The purposes of this study were (a) to examine two groups of healthy older Dutch English bilingual migrants in a New Zealand setting to investigate whether they were showing signs of L2 attrition with accompanying L1 reversion post-retirement, and (b) to identify possible factors which might play a role in the incidence of any L2 attrition and concomitant L1 reversion. Previous research has focused on similar groups of migrants in the Australian context, while New Zealand based research has focused on language shift and maintenance amongst three generations of migrants. The research design involved an analysis of sociolinguistic life, using questionnaires. These included self-assessments of L1 and L2 proficiency at three key times: on arrival in New Zealand, at time of ultimate attainment and post-retirement. Further, an analysis of assessments of respondents’ L1 and L2 proficiency pre-and post-retirement completed by interviewees’ adult children moderated respondents’ self-reports. The findings revealed a considerable overlap between participants’ self-reports and assessments by their adult children. The study also revealed a relationship between participants’ level of prior education and their ultimate attainment in the L2, with those who had come to New Zealand having learned English at Secondary School English very likely to have achieved a “good” or “very good” level of L2 proficiency. Conversely, those who had not learned the L2 at secondary school prior to arriving in New Zealand, were less likely to have achieved a “very good” level of ultimate attainment as evident both from self-reports and assessments by adult children. The design also included a linguistic analysis of elicited free speech. Data focused on key indicators of age, gender, social class, prior education, occupation and predominant linguistic environment pre- and post-retirement. Free speech was examined for code-switching, response latency and L1 structure in respondents’ spoken L2. Results indicated that a majority of respondents showed minimal if any signs of L2 attrition with concomitant L1 reversion, both as evidenced by their spoken L2 and as indicated by self-reports and assessments by adult children. Any signs of L2 attrition which were found appeared linked to respondents’ level of prior education and L2 proficiency on arrival in New Zealand. Being exposed to a predominantly L1 social environment post-retirement also appeared to result in a lifting of the threshold for L2 lexical items, resulting in a slightly increased response latency in the spoken L2. Three participants said they experienced some problems expressing their healthcare needs to medical professionals, to the extent that they were searching for words. All stated they “got there in the end” but needed more time to paraphrase their health needs. Two subjects avoided the use of the L2 during the interview, even when prompted in English. Three respondents engaged in significant codeswitching from L2 to L1 and vice versa, with two engaging in what Muysken (2000) terms “congruent lexicalisation”. Adult childrens’ reports indicated that the respondents in question had always spoken in this manner, but to a greater extent now, post-retirement. Overall, a number of the healthy older subjects interviewed for the study were showing some signs of increased response latency and lexical retrieval problems when expressing themselves in the L2, but none to the degree that they were no longer able to communicate in that language.

Social and textual aspects of the language assimilation of German exile writers are studied. Major differences concern the length of their exile, their foreign language learning ability and their attitude to assimilating, and the primary sources are letters and diaries. Descriptive analysis is performed on the prose, mainly in the area of crosslinguistic influences. Despite their differing assimilation, the prose contains similar crosslinguistic influences. There are consistent changes in crosslinguistic influences during the course of language assimilation, initially determined by the extent of second language acquisition. However, language learning factors give way to social factors with crosslinguistic infuences ultimately governed by the functional independence of the second language. Lexically triggered code-switching is usually a step towards functionally motivated code-switching. Finally a tentative, schematic model of how the process of language assimilation causes and modifies crosslinguistic influences is proposed. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>This thesis aims to contrast German and Swedish youth languages, based on material from two popular Online-Communities mainly for young people,<em> SchülerVZ</em> and <em>Lunarstorm</em>, respectively. The goal is not primarily to analyze the use of written, online youth language. Rather, language use on the Internet has developed into something between written and spoken language; often with clear characteristics of spoken language. Therefore, my corpus enables me to establish general similarities and differences in spoken (and written) German and Swedish youth communication.</p><p>Many similarities can be found in the way both German and Swedish youth play with language through e.g. many innovative lexical combinations and hyperboles. A difference can be found in the use of dialect. German youth inclines to speak and write it more explicitly to establish a "youth identity". In contrast, Swedish youth applies multi-ethnic youth language in the same way to establish this identity. This finding leads to the conclusion that multi-ethnic youth language firstly, is a more accepted or developed medium in Sweden, and secondly, something young people can employ in their formation of an identity that goes beyond social, "adult" conventions. In addition, a common use of Anglo-American loan words, mainly through <em>Code Switching</em>, can be found in both languages. This occurrence of loan words ought to depend mainly on these words being more unerring or more prestigious than native alternatives. Differences in the application of these loan words are found to be on a grammatical level. The German language tends to adopt more directly imported Anglo-American loan words, whereas the Swedish language reproduces these words in order to allow integration with the Swedish language system.</p>

<p>The essay deals with different definitions of bilingualism and why people become bilingual. Both positive and negative aspects of bilingualism are considered. It also deals with the term code-switching and when bilingual people code-switch. The material used in the essay comes from the on-line CHILD corpus of child language. The charts and the graph in the essay have been produced from a study made by the author of this essay. This study includes a bilingual girl of the age one year and three months up until the age two years and seven months. It includes the mean length of her utterances, how much the child uses the different word classes and different semantic groups, as well as how much the child code-switches in different ages. The results show that the mean length of utterances in Spanish most of the time is increasing, while the mean length of utterances in English is increasing until the child is just over two years old and then it fluctuated considerably.</p>

<p>The purpose of this essay is to investigate pupils’ attitudes towards spoken English and towards speaking in front of their friends, and how these attitudes appear to be related to their oral communication and communicative behaviour in the classroom. The material was collected by video taping two classes, a questionnaire in these two classes and by interviewing their teacher.</p><p>The results show that motivation and anxiety are psychological factors that play a significant role in the learning process. Attitudes, both towards the target language and towards their own production affect pupils’ willingness to communicate, and consequently their oral production in different tasks. The larger the group is, the more anxious they become. In order to motivate pupils, a variety of exercises is needed, where the topic is of great importance to awaken their interest for communication. The teacher also needs to circulate in the classroom to avoid a situation where pupils switch to their first language. Otherwise, pupils appear to code-switch as soon as an opportunity presents itself, which was observed in the analyses of recorded lessons.</p>

<p>The aim of this study was to investigate how code-switching operates and what impact it has on the interaction in the EFL classroom. The study was conducted at a Swedish secondary school by means of observations, interviews, and a questionnaire. The participants of the study were 79 students and two teachers. Both teachers and students were observed and, in addition to this, the students answered the questionnaire and the teachers were interviewed.</p><p>The results showed that there were several factors that triggered the students' use of the native language and the ultimate reason for switching to the native language was often to facilitate the learning process. Typical situations in which the students switched to Swedish were when they communicated with their peers or when they encountered unfamiliar words. Moreover, the results suggest that the teacher plays an important role for the choice of code in the classroom through his/her own language use and attitude towards code-switching. Neither of the interviewed teachers nor the majority of the students thought that there were any positive aspects to code-switching.</p>

<p>In this thesis, I explore the code-switching practices of long-term Angolans migrants in Cape Town when they interact with those who have been here for a much shorter period. In my Honours research essay, I revealed a tendency among those who have lived in Cape Town for some time to code-switch from Portuguese to English even in the presence of more recent migrants from Angola, who have little or no mastery of English. This thesis thus considers the effects of space, discourses of power, language ideologies and attitudes on the patterns of inter- and intra-sentential code-switching by these long-term migrants in interaction with each other as well as with the more recent &ldquo / Angolan arrivals&rdquo / in Cape Town. Twenty Angolan migrants participated in this study. Of these, ten were long-term migrants to South Africa, while a further ten were relative newcomers. While the long-term migrants could claim to be bilingual in Portuguese and English, the newcomers were largely limited to a few English words in their repertoire. However, both groups could speak one or more of the indigenous languages of Angola, like Kimbundu, Umbundu, Kikongo and even Lingala (which is an indigenous language from Republic Democratic of Congo). Some of the long-term migrants had even acquired South African indigenous language such as isiXhosa and Afrikaans. The study made use of qualitative ethnographic methodologies to collect the data. These included recorded conversations, individual and focus group interviews, both general observation and participant observation.</p>

<p>This thesis aims to explore the ways in which space patterns regimes of language use and language attitudes among Cameroonian immigrant children in a primary school in Cape Town. The presence of migrants in any classroom represents a significant challenge from the theoretical as well as practical point of view, given that schools are responsible for both socialization and learning (Gajo &amp / Mondada 1996). Most African countries are going through large-scale migration from rural to urban areas as well as increasing transnational migration due to recent socio-economic and socio-political trends. These flows affect the sociolinguistic economy of the places concerned, not only the individuals within them. Thus immigrants&rsquo / movement into an urban area not only affects their repertoires, as they find themselves confronted with the task of acquiring the communicative resources of the autochthonous population, but also those of the autochthonous population who find themselves confronted with linguistic communicative processes and resources &lsquo / alien&rsquo / to their environment. Similar effects are felt by local educational and other institutions, now faced with learners with widely varying degrees of competence in the required communicative skills. The participants in this study are a group of young migrants from Cameroon where English and French are the two official languages. These learners already have some languages in their repertoire, which may include their mother tongue or either of the two official languages. My focus will be on the multilingual resources of these learners and how they make use of these in the daily life of their new spaces, the school, the homes and community spaces, to construct new social identities.</p>

The aim of the present study is to examine the interactional functions of code-switching in plurilingual conversation, with a particular focus on those related to the elaboration of the social identities of the interlocutors, i. e. their identity work. The adopted analytical model was initiated by Auer, and further developed by Gafaranga, who combined it with the Membership Categorization Analysis elaborated by Sacks. The study is based on a corpus consisting of the audio recorded dinner talk of an Italian-Swedish family whose members use Swedish, Italian and a Ligurian dialect, and focuses on the sequential progression of the talk in interaction, thus based on an approach proper of conversation analysis. The participants create and display their different roles (identities), which are related to both group membership and individuality, a subsequent distinction made by Fant. Code-switching is used as a communicative strategy among the speakers and is used to make relevant identities, as well as a tool for the management of the interaction. The analysis is divided in two distinctive parts: one related to the code-switching connected to the organisational management of the conversation, the other connected to the identity work of the interlocutors. The linguistic codes used within the group are either inclusive (Swedish, Italian) or selective (Ligurian) and the analysis indicates a general inclusion rather than exclusion of interlocutors, as the speakers accommodating to the linguistic preferences and competences of the interlocutor. The speakers, when selecting a code, thus make use of recipient design, a concept worked out by Sacks, Schegloff &amp; Jefferson. They choose code in order to include a particular interlocutor, adjusting to the language preferences of the other. There are some instances of asymmetrical plurilingual conversation, in which the interlocutors maintain different codes, but since the code choice appears to be anticipated by the addressee the interaction runs smoothly between them. As for the direction of the code switch, two different tendencies emerge: one in the switches connected to the identity work of the participants in which the direction of the switches seems to be highly significant. The other in the switches connected to the management of the conversation in which the direction proves to be reversible.

This thesis aims to contrast German and Swedish youth languages, based on material from two popular Online-Communities mainly for young people, SchülerVZ and Lunarstorm, respectively. The goal is not primarily to analyze the use of written, online youth language. Rather, language use on the Internet has developed into something between written and spoken language; often with clear characteristics of spoken language. Therefore, my corpus enables me to establish general similarities and differences in spoken (and written) German and Swedish youth communication. Many similarities can be found in the way both German and Swedish youth play with language through e.g. many innovative lexical combinations and hyperboles. A difference can be found in the use of dialect. German youth inclines to speak and write it more explicitly to establish a "youth identity". In contrast, Swedish youth applies multi-ethnic youth language in the same way to establish this identity. This finding leads to the conclusion that multi-ethnic youth language firstly, is a more accepted or developed medium in Sweden, and secondly, something young people can employ in their formation of an identity that goes beyond social, "adult" conventions. In addition, a common use of Anglo-American loan words, mainly through Code Switching, can be found in both languages. This occurrence of loan words ought to depend mainly on these words being more unerring or more prestigious than native alternatives. Differences in the application of these loan words are found to be on a grammatical level. The German language tends to adopt more directly imported Anglo-American loan words, whereas the Swedish language reproduces these words in order to allow integration with the Swedish language system.