Observation Of Language Use Research Articles

Natives, migrants and communication practices in the Xi’an speech community

AbstractThis paper reports the results of direct observations of language use and sociolinguistic interviews in Xi’an city, Shaanxi province, China. The data were collected in the autumn of 2018. Direct observations were done in four vegetable and fruit markets providing a data set of 1,708 cases. A sample of market customers was also interviewed resulting in 168 interviews. The interview data made clear that in migrant families, home-town dialects are well maintained, but that for interactions in the city, PTH is preferred as it is for work-related interactions. The observation data showed that ninety percent of interactions between customers and salespeople were performed in either the Xi’an dialect or PTH. These two varieties were used in various combinations confirming wide-spread use of multilingual exchanges. These exchanges are further specified as speech-community-internal interactions, home-dialect exchanges and lingua franca exchanges. Community integration of migrants is clarified through the concept of the discourse communities. The latter structure the modern Xi’an speech community and connect to the national level PTH Koine Community.

The Use of Hungarian and Serbian in the City of Szabadka/Subotica : An Empirical Study

In this study Ferdinand and Komlosi analyze the use of Hungarian and Serbian in the city of Szabadka/Subotica, which is located in the Serbian region of Northern Vajdaság/Vojvodina. A mostly Hungarian speaking city for centuries, Szabadka/Subotica suffered the strong pro-Serbian language policy implemented by the Yugoslavian government from the end of the First World War until the dismantlement of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which gave Hungarian and other local minority languages a second chance to survive. Nowadays, Szabadka/Subotica is home to two main language groups, southern Slavic languages such a Serbian and Croatian (over sixty per cent) and Hungarian (thirty three per cent). Although Ferdinand and Komlosi employed official figures from the Serbian censuses to determine the size of each group, the situation of each language was mapped through empirical observation of language use in informal conversations, in official signage, and in permanent as well as temporary commercial signage. The results show that the role of Serbian (mostly written in Latin script) is dominant in almost all spheres of public life and as a lingua franca among various groups. Nevertheless, Hungarian maintains a strong presence in the city, especially in the center and in its northwestern districts. In this paper, Ferdinand and Komlosi aim to contribute to a better general understanding of group dynamics in bilingual settings and, specifically, to provide a clearer view of the language situation in one of the Hungarian-speaking regions lost by the historic Kingdom of Hungary after World War I.

Modernization and the restructuring of the Shanghai speech community

This paper reports the results of direct observations of language use in two shopping areas in Shanghai, Nanjing East Road and Xujiahui. The data reported in this paper were collected in 2007. In Nanjing East Road, four traditional stores provided a base line for the use of Shanghainese. That base line (60 percent) was compared to a hierarchy of department stores in Xujiahui. The results showed that the store that best matched the base-line data attracted customers representing upper-working class / lower middle class customers. The remaining two stores attracted middle class and upper class customers. In the latter setting, it was found that a certain segment of the customers switched from Shanghainese to Putonghua for the business transaction, an effect we associated with the presence of young urban professionals of all backgrounds. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of speech community theory, and network density, which allows predictions of changes taking place within the dominant language of the Shanghainese speech community.

The Basque Street Survey: Two Decades of Assessing Language Use in Public Spaces

Assessing the vitality of minority languages is a concern for many small language advocates and language planners. To date, most quantitative data for measuring the social presence of a language have been limited to reported language competency and use. In this article, a Basque language researcher and U.S. anthropologist collaborate to describe a novel instrument developed in the Basque Country called the Kale Neurketa or Basque Street Survey. Developed by Basque language researchers, the Street Survey is unique in offering a quantitative measure of observed, rather than reported, language use. We describe the origins of the survey in grassroots language advocacy, the knowledge gap it has sought to address, its methodology and evolution over time, and some of its key findings in the Basque context. We conclude assessing the strengths and weakness that this method of direct observation of language use offers to scholars and advocates of minoritized languages.

Effective rating scale development for speaking tests: Performance decision trees

Rating scale design and development for testing speaking is generally conducted using one of two approaches: the measurement-driven approach or the performance data-driven approach. The measurement-driven approach prioritizes the ordering of descriptors onto a single scale. Meaning is derived from the scaling methodology and the agreement of trained judges as to the place of any descriptor on the scale. The performance data-driven approach, on the other hand, places primary value upon observations of language performance, and attempts to describe performance in sufficient detail to generate descriptors that bear a direct relationship with the original observations of language use. Meaning is derived from the link between performance and description. We argue that measurement-driven approaches generate impoverished descriptions of communication, while performance data-driven approaches have the potential to provide richer descriptions that offer sounder inferences from score meaning to performance in specified domains. With reference to original data and the literature on travel service encounters, we devise a new scoring instrument, a Performance Decision Tree (PDT). This instrument prioritizes what we term ‘performance effect’ by explicitly valuing and incorporating performance data from a specific communicative context. We argue that this avoids the reification of ordered scale descriptors which we find in measurement-driven scale construction for speaking tests.

Measuring Student Language Use in the School Context

After the experience of many years of teaching in two or three languages, the Basque speech community needs to know not merely how much students achieve in each language and what level of proficiency they attain but also which language they use, how often they use each language, and the relationship between language use and other variables. This paper reports on a study, the ‘Arrue Programme’ conducted during the 2005–2006 academic year on student language use in the school context and the factors affecting it. Participants were students between the ages of 10 and 11 who were in the sixth grade of primary education in 50 schools in different areas of the Basque Autonomous Community. The data include the observation of language use by 1325 students both in the playground and inside the classroom. In addition, data on other student variables were collected through questionnaires and written work. The two sets of data are used to suggest a model of the principal background and situational variables that determine the varieties of language use that we observed.

A Sociolinguistic Survey of Araki: A Dying Language of Vanuatu

Araki is one of around a hundred languages of the Republic of Vanuatu. It is a language spoken by the people of Araki, an islet situated near the south western part of Santo, in the north of Vanuatu. Linguistic statistics have shown a gradual decline in the number of speakers. This study presents evidence to show that Araki is a declining language and adopts a diagnostic approach to finding out the underlying causes underpinning this gradual decline in the number of Araki speakers. This paper discusses why so many people of Araki within the younger generation have a passive knowledge of Araki while Tangoa, a closely related language, plays a dominant role in their daily communication. Literature on threatened languages in the world today exposes various reasons underlying these changes and steps that can be taken to revive these languages. The focus of this survey is to expose the reasons underpinning this language change and the Araki-speaking community's attitude towards this change. Furthermore, with reference to other models of language revival strategies in other countries, this study will propose a model that can be employed to revive this dying language. This study was carried out in 1998, using multiple data-collecting methods which comprised a questionnaire, interviews and observation of language use in various contexts, covering all the five extended families that make up the population of Arak, which stood at 121.

The demands of a sign bilingual context for teachers and learners: an observation of language use and learning experiences

This paper explores deaf children's experience of becoming bilingual and learning in a bilingual environment. Within sign bilingual educational settings deaf children are responding to complex ling...

The demands of a sign bilingual context for teachers and learners: an observation of language use and learning experiences

This paper explores deaf children's experience of becoming bilingual and learning in a bilingual environment. Within sign bilingual educational settings deaf children are responding to complex linguistic demands, and much can therefore be learnt about sign bilingual experience and language development through observation within this context. The pilot study reported here explores ways in which sign language and English are used in sign bilingual contexts by both the children and the adults concerned. The children's language use and repertoire of language skills are described and the demands of typical teaching activities discussed with reference to the wider bilingual field. Conclusions are drawn about the children's linguistic flexibility, the incidence of language switching and mixing, and implications for learning, teaching and research in sign bilingual settings.

Identifying english for the job: Examples from health care occupations

Designers and teachers of courses in VESL often find it necessary to identify the language required for specific jobs. This paper describes one approach to discovering the necessary language forms and the contexts in which they are used. The approach is illustrated by means of observations of language use in two health care occupations: Central Supply technician and hospital transporter. While certain uses of language are specific to particular jobs, other language functions (e.g., seeking clarification, reporting problems, understanding imperatives and numbers, socializing) seem to have wider applicability. Assumptions one may make about the language a worker needs on the job do not always hold up under a thorough on-site analysis. Thus, on-site observation of language use is important in the identification and interpretation of the language appropriate to the job.

Taalgebruik op de Markt

Modern standard Chinese (MSC) was introduced in Taiwan after the second world war in 1945, when the island once more became part of the Chinese political system. In 1956 the population consisted for 74 per cent of Minnan and for 13 per cent of Hakka. Both are immigrant groups from the Chinese mainland, who have come to Taiwan since the seventeenth century, and speak mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects. The remaining part of the population was formed by Chinese who came to Taiwan after 1945. In order to be able to determine the extent to which MSC has spread in the society unobtrusive observations of language use were made in five markets in Taipei city. Markets in Taiwan are the main channels for the supply of fresh vegetables, fruits, fish and meat, and for that reason considered as suitable places for the study of language spread. The instrument used was a modified version of that developed by Cooper and Carpenter (1976) and by Rosenbaum ä. . (1977). Apart from time, market, enumerator and commodity, the observation categories were interaction type (business transaction, touting, conversation), role of participants in the speech act (salesperson, customer), their age and sex and the language(s) they used for the interaction. MSC is used by both participants roughly equally for business transactions. The salespeople accommodate their language use to that of the customers. As to touting, this tendency is furthermore reflected by a relatively high proportion of MSC in the utterances of the salespeople. Among the customers males use relatively more MSC than females. The same is true for the oldest age group of both sexes. In the older city districts relatively less MSC is used than in the newer districts.