The Swedish School Board reported in 2007 that students with a foreign background to a larger extent than Swedish students leave school without grades in one or more subjects in the ninth grade. The report also reveals that during the year 2007/2008 17 percent of elementary school pupils had the right to home language instruction. Students with an other mother tongue than Swedish are considered a separate group that doesn’t perform as well in school. My study investigates how eleven Arabic-speaking ninth-graders at age 15-16 perceive the importance of their mother tongue for learning and identity development. To this purpose I have conducted semi-structured interviews – one comprising six students in group and five individual – in a school in one of the suburbs of Stockholms. The theoretic point of departure for this study has been the social constructivist perspective. The result shows unambiguously that the students consider their mother tongue to be important for the learning and development of the second language. It is principally spoken Arabic that is used for attaining knowledge – the written language, which in Arabic is quite different from the spoken language, has its greatest significance in home language instruction. The result of the study also shows two informants identify themselves as arabs since Arabic is their mother tongue, while the rest of the students identify themselves with the Arabic culture, which constitutes a construction of ethnicity and contributes to demarcations between us and them. LyssnaLäs fonetisk Ordbok - Visa detaljerad ordbok

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Texas at Arlington, 2009.

Esta dissertação faz considerações sobre a natureza da interferência derivada da introdução de variantes padrão de línguas imigrantes no currículo do sistema de escolas públicas de comunidades de falantes de dialetos. A pesquisa busca uma maior compreensão da questão por meio da análise de discurso e conteúdo encontrados em artigos de jornal, artigos disponíveis na Internet, mensagens trocadas em comunidades virtuais e quatro entrevistas colhidas de habitantes do município de Angelina em Santa Catarina, onde falantes de dialeto freqüentam escolas públicas onde o inglês é a única oferta de língua estrangeira, apesar da constituição étnica predominantemente germânica da população local. O trabalho ainda examina modelos teóricos de contato lingüístico baseados em teoria dos jogos em termos de sua relevância em um cenário mais complexo onde um dialeto coexista com sua variante padrão e uma língua nacional. / This dissertation prompts considerations about the nature of the interference deriving from the introduction of standard variants of immigrant languages into the curriculum of the public school system in communities of dialect speakers. The investigation seeks a greater understanding of the problem by means of discourse and content analysis of articles published in newspapers, articles available on the internet, forum posts, and four interviews collected from inhabitants of Angelina, a municipality in the State of Santa Catarina where dialect speakers attend public schools where English is the only foreign language option in spite of the predominantly German ethnic make-up of the local population. In addition, existing theoretical models that examine language contact from the perspective of game theory are examined in terms of their relevance in a more complex scenario where a dialect coexists with its corresponding standard variant and a national language.

Esta dissertação faz considerações sobre a natureza da interferência derivada da introdução de variantes padrão de línguas imigrantes no currículo do sistema de escolas públicas de comunidades de falantes de dialetos. A pesquisa busca uma maior compreensão da questão por meio da análise de discurso e conteúdo encontrados em artigos de jornal, artigos disponíveis na Internet, mensagens trocadas em comunidades virtuais e quatro entrevistas colhidas de habitantes do município de Angelina em Santa Catarina, onde falantes de dialeto freqüentam escolas públicas onde o inglês é a única oferta de língua estrangeira, apesar da constituição étnica predominantemente germânica da população local. O trabalho ainda examina modelos teóricos de contato lingüístico baseados em teoria dos jogos em termos de sua relevância em um cenário mais complexo onde um dialeto coexista com sua variante padrão e uma língua nacional. / This dissertation prompts considerations about the nature of the interference deriving from the introduction of standard variants of immigrant languages into the curriculum of the public school system in communities of dialect speakers. The investigation seeks a greater understanding of the problem by means of discourse and content analysis of articles published in newspapers, articles available on the internet, forum posts, and four interviews collected from inhabitants of Angelina, a municipality in the State of Santa Catarina where dialect speakers attend public schools where English is the only foreign language option in spite of the predominantly German ethnic make-up of the local population. In addition, existing theoretical models that examine language contact from the perspective of game theory are examined in terms of their relevance in a more complex scenario where a dialect coexists with its corresponding standard variant and a national language.

This dissertation investigates the cognitive relevance of Arabic morphology and diglossia in spoken word recognition. The current study asks four main questions: (1) Does Arabic morphology influence word recognition? (2) Which view of Arabic morphology (i.e., the root-based or the stem-based) has an online role in spoken word recognition? (3) Does Arabic diglossia (i.e., using colloquial Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) as the dominant language of speaking and literacy, respectively) affect spoken word processing? (4) How can Arabic diglossia affect spoken word recognition? Three different lexical decision experiments and one phoneme-monitoring task were designed and conducted on a group of 140 literate native speakers of Jordanian colloquial Arabic (JCA). In the first experiment, the participant responded to MSA words varied in their surface, root, and stem frequencies. Results revealed that the token frequencies of the three tested units affected the speed of word recognition to the same extent. This suggests that both roots and stems, along with the surface words, are valid units of Arabic mental lexicon. The next two experiments compared the processing of JCA and MSA words when embedded in sentences of the same or the other variety of Arabic and when primed by intra-variety vs. cross-variety words. Results showed a lexical switching cost only when the target word is processed in the sentential context. Moreover, while the sentence experiment reported a processing advantage for MSA words relative to JCA words, the priming experiment found a processing advantage for JCA words. The priming effects were larger when the related primes were presented in JCA relative to the priming effects of the MSA primes. The fourth experiment compared phoneme monitoring of consonants and short vowels in JCA and MSA words. Results showed a detection advantage for consonants relative to short vowels and no difference between the carrier words of the two varieties of Arabic. On the whole, the last three experiments suggest that both spoken language (i.e., CA) experience and literary language (i.e., MSA) experience can affect auditory word recognition. This work emphasizes the relevance of (alphabetic) literacy and experimental task in speech processing. / February 2017

Literature pertaining to English-speaking L2 learners of Arabic on study abroad programs in the Arabic-speaking world is almost nonexistent. This may be due to the fact that not even one out of a hundred American students chooses to study abroad in the Arabic-speaking world each year (Gutierrez et al., 2009). The small number of American students studying in the Arabic speaking world is at odds with the MLA's most recent language report in which Arabic enrollments increased more than any other language from 2002 to 2006 (Furman, Goldberg & Lusin, 2007). With the increase in Arabic enrollments it is probable that more and more American students will desire to study Arabic in the Arabic-speaking world. The benefits of study abroad have long been praised (Carroll, 1967; Kinginger & Farrell, 2004; Berg et al., 2008). Not all studies, however, have been congruent (Freed, 1995). This dissertation investigates L2 learners of Arabic on study abroad programs in the Arabic-speaking world. The primary countries in this research are Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen. This research focuses on issues related to acculturation, language variety preference, proficiency and the use of technology in learning Arabic among students of Arabic on study abroad programs in the Arabic-speaking world. Particular attention is paid to the binary nature of Arabic as manifest in a host of spoken colloquial varieties. For example, the spoken colloquial Arabic in North Africa differs to a great extent from the Arabic spoken in the Levant. This feature of Arabic is referred to as diglossia (Ferguson, 1959a).Over 90 L2 learners of Arabic participated in this research, though not all of them answered every question. These learners completed an extensive online survey pertaining to their cultural experiences and interaction, language situations and functions, proficiency in Arabic, and which technologies they or their teachers used to assist in learning Arabic. It is hoped that this research will provide empirical insights pertaining to the cultural and linguistic experiences of L2 learners of Arabic in the Arabic-speaking world. General implications for Arabic programs are also presented.

This thesis revisits the variation inherent to the French wh interrogative system. In La[urentien]F[rench], there are many ways to ask wh questions, all of which are said to have the same general interpretation. By looking at different types of data, historical as well as contemporary, this thesis puts forward three main findings/proposals: i. the high degree of variation is due to the use of wh est-ce que, which appeared in Old French as an interrogative cleft (Rouquier 2003); ii. between Old and Modern French, wh est-ce que has gone through a typical cycle of grammaticalisation (as described by Roberts & Roussou 2003, van Gelderen 2008a, b), while the free relative of the Old French cleft remained unchanged; iii. today’s LaF wh system is dominated by the wh est-ce que and variants (over 98 percent of use – Elsig 2009), which lack traditional wh movement. It is proposed that wh est-ce que and variants appear in a construction containing an atrophied clefted CP adjoined to a main clause containing a wh operator, whereas the variant traditionally called wh in situ is generated in a structure in which the wh element is interpreted and spelled-out in the position of Merge. In addition to its theoretical contribution, this thesis helps to bring together theoretical and applied linguistics, since it makes use of different types of data, both historical and synchronic (oral and written corpora, experimental studies and grammaticality judgements). Moreover, the conclusions raise important questions about the realities of diglossia in the French diaspora: wh interrogative variants are divided according to fundamental structural differences; some have wh movement (high, formal register) and others do not (vernacular and neutral register). Finally, this thesis also contributes to the theories of oralité (Gadet 1992), since it sheds light on a complex system of variants found exclusively in vernacular speech.

This thesis revisits the variation inherent to the French wh interrogative system. In La[urentien]F[rench], there are many ways to ask wh questions, all of which are said to have the same general interpretation. By looking at different types of data, historical as well as contemporary, this thesis puts forward three main findings/proposals: i. the high degree of variation is due to the use of wh est-ce que, which appeared in Old French as an interrogative cleft (Rouquier 2003); ii. between Old and Modern French, wh est-ce que has gone through a typical cycle of grammaticalisation (as described by Roberts & Roussou 2003, van Gelderen 2008a, b), while the free relative of the Old French cleft remained unchanged; iii. today’s LaF wh system is dominated by the wh est-ce que and variants (over 98 percent of use – Elsig 2009), which lack traditional wh movement. It is proposed that wh est-ce que and variants appear in a construction containing an atrophied clefted CP adjoined to a main clause containing a wh operator, whereas the variant traditionally called wh in situ is generated in a structure in which the wh element is interpreted and spelled-out in the position of Merge. In addition to its theoretical contribution, this thesis helps to bring together theoretical and applied linguistics, since it makes use of different types of data, both historical and synchronic (oral and written corpora, experimental studies and grammaticality judgements). Moreover, the conclusions raise important questions about the realities of diglossia in the French diaspora: wh interrogative variants are divided according to fundamental structural differences; some have wh movement (high, formal register) and others do not (vernacular and neutral register). Finally, this thesis also contributes to the theories of oralité (Gadet 1992), since it sheds light on a complex system of variants found exclusively in vernacular speech.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, School of English and Linguisitics, 1984. / Bibliography: leaves 443-447. / Introduction -- The social setting of Norfolk speech -- Outline of analytical framework -- This study in relation to recent research into variation -- Collection of data and interview procedures -- Inventory of distinctive broad Norfolk features -- Study of Norfolk texts : diglossic speakers - varieties 1 and 2 (part 1) : special broad speakers -- Study of Norfolk texts : diglossic speakers - varieties 1 and 2 (part 2) : general broad speakers -- Study of Norfolk texts : modified broad speakers - variety 3 speakers -- Young Norfolk Island informants -- Analysis of young people's elicited data (part 1): grammatical structures -- Analysis of young people's elicited data (Part 2) -- Conclusion. / This thesis examines the behaviour of Norfolk Islanders in a particular language situation: in which the participants are Islanders, in which the purpose is understood to be informal conversation, and in which the setting is conducive to the speaker producing his/her natural vernacular. -- Emphasis on dialectal speech means that for some speakers types of Broad Norfolk are the object of investigation; for others Modified Norfolk is the dialectal variety. In the speech situation under study, all Islanders may be heard to shift through partial change of code into Modified Norfolk so that various stylistic patterns occur, dependent on the interaction of dialectal and situational factors. The analysis of such dialectal and stylistic variants as Norfolk Islanders employ in informal speech is of central interest in this work. -- Following on from an explanation of the social setting and analytical framework of the thesis, textual data of a number of Norfolk informants are examined; a set of propositions relating to the defining characteristics of diglossia, as enunciated by Charles Ferguson (1959), serves as reference points for the examination of each speaker's dialectal competence. Text analysis concentrates on the following principal areas of inquiry: / (1) Identification of the formal qualities of each speaker's dialect in relation to the distinctive features of old Broad Norfolk and location of his/her dialectal norms along the Broad Norfolk to Modified Norfolk continuum. (2) Inquiry into the degree of informants' conformity to the kind of diglossic stability which is typically demonstrated by older Islanders: the extent to which individuals reserve the use of their Norfolk and Norfolk English codes for separate dialectal and superposed purposes. (3) Speakers' code-variation in the Modified Norfolk continuum is examined: Firstly, to identify the linguistic configuration of mutated, merged and blended forms of Modified Norfolk, and Secondly, to analyse the meaning of Modified structures: whether they signify a stylistic shift pertaining to the speaker in relation to his language situation or whether they represent habitual, unmarked variants in the dialect of the speaker concerned. -- (4) Analysis of the dialect of old and young Norfolk Islanders is designed to demonstrate how maintenance and change are manifested in the present community; how their different types of code-variation relate to the dialectal-superposed norms of older diglossia; and how a range of stylistic meanings, determined by the interaction of dialectal/situational factors, is expressed within the Modified Norfolk continuum. Thus this study aims to provide a coherent interpretation of the uses of code-variation in a community of unstable diglossic practice so that it is possible to refer different types of variants to the basic diglossic framework. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / viii, 449 leaves

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 269-286). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.