Bilingual Community Research Articles

Feasibility and acceptability of involving Bilingual Community Navigators (BCNs) to improve access to health and social care services in general practice setting of Australia

Feasibility and acceptability of involving Bilingual Community Navigators (BCNs) to improve access to health and social care services in general practice setting of Australia

A systematic review of bilingual experiences, labels, and descriptions in autism spectrum disorder research

There is growing research on autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that examines linguistically diverse samples, increasing research generalizability as many individuals with ASD live in bilingual or multilingual communities. However, bilingualism is not a homogenous experience that can be easily categorized. By clarifying participants' language experiences, research findings can be more meaningful for clinicians and practitioners. In this systematic review, we document how the language experiences of samples with and without ASD were described in 103 peer-reviewed journal articles. We observed that language experiences were characterized using a wide range of labels and descriptions. Approximately half of the studies in this review reported participants' language acquisition history, and 64% of the studies defined language proficiency using standardized measures or parental reports. However, <20% of the studies reported daily language exposure and/or usage of the participants. The diversity in how participants' language experiences were characterized in research reflects the complexity of bilingualism. Yet, to further understand how ASD and bilingualism intersect across studies, to facilitate meta-science development, and to balance generalizability with specificity, reporting common characteristics of bilingual experiences is recommended.

“They are. Bilingual.”: Manifestations of bilanguaging love in a dual language bilingual classroom

ABSTRACT Translanguaging, the fluid and dynamic language practices of bilinguals, reimagines language learning and offers the possibility of a more equitable academic experience for active bilingual students of Color, which was the impetus for our inquiry. This article presents the findings of an ethnographic study conducted in a second-grade dual-language classroom that focused on how bilanguaging love is manifested through the perspectives and approaches to translanguaging of bilingual students and their bilingual teacher. Drawing on the concepts of translanguaging and bilanguaging love, we present two main findings: (1) Generative translanguaging perspectives, and (2) Confronting tensions with and through translanguaging. The findings have important implications for translanguaging implementation in bilingual spaces and recognizing that the work involved in this approach is sustained by love for and with bilingual students and communities of Color.

Development of Bilingual Education –A case study of a junior high school with a bilingual curriculum in Taipei City of Taiwan

<p>本研究旨在探討臺灣雙語教育政策的影響之下，雙語實驗學校如何透過雙語教師專業發展社群以及雙語教師增能來發展並培育雙語教學團隊。本研究以質性個案研究作為研究架構，以深入了解個案學校具體如何推行雙語教育，並以「沃土」雙語模式為分析架構探討影響國中階段推行雙語教育的因素，以及雙語教師專業發展社群與雙語教師增能如何影響校內推動雙語教育。研究結果發現，雙語教師增能幫助教師提升自我效能感並精進教師的雙語教學技巧，而在內容與管道上必須多元化並賦予更多彈性空間。此外，雙語教師專業發展社群協助雙語教師精進雙語教學，其組成需為本國籍英語教師搭配學科教師。最後，透過個案學校的經驗提出對於臺灣國中階段實施雙語教育之省思與建議，並作為臺灣推動雙語教育時之參考。</p> <p> </p><p>The purpose of this study is to explore how a bilingual teaching team is formed and cultivated through a professional bilingual teacher learning community and teacher professional growth. This study chose qualitative case study as its research framework to deeply understand how to implement bilingual education in junior high schools. It selected a bilingual experimental curriculum school in Taipei and analyzed the background and development of its bilingual education. This study used the “fertile” bilingual model as the analysis framework to explore those factors that could affect the implementation of bilingual education in junior high schools. The findings are as follows. First, bilingual teachers could benefit from attending teacher training programs, workshops, and related activities in the aspect of their self-efficacy and to increase their teaching strategies. Second, the contexts and accesses of bilingual teacher training should be verified, diversified and given more flexibility. Third, a bilingual teacher professional community provides a platform for maintaining bilingual teachers’ instruction strategies and cooperation between administrators and teachers. Fourth, the composition of the community should be local English teacher and bilingual subject teachers. Lastly, this study put forward some reflections and suggestions on the implementation of bilingual education in junior high schools in Taiwan and serves as a reference for Taiwan to promote bilingual education nationwide.</p> <p> </p>

Hemispheric Quechua: language education and reclamation within diasporic communities in the United States

Abstract Over the last two decades, the United States has increasingly become a site of Quechua language use and reclamation. Reclamation programs have emerged, both promoting the language and fostering community empowerment, particularly among Latinx youth. In this essay, we draw on our experiences as U.S.-based Quechua-language educators and organizers to explore the participation of diasporic Quechua reclamation movements in the global advance of the language. We frame these U.S.-based projects not as discrete entities, but as initiatives in constant connection with their counterparts in the Andes. This reflection piece provides a timeline of academic and community organizations in New York City, a global urban center with one of the largest bilingual Quechua-Spanish communities outside of the Andes. We conclude that these diasporic bottom-up language policy and planning (LPP) efforts are natural agents of dialogue on Quechua-language education and an integral part of the international Quechua reclamation movement.

Mixing adjectives

AbstractHow do bilinguals mix adjectives and nouns from two languages with a word order conflict at the boundary between them? Prominently competing theories of code-switching (CS) that appeal to abstract features or to a matrix language remain in a stalemate, since their predictions have been reported to mostly coincide. Here, we contribute data from northern New Mexico bilingual community members who switch between Spanish and English in both directions. Beyond the NP-internal mixes within the purview of the theories, the widened data set encompasses all relevant mixes and positions: every adjective or associated noun at the boundary with the other language. We thus assess lone-item and multi-word mixing types, distinguishing also between multi-word CS at different points of the NP. Multi-word CS at the adjective-noun boundary is indeed rare. These bilinguals choose CS after the determiner with prenominal modifiers in English adjective-noun pairs, as previously observed, and at the external NP boundary. Furthermore, they disproportionately prefer the shared predicative position. Accounting for all adjective mixes, the Variable Equivalence hypothesis proposes that, where cross-language equivalence is not consistent due to language-internal variability, bilinguals prefer CS at alternative syntactic boundaries that are consistently equivalent and more frequent in their combined linguistic experience.

Analisis Alih Kode dan Campur Kode dalam Media Sosial Twitter Akun @KuntoAjiW

The mastery of more and more languages ​​causes a change in the use of one language with another in the communication process. The use of languages ​​with different ethnic backgrounds will also provide different language variations in the communication process. One of the language variations is in the form of code switching and code mixing. Code switching and code mixing are the changing of a particular language or variety of language into another language. Code switching and code mixing can occur in bilingual or multilingual communities. Language mixing occurs in the context of formal and non-formal speech. Code switching and code mixing can not only occur in direct speech, but can also occur in social media, especially Twitter. This study aims to identify forms and describe the factors that influence the occurrence of code switching and code mixing on the Twitter account @KuntoAjiW. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative method. Data was obtained through observation and documentation on social media Twitter. The results of this study are in the form of code switching and code mixing, as well as factors that influence code switching and code mixing on social media Twitter on the @KuntoAjiW account. The forms of code switching and code mixing contained in the @KuntoAjiW account are Indonesian, Javanese and English. Factors that influence the occurrence of code-switching and code-mixing on the @KuntoAjiW account are the habits of speakers, speech partners, the presence of third speakers, and the use of more popular terms and topics of conversation..

A new look at language choice and accommodation in U.S. Spanish-English bilingual service encounters

Abstract The study of service encounters in bilingual communities offers opportunities to gain insight into the factors that influence language choice and accommodation in these interactions and the ways that language may be used to build community. Previous work on bilingual service encounters has found that age, gender, speech turn, and customer ethnicity may all contribute to service providers’ choice of one language over another. This study reexamines language choice and accommodation in Spanish-English service encounters by observing the language use of 96 service providers in 35 Latino-owned restaurants of the Washington metropolitan area. Using data from service encounters between bilingual service providers and Latino and white customers, we explore the extent to which the factors identified in previous studies are relevant in this region. Additionally, we explore whether the increasingly polarized political climate in the United States has impacted language use. We argue that while customer ethnicity is the main deciding factor to start an interaction, service providers always accommodate to customer language subsequently. This demonstrates the importance of both language as a community builder – even in the face of social pressures that sanction the use of Spanish in public spaces – and the power differential that exists between workers and customers in determining language use.

Quantifying the language dynamics of bilingual communities

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Bruges as a multilingual contact zone: book production and multilingual literary networks in fifteenth-century Bruges

AbstractMedieval Bruges was an important international economic hub in the late Middle Ages. Similar to other luxury goods, manuscripts produced in Bruges were intended for both local and international audiences. This article scrutinizes the specific urban context of Bruges as a multilingual contact zone focusing on quantitative data of extant manuscripts and case-studies of professional and non-professional book production. The dominance of francophone manuscripts in a Dutch-speaking town is noteworthy and called for an actively bilingual community of book professionals. Furthermore, the social competition of locally embedded social groups (court, merchants, craft guilds) influenced language choice as well. Both ‘official’ production of books for trade by professional writers and librarians, and the ‘private’ multilingual literary accomplishments of Bruges city-dwellers, illustrate the multilingual dynamics of urban contacts in Bruges.

The Language Choice of Madurese Ethnics in Urban Area: A Case Study of Jember City

Jember society is an urban and bilingual community because they master Javanese, Madurese and Indonesian. This article examines language choice forms of the Madurese community in Jember and the factors underlying the choice of the Madurese community's language. The study was conducted through a qualitative method. Data was collected through a questionnaire. The results show that the Madurese language (BM) selected by the Madurese community in Jember is generally dominant (55%). The BM's choice of family domain is higher (58%) than the neighboring domain (52%). The dominant factors in determining language choice include speech situations, participants, and means of speech.

COVID-19 Infection and Contact Tracing Among Refugees in the United States, 2020-2021.

Refugees in the United States are believed to be at high risk of COVID-19. A cross-sectional study design was utilized to collect anonymous, online surveys from refugee communities in the United States during December 2020 to January 2021. We invited bilingual community leaders to share the survey link with other refugees aged ≥18 years. We identified factors associated with COVID-19 infection and measured the distribution of contact tracing among those who tested positive. Of 435 refugees who completed the survey, 26.4% reported testing positive for COVID-19. COVID-19 infection was associated with having an infected family member and knowing people in one's immediate social environment who were infected. Among respondents who tested positive, 84.4% reported that they had been contacted for contact tracing. To prepare for future pandemics, public health authorities should continue partner with refugee community leaders and organizations to ensure efficient programs are inclusive of refugee communities.

COMMUNITY-ENGAGED STRATEGIES FOR RECRUITMENT OF ASIAN AMERICAN OLDER ADULTS

Abstract Asian Americans one of the fastest growing older adult populations in the U.S., and are emerging as a high-need, lower-income population. Inclusion of Asian Americans in research is critical given anti-Asian rhetoric and hate crimes targeting Asian American older adults and because Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the U.S. We focus on recruitment strategies used during the implementation of 11 primary collection data efforts, including national and regional community health resources and needs assessment surveys, launched during the COVID-19 pandemic (starting May 2020). Unique recruitment challenges included the heterogeneity of language, culture, and sociodemographic characteristics of participants, digital literacy, and survey fatigue. Effective recruitment facilitators included: prioritizing community engagement at all research stages; aligning the research purpose with community priorities; recruitment through community-based organizations and bilingual community health workers; translating survey instruments; and regularly scheduled meetings with community-based organizations to discuss the survey progress.

The Influence of Product Gender on Frequency of Code-switching in Online Advertisements: A Study on the Saudi Digital Marketing Platform Maroof

Code-switching can be a successful marketing strategy in online advertisements even when the targeted audience is monolingual. Yet, little research was conducted on its frequency or attitudes towards it, especially in the Middle Eastern context. Additionally, most current research on code-switching is on bilingual communities. Such gaps in the literature contribute to the significance of the current study. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to investigate whether gender is a factor influencing both the frequency and the preferences of code-switching in online written advertisements listed on Maroof, a Saudi governmental platform for verifying local online shops. Two questions were formulated to determine if code-switching frequency in advertisements for male and female products is statistically different and to check whether the targeted recipients have different code-choice preferences depending on the gender for which the product is made. A textual analysis and an online questionnaire were employed to answer these research questions. Fifty randomly selected online shops containing products for women were compared with fifty other shops advertising men’s products. The advertisements were mostly Arabic monolingual for both groups (82% in men’s products and 76% in women’s products). However, the group of women’s products had a significantly higher frequency of code-switching, with a p-value of 0.46. A questionnaire completed by 936 Saudi respondents revealed that English monolingual advertisements are favored by a considerable number of respondents, despite their complete absence in the sampled advertisements. The questionnaire also revealed that code-switching preferences seem to be influenced by linguistic constraints.

Linguistic factors modulating gender assignment in Spanish–English bilingual speech

AbstractDrawing on naturally-occurring bilingual speech from a well-defined codeswitching community in Southern Arizona, this study examined the influence of semantic gender (a.k.a. biological gender), analogical gender, and other-language phonemic cues in modulating gender assignment in Spanish–English codeswitched speech. Thirty-four Spanish–English early bilinguals completed a forced-choice elicitation task involving two codeswitching environments: Spanish determiner–English noun switches (Task 1) and English–Spanish switched copula constructions (Task 2). The results revealed that for human-denoting nouns, bilinguals assigned grammatical gender based on the presupposed sex of a noun's referent in both syntactic environments tested. As for inanimate nouns, bilinguals were more likely to assign masculine over feminine gender to such nouns in determiner–noun switches, but not in switched copula constructions. Other-language phonemic cues did not influence the assignment mechanism. A methodological implication is that the study replicated the codeswitching patterns observed in naturally-occurring bilingual speech from the same bilingual community.

Moving away from deficiency models: Gradiency in bilingual speech categorization.

For much of its history, categorical perception was treated as a foundational theory of speech perception, which suggested that quasi-discrete categorization was a goal of speech perception. This had a profound impact on bilingualism research which adopted similar tasks to use as measures of nativeness or native-like processing, implicitly assuming that any deviation from discreteness was a deficit. This is particularly problematic for listeners like heritage speakers whose language proficiency, both in their heritage language and their majority language, is questioned. However, we now know that in the monolingual listener, speech perception is gradient and listeners use this gradiency to adjust subphonetic details, recover from ambiguity, and aid learning and adaptation. This calls for new theoretical and methodological approaches to bilingualism. We present the Visual Analogue Scaling task which avoids the discrete and binary assumptions of categorical perception and can capture gradiency more precisely than other measures. Our goal is to provide bilingualism researchers new conceptual and empirical tools that can help examine speech categorization in different bilingual communities without the necessity of forcing their speech categorization into discrete units and without assuming a deficit model.

The Effect of English-Spanish Language Contact on North Midland /u/ Production

Abstract Monolingually-raised English speakers in the North Midland region of the United States have been found to produce a centralized or fronted /u/, despite it not being a standard feature of the region. The production of this relatively novel sound in bilingual contexts, as is the case of English-Spanish bilingual communities in the Chicagoland area, is not currently well-understood. In order to examine the effect of language contact and phonetic transfer on bilinguals’ speech, 20 adult heritage speakers from the Chicagoland area were recorded while producing /u/ in English and Spanish. 20 formant values at equidistant points from these vowels were taken and then analyzed using a generalized additive mixed-effects model (GAMM). The results of the GAMM and its visualization showed that, overall, the heritage speakers produced a fronted /u/ when speaking English but maintained a backed production of /u/ when speaking Spanish. These results suggest that bilingual heritage speakers are participating in the sound change of the North Midland, while successfully separating its influence from their Spanish speech.

The theory and discussion of diglossia

As a result of the globalization process, the number of diglossia and bilingual communities that are bilingual and linguistically regional has now surpassed the number of monolinguals and monolinguals worldwide, the phenomenon of bilingualism and diglossia in different countries shows great diversity. But the idea of bilingualism in the popular mind, has always been associated with the state, such as in Chinese and English, but there is another possibility, for example, that bilingualism is a form of bilingualism. Here, I will be from the definition of diglossia system, types and the combination of diglossia system with other disciplines and specific cases of diglossia system to elaborate these aspects. Due to the particularity of China’s national conditions, that is, there are 56 ethnic groups, 8 Mandarin dialects, countless dialects and international discourse system in common, diglossia and bilingualism are very numerous.

Language as a cue for social categorization in bilingual communities.

This registered report article investigates the role of language as a dimension of social categorization. Our critical aim was to investigate whether categorization based on language occurs even when the languages coexist within the same sociolinguistic context, as is the case in bilingual communities. Bilingual individuals of two bilingual communities, the Basque Country (Spain) and Veneto (Italy), were tested using the memory confusion paradigm in a 'Who said what?' task. In the encoding part of the task, participants were presented with different faces together with auditory sentences. Two different languages of the sentences were presented in each study, with half of the faces always associated with one language and the other half with the other language. Spanish and Basque languages were used in Study 1, and Italian and Venetian dialect in Study 2. In the test phase, the auditory sentences were presented again and participants were required to decide which face uttered each sentence. As expected, participants error rates were high. Critically, participants were more likely to confuse faces from the same language category than from the other (different) language category. The results indicate that bilinguals categorize individuals belonging to the same sociolinguistic community based on the language these individuals speak, suggesting that social categorization based on language is an automatic process.

Mi Plan: Using a Pediatric-Based Community Health Worker Model to Facilitate Obtainment of Contraceptives Among Latino Immigrant Parents with Contraceptive Needs.

Bilingual community health workers (CHWs) play an important role in helping Latino immigrants with limited English proficiency (LEP) access health care services and information. Contraceptive health care services and Spanish-language contraceptive information are particularly challenging to access for uninsured LEP immigrants. Contraceptive and reproductive care are longitudinal health needs, and pediatric settings pose a unique opportunity to address these needs among parents whose children access pediatric care. The purpose of this study was to pilot the feasibility of a CHW to support parental contraceptives needs within a pediatric setting serving a high number of Latino immigrant families. This article describes Mi Plan/My Plan, a CHW contraceptive counseling and resource navigation pilot program. The research team conducted a retrospective analysis of demographic and contraceptive use data from a 15-month CHW pilot within an urban, primary care pediatrics clinic. The CHW provided contraceptive counseling, referral, and appointment coordination. The outcome was desired contraceptive method obtainment within three months of counseling. All 311 individuals counseled were Latina mothers with median child age of 3 months. At baseline, 64.3% were using contraception and 76.5% desired to start or change their current method. Among those who desired a change, 47.9% (114/238) obtained their desired method within three months of initial counselor contact. Bilingual CHW contraceptive counseling and care coordination is feasible and acceptable in a pediatric setting serving a high number of Latino immigrant families. CHWs in pediatric settings support health care access equity and are relevant to optimal maternal and child health.