Development Of Sociolinguistic Competence Research Articles

Ideology, Indexicality, and the L2 Development of Sociolinguistic Perception During Study Abroad

This article explores one second language Spanish learner’s development of sociolinguistic perception in Peru involving target language variation and social indexicality in a study abroad context. Specifically, it investigates the perceptual mechanism that evolves in this context and enables L2 learners to interpret dialectal target language forms by linking them with elements of character, group traits, and other social attributes. An analysis of ethnographic data revealed two phases in this development. While the initial phase was characterized by the learner’s formation of contrastive social and linguistic categories and first-order sociolinguistic indices linking ways of speaking to kinds of people, the latter phase involved a rationalization and justification of these links. I claim that this produced an ideological field in which the learner located specific morphosyntactic variants as indexing social qualities like ‘licentiousness’ and ‘ineptitude’ via their association with brichero and cholo social types from the host society. These findings implicate language ideologies as the fundamental perceptual mechanism that enables L2 learners to interpret the social meaning of TL practices. This case study recommends critical pedagogies and innovative curricula to bolster L2 learners’ development of sociolinguistic competence during study abroad.

Inappropriate Identities: Racialized Language Ideologies and Sociolinguistic Competence in a Study Abroad Context

Abstract This article examines cases where two study abroad students—Rita and Jack—problematized the normative use of specific dialectal variants by local native speakers at the end of their Spanish immersion program in Peru. Specifically, it explores what these cases reveal about second language learners’ sociolinguistic competence in a study abroad context involving their knowledge of native speaker norms and the contextual appropriateness of target language variation. An analysis of ethnographic data suggests that Rita and Jack interpreted the appropriate use of sociolinguistic variation from the local variety of Andean Spanish by drawing on prevalent racialized language ideologies in the host community that link non-standard variants to an indigenous identity imagined as incompetent in Spanish. These findings validate a need for alternative analytic frameworks that conceptualize second language learners’ development of sociolinguistic competence in terms of language ideologies rather than objective sets of normative native speaker practices. This study advances calls to develop L2 learners’ critical language awareness through curricular innovation and critical pedagogies in study abroad programs.

Es un mal castellano cuando decimos ‘su’: Language instruction, raciolinguistic ideologies and study abroad in Peru

This article explores how two Quechua language teachers negotiated and reproduced raciolinguistic ideologies in the classroom during a Spanish immersion study abroad program that focused on indigenous communities in Peru. Specifically, it examines the ways that they conveyed the sociolinguistic appropriateness of racialized “double-possessive” constructions from the local variety of Spanish to a cohort of U.S. undergraduate students in Cuzco. An analysis of ethnographic data reveals that both instructors drew learners’ attention to these constructions, depicted them as signs of an incompetent Quechua-speaking identity, and affirmed the normative appropriateness of racially-unmarked sociolinguistic variants within the host society. These findings suggest that racialized language attitudes can underlie the ways that learners are taught appropriate target language practices during study abroad. This study illustrates how language instructors and study abroad programs can foster racialized ideologies of language that students may internalize as part of their development of sociolinguistic competence.

The Development of Sociolinguistic Competence across the Lifespan: Three Domains of Regional Dialect Perception

ABSTRACT This study investigated the developmental trajectories of three perceptual domains related to regional dialect competence: the linguistic domain, tested through an intelligibility in noise task; the objective indexical domain, tested through locality judgments and a free classification task; and the subjective indexical domain, tested through smart and friendly judgments. To allow direct comparison across domains, participants aged 4–71 years (N = 302) completed all tasks with the same talkers from four regional dialects of American English. The results demonstrated that development in each of these domains is protracted, with changes occurring as late as early adulthood. However, the developmental trajectories for each task and the connections between them differed significantly among the stimulus dialects. These dialect-specific patterns suggest that dialect perception requires extensive exposure to variety-specific linguistic and socio-cultural information, and the lengthy timecourse of sociolinguistic development reflects the substantial exposure that is necessary to successfully integrate linguistic and social information.

The Sociolinguistic Impact of Service-learning on Heritage Learners Sojourning in Spain

Over the past three decades, a considerable number of studies have investigated the connection between study abroad and second language acquisition to the exclusion of another emerging language profile, that of heritage language learners who study abroad to enhance their home language skills. The few studies on heritage language learners’ development of local features abroad have focused on phonological ones, concluding that more in-depth exposure to the varieties abroad was related to increased production of the local features (Escalante, 2018; George & Hoffman-González, in press). Research on the effects of international service learning have also been limited to second language learners, demonstrating increased second language use and proficiency (Martinsen, Baker, Dewey, Bown, & Johnson, 2010) along with the development of geographically-variable patterns of use (Salgado-Robles, 2018). The current study combines these two fields and investigates the development of a variable local feature (vosotros versus ustedes) by 20 U.S. Spanish-speaking heritage language learners of Mexican descent studying abroad for four months in Spain. The experimental group (N = 10) participated in a service learning course in addition to traditional coursework, while the control group (N = 10) completed traditional coursework and no service learning course. The results of the Oral Discourse Completion Task demonstrated that all participants significantly increased their use of vosotros from the beginning to the end of the semester; however, the change by the experimental group was two times higher than the control group. This could be explained by the results of the Language Contact Profile, which revealed more use of Spanish and less use of English by participants in the experimental group. This study offers implications for future study abroad programs, the linguistic impacts of service-learning, and the development of sociolinguistic competence.

Constructing a Second Language Sociolinguistic Repertoire: A Sociocultural Usage-based Perspective

Abstract This article discusses a sociocultural usage-based perspective on the development of sociolinguistic competence. Previous research has focused on learners’ acquisition and use of alternative ways of ‘saying the same thing’ (i.e. native-like variation) in relation to study abroad, contact with native speakers, and pedagogy. Missing from the literature are studies examining the developmental trajectories of individual learners from a qualitative perspective. This article takes a first step in this direction by documenting the specific lexicogrammatical constructions deployed by one learner of French, Leon, over the course of a 6-week stylistic variation intervention. The findings show that his sociolinguistic repertoire emerged from a single multiword expression, which in combination with Leon’s application of new metalinguistic knowledge and mediation from a teacher expanded to become a more productive schematic template. The research suggests that future work on L2 sociolinguistic development would do well to focus on qualitative accounts of individual developmental trajectories, emphasizing the specific lexicogrammatical constructions learners appropriate, to understand how L2 sociolinguistic repertoires are constructed across time.

The Effect of Educational Input on the Development of Sociolinguistic Competence by French Immersion Students: The Case of Expressions of Consequence in Spoken French

In this paper we discuss the results of a comparative study examining the words used by 41 Grade 9 and 12 OntarioFrench immersion students to express the notion of consequence intersententially (i.e., between two clauses). The immersionstudents' usage is compared to that found in: a) the spoken Frenchof Quebeckers, b) the in-class speech of a sample of French immersion teachers, and c) a series of French language artsteaching materials used in French immersion programs.The comparison reveals that this notion of consequence is expressed bytwo variants, namely alors and done, that are used with differential frequencies in all four corpora, another variant, namely (9a) faitque, that is used almost exclusively by the speakers of Quebec French and a final variant, namely so, that is used only by the immersion students. Explanations for these findings are tied to a number of factors (e.g., the differential sociostylistic values attached to these variants, and inter- and intra-systemic properties of the variants). For instance, the absence of the frequent variant(9a) fait que in the student and educational corpora reflects this variant's vernacular status in Quebec French and, hence, its avoidance in the students' educational input. Also, the students' useof so is attributed to their not having fully automatized the French conjunctions of consequence and their occasional switching to thisEnglish equivalent. Finally, we discuss the pedagogical implications of our findings.

英語リーディングにおける言語機能を活用した英作文指導 : Sociolinguistic Competenceの育成(7)

英語リーディングにおける言語機能を活用した英作文指導 : Sociolinguistic Competenceの育成(7)

The development of dialect classification across the lifespan

The current study investigated the developmental trajectory of listeners’ ability to perceive regional dialect variation in American English using a free classification paradigm. Listeners ranged in age from 4 years old through late adulthood. In two experiments, listeners sorted a set of talkers into groups based on where the talkers were from. Talkers from four regional dialects of American English (Midland, New England, Northern, Southern) were presented. The results showed that some of even the youngest listeners (4- to 5-year-olds) were able to separate New England talkers from talkers from other regions, providing evidence that they perceived dialect variation and exhibited some level of sociolinguistic competence. Moreover, children׳s dialect perception abilities showed incremental improvement through childhood and adolescence, with major developmental improvements in dialect classification accuracy observed in middle childhood (between the ages of 7 and 8 years), late childhood (between 11 and 12 years), and in the teenage years (between 15 and 16 years), when adult-like abilities were reached. The overall results have implications for the experimental methods suitable to gauge young children׳s sociolinguistic knowledge and for our understanding of the time course of children׳s development of sociolinguistic competence, particularly their acquisition of the social significance of linguistic variation.

Teaching and Learning Sociolinguistic Competence: Teachers’ Critical Perceptions

Sociolinguistic competence has been an integral part of communicative competence in that it includes learning pragmatic and sociolinguistic knowledge about how to use language linguistically and socially appropriately. However, a number of studies highlight the lack of such communicative skills among EFL learners regardless of their proficiency level of linguistic knowledge. More specially, learners may not be able to develop socio-pragmatic knowledge of language as much as grammatical knowledge of the language being learnt. Informed by this critical inconsistency and learning challenge, this study reports the perceptions of English teachers about the development of sociolinguistic competence in language classrooms. The purpose is to explore their perceptions about learners’ as well as the non-native EFL teachers’ knowledge of sociolinguistic competence along with any difficulty they may face with the integration of this particular competence in their classroom practice. Both native (n=35) and non-native (n=35) English teachers were administered a questionnaire and were asked to submit written reports revealing their perceptions underpinning the knowledge and practice of sociolinguistic competence as part of communicative competence. The results revealed that the development of sociolinguistic rules can guide learners in the choice of appropriate forms which should be closely integrated in language teaching and learning curricula

BIDIRECTIONAL LINGUISTIC CHANGE IN RURAL CHILD AND ADOLESCENT LANGUAGE IN SYRIA

Investigating the spread of the urban feature the glottal stop [ ʔ ] in place of the rural voiceless uvular stop [q] in the speech of rural children and adolescents in the Syrian village, Oyoun Al - Wadi, a bidirectional linguistic change is observed. Girls retain their mothers’ urban feature in preadolescence and adolescence; boys who initially acquire the urban feature start switching to the rural feature around age eight and increase their use of this feature with age. Thus, the observed variation a nd changes are gender - and age - related and result from different meanings associated with urban and rural sounds. Preadolescence emerges as the period in which kids are emotionally involved in building a social identity, indicating early development of soc iolinguistic competence.

Learner beliefs about sociolinguistic competence: A qualitative case study of four university second language learners

AbstractThis article explores the beliefs about second language (L2) sociolinguistic competence of four university-level advanced L2 learners. It places particular emphasis on 1) how these university learners conceptualized L2 sociolinguistic competence; 2) how they thought about two different language learning contexts (viz., the L2 classroom versus study abroad) for their development of sociolinguistic competence; and 3) the L2 strategies they employed to develop their L2 sociolinguistic knowledge. The study found, first, that the university learners conceived of sociolinguistic competence as the ability to adjust their language to reflect the social distance between themselves and other speakers. Second, it demonstrates that the university learners believed that the classroom environment might provide them with insufficient opportunities to utilize those L2 registers that are most sensitive to context. Nevertheless, their beliefs about the necessity of having sociolinguistic competence played a pivotal role in helping most of them to find meaningful L2 learning opportunities in the classroom, as well as in study-abroad contexts. Finally, while immersive experiences can help learners sustain L2 motivational strategies according to their ultimate L2-related goals, the present study lends support to the observation that contexts

An Investigation of the Effects of Text Variation on EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension Ability

Early seeds of language variation studies were planted near the beginning of the 1960s under the influence of William Labov who is generally regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics which deals with language variations caused by linguistic and non-linguistic factors. With many other branches of linguistics, studies of language variation were also extended to the field of SLA and thereby studies of interlanguage or L2 learners’ language variation came into fashion. Almost all studies that have been conducted in this area are in association with variation in speech production and development of sociolinguistic competence and there are few studies which were devoted to the influence of linguistic or non-linguistic factors on variation in first and second language comprehension. This study, therefore, attempts to investigate the influence of text variation (in terms of narrative and non-narrative) on EFL learners’ reading comprehension ability. Doing so, 45 Persian native-speaking university students majoring in English translation at Arak university, Iran, were selected from among 67 ones and put into two homogeneous intact experimental and control groups (consisting of 21 and 24 participants, respectively). From a large body of existing texts, three narrative and three non-narrative texts (each between 1373 to 1622 words) with Flesch Reading Ease Original Research Article British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science, 4(6): 691-707, 2014 692 scores ranged from 66.83 to 73.90 were selected and used as tasks of elicitation. Statistical results, under the influence of existing variation between narratives and nonnarratives, indicated significant difference between the experimental and control groups’ reading comprehension test scores from pretest to post test. Possible reasons for developed variation in reading comprehension ability and implications of the findings for language teaching are discussed.

Future temporal reference in the bilingual repertoire of Anglo-Montrealers: A twin variable

This article focuses on the development of sociolinguistic competence in a second language, (here, French being acquired by young Anglo-Montrealers) in a naturalistic context where the target language is part of daily life. Sociolinguistic competence is assessed through analysis of Anglo-Montrealers’ use of a morphosyntactic variable, Future Temporal Reference (FTR), in both French and English. Variationist analyses reveal that Anglo-Montrealers possess distinct FTR variation systems for each of the languages of their linguistic repertoire. Results show that substantial contact with native speakers is a necessary condition for detailed and complete mastery of target sociolinguistic variation, in particular because the rules that govern it are rarely, if ever, explicitly taught.

Teaching and Learning Sociolinguistic Skills in University EFL Classes in Taiwan

The study reported in the present article was a process—product investigation of foreign language classroom practice and its effects on learners' development of sociolinguistic competence, which, though important for appropriateness of language use, has long been neglected in L2 teaching. Based on classroom observation, the study examined the extent to which college English classes in Taiwan were instructed in this specific aspect of communicative competence and how learners' performance might be linked to the instructions they received. The findings showed that no matter whether a given class was considered more communicatively oriented or less, sociolinguistic instruction was mostly neglected in classroom practice, and that, although the participants had different learning outcomes in speaking and listening skills, they did not differ in sociolinguistic performance.

The acquisition of sociolinguistic competence in French as a foreign language: an overview

The present contribution presents an overview of studies in French as a second (L2) and/or foreign language that consider the effects of extralinguistic variables (mostly instructional, experiential and situational factors) on the development of sociolinguistic competence. It focuses specifically on variation between informal and formal variants in phonology, morphology, morpho-syntax and the lexicon.

Metaphor, Play and Drama: The Role of the Symbolic in the Development of Sociolinguistic Competence

In this paper I explore the inter-relationships between metaphor, play and drama, and the roles they play in the development of sociolinguistic competence. I concentrate particularly on the role of symbolic play in the development of metaphor, and the importance of metaphor in discourse. Symbolic play has long been seen as important in child development and I show how metaphor is another of the abilities that arises from pretend play. I then look at the question of what happens to the skills used in pretend play as children grow older, and how they can continue to be developed through drama. Finally, I examine the nature of autism, a condition marked by an absence of both symbolic play and metaphor, to see what light this can shed on the links between the two.

The Development of Sociolinguistic Competence through Function

The Development of Sociolinguistic Competence through Function