Bilingual Context Research Articles

The evidence of Embedded Language islands: the case of Pashto-English codeswitching

ABSTRACT This study investigates the function and morphosyntax of English Embedded Language (EL) islands in Pashto-English bilingual data, using the Matrix Language Frame model to explore the role of the two languages in codeswitching and the pragmatic force behind the selection of EL islands. A dataset of 14 hours was collected from AVT Khyber, a YouTube channel covering a wide range of talking shows and interviews. The research question is how EL islands figure in the overall clause structure of Pashto-English codeswitching. The study finds that English EL islands in Pashto-English codeswitching follow the structure dependency rule of the Embedded Language to retain well-formedness with the overall grammatical frame of the Pashto language. Most of the EL islands are fixed expressions and the multiword are collocated with each other. In most cases, EL islands are used as their counterparts in the Pashto language and lack the same pragmatic force. The study provides insights into the pragmatic and morphosyntactic aspects of EL islands in the Pashto-English bilingual context and contributes to the understanding of codeswitching phenomena in bilingual communities.

The Constraints of Monolingual Language Policy and Heteroglossic Practices as a Vehicle for Linguistic Justice

This paper draws on conceptualisations of language as heteroglossic practices to examine how the experienced bilingual science teacher navigates between the monoglossic ideology that is embodied in the official Namibian Language in Education Policy (LiEP) within a linguistically constrained Namibian bilingual context. This paper aims to support recent research that challenges monolingual and monoglossic language practices, which tend to ignore the linguistic resources that children bring to the classroom. Data were collected from a classroom including video and audio recordings of lessons, field notes and photographs. The data were analysed through socio-cultural discourse and fine-grained multimodal analytical methods. The data findings illustrate the moment where the science teacher was constrained by English monolingual policy to mediate learners’ access to science learning, and harnessed all linguistic resources that the learners bring to the classroom. Subsidiary to that, there were moments where the teacher worked flexibly across languages, discourses and modes to interrupt the monoglossic ideology that is embodied in the official Namibian Language in Education Policy (LiEP). The use of rich heteroglossic practices is a clear testimony to enhanced science meaning-making regardless of learners’ ‘limited proficiency in English. The findings highlight the need to support learners from linguistically diverse backgrounds through a deliberate inclusive language policy that harnesses the heteroglossic nature of communicative practices and prepares teachers for a multilingual reality.

A comparison of automatic and manual measures of turn-taking in monolingual and bilingual contexts.

The Language ENvironment Analysis system (LENA) records children's language environment and provides an automatic estimate of adult-child conversational turn count (CTC) by automatically identifying adult and child speech in close temporal proximity. To assess the reliability of this measure, we examine correlation and agreement between LENA's CTC estimates and manual measurement of adult-child turn-taking in two corpora collected in the USA: a bilingual corpus of Spanish-English-speaking families with infants between 4 and 22 months (n = 37), and a corpus of monolingual families with English-speaking 5-year-olds (n = 56). In each corpus for each child, 100 30-second segments were extracted from daylong recordings in two ways, yielding a total of 9300 minutes of manually annotated audio. LENA's CTC estimate for the same segments was obtained through the LENA software. The two measures of CTC had low correlations for the segments from the monolingual 5-year-olds sampled in both ways, and somewhat higher correlations for the bilingual samples. LENA substantially overestimated CTC on average, relative to manual measurement, for three out of four analysis conditions, and limits of agreement were wide in all cases. Segment-level analyses demonstrated that accidental contiguity had the largest individual impact on LENA's average CTC error, affecting 12-17% of analyzed segments. Other factors significantly contributing to CTC error were speech from other children, presence of multiple adults, and presence of electronic media. These results indicate wide discrepancies between LENA's CTC estimates and manual CTCs, and call into question the comparability of LENA's CTC measure across participants, conditions, and developmental time points.

Auditory pseudoword rhyming effects in bilingual children reflect second language proficiency: An ERP study

This study investigated second language (L2-English) phonological processing in 31 Spanish-English bilingual, 6- to 8-year-old schoolchildren in an event-related potential (ERP) auditory pseudoword rhyming paradigm. In addition, associations between ERP effects and L2 proficiency as measured by standardized tests of receptive language and receptive vocabulary were explored. We found a classic posterior ERP rhyming effect that was more widely distributed in children with higher L2 proficiency in group analyses and was larger for children with better L2 proficiency in correlation analyses. In contrast, the amplitude of an early (75–125 ms) auditory positivity was larger in children with lower L2 proficiency. This pattern suggests differential use of early and late auditory/phonological processing resources in the pseudoword rhyme task associated with L2 proficiency, which is consistent with the predictions of the lexical restructuring model in a bilingual context.

RAN and two languages: a meta-analysis of the RAN-reading relationship in bilingual children

RAN (Rapid Automatized Naming) is known to be a robust predictor of reading development in different languages. Much less is known about RAN predictive power in bilingual contexts. This is the first meta-analysis of research with bilingual children, assessing the strength of the RAN-reading relationship both within and across languages. It also explored the moderators that may affect this relationship. The search identified 38 published studies of bilingual children with 47 samples, 313 effect sizes and 5312 participants. Analyses of random-effects models with robust variance estimation revealed weak-to-moderate overall effect sizes of RAN and reading concurrently (r = −.39) and longitudinally (r = −.38). Moderator analyses of concurrent correlations revealed that RAN correlated more strongly with reading fluency (r = −.56) than accuracy (r = −.38). Alphanumeric RAN tasks (digits r = −.39, letters r = −.42) showed stronger associations with reading than non-alphanumeric RAN tasks (objects r = −.38, colors r = −.25). RAN-reading correlation was statistically significant both within and across languages. It was somewhat weaker when the two skills were measured in different languages (rL1RAN—L2 reading = −.34, rL2RAN—L1 reading = −.36) compared to when they were measured in the same language (rL1 = −.40, rL2 = −.44), though those differences failed to reach statistical significance. In addition, the type of bilingualism was found to be a potential moderator of the RAN-reading relationship longitudinally, with its magnitude being the strongest in simultaneous bilinguals. Our results suggest that, as a predictor, RAN taps into general, language-independent processes underlying reading.

Examining ESL and bilingual teachers’ agency after NCLB: expanding the ecological perspective

ABSTRACT There is growing recognition about the importance of studying teacher agency in working with Linguistically Diverse Students (LDSs) after No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Every Student Succeed Act (ESSA) given that the high-stakes testing and accountability system, required by NCLB and largely maintained by ESSA, have exerted negative effects on LDS educators and students. In response to this, we compiled a comprehensive set of empirical studies and conducted a thematic synthesis to examine how various factors could impact pre-service and in-service teachers’ agency in English as Second Language (ESL) and bilingual PreK-12 classrooms in the U.S. We adopted the ecological model of teacher agency as the analytical framework to guide our synthesis. Through both a top-down and bottom-up coding process, we further expanded the existing ecological model by adding two factors: knowledge and emotions. Detailed analyses led to seven common factors that could shape teachers’ agentic power in working with LDSs, all of which are either from the iterational or practical-evaluative dimension of agency. The projective dimension of teacher agency is relatively less discussed. Among those factors, cultural and structural factors draw most research attention across the selected studies, with the structural factors exerting most constraining effects on teacher agency. Additionally, we uncovered nuanced differences in teacher knowledge and emotions through in-depth analysis of the ESL and bilingual contexts. Further implications on how to improve teacher education and professional development are provided, in addition to the future directions for research.

The real preschoolers of Orange County: Early number learning in a diverse group of children

The authors assessed a battery of number skills in a sample of over 500 preschoolers, including both monolingual and bilingual/multilingual learners from households at a range of socio-economic levels. Receptive vocabulary was measured in English for all children, and also in Spanish for those who spoke it. The first goal of the study was to describe entailment relations among numeracy skills by analyzing patterns of co-occurrence. Findings indicated that transitive and intransitive counting skills are jointly present when children show understanding of cardinality and that cardinality and knowledge of written number symbols are jointly present when children successfully use number lines. The study’s second goal was to describe relations between symbolic numeracy and language context (i.e., monolingual vs. bilingual contexts), separating these from well-documented socio-economic influences such as household income and parental education: Language context had only a modest effect on numeracy, with no differences detectable on most tasks. However, a difference did appear on the scaffolded number-line task, where bilingual learners performed slightly better than monolinguals. The third goal of the study was to find out whether symbolic number knowledge for one subset of children (Spanish/English bilingual learners from low-income households) differed when tested in their home language (Spanish) vs. their language of preschool instruction (English): Findings indicated that children performed as well or better in English than in Spanish for all measures, even when their receptive vocabulary scores in Spanish were higher than in English.

Does Language Entropy Shape Cognitive Performance? A Tale of Two Cities

AbstractResearch examining the cognitive consequences of bilingualism has increasingly relied on continuous measures to capture the degree and nature of bilingual experience, using such variables as proficiency, age of acquisition, and language environments. One such measure, language entropy, indexes the social diversity of contexts in which each language is used. The construct was developed in a particular bilingual context, Montréal, Canada. The present study investigated the extent to which it also applies to a context in which social language use is substantially different from that of Montréal – namely, Toronto, Canada. Following the procedures in the original study, participants were assigned an entropy score and performed the AX-Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT). Performance was associated with self-rated language proficiency, but unlike the results from Montréal, was not associated with entropy scores. Therefore, differences in the language context influence whether language entropy is related to behavioral performance on a cognitive task.

Bilingual education teachers and learners in a preschool context: Instructional and interactional translanguaging spaces

This study explores how bilingual education teachers' flexible delivery of instructional translanguaging within a bilingual preschool in the predominately monolingual context of Turkey could provide children with a space for bilingual interaction. The research aim is to analyse the children's use of translanguaging in relation to translanguaging pedagogy of the teachers. These flexible practices involved two levels of translanguaging. One was teachers' design of the teaching materials, assigning either Turkish or English to each task as the instructional and interactional languages. The other was the facilitation of children's unenforced flexibility to alternate and shuttle between Turkish and English. Six co-teachers were interviewed online about their bilingual teaching experiences and their journals containing children's translanguaging utterances were obtained. Implications for teachers, teacher educators, and policy makers in bilingual education contexts are discussed.

Identification of stuttering in bilingual Lebanese children across two presentation modes

The goals of this study were to investigate whether Lebanese speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are accurate at identifying stuttering in bilingual children, to examine whether the use of video-recordings instead of audio-recordings allows for better analyses, and to explore factors that may affect the SLPs’ judgments. In phase 1, 32 SLPs listened to narrative samples in Lebanese Arabic of 6 children who do not stutter (CWNS) and 2 who stutter (CWS). They were instructed to label each child as stuttering or not, and to explain what motivated their decisions. Afterwards, they were asked to provide background information by means of a questionnaire. In phase 2, they were asked to judge the same speech samples on the basis of video-recordings, and to explain for each child which speech characteristics they relied on to make their decisions. The results showed that misidentification happens frequently, is significantly more likely to happen with CWNS than with CWS, but also varies within these categories. Moreover, the use of video-recordings does not provide more reliable analyses of speech disfluencies, and speech samples’ characteristics and bilingual profile rather than SLPs’ characteristics seem to influence the judgments. Qualitative analyses indicate that, in the current study, misidentification may be driven by neglecting or misinterpreting physical concomitants. In general, the findings indicate that identifying and analyzing speech fluency behaviors remain a challenging perceptual task, which underlies the need for developing consistent methods for training students and clinicians in identifying stuttering, especially in a bilingual context.

Whose Bilingualism Counts? Juxtaposing the Sanctioned and Subaltern Languaging of Two Dual Language Teachers

ABSTRACT As bilingual scholarship increasingly examines who counts in bilingual education, we join the conversation by exploring how two DLBE teachers’ languaging is often marginalized, even in bilingual education contexts. In this comparative case study, we draw from the testimonios of two differently racialized DLBE teachers (one of Mexican and one Persian heritage) in the U.S. to answer the research questions: (a) Which forms of languaging do the DLBE teachers employ across their lives? and (b) How is their languaging privileged or marginalized within official bilingual education spaces? Taking a raciolinguistic perspective, findings reveal both participants share a variety of complex, sophisticated languaging over various spaces of their lives, with only a fraction of one participant’s languaging being sanctioned in school. The other participant’s languaging is invisibilized significantly more. In turn, the researchers call for more expansive bilingual policies that affirm and extend whose languaging and what languaging counts in schools.

Using a simulation-based approach to promote structured and interactive nursing clinical handover: a pre- and post-evaluation pilot study in bilingual Hong Kong

Effective clinical nursing handover involves the transfer of responsibility and accountability for patient care between nurses, leading to better patient safety and continuity of care. Nurses in bilingual contexts, such as Hong Kong – where nurses are trained in English but communicate in Cantonese – may find it challenging to deliver a safe clinical handover. This article reports a pilot study in which a simulation-based approach is being developed to enhance nursing handover with structured and interactive interactions, using handover protocols such as ISBAR (introduction, situation, background, assessment, recommendation and readback) and CARE-team (connect, ask, respond, empathise) protocols in a bilingual context. The study has a pre‐ and post-evaluation design involving a questionnaire survey before and after a 4‐hour workshop. Fourteen selected bilingual nurses in Hong Kong were trained according to the ISBAR and CARE-team protocols, and their perceptions of complete and structured handovers were evaluated before and after training using the questionnaire. The nurses reported that they were more self-confident in their handover experiences, with a deeper understanding of ISBAR and CARE-team protocols after the simulation-based training intervention, leading to better (i.e., more structured and interactive) clinical handover between nurses. Overall, the staff perceived their handover communication to have improved using simulation-based training.

Heritage language socialization at work: Spanish in Miami

Abstract In recent decades, the increasingly blurred boundaries between work, home, and various other spheres of social life have brought greater complexity to the notion of the workplace. In many contemporary workplace environments in the U.S., the demand for Spanish is unequivocal and uncontested; in some areas, Spanish is a de facto requirement. Because U.S. Latinx bilinguals show a broad social preference for English and lack formal education in Spanish, they may feel challenged to meet workplace language demands in Spanish, particularly where specialized vocabulary or formal registers are concerned. Carried out in the highly dynamic bilingual context of Miami, this study posed the following questions: Do adult heritage speakers of Spanish in Miami – where a broad majority of the population speaks Spanish – appear to draw linguistic benefits from participation in the local labor market? Does this participation have the potential to curtail language loss? To answer these questions, semi-structured interviews were carried out with heritage speakers of Spanish in Miami. Their personal accounts of adult heritage language socialization suggest that Spanish use in the U.S. workplace is a highly situated, localized discourse practice that depends largely on the individuals involved. Despite the uncontested value of Spanish in Miami and the demand to speak it in most workplace settings, conscious choice to do so remains with the individual. The participants’ related experiences reveal the importance of speaker agency and manifest the potential of workplace environments to engender more positive orientations toward Spanish as well as active use of the language during adulthood.

Spanish–English Cross-Linguistic Influence on Heritage Bilinguals’ Production of Uptalk

The present study examines the production of uptalk in Spanish and in English by Spanish heritage speakers in Southern California. Following the L2 Intonation Learning Theory, we propose that cross-linguistic influence in heritage bilinguals’ uptalk may occur along multiple dimensions of intonation. In this study, we examined the systemic dimension (i.e., presence of uptalk and presence of uptalk with IP-final deaccenting), the frequency dimension (i.e., frequency of uptalk and frequency of uptalk with IP-final deaccenting), and the realizational dimension (i.e., pitch excursion and rise duration) of heritage bilinguals’ uptalk. Our data showed that the three dimensions of intonation demonstrate varying degrees of cross-linguistic influence. The heritage bilinguals produced uptalk with IP-final deaccenting in both languages (i.e., systemic dimension), but produced it more in English than in Spanish (i.e., frequency dimension). That is, IP-final deaccenting emerges in heritage bilinguals’ uptalk in Spanish, but heritage bilinguals seem to recognize that this is an English feature that is not allowed in Spanish and try to suppress it as much as possible when producing uptalk in Spanish. However, in the realizational dimension, the heritage bilinguals demonstrated either phonetic assimilation to English (i.e., pitch excursion) or individual variability conditioned by language learning experience (i.e., rise duration). The asymmetry found across the dimensions suggests that, when bilinguals’ two languages are in competition for finite online resources, such as in the case of spontaneous speech production, phonological distinctions between L1 and L2 prosodic structures are kept, whereas phonetic differences that do not lead to any change in meaning are more prone to undergo cross-linguistic influence in order to reduce online processing cost. This study attempts to fill a gap in the literature on the cross-linguistic influence of intonation by bringing attention to heritage bilinguals. Heritage bilingualism introduces bilingual contexts that are often left unnoticed in traditional L2 acquisition scenarios (e.g., transfer from L2 to L1 intonation, asymmetry between order of acquisition and language dominance). Given that many aspects of cross-linguistic influence are shared across bilinguals, the investigation of heritage bilinguals’ intonation will contribute to building robust models of bilingual intonation.

Key competencies of higher education teachers in bilingual education context

This article presents the findings of a study aimed at systematically identifying and specifying the essential competencies required by instructors in higher education institutions to carry out their roles in interdisciplinary bilingual education effectively.

Context, intersectionality, and resilience: Moving toward a more holistic study of bilingualism in cognitive science.

Bilingual experiences are diverse, vibrant, and multidimensional. Yet, prior research has often homogenized bilingualism and based outcomes upon monolingual norms. Framing monolinguals as the norm distorts the reality of bilingual experiences. To promote a more diverse and inclusive study of bilingualism, we propose a theoretical and methodological paradigm shift. Bilinguals exist in different networks, cultural contexts, and individual and societal settings, all of which may lead to differential cognitive and linguistic outcomes that will be lost if left unexamined. Bilingual interactional contexts occur within extensive environmental and ecological systems, and may lead to different outcomes based on experiences within these systems. We seek to recognize these interactional contexts and how, as researchers, we can strive to better understand the complexities of bilingual populations. We propose incorporating more diverse theoretical frameworks-including raciolinguistics, an intersectional resiliency perspective, and an ecological approach-so that researchers can begin to think about how bilingual experiences are shaped before study participants enter the lab. Included also are methodological considerations that will improve our understanding of bilinguals' intersectional experiences. We offer suggestions for becoming more diverse and inclusive in our research. We encourage scientists to take a more holistic and nuanced approach to understanding how individual and contextual factors affect our study populations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Some remarks on Spanish in the bilingual world

AbstractThe core goal of this article consists of raising new questions about the status of Spanish in bilingual contexts. The starting point is that we observe tremendous variance in the repertoire, competence, and use of Spanish by bilinguals across the globe: from very fluent bilinguals to subtractive bilinguals (also known as heritage speakers) to overhearers, who heard Spanish in the background growing up but did not actively speak it. Setting the overhearer type aside, I contend that the other types of bilinguals meet the criteria for native speakerhood, which is nowadays understood in a more flexible and nuanced way than in more traditional variants of sociolinguistics. The discussion centers around the issues of the baseline (the language that serves as input to the bilingual upbringing), minimal exposure required for the acquisition of a language as a native one, and sociolinguistic models that allow for discontinuity in a given language community.

Феномен художественного билингвизма в удмуртской литературе (на примере творчества Г. Е. Верещагина)

The article describes the phenomenon of bilingualism, expressed in Udmurt literature at the origins of its formation. An analytical insight of this phenomenon is undertaken on the example of the works of the first Udmurt writer G. E. Vereshchagin, namely, on one of his poems. The introductory part briefly describes the various possible forms of a writer's bilingualism, one of which is adopted by the author under study. Several hypothetical versions are proposed to explain the reasons for the Udmurt writer's appeal to self-translation. An analysis of his lullaby “Glaucous, glaucous dovelet!” in Udmurt and its translated version in Russian, carried out by G. E. Vereshchagin himself, is provided. In the course of a comparative study, similarities and differences were found. It is summarized that the formation of a bilingual context in Udmurt literature begins with the works of G. E. Vereshchagin. Through the author's translation, his poetic creativity is also presented to the Russian-speaking reader for the first time. It is revealed that in the translated text the poet successfully embodied the national stylistics and figurative expressiveness inherent in the original. The study of the bilingual creativity of G. E. Vereshchagin contributes to the understanding of the bilingual phenomenon of national literature.

DEEP AGING: THE CONNECTION THAT SURVIVES DEATH AND ITS ROLE IN INCREASING HUMAN–NONHUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

Abstract Ageing is part of life, and so is death. Although death will involve all of us over time, it is often regarded as a taboo topic, and bonds with the dead are seldom acknowledged in contemporary times. The aim of this paper is to present selected insights on the connection that survives death and its role in increasing human/non-human relationships, learned from two indigenous knowledges—whakapapa (genealogical connections in Maori) and filial piety (respect/care for parents and ancestors). Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 49 key informants (Maori=25; Korean=24) between 2019 and 2021 in New Zealand and South Korea. A modified thematic analysis method was used to analyse the data obtained in a bilingual research context. The research findings show that the connectedness with ancestors or deceased loved ones is a significant part of the participants’ mental and social lives, emphasised in both whakapapa and filial piety/ancestor veneration traditions. Maori participants were likely to consider their natural environment (for example, land and water) as a common good for all generations, while Korean counterparts viewed it (for example, a mountain) as the place where ancestors were remembered and venerated. Participants’ awareness of the post-mortem relationships was associated with their connection with nature and spiritual practices. Overall, this study suggests that there are several possible ways that older people could do ‘something’ prior to death for their remaining families and friends, ranging from activities concerning death talk, end-of-life preparation, legacy building and after-life planning, to connectedness with nature and non-human beings.

Working towards diagnosing bilingual children's language abilities: issues for teachers in Wales

One area of concern within a bilingual context relates to the appropriate ‘diagnostic’ assessment of bilingual children’s language abilities and to the suitable application of their assessment results in practice. Communication and language difficulties are numerous and complex, and manifest themselves in a variety of ways that are captured to different degrees via standardised tests. Such tools are readily available – often in multiple forms – in some languages, such as English, but less readily available in others. This is particularly the case for minority languages such as Welsh, and this poses great difficulty when aiming for a certain type of assessment of specific language abilities. This paper outlines the current state of diagnostic assessment tools for Welsh, with a specific focus on measures of literacy abilities. Drawing on research evidence from the Welsh context, we argue for appropriate training of educators in this area, and for the urgent need to develop tools that are both language and context specific, with relevant bilingual speaker norms, that have practical applications in the classroom, to ensure equitable and relevant diagnosis and support for all children educated in Wales.