Bilingual University Research Articles

Measuring Verbal Fluency Task Performance of Indonesian Bilinguals

Verbal fluency (VF) task is a tool that has been utilized in bilingual studies to measure executive performance of bilingual individuals. While many of the previous studies compared bilingual speakers’ performance in VF to their monolingual counterparts, this descriptive study compares exclusively the cross-linguistic VF performance of Indonesian bilinguals in their first (L1), second (L2), and third language (L3). The aim of this study was to see whether or not there were any differences in the result of their performance in each of their languages. The participants of the current study were 25 non-native bilingual university students in Indonesia who speak English in at least intermediate level. Javanese is the L1 of the participants. Indonesian is their L2, whereas English is their L3. In the VF task, the participants were requested to generate, in a rapid fashion, semantic category and phonemic category in their L1, L2, and L3. The results showed that the participants’ VF performance in English and standard Indonesian were significantly higher (p < .05) than Javanese. However, no significant difference was indicated when comparing the semantic category and phonemic category in all three languages. The findings of this study will be used as a basis for a forthcoming study on VF performance of Indonesian bilinguals.

The effects of bilingual Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) on exercise in bilingual international university students

Promoting physical activity is a crucial public health priority. Interventions that use applied behavior analytic procedures (ABA) such as contingency management and self-management have shown promise for facilitating physical activity. However, additional research is needed to advance innovation, particularly with respect to interventions that work through indirect-acting contingencies. Among these innovative models of behavior intervention, Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) has received increased attention and empirical support. Previous research has provided evidence that ACT can increase exercise but previous ACT studies have generally used group designs, which makes it difficult to carefully consider the effects of the intervention at the level of the individual participant, the level at which ACT trainers and therapists work. The present study evaluated a bilingual, five-week, one-on-one ACT-based coaching program for increasing exercise in bilingual international university students. After receiving the ACT intervention, all four participants increased their average daily steps, gym visits, and gym duration significantly and gains maintained after intervention was terminated. The results of this study suggest that an ACT-based bilingual coaching program of moderate duration can be effective for increasing exercise in bilingual university students.

Profiles of Students in Bilingual University Degree Programs Using English as a Medium of Instruction in Spain

This is an empirical study which aims to examine the profile of Spanish university students in bilingual degree programs that employ English as a medium of instruction by utilizing the bilingual section of the teaching degree course at the University of Granada as a sample. To this end, a questionnaire was applied to 216 students. While 75% of the students reported having problems when following a bilingual class, these difficulties were found to diminish or disappear after the first trimester. The majority of the students (70%) were satisfied with the program offered but they also detected some deficiencies, which provided a basis for various suggestions as to how university bilingual programs might be improved.

Reliability of the French-Canadian adaptation of the Personality Assessment Inventory: Medical–legal implications

The Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) is a reliable multidimensional psychometric inventory that is increasingly being used in the medical–legal context. To date, 18 language adaptations of the PAI exist, yet only the Spanish, Greek and German language versions have been examined psychometrically. This study evaluated the psychometric properties of the French-Canadian version of the PAI by comparing mean scale and subscale scores between the French-Canadian and English language versions, and analyzing the internal consistency and mean item inter-correlations (MICs) of each version in a sample of 50 bilingual university students. Cronbach’s alphas ranged from −.57 to .80 in the French-Canadian version and from −1.10 to .83 in the English version, with most scales being below .70, indicating inadequate internal consistency. In addition, most of the MICs were below .20, indicating a lack of item homogeneity. Caution is given to this adaptation of the PAI in the medical–legal context.

A bilingual university student’s acculturation process in the United States: A linguistic case study for culturally responsive curriculum development

The present study explores and investigates how a Korean-English bilingual speaker is influenced by her native culture during her acculturation process in the United States (U.S.). This linguistic research study is designed around three main themes. The first theme is the cultural adaptation process of the participant, which is analyzed based on the participant’s perceptions about Korean daily life and customs. The second theme refers to exploring the participant’s acculturation process within the U.S. along with her socialization stages. For the third theme, the participant’s intercultural awareness towards her native culture is explored. The interview data analysis confirmed that the participant experienced a culture shock within her first school year in the U.S. The findings of the interviews indicate that the participant applied particular strategies to overcome her culture shock in order to adapt a new way of life, which would be informative for improving culturally responsive curriculum development strategies.

‘Converse racialization’ and ‘un/marking’ language: The making of a bilingual university in a neoliberal world

AbstractThe discourse on the opening of a bilingual university along the Texas-Mexico border leads us to propose a theory of ‘converse racialization’ through which the local Spanish is being progressively ‘unmarked’ and disassociated from the language practice of Mexican Americans. Converse racialization, as the equal and opposite co-constituting underside of racialization, shifts the directionality of semiotic indexes away from a particular ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ (including whiteness) and produces an apparent state of ‘unmarkedness’. We argue that the process of ‘unmarking’ Spanish has social, economic, and racializing consequences. Specifically, the language-as-resource discourse obscures and rearticulates the ‘deficiency perspective’ that continues to perpetuate structural inequalities that Latinxs in the border face. (Racialization, higher education, critical race theory, bilingualism, neoliberalism)*

Measuring the impact of translanguaging in TESOL: a plurilingual approach to ESP

ABSTRACT This study compares the language proficiency gains of two groups of students taking a business English course module in a bilingual university in Catalonia (Spain). Whereas one of these groups followed a ‘translanguaging’ or ‘plurilingual’ pedagogy, the other followed a strictly monolingual approach. Participants were 54 mostly Catalan/Spanish bilingual university students of Business (n = 35 translanguaging and n = 19 monolingual). Whereas the teacher in the ‘translanguaging group’ used and fostered the use of Catalan and Spanish besides English, the teacher in the ‘monolingual group’ only used English and allowed only English in class. Participants were administered a placement test, and performed a written composition and an oral sales pitch the first and last week of the semester. Participants were also administered a questionnaire before and after the treatment. The EFL development of the participants was measured in terms of fluency, lexical complexity, grammatical complexity and accuracy, but it was also assessed by an expert examiner, who based her ratings on a rubric including four scales: language, communicative achievement, content, and organisation. Results show that both groups experienced comparable gains, but the few significant differences favoured the translanguaging group.

THE ROLE OF BILINGUALISM IN ACQUIRING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

The present study emphasizes the role of bilingualism in foreign language learning by investigating the acquisition of English as a third language of Turkish bilingual university students with Arabian origins. This study is based on a phenomenologic research design which is a qualitative research methodology, within the interpretive research paradigm, that inquires the qualitatively diverse ways in which people experience something. The data of the study were gathered through a semi-structured interview developed by the researcher and content analysis technique was utilized to analyze the collected data. The results of the study suggest that being already proficient in both Turkish and Arabic languages facilitates the acquisition of a third language and the already possessed languages provide an advantage in acquiring a new language.

Humor and the Creative Use of English Expressions in the Speech of University Students: A Case From Jordan

The present study examines the use of English lexical insertions to create humor by Jordanian university students. The data of the study are collected from spontaneous tape-recorded conversations from 62 participants of both males and females, representing different age groups (from 18–23 years old) and belonging to different specializations (e.g., engineering, pharmacy, mathematics, business, and English). The recorded conversations are qualitatively analyzed applying Auer’s sequential approach to code-switching to attain a local interpretation of lexical insertions for humor effect from English into Jordanian Arabic (JA). The findings of the study reveal that Jordanian university students exploit their bilingual repertoire to create humor by playfully and innovatively switching to English. This is shown to take place by unexpected switching points, a switching that flouts Arabic syntactic constraints, a violation of code-switching constraints, incongruity and incompatibility of translating Arabic culture-bound expressions to English, and imposing Arabic word formation templates to English insertions. Specifically, five patterns of code-switching of humor are found, namely, switching around the interrogative, playful affixation, phonological playfulness, haphazard calquing, and the imposition of Arabic morphological rules on English lexical insertions. The study argues that humorous insertions are in fact a marker of solidarity and an in-group membership. Humorous insertions are also shown not to contribute to the content of the message or the pragmatic meaning. Bilingual university students (of Arabic and English) purposefully make use of an additional linguistic resource to mock certain propositions.

Integration of Wavelet and Recurrence Quantification Analysis in Emotion Recognition of Bilinguals

Background: This study offers a robust framework for the classification of autonomic signals into five affective states during the picture viewing. To this end, the following emotion categories studied: five classes of the arousal-valence plane (5C), three classes of arousal (3A), and three categories of valence (3V). For the first time, the linguality information also incorporated into the recognition procedure. Precisely, the main objective of this paper was to present a fundamental approach for evaluating and classifying the emotions of monolingual and bilingual college students. Methods: Utilizing the nonlinear dynamics, the recurrence quantification measures of the wavelet coefficients extracted. To optimize the feature space, different feature selection approaches, including generalized discriminant analysis (GDA), principal component analysis (PCA), kernel PCA, and linear discriminant analysis (LDA), were examined. Finally, considering linguality information, the classification was performed using a probabilistic neural network (PNN). Results: Using LDA and the PNN, the highest recognition rates of 95.51%, 95.7%, and 95.98% were attained for the 5C, 3A, and 3V, respectively. Considering the linguality information, a further improvement of the classification rates accomplished. Conclusion: The proposed methodology can provide a valuable tool for discriminating affective states in practical applications within the area of human-computer interfaces.

Linguistic Identities in the Digital Space

Abstract Within the digital world, new multilingual contacts appeared, which led to a more multilingual Web and enabled local and global participation that assert new identities (Lenihan and Kelly-Holmes 2017). For multilingual people, language choice and code-switching serves as a means for users to perform a specific image of cultural or personal identity and signal their affiliation with a particular community. The paper analyses digital multilingual practices of bilingual (Hungarian-Romanian) university students in Romania. The data consists of students’ public Facebook profiles, examining language choice, code-switching, and hybrid practices. My research question refers to how their linguistic identity is constructed in their online communicative practices. Multilingual practices in the social media are not necessarily connected to language competences in a traditional sense and may serve as a space for resolving conflicting linguistic identities. In my data, students use their diverse linguistic and semiotic resources in varying ways to express and build their online identity, relying on the multimodal affordances of the digital world. Online multilingual practices rely on the speaker’s complete language repertoire, but they do not necessarily depend on language proficiency.

Relationships between openness to experience, cognitive flexibility, self-esteem, and creativity among bilingual college students in the U.S.

ABSTRACT Currently, the positive role of creativity has received support and research in bilingual literature. However, the positive psychological processes that may contribute to creativity only received little attention, especially in bilingual population. This study focused on exploring the possible psychological processes among several variables: openness to experience, cognitive flexibility, self-esteem, and creativity, in bilingual population, and further tested the mediating roles that cognitive flexibility and self-esteem may play in the relationship between openness to experience and creativity. A sample of 284 bilingual college students in the U.S. participated in this study. Results showed that: (1) openness to experience, cognitive flexibility and self-esteem all had moderate to strong positive correlations with creativity; (2) cognitive flexibility and self-esteem partially mediated the relationship between openness to experience and creativity. The results suggested that openness to experience, self-esteem, and especially cognitive flexibility, potentially play positive roles in promoting creativity of bilingual students. Based on the current findings, some practical implications about enhancing bilingual’s creativity through positive personal factors were discussed.

Translanguaging in the Case of Bilingual University Students

According to Garcia (2009), translanguaging is “… the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to maximize communicative potential” (p. 140). Therefore, it is more about communication than language use. Bilinguals tend to employ their linguistic repertoire as an integrated communication system. In the context of this study, senior university bilingual students majoring in business in Saudi Arabia are usually competent in their mother tongue (Arabic) and in their additional language (English) due to the nature of business. They are keen to maintain their ability in English as far as possible as they consider themselves “long-term English learners”. Today, Saudi Arabia is increasingly building bridges to the outside world and clearly proficiency in English is one such bridge, allowing Saudi Arabia to integrate with English-speaking countries. Stakeholders in Saudi Arabia are now seeking English-proficient applicants for jobs, regardless of their speciality, more so than previously. This has become the norm in both the public and private sectors. However, bilingual university students majoring in business still tend to employ their mother tongue regardless of their proficiency in English. This may indicate their views and feelings with regard to the need to be bilingual in any future work context. This study focuses on senior business students at Majmaah University. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the students (n=14) and their instructor (n=1). This paper reports on the students’ attitudes towards bilingual activities, specifically task-related discussions, and the impact on their communicative repertoire from their perspective.

It takes two to make a thing go write: self-reported Spanish reading and writing skill and relationships with digit span and stroop task performance among Spanish-English bilinguals

ABSTRACT The current study examined self-reported first language (Spanish) language reading and writing ability and behavior and relationships with digit span and stroop task performance. A battery of assessments and questionnaires was administered to 81 sequential Spanish-English bilingual university students in the U.S., for whom the sole language of education is English. Hierarchical regression models revealed self-reported amount of Spanish used for academic writing uniquely accounted for 17% of variance in digit span forward scores, controlling for non-verbal IQ. Self-reported Spanish reading and writing ability also significantly predicted higher digit span forward scores and stroop task performance. Findings indicate that vectors of within-population difference related to L1 academic reading and writing are associated with differences in verbal short term memory and inhibition. Findings underscore the importance of considering diversity within bilingual samples and further support theories of a continuum of bilingual experience intensity, which is related to outcomes.

Fostering a critical consciousness in ELT: incorporating a women, gender and sexuality course in a bilingual education university program in Bogota, Colombia

ABSTRACT This article presents a systematization of experiences of a course called ‘Women, Gender, and Sexuality’ in a bilingual education program within a teachers’ college in Bogotá, Colombia. In Colombia, there has been a recent controversial movement to address gender and sexuality in the classroom and in policy. The study provides an account of experiences that examined students’ reflective journals throughout the implementation of the course. In doing so, it underscores the importance of highlighting gender and sexuality within English language teaching (ELT) curriculum and teacher education programs; such topics aid students in debunking stereotypes, fostering empathy and forming their teacher identities. These are pertinent topics within the current ELT training courses as they encourage inclusive classrooms through representing unrecognized narratives and promoting a critical consciousness. Within the Colombian context, the construction of narratives and consciousness are also important for the post- conflict transition into a peaceful and inclusive society.

Attitudes to English in the Kaleidoscopic Iranian Context: Second, Foreign or International?

Today’s world seems to be quite overwhelmingly concerned with communication as an incontestable aspect of which is communicating with people lacking a shared linguistic background. A common language (or lingua franca) would, therefore, be needed which can cut across all local, national, and regional linguistic boundaries. This study aimed at exploring the attitudes of 400 bilingual and monolingual college students and EFL learners. It investigated English language status in the linguistically diverse context of Iran. For the purpose of the study, a standardized questionnaire containing 37 Likert-type items was distributed. Descriptive statistics were employed for data analysis revealing that learners from different linguistic backgrounds had significantly different reactions and attitudes to the issues such as: General perception to English, Status of English, text and content matter comprehensibility through English, job prospects, official status, culture learning, integrating with American or British cultures, religion and foreign language learning, English ownership, Adherence to British English, American English or English as an international language.

Second language vocabulary level is related to benefits for second language listening comprehension under lower reverberation time conditions

ABSTRACTThe acoustic qualities of a room can have a deleterious effect on the quality of speech signals. The acoustic measurement of reverberation time (RT) has shown to impact second language (L2) speech comprehension positively when lower due to release from spectral and temporal masking effects as well as top-down processing factors. This auralization experiment investigated the benefits of better L2 vocabulary and executive function (updating) skills during L2 listening comprehension tests under shorter versus longer RT conditions (0.3 and 0.9 s). 57 bilingual university students undertook L2 vocabulary, number updating and L2 listening comprehension tests. After splitting groups into high/low vocabulary and updating groups, a mixed ANOVA was conducted. The high number updating group showed no significant differences or interactions in L2 listening comprehension than the lower number updating group across RT conditions. The high vocabulary group had 22% better L2 listening comprehension than the low vocabulary group in long RT, and 9% better in short RT. A significant benefit in L2 listening comprehension due to release from reverberation was only evident in the high vocabulary group. Results indicate that the benefit of good room acoustics for listening comprehension is greatest for those with better language (vocabulary) ability.

Evaluation of a Psychoeducational Intervention in the Development of Social and Communication Skills for Incoming Medical Students at a Bilingual University

Abstract Concerns about social skills in academic and professional settings are rarely considered. Undergraduate students and professionals without social and communication skills lead to an increase in the incidence of malpractice claims and interpersonal conflicts. The study is aimed at evaluating a psychoeducational intervention focused on improving social skills for incoming medical students at a bilingual university. A psychoeducational intervention was conducted in a required course from first academic term with 57 incoming medical students from Brazil and other Latin America Countries whose average age was 21.28 (SD = 4.04). The psychoeducational intervention occurred fortnightly for seven sessions which aimed to develop theoretical knowledge about communication and interpersonal relationships in academic and professional settings, interpersonal patterns, teamwork, and interpersonal problem solving. Prior and after the intervention, the students answered two self-report instruments to identify social skills and their academic experience. After the intervention, there was a significant average increase in scores related to social skills and academic experience. These increases were evident in the dimension/factor scores, as well as the total scores. The results demonstrated the importance of early and short-term interventions as a way to develop social and communication skills.

Translanguaging in the Case of Bilingual University Students

According to Garcia (2009), translanguaging is “… the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to maximize communicative potential” (p. 140). Therefore, it is more about communication than language use. Bilinguals tend to employ their linguistic repertoire as an integrated communication system. In the context of this study, senior university bilingual students majoring in business in Saudi Arabia are usually competent in their mother tongue (Arabic) and in their additional language (English) due to the nature of business. They are keen to maintain their ability in English as far as possible as they consider themselves “long-term English learners”. Today, Saudi Arabia is increasingly building bridges to the outside world and clearly proficiency in English is one such bridge, allowing Saudi Arabia to integrate with English-speaking countries. Stakeholders in Saudi Arabia are now seeking English-proficient applicants for jobs, regardless of their speciality, more so than previously. This has become the norm in both the public and private sectors. However, bilingual university students majoring in business still tend to employ their mother tongue regardless of their proficiency in English. This may indicate their views and feelings with regard to the need to be bilingual in any future work context. This study focuses on senior business students at Majmaah University. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the students (n=14) and their instructor (n=1). This paper reports on the students’ attitudes towards bilingual activities, specifically task-related discussions, and the impact on their communicative repertoire from their perspective.

Rear-view Mirror: Towards a Better Understanding of the Needs of French Immersion Teachers in Regards to Professional Development in Visual Arts

An Ontario bilingual university and a community arts committee collaborated in offering a professional development program for elementary and high school teachers to improve their instructional competence in visual arts. A year after offering the professional development program, researchers did a qualitative study in order to verify the effectiveness of the program as well as gather detailed information about its impact on classroom teaching. The group of participants in the follow-up project was comprised of French immersion teachers. Data was collected with a questionnaire used during a phone interview with each participant. Findings indicate that the program was successful in changing practices. The critical factor effecting change was the emphasis throughout the program on participants playing the role of children in age-appropriate activities. Confidence and motivation increased considerably during field applications; skills and concepts were effectively integrated into the school curricula; and creativity, experimentation and flexibility were employed to overcome instructional obstacles and effectively deliver visual arts lessons.