Sociolinguistic Variation and Acquisition in Two-Way Language Immersion

Negotiating the Standard

Rebecca Lurie Starr

• Verlag: Multilingual Matters
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783096398
• Thema: Langues et linguistique
• Thema: Linguistique

This book investigates the acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge in the early elementary school years of a Mandarin-English two-way immersion program in the United States. Using ethnographic observation and quantitative analysis of data, the author explores how input from teachers and classmates shapes students' language acquisition. The book considers the different sociolinguistic messages conveyed by teachers in their patterns of language use and the variety of dialects negotiated and represented. Using analysis of teacher speech, corrective feedback and student language use, the author brings together three analyses to form a more complete picture of how children respond to sociolinguistic variation within a two-way immersion program.

1Introduction

Aims and Scope

‘It’s just our accents.’

It’s a Thursday afternoon at the Meizhang school, and Miss Alice is teaching her first-grade students how to tell time. In this lesson, she is explaining the notions of ‘half-past five’ and ‘five-thirty’. The students are arranged on the carpet facing Miss Alice, who is holding a model of a clock face, turning the hands to demonstrate various times. I am sitting behind the children, thinking to myself, ‘oh, this is going to be interesting’.

I am thinking this because, while Miss Alice is from England, we are in an American classroom, and this particular lesson topic means we have a linguistic perfect storm on our hands: first, Miss Alice will pronounce each of the words in ‘half past’ with an ‘ah’ sound (indicated in the International Phonetic Alphabet as [ɑ]), in contrast to the [æ] sound used in the United States. On top of that, she will pronounce ‘thirty’ with no [r] and with a [t] instead of the d-like flap sound (written as [ɾ]) used in American English. Let’s check in to see how this lesson is going:

Example 1.1

Miss Alice:	Five thirty, or could we say, h[ɑ]lf p[ɑ]st five.
Cynthia:	H[æ]lf p[æ]st five.
Miss Alice:	It’s gone h[ɑ]lf the way round the clock, here’s five o’clock, and it’s gone h[ɑ]lf-way round, so it’s h[ɑ]lf p[ɑ]st five.
Nicole:	H[æ]lf p[æ]st five, not h[ɑ]lf p[æ]st.
Miss Alice:	I say it different to you, you say h[æ]lf.
Nicole:	Yeah, h[æ]lf.
Miss Alice:	I say h[ɑ]lf.
Nicole:	Because it’s h[æ]lf.
Miss Alice:	I say h[ɑ]lf p[ɑ]st, you’d say h[æ]lf p[æ]st. It’s a—it’s just our accents.
(1 minute later)
Miss Alice:	What time is this one?
Ellie:	H[æ]lf p[æ]st eleven.
Miss Alice:	H[ɑ]lf p[ɑ]st eleven, or, eleven—
Cynthia:	Th[ɜ:ɾ]y!
Miss Alice:	Eleven th[ɜ:t]y, there’s two ways to say it.
Cynthia:	You say th[ɜ:t]y and we say th[ɜrɾ]y.
Miss Alice:	Yeah. You can say h[ɑ]lf p[ɑ]st eleven or eleven th[ɜ:t]y.

Although these first-graders are only six and seven years old, it has not escaped them that Miss Alice has an unusual way of speaking; in fact, they find this phenomenon endlessly fascinating. We also notice that Miss Alice appears to have developed strategies for dealing with student comments about language differences. In a classroom where the teacher speaks quite differently from the students, every lesson carries a subtext of linguistic negotiation.

We might say that Miss Alice’s class is unusual – American children don’t generally have British teachers. On a smaller scale, however, this same phenomenon of negotiating language differences occurs whenever children enter a school environment. For children, starting school means encountering new speech situations and new ways of speaking. And in many communities around the world, teachers either do not natively speak the same language variety that the school is meant to be promoting, or do not speak the same variety as their students. In this sense, the situation of Miss Alice and her students is a magnified version of the typical early elementary school experience.

There is something else that is special about Miss Alice’s students: they are participating in a Mandarin-English two-way immersion program. This means that about half of these students speak Mandarin Chinese at home, while the other half speak English, or some other language. The students in this class spend more than half of their school day learning in Mandarin, and the rest of the day learning in English with Miss Alice, with the goal of becoming bilingual, biliterate and bicultural. This combination of students from different language backgrounds is brought together by design, based on the notion that having native speakers of each language in the classroom will reinforce language learning and improve student outcomes.

The sensitivity of the students in Example 1.1 to Miss Alice’s pronunciation differences is all the more impressive when we consider that many of them do not have parents who speak American English, or indeed any sort of English, at home. Do children enrolled in two-way language immersion, who must learn to balance multiple languages in school, develop a heightened awareness of variation within languages? When Miss Alice tells them ‘it’s just our accents’, what does this teach them about how languages and accents work? How will these children end up speaking, given that they have teachers and classmates from a range of language backgrounds? These are the questions I had in mind when I began my research on two-way language immersion.

Aims of this book

The primary aim of this book is not to determine whether students in two-way language immersion are learning English and Mandarin successfully in terms of how they score on achievement tests. Previous studies of two-way language immersion have consistently found that students perform well in these programs (Christian, 1996; Cummins, 1998; Lindholm-Leary, 2001, among others). Rather, using ethnographic observation and quantitative analysis of data collected over a year of fieldwork at the Meizhang school, I will address several questions related to student acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge in the early-elementary school years of Mandarin-English two-way language immersion:

(1)What sorts of sociolinguistic messages are conveyed by teachers in their patterns of language use?

(2)How are dialect differences negotiated and represented in discourse about language?

(3)How does input from teachers and classmates shape students’ language acquisition?

Although these questions involve a range of classroom phenomena that might normally be relegated to separate volumes, when combined together they help us form a picture of what children are learning about language in school from the various resources available in their environment. In my analysis, I will first address what patterns children are hearing from their teachers, who are generally the most significant source of second language input at school. Then I will consider what indirect information about language children might pick up from the school environment via corrections and other ‘metalinguistic’ discourse, and how these messages differ among the two languages used at school. Finally, I will examine student language use, looking both at native-speaker children and their learner classmates, to consider how the usage patterns of the former influence the latter’s language-learning outcomes.

The Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Knowledge

This study of students in two-way language immersion will be approached from a sociolinguistic perspective, meaning that the goal is to further our understanding of how language functions in society. Of central interest in sociolinguistics is the phenomenon of variation: different ways of expressing a particular meaning (for example, the difference between h[ɑ]lf and h[æ]lf from our time-telling lesson). The study of variation in sociolinguistics seeks to account for differences in language use across social groups, contexts and time. Competent adult native speakers have mastered the interpretation and use of sociolinguistic variation, in the sense that their knowledge of language includes not only what is grammatical, but also what sort of language is appropriate in different scenarios and what variants are likely to be used by different types of speakers (Hymes, 1972). In order to understand how sociolinguistic variation functions and is transmitted within a community, we must also examine how, and when, individuals acquire the skills necessary to becoming competent interpreters and users of socially meaningful features of language.

While some sociolinguists have argued in the past that children do not begin to exhibit patterns of variation until early adolescence (e.g. Labov, 1970), scholars have come to accept that young children can and do engage in consistent and meaningful variation (Andersen, 1990; Kornhaber & Marcos, 2000; Roberts, 1994, among others). Indeed, although children’s patterns of language use often do not exactly match those of adults, a consensus has been reached that the acquisition of communicative competence is an integral part of the language acquisition process (Romaine, 1984: 261). More recent studies have provided a window into how children acquire sociolinguistic variation as they acquire language, mirroring the variation patterns of their caregivers (Smith et al., 2007).

When children first enter school, however, they encounter new patterns of variation, new social categories and perhaps a new language (or two). Students who do attend school in a new language are generally dependent upon the linguistic input they receive at school in their acquisition process; crucially, they are also dependent upon the sociolinguistic input available in school in order to develop their communicative competence in that language. Given the wide range of linguistic situations a native speaker encounters outside of school, acquiring sociolinguistic knowledge comparable to a native speaker via a restricted school setting is a daunting task. Previous work suggests that acquiring casual speech styles through school is particularly challenging, even for students in full-day language immersion (Mougeon et al., 2010; Swain, 1985).

Acquiring a new language in a school setting becomes more complicated when multiple varieties of a language co-exist within a single school. This situation can arise not only in the case of non-standard varieties used along with a prestigious standard variety promoted by the school, but also when multiple standard varieties come ...