English-dominant Society Research Articles

Changing language hierarchies and ideologies in New Zealand dual language picturebooks: 1973-2020

Aotearoa New Zealand is a multilingual country with three official languages, Te Reo Māori and New Zealand Sign Language, and English. The presence of Māori and English in picturebooks published in New Zealand between 1973 and 2020 offers a method of exploring and documenting the changing language hierarchies and ideologies across a 47-year period. This is of particular importance because of the contribution of children’s literature to developing language attitudes in child and adult readers. In this article, a sociolinguistic lens called Linguistic Landscape is used to analyse a sample of seven picturebooks, showing how picturebooks reflect language beliefs and attitudes to official yet minority languages in an English-dominant society. The picturebooks are analysed in terms of the relative space and dominance afforded each language. Links to language status in law and education are examined exploring the potential of picturebooks as a source for the study of changing language hierarchies and ideologies.

“You don't actually experience it until you're actually in it”: A translanguaging simulation for preservice teachers

“You don't actually experience it until you're actually in it”: A translanguaging simulation for preservice teachers

English learner education and teacher preparation in the U.S.: an interpretive language education policy analysis

ABSTRACT This article examines recent U.S. language education policies regarding English learners (ELs) and their teachers using an interpretive policy analysis theoretical lens (Wagenaar 2011) incorporating a sensemaking perspective on organizational dynamics (Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld 2005). We portray U.S. EL policies as shaped by varying macro, meso, and micro-local sociohistorical contexts and conflicting discourses regarding language and education. We identify major tensions between (a) centripetal versus centrifugal policy influences; (b) monolingual English-only versus multilingual policy influences; (c) policies that address ELs’ specific instructional needs versus policies addressing equitable access to the mainstream curriculum. We argue that EL policy must be considered in tandem with language teacher education policies since educators’ sensemaking of these tensions depends on their professional training, dispositions, and beliefs. We identify significant gaps in U.S. language teacher education policies including (a) low and inconsistent levels of teacher preparation, (b) little training for mainstream educators, and (c) inadequate recruitment of educators from EL students’ ethnolinguistic communities. Based on our analysis, we argue for rigorous comparative interpretive policy analyses (Appe and Telch 2020) of EL and language teacher education policies both within and across English-dominant societies to elucidate common challenges, advocate and work for equity, and make institutional change.

English language ability and discursive agency: the case of Canadian adult English language learners on facebook

ABSTRACT This study provides a suggestive reassessment of the extent to which levels of English language ability among adult English language learners impact their ability to get things done in talk and text as discourse in a Canadian context where English is the lingua franca. The data are drawn from a Facebook Group for linguistic minority parents who attend a beginner level adult ESL class. Interpreting the data from within a pragmatics-oriented framework informed by lexical priming, conversation analysis and discursive psychology, microanalysis of a twelve-turn discussion thread is conducted with a view to implications for Canadian citizenship. Findings highlight the capacity of migrants with lower thresholds of English language ability to get substantive discursive work done in English in Anglophone Canada. The study qualifies a prevailing narrative that migrants to English dominant societies are empowered by language ability in English. By focusing on what adult English language learners are able to do rather than on what they cannot say, an implied connection between thresholds of English language ability and discursive agency in English is interrupted. The study advances a vision of Canadian citizenship premised not on benchmarks of English language skills but rather on the actual deployment of rhetorical potential.

Language history attenuates syntactic prediction in L1 processing

An eye-tracking experiment in the Visual World Paradigm was conducted to examine the effects of language history on the predictive parsing of sentences containing relative clauses in the first-learned language of fluent bilingual adults. We compared heritage speakers of Spanish (HSs)—who had spent most of their lives immersed in an English-dominant society—to Spanish–English late bilinguals (LBs), who did not begin immersion in an English-dominant society until adulthood. Consistent with studies of monolinguals, the LBs demonstrated a subject/object relative clause processing asymmetry, i.e. a processing advantage during subject relative clauses and a processing disadvantage during object relative clauses. This suggests that the LBs actively predicted the syntactic structure of subject relative clauses, consistent with the active filler hypothesis. The HSs, on the other hand, did not exhibit this processing asymmetry, suggesting less active prediction. We conclude, therefore, that decreased exposure to the first-learned language causes less active prediction in first-language processing, which causes both disadvantages, and interestingly, advantages, in processing speed.

The Effectiveness of Phonological-Based Instruction in English As a Foreign Language Students at Primary School Level: A Research Synthesis

Phonological-based instruction, namely phonological awareness instruction (PA) and phonics instruction, has shown to be effective on early literacy skills among young children in western countries. Children who learn English as a foreign language (EFL) learn to read English differently from children in English dominant societies. Effectiveness of the instruction in the EFL context is much less investigated. The present study systematically reviewed 15 experimental and quasi-experimental studies published in between 2000 to 2016, on the topic of the effectiveness of phonological-based instruction in the EFL context. Study characteristics and instructional features were described, and effect sizes were calculated. Phonological-based instruction was consistently found to be effective among primary school EFL students on reading underlying skills including phonemic awareness and non-word reading. The median value of the effect size was moderate. In contrast, the effectiveness on word recognition (lexical access and pronunciation) and reading comprehension were inconsistent across studies. The median value of the effect size on word reading was small. This pattern suggests a limitation of the phonological-based instruction, which is the difficulty of transferring the phonological underlying outcomes to real reading. We found that most studies, although meeting the minimum standard of evidence for effectiveness, suffer from methodological flaws, thus they are potentially biased. Therefore, the positive effects reported in this study should be interpreted with caution. The implication for practice of this study is that including phonological-based instruction in the current English curriculum may be beneficial for young EFL students, thus they can better learn to phonologically decode English words. But not enough evidence has been found to support the instructional effectiveness on real word recognition and reading comprehension. Future research on this topic with rigorous design are needed so that strong causal inference can be made. The findings of this study provide novel insights into foreign language education of English for young learners.

Refugee-themed picture books for ethical understanding in curriculum English

ABSTRACTThis study looked at the curricular resource potential of refugee-themed picture books for embedding an ethics of responsibility for linguistic diversity into the subject of English studied by all students in English-dominant western societies. Selected picture books were analysed in terms of a Levinasean ethics of responsibility for alterity in order to probe the possibilities of a supplement or alternative to the ethics of empathy long established in the literary component of English. The analyses looked at the books as multimodal artefacts, understanding the linguistic modes of the texts from a translingual perspective. This perspective construes language as mobile semiotic resources that are rendered meaningful through the performances of interlocutors in a given communicative situation. From the analyses, findings were produced about (1) representations of the monolingual sameness of everyday life in Australia as an English-dominant society and (2) the translingual dispositions called forth when language variation enters into the linguistic text. It is concluded that the ethics of responsibility for alterity holds out promise for tapping the curricular resource potential of refugee-themed picture books for embedding ethics into the language awareness component sometimes incorporated into English.

Children learning Chinese as a home language in an English-dominant society

Many Chinese families face many difficulties in maintaining their heritage language for their children in English-dominant societies. This article first looks at the losses from monolingualism and benefits of bilingualism. Then, it explores the common methods used today in teaching Chinese. We conclude that families and community play an indispensable role in their children's acquisition. For children to acquire adequate proficiency in the language, educators should inform families about this topic and partner with them. Families can indeed be active in the process. Hence, the article further describes a guide designed and written by the author to accommodate the needs of parents. It can be used as a model for future guides. Further, the article recommends effective media routes by which families can have access to similar guides.

What Does Standards‐based Educational Reform Mean for English Language Learner Populations in Primary and Secondary Schools?

he standards movement has become omnipresent in contemporaryeducation, impacting English teaching and learning in second andforeign language contexts around the world. A particular set of issues,however, is relevant to primary and secondary school settings for learn-ers of English in which English is used as the predominant means ofeducating the student population across the curriculum. In these con-texts, students are not just learning English as a subject matter but arelearning (and being assessed upon) standards-based academic contentin English as well. In these settings, standards, curricula, and assess-ments are designed with varying understandings and incorporation ofissues related to the linguistic and academic development of Englishlanguage learners (ELLs). A focus on standards-based reform in suchEnglish-medium contexts is a particularly relevant and timely focus fora TESOL Quarterly special issue because many countries with English-medium education have growing numbers of school-aged immigrantand indigenous ELL students and ongoing, contested debates abouthow best to educate them. New national standards have recently beenreleased in the US (Common Core State Standards: National Gover-nors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief StateSchool Officers, 2010a, 2010b; Next Generation Science Standards:NGSS Lead States, 2013) and Australia (The Australian Curriculum:ACARA, 2012), while ongoing reforms continue both in other tradi-tionally English-dominant societies, such as England and Canada, andworldwide. Issues of standards-based reform presented in this specialissue are also relevant more generally to the many other countries inwhich the official language of schooling is not that of the larger com-munity or population, and while this special issue is dedicated to Eng-

Socialization of Language Through Family Language Policy: A Case Study

Abstract Challenges of heritage language maintenance and benefits of bilingualism have been widely acknowledged. Heritage language maintenance research most oft en focuses on heritage languages in English-dominant societies. This paper presents a case study on family language policy experiences, strategies, and outcomes led by an American-born mother in her effort to maintain and promote English, her heritage language, within the home in the Hebrew-dominant environment in Israel

Heritage Language Maintenance among Native English Speakers Living in Israel

<p>Heritage language maintenance research most often focuses on heritage languages in English dominant societies. This paper presents a case-study, the second in a series, which focuses on the family language policy experiences, strategies, and outcomes of native English speakers raising children in a Hebrew dominant environment in Israel. </p>

Te Espero: Varying Child Bilingual Abilities and the Effects on Dynamics in Mexican Immigrant Families

Author(s): Seals, Corinne A | Abstract: This paper offers a closer examination of the effects of an English-dominant society on bilingual abilities by looking at everyday family dynamics in Mexican immigrant families. Three immigrant families from Mexico currently residing in Northern California provided the data for this project through ten hours of audio recordings documenting their normal home interactions. A qualitative analysis of family interactions shows that while the youngest children are proficient in the dominant language of the society they live in, they experience a far greater degree of difficulty with bilingualism than do their older siblings. This difficulty leads to heritage language avoidance with their parents and a weakening of family interaction. As a result, middle children find it necessary to take it upon themselves to act as translators within the family in an effort to maintain cohesive family dynamics.

Language barrier and its relationship to diabetes and diabetic retinopathy

BackgroundLanguage barrier is an important determinant of health care access and health. We examined the associations of English proficiency with type-2 diabetes (T2DM) and diabetic retinopathy (DR) in Asian Indians living in Singapore, an urban city where English is the predominant language of communication.MethodsThis was a population-based, cross-sectional study. T2DM was defined as HbA1c ≥6.5%, use of diabetic medication or a physician diagnosis of diabetes. Retinal photographs were graded for the severity of DR including vision-threatening DR (VTDR). Presenting visual impairment (VI) was defined as LogMAR visual acuity > 0.30 in the better-seeing eye. English proficiency at the time of interview was assessed.ResultsThe analyses included 2,289 (72.1%) English-speaking and 885 (27.9%) Tamil- speaking Indians. Tamil-speaking Indians had significantly higher prevalence of T2DM (46.2 vs. 34.7%, p < 0.001) and, among those with diabetes, higher prevalence of DR (36.0 vs. 30.6%, p < 0.001), VTDR (11.0 vs. 6.5%, p < 0.001), and VI (32.4 vs. 14.6%) than English speaking Indians. Oaxaca decomposition analyses showed that the language-related discrepancies (defined as the difference in prevalence between persons speaking different languages) in T2DM, DR, and VTDR could not be fully explained by socioeconomic measures.ConclusionsIn an English dominant society, Tamil-speaking Indians are more likely to have T2DM and diabetic retinopathy. Social policies and health interventions that address language-related health disparities may help reduce the public health impact of T2DM in societies with heterogeneous populations.

Working towards a motivational pedagogy for school programmes in additional languages

The teaching and learning of languages additional to English (L2) in English-dominant societies has reached a crisis point, with teachers often facing considerable challenges with recruiting, and then retaining, students. This article presents findings from a study in New Zealand, where the introduction of a revised curriculum has provided the opportunity for L2 teachers to reflect on current and future teaching practices. Data from interviews with teachers and curriculum support workers (advisers) are used to consider whether a learner-centred and experiential pedagogical approach might make a positive difference to L2 students' classroom experiences, and thereby potentially contribute to alleviating the challenges of demotivated students, low enrolments and attrition.