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This study investigated the use of intrasentential code switching on Facebook. The corpus included 1000 screenshots of Facebook comments collected from 10 Saudi female Facebook friends who were bilingual in Arabic and English. The data were examined through statistical and content analysis. The results showed that intrasentential code switching occurs frequently in informal Facebook interactions. Further, the occurrence of code-switching was analyzed in relation to 10 topics of Facebook interactions, including gossip, humor, technology, compliments and thanking, achievement, movies and songs, family and intimacy, makeup, travelling, and religion. Among these 10 topics, gossip and humor elicited significantly higher frequencies of intrasentential code-switching. Moreover, the qualitative results showed that the most frequent English words within Arabic sentences were technical and academic terms, whereas the most frequent Arabic words within English sentences were religious words. Overall, this study shows that the use of intrasentential code-switching among Arabic-English female friends on the social network Facebook is a natural part of their interactions and the frequency with which they employ code-switching is related to the topic of their communication, their language environment, their cultural experiences, and their religion.

Consumers globally demand more diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace, including in the media content they consume. Language is one of the most important diversity, equity and inclusion factors, cutting across race, gender, sexual orientation and disability. In the South African context, research has ignored the role of language in behavioural intention. Language has been a point of tension and conflict in South Africa for the country's entire colonial history. The apartheid system was particularly involved in shaping where people live (spatial planning), and the modern language ecosystem in South Africa because it was a system of separate development on the grounds of race. In South Africa, language, race and location highly correlate and intersect. Post 1994, everyone has had the right to use the language and participate in the cultural life of their choice and no one who exercises these rights may do so in a manner inconsistent with any provision of the Bill of Rights. These rights extend to capitalism, the buying and selling of goods, and the creation and consumption of advertising content. Within multiple business industries and brands, there is now a major focus on diversity, equity and inclusion, hiring, career progression, retention and producing, and telling diverse and inclusive creative stories. For the content of stories (advertisements) to be diverse and inclusive, the creators (client and agencies) need to become more deliberate, intentional and proactive about unstereotyping users or consumers. They are expected to do this by making sure the content reflects the general population, increasing screen time for all: who they cast, gender representation, director diversity, vernacular, voice, skin tones, race, sexual orientations, people with disabilities, location shoot diversity, and age groups, to mention a few. The primary purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of English-language advertising to non-English speakers in Western and Eastern Cape townships. The study focuses on television advertising, a form of marketing communication. The television medium in South Africa and the rest of Africa still has the greatest reach and media budget compared to marketing via digital platforms, radio, print, out-of-home, and emailing media. The study identified a number of theoretical frameworks and combined them to develop an integrated theoretical framework. The framework helped the researcher understand the complex nature of television advertising. The study proposed that the language used in an advertisement serves as an attribute and medium of experiences to influence customers' affective responses or intentions to act. A pragmatic philosophical stance was adopted, allowing the collection, analysis and interpretation of qualitative and quantitative data in a single study in three parts. The first sub-study collected and analysed quantitative data, the second involved four focus-group interviews, and the last study involved semi-structured interviews with experts. The development of an integrated theoretical framework is a major contribution of the study. As the first application of the Theory of Planned Behaviour to understand the effects of English-language television advertising on customers living in Western and Eastern Cape townships, the study contributes value to the marketing discipline. It also contributes significantly by combining quantitative advertising testing with traditional qualitative communication-testing methods. Practical implications of the study include a review of the use of the English language as a medium of communication to non-English-speaking consumers or those who speak English as a second or third language.

Culture, thought worldview and language have been discussed for a long time in different fields from various perspectives. However, the basis of this study is the view of language as both the product and producer of people just as people are the producer and product of language. Each language requires of those who use it, a particular way of viewing reality. The structure of language containing a particular worldview therefore must influence how people learn and acquire a second language. The purpose of this study is to test this assumption about worldview in adult second language acquisition. The main concern is whether or not the native English speakers' worldview influences their ability to learn Chinese as a second language. The focus of this investigation is the Aspect marker -le, which represents a different way of observing action when compared to Tense used in English. Chinese is a context sensitive language. The way of perceiving action is in terms of Aspect, which is to observe an action within an event from a specific point of view without considering Speech-time. In contrast, English is less context sensitive, and its way of perceiving action is more precise and time-conscious, in terms of Tense. The results of the investigation of a group of native- English-speakers learning Chinese as a second language reveals that the worldview they have in observing action is shaped by their native tongue and interferes with their use of the Chinese Aspect marker -le. / Graduation date: 1998

Increased worldwide mobility has led to a rise in the number of interlingual parents attempting to transmit their native languages to their children. Within the related fields of heritage language acquisition and bilingualism, there is a lack of research focusing on sequential language acquisition. This exploratory longitudinal case study investigates a four-year-old girl’s sequential acquisition of French, her mother’s language, within the context of an expatriate community in Hong Kong in which English, her father’s language, was predominant. Spontaneous speech samples were collected from different learning environments and interviews were conducted to elucidate the impact of the learner’s various experiences on her L2 acquisition. Results indicated a lack of L2 confidence that was perhaps under-estimated by her parents and teachers. The change in maternal input patterns provoked a frequently angry reaction in the learner and resulted in a high proportion of code-switching in her output. Findings indicated tentative support for Muranaka-Vuletich’s (2002) suggestion that child code-switching rates may not always be influenced by the parents and that it may sometimes be the reverse. The bilingual nature of the French community in Hong Kong made it difficult to immerse the learner in truly monolingual L2 environments. However, the combination of the child’s educational and social experiences seem to have contributed to her increased L2 output by the study’s conclusion. The present study may have worrying implications for those parents unable to provide the requisite conditions for L2 acquisition at home and who do not have access to heritage language education or expensive immersion trips. / published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

The purpose of this creative project is to provide a manual for French teachers who wish to incorporate a cultural element with emphasis on religion into their course. In preparing these materials, the author has had the Christian school especially in mind.The Christian school movement is developing rapidly in the United States today. These schools along with Catholic parochial schools train a significant segment of our society. Because such schools are Christocentric in philosophy, they require supplementary materials not provided by secular publishers.This Creative Project contains a teacher's manual which is divided into three sections. Each of these sections is developed around the theme of a religious holiday. Teachers aids include prayer forms in French, pertinent Scripture passages, and songs to accompany the theme. The instructor will also find grammar explanations, vocabulary helps, and comments on French customs.There are worksheets and illustrations that can be duplicated and used in the classroom as learning aids. The teacher may also profit from program ideas and other activities designed to stimulate students in the language learning process.This project is aimed at preparing materials that will appeal to young teens and will also be practical for a busy instructor.

The case studies offered in this ethnography describe the learning experiences of 13 second and third grade students, six girls and seven boys, living in a medium-sizemidwestern town in the United States, who are taught Spanish as a foreign language once a week in 30 minute sessions during the 1995-6 school year. None of the children had any prior exposure to Spanish nor any additional exposure to Spanish outside the class I taught.The research investigates several areas of individual variety, including motivation, learning style, approach to vocabulary learning, classroom behavior, expectations, and listening and pronunciation skills.The study also investigates the impact of age and gender, as well as associations between the individuals' basic skills and L2 learning success.In addition, the study documents the teacher's experiences, observations, and insights during these classroom sessions. The researcher functioned as a participant-observer by teaching, recording, transcribing, and analyzing.The material for this study comes from hours of classroom teaching which were video- and audio-taped and from careful notes. The tapes and notes were transcribed and analyzed for patterns of learning behavior.A large number of observations resulted from this indepth study. One of the main findings of the study was that classroom management, emotional climate, and peer group influence are very closely interconnected. Learning was strongly related to cooperativeness and supportiveness in the two groups of girls but not seem to be so with the boys. There was no conclusive evidence that any one personality trait was more important than another in the long run. Overall scores on the CTBS were positively related to success in second language learning and were not negatively affected from one year to the next from the time taken out to study Spanish. There was no one area in the CTBS battery that could successfully predict foreign language aptitude; the best predictor seemed to be overall classroom success. Learning a foreign language was not particularly easy or automatic with this group; however, they did seem to have an aptitude and a willingness for repeating unfamiliar sounds. / Department of English

Research on morphological variability in second language (L2) acquisition has focused on the syntactic consequences of variability: that is, whether or not morphological variability entails underlying syntactic deficits. The interrelationship between morphological features in their own right has been largely ignored. This thesis addresses the representation of L2 features by investigating the use of default morphology---the outcome of systematic substitution errors employed by speakers of L2 Spanish. It is hypothesized that underspecified features act as defaults; by assumption, those features that are unmarked are underspecified. / Evidence to support this hypothesis comes from two sets of experiments conducted on intermediate- and advanced-proficiency L2 Spanish subjects (L1 English). The first set of experiments addresses verbal morphology, and consists of a spontaneous production experiment on person, number, tense, and finiteness, and a comprehension task on person and number. The second set of experiments addresses gender and number in nominal morphology, and consists of a spontaneous production experiment on determiners, an elicited production experiment on clitics and adjectives, and a picture-selection task on the comprehension of clitics. Across tasks and across verbal and nominal domains, errors involve the systematic substitution of underspecified morphology. The observation that morphological variability extends to comprehension, and is qualitatively similar to the variability found in production, counters the suggestion that variability is strictly a product of mere performance limitations on production. Finally, the systematicity of substitution errors suggests that the natural classes of features such as gender, number, tense, and person are acquirable in an L2, regardless of whether or not these features have been instantiated in the native language.

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