was first seen in Canada in the 1960s, when the political movement to improve the status of French resulted in English-speaking children having the option of attending French immersion schools, in which classes composed of English native speakers were conducted entirely in French. To the surprise of researchers, students excelled in these types of programs, surpassing their English monolingual classmates in tests of English performance and equaling native French speaker performance in tests of French (Peal & Lambert, 1962). Compared to conventional foreign language courses, in which students receive only a few hours of instruction per week, these outcomes were far superior.
One of the observed limitations of conventional language immersion, however, is that children gain limited competence in more casual forms of the language. Because their exposure to their second language comes almost exclusively from their teachers in the classroom, students lag behind their native-speaker counterparts when it comes to colloquial styles that are used outside of the classroom (Mougeon et al., 2010; Swain, 1985). From a testing or academic performance perspective, this gap may not at first appear particularly important, as formal language is the primary focus in academic settings. If we consider that the goal of second language teaching is to enable students to competently use the language outside of school, however, it becomes apparent that only equipping students to use formal speech styles is a serious shortfall of a language education program. Indeed, research on learner attitudes finds that the gap between learner speech patterns and native-speaker speech patterns represents a significant barrier to participation in native-speaker communities (Auger, 2002; Lyster, 2007).
Two-way language immersion (also called dual language immersion) is an increasingly popular educational model in which students from two different language backgrounds are placed in the same classroom and spend time learning in each language. In contrast to single-language immersion programs, two-way immersion can simultaneously serve the functions of a heritage language program, an ESL program and a conventional immersion program, integrating them into a single model (Lindholm-Leary, 2001: 1). The goal of these programs is to produce high-achieving students who are not only bilingual and biliterate but also bicultural, meaning that they are familiar with the cultures associated with each language and are comfortable operating in communities in which each language is spoken.
While Spanish-English two-way language immersion programs are the most common in the United States (CAL, 2011), two-way immersion has also proven to be a popular model for Mandarin Chinese, due to the availability of both a population of heritage and native speakers who want their children to continue to speak Mandarin, and a population of non-Chinese speakers who want to start their children early on learning Mandarin, a language that is perceived to be unusually difficult. The growing popularity of the two-way language immersion model has also coincided with an explosion of general interest in learning Mandarin in the United States, and with the increasing immigration of Mandarin-speakers from Mainland China who want their families to maintain close ties to their native country (Semple, 2009). Many new immigrants are looking for alternatives to the existing weekend Chinese language school model, which is considered relatively ineffective and, in some regions, is dominated by Taiwanese Americans and other more well-established Chinese immigrant groups. Individuals who are interested in enrolling their children in a Mandarin-English program often have the money and time required to lobby for the establishment of such programs within the public school system, or to organize private programs themselves (Hu, 2011). As a result, the past decade has seen a boom in the number of new Chinese-English two-way immersion programs in the United States, in both public and private institutions (Lin, 2006).
Education research on two-way language immersion programs has found extremely positive outcomes; students from both language backgrounds achieve comparable or better test results in their home language compared to students in monolingual schooling, while also gaining proficiency in a second language (Collier & Thomas, 2004; Lindholm-Leary, 2001: 313). In comparison to conventional immersion, two-way immersion has the advantage of native-speaker peer interaction, which brings a host of potential sociolinguistic benefits. But, as Rubinstein-Avila (2002) points out, the notions of 'dual' and 'two-way' immersion oversimplify the reality of variation within the two languages being taught. Because participants in these programs generally include individuals from a wide range of immigrant backgrounds, for many two-way immersion programs at least one of the languages in the school is being represented by a number of different dialects. Crucially, this diversity is not localized to the student body but is also present among teachers. This heterogeneity in the varieties used by the staff of a program can create a scenario in which the language variety promoted by the school must be negotiated; in Rubinstein-Avila's case study, for example, Portuguese teachers from Brazil and Portugal discovered that they had very different ideas about what constituted standard Portuguese (Rubinstein-Avila, 2002: 81). In this dialectally diverse school setting, inter-variety conflicts can arise in many scenarios: among teachers, in written or multimedia classroom materials, between teachers and students, or between students themselves.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sociolinguistic Variation and Acquisition in Two-Way Language Immersion by Rebecca Lurie Starr. Copyright © 2017 Rebecca Lurie Starr. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Standard Mandarin and Sociolinguistic Variation
3. Teacher Language Use
4. Corrections and Other Metalinguistic Discourse
5. Student Language Use
6. Implications and Future Directions
References
What People are Saying About This
This book provides an exciting addition to research on the crucial question of when and how children acquire sociolinguistic norms in the early stages of language use. Starr's investigation focusses on both teacher and student talk in a two-way language immersion class, providing a multi-pronged approach to the crucial question of how teacher input may effect student output in negotiating the complexities of sociolinguistic variation. This rigorous yet accessible book will be invaluable for sociolinguists, acquisitionists and educators, and is set to be a key text for students working in these areas.