Case Study Research in Applied Linguistics

Patricia Duff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780805823585
• eBook ISBN: 9781136799266
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Linguistics

Case studies of individual language learners are a valuable means of illustrating issues connected with learning, using, and in some cases, losing another language. Yet, even though increasing numbers of graduate students and scholars conduct research using case studies or mix quantitative and qualitative methods, there are no dedicated applied lin

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CASE STUDY RESEARCH IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

1.1 Introduction

The goal of this book is threefold: (1) to help readers understand the methodological foundations of case study research as one type of qualitative research, (2) to examine seminal case studies in the area of second language (L2) teaching, learning, and use, in order to illustrate the approach across thematic areas, and (3) to provide some guidance, on a more practical level, about how to conduct, evaluate, and write up case studies in applied linguistics. The book expands on the overviews provided in other methods textbooks and also draws on the burgeoning literature on qualitative research, and case study in particular, from the fields of psychology, sociology, and education primarily (e.g., Bromley, 1986; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Merriam, 1998; Stake, 1995; Yin, 2003a, 2003b).

I begin, as many case studies do, with a concrete example, a narrative description of a language learner named “Jim,” with short interspersed excerpts of his oral English language production at different stages in time. Details are provided about my original analysis of Jim’s L2 development and the rationale for that focus. Then, for the more general purposes of this book, a fuller description of Jim’s life and circumstances is provided, including his experiences learning English and his challenges in Canada as a government-assisted refugee, a new immigrant, and an English as a second language (ESL) student with a wife and young children to support. Later in this chapter and elsewhere in the book, I refect on other kinds of analysis that could be conducted with an individual such as Jim, especially given current directions in our field related to language and literacy socialization, family multiliteracies, identity and language learning, and sociopolitical and economic aspects of immigration. I also consider the strengths and limitations of case studies such as this one.

Although the case presented here is that of a language learner, many of the same principles of case study research apply when conducting other kinds of case studies within the realm of applied linguistics, including descriptions and analyses of an individual language teacher or learner, a school, or a country’s language policies, communication in a multilingual workplace setting, language shift in a postcolonial small-scale society, and so on.

1.2 Case Study of a Language Learner: “Jim”

In February 1986, Jim* was a 28-year-old Cambodian man who had just been granted refugee status in Canada, where he and his family had lived for two months.^† The experiences leading up to that significant milestone in his life included harrowing years of being on the run in Cambodia and later living and working at refugee camps in Thailand, while seeking opportunities to immigrate to North America. Two years earlier, in 1984, as the following excerpt reveals, he had married a Cambodian woman who had already obtained a United Nations refugee number that would allow her and her (first) husband and their two infants to leave Thailand. However, before their immigration could be finalized, her husband was killed by Thai soldiers, a tragedy that had a positive outcome for Jim. By marrying this young widow, Jim gained refugee status in the place of her late husband, and thus the chance of a new life in Canada. His wife’s chances of immigration were increased because Jim knew some English, which was rewarded by the Canadian Embassy interviewers at the time, according to Jim. In Excerpt 1, Jim describes some of this background:

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* In previous publications I referred to Jim as “JDB,” my abbreviation for the Cambodian king, Jayavarman the Seventh (pronounced Jayavarman Dibrombul in Khmer), who built Angkor Wat (e.g., Duff, 1993a, 1993b).

† Approximately 18,600 Cambodians entered Canada in this way between 1980 and 1992, according to one Canadian source (http://www.multiculturalcanada.ca/ecp/content/cambodians_khmer. html).

Excerpt 1*

Four person [in my family]. My wife, her husband die. I was arri(ve) in Thailand on [1984] so I haven’t raison [food rations] and UN number… and impossible interviews other embassy, so I must to live with my wife. Because my wife, her husband die by Thai soldier, and my wife has the UN number and raison [rations]… So now I no + children but my wi(fe) has two children… four year and two year… After that I was to + examination at IRC + International Committee Red Cross + after that and + was pass a + examination and + teacher Cambodian-Cambodian teacher at school + in Thailand… In Cambodian, when I stop study, because my fatherland has big fighting, so I must stop…

[There are four people in my family. My wife’s husband died. I arrived in Thailand in 1984 and I didn’t have food rations or a United Nations number, and it was impossible to get interviews at other embassies, so I had to live with [marry] my wife. Because my wife’s husband, who was killed by a Thai soldier, had a UN number and rations. So I have no children but my wife has two children, a four-year-old and two-year-old. After that I had an examination at the International Red Cross and passed and became a Cambodian teacher at school in Thailand. In Cambodia, I had to stop studying because of the war…]

Jim’s story was a fascinating but sad one that over the next 20 years would take various twists and turns, not unlike those of others who immigrate under similar circumstances. During his first winter in Canada, Jim began to take intensive English courses five hours a day at a government sponsored adult education center and had just begun to deliver newspapers in my neighborhood, a new job for him and his first in Canada. I myself had just moved back to Canada from Asia and had a new job as well, teaching university courses on L2 education and acquisition. Jim’s wife and young children spoke no English. I met Jim a few times that January and February, and asked whether he would agree to participate in this research about his English language learning. I would pay him to discuss various

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* Transcription conventions: + is a short untimed pause;… denotes talk I have ellipted; commas mark sharp rising intonation; timed pauses appear as numbers, in seconds, for example (1.0); (x) denotes unclear word; (xx) denotes two unclear words. Words in square brackets are provided by the researcher to aid interpretation of the utterance or excerpt; a half-attached dash represents a false-start or self-correction; a colon represents lengthening of a sound or syllable. For other conventions, see Chapter 5, Table 5.2.

topics and he would have a chance to practice his English. He was very willing to comply. I had other interactions with him outside of this study as well, taking his family grocery shopping sometimes, helping them in emergencies, offering Jim additional paid employment (e.g., gardening), and attending Cambodian cultural events with his family. He was part of a small, rather fragile community of Cambodian refugees who had recently arrived in Canada. Like many of them, he was anxious about not having had any contact with, or news from, relatives in Cambodia for nearly 15 years, despite many attempts to locate them.*

At that stage in Jim’s life, it was unclear how his oral English would develop over time, with his daily exposure to English in classes and his encounters with a range of English speakers in the community, such as government agencies, charities, neighbors, church members, and the general English-speaking public. Would he exhibit developmental patterns similar to those reported in Huebner’s (1979, 1983) influential case study of a Hmong-speaking Laotian immigrant (refugee) in Hawaii named Ge? Whereas Ge had received no formal English instruction in either Laos or Hawaii, Jim had studied some English. Would he therefore make more rapid progress in his acquisition of English based on his intensive language courses and contact in the community?

Huebner’s longitudinal study focused mainly on Ge’s evolving nominal reference system, which involved learning to use appropriate articles with nouns and supplying required sentence subjects in English (e.g., with specifc/definite nouns or with information known to the hearer). For example, he tended to produce utterances of the following type (with the sentence topics, minus the definite article the, shown in italics):

chainis tertii—tertii fai. bat jaepanii isa twentii eit. (1–224)

[The Chinese man is thirty-five. But the Japanese is twenty-eight.]

en beibii, isa in da moder, en da owder broder. (1–115)

[And the babies were placed between the adults.]

(Huebner, 1979, p. 27)

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* He received his first news from Cambodia a few months later, in 1986, when he received a letter and a small, wrinkled black-and-white photo that his parents had sent of his family. Although they had survived the war, several of them were in need of medical treatment and Jim began sending them medical supplies. Jim subsequently (in the 1990s) made two trips back to Cambodia.

Huebner detected several traits in Ge’s interlanguage (his developing second-language system) that refected the topic prominence of his first language (L1), Hmong, especially in his earliest stages of development (see Chapter 3 for more details). The traits were similar to those I observed in Jim and among Chinese and Japanese learners of English in other studies I was conducting (Duff, 1985, 1988): the use of have constructions that functioned as existentials and introducers of new information/noun phrases (e.g., Have four man in my family [There are four people in my family] and On hill have much man [There are many people on the hill]); the omission of subjects that could be guessed from context; and the frequent use of a topicalizing device (e.g., As for me, I am a student).* In Ge’s case, the topic marker was the invented (but copula-like) form “isa,” as in gow howm, isa plei da gerl [When we went home, we would visit with the girls] (Huebner, 1979, p. 27).

Thus, Ge and Jim had rather similar personal and linguistic backgrounds, with topic-prominent L1s that influenced their English. My research was not meant to be a replication of Huebner’s study examining the exact same sets of structures. I had two goals: (1) to examine Jim’s English as it became less topic prominent and more subject prominent over time (Duff, 1993a), and (2) to consider task-related variation in his performance (Coughlan & Duff, 1994; Duff, 1993b). Here I mainly discuss observations related to the first goal. The study, which took place over a 2.5-year period, yielded about 36 hours of interviews and hundreds of narratives about Jim’s personal experiences, and other kinds of elicited language production, including picture descriptions, picture-sequence narratives, and Cambodian folktale narratives (Duff, 1993a, 1993b).

A brief sketch of Jim’s background as an English language learner helps to contextualize his observed language development. The son of a school principal, Jim had started studying English at a public school in Cambodia at the age of 15. Six months later, the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot’s leadership, closed all schools and began a campaign of genocide that resulted in the killing of more than a million Cambodians and the devastation of the country. Some years later, Jim had studied English for about six months in refugee camps and had also attended a teacher-training course

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* Duff (1985) and Sasaki (1990) reported similar findings with Japanese learners of English.

offered partly in English in order to learn how to teach Cambodian* to Cambodian children in the camps. He was also briefly involved in developing materials for English teaching, just prior to his emigration. Along the way he had learned some Thai and Vietnamese as well.

At the time we met, Jim was able to communicate in English at a fairly basic level, as Excerpt 1 illustrates, able to convey information about his family, the politics and history of Cambodia and Thailand, and aspects of his education and prior training. His English was heavily accented phonologically, influenced by his L1, Khmer (Cambodian). His English grammar also bore the traces of his L1 and other developmental factors, and certain recurring patterns were evident. Many aspects of his English interlanguage, as in My wife, her husband die and I no children, refected topic-comment constructions found in many topic-prominent languages, including Khmer (Duff, 1985, 1993a; Givón, 1979; Huebner, 1983; Li & Thompson, 1976; Rutherford, 1983; see Mitchell & Miles, 2004, for a recent review of some of this work).^† As described above with respect to Hmong, Chinese, and Japanese, these languages often feature the use of a sentence-initial noun phrase (e.g., My wife) or locative representing “old information” (e.g., In Cambodia) that is followed by a topic marker or a pause and rising intonation, and then an expression (comment) containing “new information” related to the first semantically or pragmatically, but not necessarily linked to the topic syntactically (e.g., her husband die). Word order is somewhat flexible and pragmatic, determined by the focus of the sentence, and unambiguous grammatical subjects are often omitted. Grammatical morphology is minimal. English and other subject prominent languages, on the other hand, generally have syntactic devices for connecting subjects to predicates (e.g., subject-verb agreement) and have subordinate clauses, complex verb phrases, passives, and other constructions that either do not exist or are not as widely used in topic-prominent languages (Li & Thompson, 1976). As a result, those elements are

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* I use the terms Cambodian and Khmer interchangeably here to refer to the language.

† As reported in Duff (1993a), Khmer (Cambodian) belongs to the Mon-Khmer family. It is a nontonal, isolating language with flexible, pragmatic word order refecting topic-comment sentence organization (Ehrman, 1972). A typical topic-comment sentence is kasaet nih kee lú? craen cbap (newspaper this, they sell many copy = “they sell many copies of this newspaper”). The uninflected word mian marks both existence and possession in the affirmative: niw nih mian menuh craen peek (at here have people too many) [menuh = people, craen = many, peek = too (excessive), craen peek = too many].

often challenging for speakers of other types of languages, such as Khmer, when learning English.

Although there were definite signs of progress in Jim’s English over time (Duff, 1993a, 1993b), certain structures had not fully developed (yet), such as his use of the existential expression there is/are…, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Case Study Research in Applied Linguistics
• Chapter 2 Defining, Describing, and Defending Case Study Research
• Chapter 3 Examples of Case Studies in Applied Linguistics
• Chapter 4 How to Conduct Case Studies (Part 1)
• Chapter 5 How to Conduct Case Studies (Part 2)
• Chapter 6 Writing the Case Study Report
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index