Bilingual University Research Articles

Bilingual young adults’ perceived influence of parents, grandparents, siblings, and friends on their Spanish and English proficiency: A qualitative analysis

Aims and objectives/purpose: Qualitative studies on bilingual individuals’ perspectives can inform research by identifying community understanding of lived phenomena and aiding in theory building. The purpose of this study was to examine the perceived role of external factors in the family, school, and community on the Spanish and English proficiency of a group of Latine Spanish–English bilingual university students. Methodology: A qualitative content analysis was used to compare participants’ perspectives and establish the commonality of their experiences. Researcher triangulation was used to ensure rigor. A consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative research was used to ensure that the design, collection, and analysis were consistent with accepted qualitative research standards ( Tong et al., 2007 ). Data and analysis: Twenty-three bilingual university students in Houston, United States, rated their proficiency in Spanish and English using the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q; Marian et al., 2007 ) and participated in a structured in-person interview regarding their perceptions of the influence of various external factors on their English and Spanish proficiency. Findings: Factors reported to contribute most to adults’ Spanish proficiency included home interactions with parents, family language policies that encouraged Spanish language use, and the need to communicate with grandparents. The most important factors for English proficiency were friends, siblings, and the school environment. These findings aligned with the self-reported ratings. Originality: This study is one of the few to qualitatively examine bilingual adults’ experiences and report on relevant factors during childhood to early adulthood. Significance: Bilingual experiences in the Houston context are documented here. Findings from this and future studies may be useful to estimate the impact of external factors on proficiency in adulthood, which has implications for conceptual frameworks for bilingual acquisition research.

Literacy in everyday life: How bilingual college students repurposed and adapted literacy spaces

Literacy in everyday life: How bilingual college students repurposed and adapted literacy spaces

Influence of cognitive control on the moral foreign language effect

Purpose: The Moral Foreign Language Effect (MFLE) is characterized by an increase in utilitarian responding when moral dilemmas are presented in a foreign language. Renewed interest in this psycholinguistic phenomenon has led to investigation of its boundary conditions and the modulatory influence of separable dimensions of foreign language experience. However, even when accounting for these additional differences, considerable variability in the MFLE is observed across participants. Recently, cognitive control, a set of mental processes that regulate thinking and behavior, has been identified as a potential modulator of the MFLE. To date, no studies have investigated whether differences in cognitive control influence the emergence of the MFLE. The present study aimed to directly explore this topic in a sample of Mandarin-English bilingual university students in Mainland China. Methodology: Participants responded to a set of moral dilemmas presented in either their native or foreign language and completed a Simon task to assess cognitive control. Findings: We report a dilemma and language context-specific modulatory role for cognitive control on the MFLE. Specifically, when presented in a foreign language, higher levels of cognitive control were associated with higher rates of utilitarian decisions on the classic Trolley dilemma. Originality: This study marks the first empirical investigation of the influence of cognitive control on the MFLE. Significance: Findings from this work highlight the role of cognitive control in moral decision-making and chart a course for future investigations on this topic.

Interculturality In Universities: Identity, Experiences And The Impact of Beca 18 on Bilingual Students

Financial incentives play a crucial role in the bilingual intercultural education of university students; therefore, this study aims to analyze the impact that Beca 18 has on bilingual university students from an intercultural approach. The study uses a qualitative approach, employing the interview technique, conducted with students from the Toribio Rodríguez de Mendoza National University of Amazonas and the Fabiola Salazar Leguía National Intercultural University of Bagua. The results show a positive impact of the scholarship on the students, highlighting its importance in their academic training, mainly due to the financial support that allows them to cover study and living expenses. Many point out that without this assistance, they would not be able to continue their higher education. The main challenges faced by students from native cultures include adapting to Spanish, understanding technical terms, and transitioning to university life. The study concludes that while financial support is essential, additional resources and strategies are needed to address these linguistic and cultural challenges, thereby enhancing the overall effectiveness of intercultural bilingual education.

Knowledge of the Stress-Health Link as a Source of Resilience Among Mexicans in the Arizona Borderlands.

Mexicans who migrate to the United States endure significant stressors related to the migration process and social and environmental conditions of life in the United States. Given that chronic stress exposure has been linked to the onset of health conditions, these ecological factors may expose them to increased risk for poor health. However, Mexicans have many positive health outcomes compared to those monitored nationally, making it crucial to understand possible sources of resilience in this population. Here, we investigate Mexicans' lay health knowledge in response to stress as a possible source of health-related resilience. Health knowledge is considered a central facet of practical and traditional knowledge as well as adaptive modes of intelligence and has a tangible impact on health. Using an ethnographically grounded community-based participatory research design informed by the theory of embodiment, our hybrid team of bilingual university and community-based researchers interviewed Mexican-origin residents (N = 30) living in rural southwestern Arizona about how they experienced and responded to stress and incorporated it into their etiological frameworks. Thematic analysis revealed that participants paid close attention to how stress presented itself in their bodies, which informed their understanding of its potentially harmful health impacts and motivated them to employ multiple stress reduction strategies. Our results highlight the breadth of Mexicans' lay health knowledge, thereby challenging dominant narratives about low rates of health literacy in this population. Findings can be harnessed to optimize potential health protective effects in home and community settings as well as to inform preventive and clinical interventions.

Developing Students’ Competences in the Era of Technology: Experience of Integrating Writing in a Content Course at Christian Bilingual University of Congo

Developing Students’ Competences in the Era of Technology: Experience of Integrating Writing in a Content Course at Christian Bilingual University of Congo

Exploring the roles of openness to experience, emotions, and proficiency levels in bilingual students’ happiness

Aims and objectives: Limited attention has been paid to whether and how bilinguals’ multiple language status is related to their well-being. Thus, this research aims to explore whether and how bilingual proficiency interacts with the relationships between personality, emotions, and happiness in bilinguals. Methodology: This study employed a survey questionnaire approach. Data and analysis: A sample of 277 bilingual college students in the United States participated in the project. Mediation and moderation analyses were conducted. Findings and conclusion: Results suggested that positive emotion fully mediated the relationship between openness to experience and happiness, and bilingual proficiency moderated the relationship between openness to experience and emotions. Originality: This study unpacked the link between openness to experience and happiness through mediators of different emotions. Importantly, this study highlighted the different moderating impacts of bilingual proficiency on the relationship between openness to experience and emotions. Implications: This study presents several implications related to positive language education practices.

Comprehension monitoring across languages – The effect of online feedback

BackgroundReading and comprehending texts is challenging for students in higher education, especially when reading in English as a foreign language (EFL). An important component of efficient reading comprehension is the ability to accurately self-monitor understanding and performance, though most readers are not accurate at monitoring their comprehension. AimsThis study investigated whether online, immediate and repetitive feedback on the process of calibration of comprehension, can improve comprehension monitoring when reading in native (L1) and foreign languages (FL), and whether such improvement can be generalized across languages. SampleParticipants were 138 undergraduate Hebrew-English bilingual university students. MethodsMonitoring accuracy was calculated through the paradigm of ‘calibration of comprehension’. Participants were divided into four study groups according to the language of reading (L1 or FL) and the exposure to feedback on calibration (with or without). Participants attended a total of five study sessions: a pre-exposure session, three exposure sessions and a fifth post-exposure session. ResultsOnly students who engaged with texts in the FL and received feedback showed improved monitoring accuracy. This improvement did not generalize to their L1. ConclusionsPedagogically, these results indicate that comprehension monitoring skills can be improved through online, immediate and repetitive feedback, especially in the FL. We suggest that FL comprehension was amenable to change because it met the optimal level of text difficulty to engage participants with the monitoring process. Thus, online feedback supported by digital technology may offer distinctive educational opportunities for bolstering comprehension monitoring.

The bilingual styles of young Puerto Rican adolescents online

Abstract This article examines the language mixing practices of Puerto Rican adolescents in various social media platforms through a framework of code-mixing and socioindexicality. Over a twelve-week period, I collected samples of online text messages from six island bilinguals of an elite community of practice (CofP) and studied the way their unique socializations in private schools and bilingual universities contributed to the ways they made sense of languages, their social meaning potentials, and uses across online interactions. Against the meaningful backdrop of colonial-dynamics of Spanish and English in Puerto Rico, the paper examines how ideologies of “nationalism” and “race” get reproduced or challenged through bilingual practice, and English takes up an equally important role for the construction of social identities in the interactions of youth. Additionally, the study discusses bilingual styles that have been enregistered as social styles specific to technological mediums of communication and youth registers, Puerto Rican netspeak, as well as emerging social styles that indicate queer gender identity, or non-binary practices. In this sense, I offer a description of the island bilingual that is dynamic, strategic, and metapragmatically conscious of the purist ideologies of Spanish in Puerto Rico, as well as the indexical potentials of appropriating variable gender forms in Spanish, bilingual language practices, and netspeak registers towards the negotiation of identities in technological interaction. The way bilinguals relate to the languages at their disposal can provide a window to impending questions on the perceived coloniality of English, potential changes in language ideologies and uses, and whether and how language policies may shift to meet current demographic attitudes and language uses of contemporary Puerto Ricans.

Increasing Accessibility to Neuroscience through Translation: Going beyond the English Language.

Declaring the 1990s as The Decade of the Brain put the field of neuroscience at the forefront of public attention, with the nervous system becoming a subject of increasing interest in popular media. Although this has generally brought large swaths of the public closer to neuroscience, most current research is published and disseminated in a single language: English. This is unsurprising as English is indeed the lingua franca in scientific circles, but people around the world communicate in many other languages. To make neuroscience accessible to a larger audience, we share an initiative to translate the Knowing Neurons platform into a second language: Spanish. This collaborative project integrates humanities and STEM academic programs to make use of bilingual university students, in association with professional linguists and neuroscientists, to translate scientific content into a relatable format to Spanish speakers regardless of their country of origin. The translation effort was piloted within the framework of undergraduate outreach courses at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is coupled with outreach components targeting the Spanish-speaking community to promote this new resource. This project aims to foster an environment where the neuroscientific interests of the public, college students, instructors, and researchers coalesce in a unified space. We hope that opening new lines of communication with traditionally underrepresented communities might help combat the persistent lack of diversity in neuroscience (and STEM) that is currently seen in academia. We also provide an outline to inspire others to translate these, and similar resources, into other languages.

Investigating university students’ digital citizenship development through the lens of digital literacy practice: A Translingual and transemiotizing perspective

This qualitative study has investigated how a group of bilingual university students in Hong Kong understand digital citizenship and construct it through digital literacy practices in social media. Drawing on interview data and examples of digital activity shared by the students, we adopt the theories of digital literacies and translanguaging and transsemiotizing to reveal how they construct digital citizenship through an complex interplay between several factors, most prominently (1) a variety of digitally mediated social, cultural and educational practices the students engage in, (2) their agency of deploying diverse linguistic and semiotic recourses to achieve varied communicative effects in different settings and (3) their personal pursuits of intellectual and professional development and social engagement in a digitalized and globalized society. We then discuss how the findings can enrich our understanding of digital citizenship and its relationship with digital literacies in a multilingual and multicultural context such as Hong Kong. The implications for digital citizenship education are also discussed.

Effect of Strategic Leadership Practices on Institutional Performance. A Case of Christian Bilingual University of Congo

The study sought to examine the effect of strategic leadership practices on institutional performance – a case of Christian Bilingual University of Congo. The independent variable of the study includes strategic control, human capital, ethical practices, and balanced strategic control while institutional performance constitutes the dependent variable. The study used a quantitative research design. The accessible population was 32 employees of Christian Bilingual University of Congo. Data was collected using self-administered questionnaires. The study found that human capital development affects institutional performance insignificantly. Christian universities do not achieve their optimal institutional performance. However, Strategic Control promotes Institutional Performance, and the work plans address the organization’s objectives, targets, indicators, strategies, timelines, monitoring, and budget. The study concluded that Christian universities are not carefully evaluating openly the capacity required for their programs, services, and activities. They lack known procedures for selection and prioritization of training components based on the defined assumptions. The study has recommended that the Christian universities in Congo should re-engineer their approach to human capital development so that they may meet their objectives and mission and have qualified and better-equipped people who will move forward as they have the knowledge and they can use it for the advancement of the institution.

Who Read Vidyasamgraham: The Story of a Bilingual College Magazine from Nineteenth-Century Kerala

The paper attempts to understand the idea of readership and access to printed books in colonial South India, responding to print and missionary interventions in nineteenth-century Kerala. The paper would ask, how does one work with traces of reading in the text and construct its beyond with interest in this history, paying heed to its entanglements in desires and fears of and from the same activity of reading? Is there a potential affective space in this history, accounted by the reader between divisions of the material text and the liminalities of reading events scattered in its time and space? The paper envisions methods to study reading and its lives by imaginatively and symbolically locating “readers” and “respondents” to the changes within the nineteenth-century missionary printing exercise. The study understands the coming of Vidyasamgraham or The Cottayam College Quarterly Magazine, published between 1864 and 1867 to have set the pace for both knowledge dissemination and the making of rational modern “reading” subjects in nineteenth-century Kerala. The serialization of The Slayer Slain throughout its eight issues will be read alongside the selected entries of Vidyasamgraham to ask questions about how reading was conceived, its locations, and the nature of the book.

Analysis of the Meaning of Functional Load for English Pronunciation Teaching at a Cross-Cultural Bilingual University Taking Wenzhou-Kean University as an Example

Wenzhou-Kean University (WKU) is a Sino-American collaborative university where Chinese students communicate in English with professors and peers having diverse English accents. Through such interactions, these students seem to naturally develop an awareness of pronunciation modification. Since pronunciation teaching is not yet emphasized at WKU, this study preliminarily examined if traditional factors affecting functional load (FL), for example, the number of minimal pairs, the difference between consonants and vowels, word frequency, and language context made sense for teaching phonemic contrasts at WKU. At the same time, students perceptions of interactions effect on pronunciation awareness were assessed. The researcher collected and analyzed attitudinal data from 114 WKU students with different English learning goals. It turned out that emphasizing teaching traditional high FL mistakes, consonant contrasts, and frequently used spoken words might not be necessary at WKU. Instead, through natural interactions in an English as an International Language (EIL) environment, students seemed to have identified important pronunciation mistakes among Chinese learners, tolerated those mistakes not hindering understanding, and practiced perceiving the meaning of accented words through language context.

Psychopathy in Iran: Developing and Validating a Persian Version of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality- Self-Report (CAPP-SR)

The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality-Self-Report (CAPP-SR) is the most recent operationalization of the CAPP model which uses 33 symptoms to conceptualize psychopathic personality disorder. In the current study, we sought to examine the cross-cultural utility of the CAPP-SR in an Iranian sample. In Study 1, we translated the CAPP-SR into Persian and assessed the linguistic convergence between the Persian and original English versions using a sample of Persian–English bilingual university students in New Zealand. In Study 2, we examined the reliability and validity of the Persian CAPP-SR using a sample of university students in Iran. Our results showed that the Persian CAPP-SR has a promising pattern of convergent and incremental validity in terms of their associations with conceptually-relevant criterion measures, including those designed for the Iranian cultural context. Overall, the findings from the current study support the use of the Persian CAPP-SR as well as having implications for the cross-cultural utility of the CAPP model.

Social facilitation and bilingual cognitive advantage: Bridging social psychology and psycholinguistics

This study examined the role of social context in the expression of the bilingual cognitive advantage in 145 bilingual university students. All participants mastered Arabic as their native language (L1), but half were highly proficient in French (high L2 group), whereas half were less proficient (low L2 group). A color-word Stroop test with incongruent, congruent and neutral stimuli was administered in single language blocks (Arabic or French words) or in a mixed block (Arabic and French words), either under social presence, or alone. Stroop interference was analyzed to assess the cost of resolving conflict in incongruent trials and was compared across groups and experimental conditions. If bilingualism comes with a cognitive advantage, a reduction of interference in high (vs. low) L2 proficient subjects is to be expected. Analysis revealed that interference was significantly reduced in high L2 group, but only under the single language condition. Furthermore, whereas social context and sex had no main effects, analysis revealed a significant 4-factor interaction between L2 proficiency, linguistic context, social context, and sex. Social presence further reduced interference (social facilitation) in high L2 proficient females, but not in males. Overall, the results suggest that mastering a second language comes with cognitive advantages which adapt dynamically to social and linguistic contexts in a sex-dependent manner. We argue that advancing bilingualism research requires more attention to the social environment.

Validity and reliability of the Arabic sedentary behavior questionnaire among university students aged between 18–30 years old

PurposeThe study aimed to test the validity and reliability of the Arabic version of the sedentary behavior questionnaire (SBQ).MethodsA total of 624 university students (273 males; 351 females, mean age = 20.8 years) were recruited from Taibah University, Madinah, Saudi Arabia. For criterion and constructive validity (n = 352), the Arabic SBQ was compared with total sitting time from the International Physical Activity Questionnaire-short form (IPAQ-SF) and the International Physical Activity Questionnaire-long form (IPAQ-LF). For concurrent validity, the English and Arabic SBQ versions were given concurrently to bilingual university students (n = 122) once. For test–retest reliability, the Arabic SBQ was given twice to participants (n = 150) at a one-week interval.ResultsSitting time of IPAQ-SF (7th question: sitting time on weekdays) and IPAQ-LF (21st question: sitting time on weekdays and 22nd question: sitting time on weekends) correlated significantly with total sitting time/week of the Arabic SBQ (r = 0.29, p = 0.003; r = 0.14, p = 0.02, respectively). Motorized transportation measured with the IPAQ-LF correlated significantly with time spent driving in a car, bus, or train from the Arabic SBQ on weekdays and weekends (r = 0.53, p < 0.001; r = 0.44 p < 0.001, respectively). The total sitting time of the Arabic SBQ was inversely correlated with BMI (r = -0.18, p = 0.001). The correlations between the Arabic and the English SBQ versions ranged from 0.25–0.96; p < 0.001 on weekdays and 0.50–0.90; p < 0.001 on weekends. Moderate to good reliability was also found between test and retest for all SBQ items and total score during weekdays (0.72 to 0.8), and weekends (0.64 to 0.87), with exception of the 7th item "play musical instrument", ICC = 0.46). Mean difference of test–retest of the Arabic SBQ was not significantly different from zero for the total sitting time of the Arabic SBQ (t = -0.715, P = 0.476).ConclusionThe Arabic SBQ had satisfactory levels of reliability, with total sitting time of the Arabic SBQ correlating significantly with sitting times derived from IPAQ-SF, IPAQ-LF, and the English SBQ versions. Hence, the Arabic SBQ can be used as a tool to measure sedentary behavior among adult Arabs aged between 18 to 30 years old in future epidemiologic and clinical practice.

Competencia prosódica del alumnado bilingüe universitario en la lectura en voz alta: producción y percepción

The aim of this work is to analyze the prosodic competence of bilingual university students of the Basque Country in two areas of the oral language: production and perception. Once collected and studied the data in the production of reading aloud, perception tests are used in order to know the prosodic group best valued in reading aloud, for this an experimental investigation has been carried out based on the more general characteristics of the prosodic groups. 101 bilingual young people took part in the study. They read news aloud for further phonetic analysis. The result of the data obtained with a Chi-square test in tonal peaks shows that gender is statistically significant. In the case of perception, mother tongue affects significantly in assessing stimuli that are manipulated.

A contrastive analysis of emotions and thoughts across Arabic and English as foreign languages in narratives written by bilingual Jordanian university students studying in Hungary

The present study aimed to explore bilinguals’ narratives in their two languages by examining their emotions by comparing the number of adjectives and adverbs used to describe a photo. The study also examines whether the thoughts expressed in their narratives are similar in Arabic and English. Data were collected from 18 Jordanian Arabic-English bilingual university students residing in Hungary, through narratives formed to describe a thematic apperception test photo. To compare the number of adjectives and adverbs, data were analyzed using SPSS 20, and qualitative thematic analysis was conducted to explore the themes in the narratives. The results of this study indicate that when participants used their first language (L1), they did not tend to employ a greater number of adjectives and adverbs in their writing. In other words, the use of adjectives and adverbs in L1 does not appear to be more frequent than in other languages. Findings also indicate that participants would describe the same photo differently by presenting different thoughts when using their L1 and L2. This study presents further evidence that bilinguals use their two languages differently.

Students’ conceptualizations of monolingual Swedish-language spaces and bilingual practices at a bilingual university in Finland

This paper aims to analyze students’ discourses on language policies and practices in a Swedish-medium study program at the largest bilingual university in Finland. In educational discourse and practice in Finland, the position of Swedish as a de facto minority language has traditionally been understood as secured through institutional language separation. While the declared language policies at the University of Helsinki have witnessed a shift towards the simultaneous use of multiple languages, the structure of the study programs still reflect a policy of parallel monolingualisms (Heller, 2007). By analyzing student interviews using a spatially informed framework, we look at how the students in a Swedish-medium study program negotiate the meaning of the program as a linguistic space and how bilingual policies and practices appear to them in this construct. Our findings show that the familiar discourses of language separation in minority language educational contexts also circulated in higher education: monolingual Swedish-medium programs were seen as “svenska rum” (Swedish rooms or spaces), material and social markers of the status of Swedish at the university and guaranteeing the access to education in the other national language. However, bilingual policies and teaching practices were seen as necessary to deconstruct linguistic and social borders between students in different programs in order to prevent alienation and to improve language skills. Nevertheless, the existing bilingual courses were oftentimes experienced as marginalizing the users of Swedish and careful planning was pointed out as crucial in implementing successful bilingual and multilingual practices in higher education.