The present study investigated the possibility of heritage language loss in twenty students of Hispanic origin, selected from six second-grade classrooms in one elementary school of a large district in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Ten students were enrolled in Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE) classes and ten students were enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, during the academic year 2004-2005. Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) in English and Spanish were measured over a short-term progress monitoring period (i.e. sixteen consecutive weeks), and over a long-term follow-up period (i.e. nine and twelve months later, respectively). To answer the first research question on the amount and type of growth in English and Spanish ORF demonstrated by the students over time, two main types of analyses were conducted: a) time series analysis of group improvement trends, and b) Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) on individual student slope coefficients. Results from quantitative analyses revealed that both groups of students improved in English reading over time. However, when considering the long-term progress, the TBE group demonstrated a faster rate of improvement in English reading when compared to the ESL group and also to their own Spanish reading. As for the ESL group, the students reached a plateau of performance in Spanish, indicating, at best, minimal skills in the heritage language while continuing to progress in English. To answer the second research question, regarding parents’ beliefs on bilingualism and maintenance of the heritage language in their children, semistructured Parents’ Interviews (PI) with open-ended questions were conducted. Results from qualitative analyses revealed three major themes: Both sets of parents believed in the connection between the native language and increased life opportunities, the TBE parents affirmed the heritage language as symbol of their cultural identity, and the ESL parents acknowledged their children’s native language loss. Findings from this study suggest that students instructed in their native language in the early elementary years appear to have a better chance of maintaining their heritage language over time, when compared to students instructed solely in English.

Taiwan is a country colonized by various regimes over the past four hundred years. The research first adopted the narrative inquiry-an autobiography on my journey to find my Taiwanese identity and mother tongue loss. Secondly, a phenomenological study on three Taiwanese families was conducted to secure an in-depth complex understanding on the scope and extent of the language loss phenomenon in Taiwan, of the thoughts and feelings about losing mother tongues, of the role of political power, the colonial history and other sociocultural contexts in the language loss phenomenon in Taiwan. Ten features and eleven themes were identified in this study. The political power and colonial history are important factors of mother tongue loss among my three participant families.

Taiwan is a country colonized by various regimes over the past four hundred years. The research first adopted the narrative inquiry-an autobiography on my journey to find my Taiwanese identity and mother tongue loss. Secondly, a phenomenological study on three Taiwanese families was conducted to secure an in-depth complex understanding on the scope and extent of the language loss phenomenon in Taiwan, of the thoughts and feelings about losing mother tongues, of the role of political power, the colonial history and other sociocultural contexts in the language loss phenomenon in Taiwan. Ten features and eleven themes were identified in this study. The political power and colonial history are important factors of mother tongue loss among my three participant families.

abstract: The Ak-Chin Indian Community is a small community in southern Arizona comprised of roughly one thousand O’odham. The indigenous language of Ak-Chin is the ’O’odham ñeo’okĭ, O’odham language, however in recent decades the number of speakers of this language have begun to sharply decline. Due to a variety of sociological factors in interacting with the dominant colonial society, the people of Ak-Chin have begun a shift toward the predominant use of English in daily affairs. The goal of this thesis is to investigate the societal factors that have led to the decline of the O’odham language in Ak-Chin and to examine language policy and planning principles and practices which may serve as examples for the Ak-Chin community to re-establish a strong connection to their heritage language. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis American Indian Studies 2017

Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of supporting home languages for linguistic-minority families in multilingual settings, as the family language is the means through which they can more successfully socialize their children into the beliefs, values, ideologies and practices surrounding their languages and cultures. Although there has been some research examining issues of Spanish acquisition, maintenance and loss in Canada, the language socialization ideologies and practices of Hispanic families have not yet been examined in this context. This ethnographic study investigated language socialization in immigrant families from ten Spanish-speaking countries residing in Greater Vancouver. Thirty-four families participated, three of which were selected for intensive case study in their homes and in three grassroots community groups. More specifically, the study examined the families’ desires and goals with respect to Spanish maintenance, the meanings they assigned to Spanish, and the processes through which they attempted to valorize Spanish with their children. The study found that many families formed support groups in order to transmit language and culture to their children. A cross-case analysis revealed that the families further exerted their agency by strategically turning these spaces into “safe houses” to resist assimilation and into venues for the Spanish socialization of their children, which enabled them to also transmit cultural values, such as familism. The families conceptualized Spanish maintenance as an emotional connection to the parents’ selves and as a bridge between the parents’ past and the children’s future. It was also constructed as a key that opened doors, as a bridge for learning other languages, and as a passport to a cosmopolitan worldview. Detailed discourse analyses revealed how the families utilized explicit and implicit directives, recasts, and lectures to socialize children into Spanish language ideologies. These analyses also showed how children at times resisted the parents’ socialization practices, but other times displayed their nascent understanding of their parents’ language ideologies in their own use of cross-code self-repair. The study offers unique insights into the complexity of L1 maintenance and the dynamics of language socialization in the lives of linguistic minorities and concludes with implications for policy, pedagogy and research.

Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of supporting home languages for linguistic-minority families in multilingual settings, as the family language is the means through which they can more successfully socialize their children into the beliefs, values, ideologies and practices surrounding their languages and cultures. Although there has been some research examining issues of Spanish acquisition, maintenance and loss in Canada, the language socialization ideologies and practices of Hispanic families have not yet been examined in this context. This ethnographic study investigated language socialization in immigrant families from ten Spanish-speaking countries residing in Greater Vancouver. Thirty-four families participated, three of which were selected for intensive case study in their homes and in three grassroots community groups. More specifically, the study examined the families’ desires and goals with respect to Spanish maintenance, the meanings they assigned to Spanish, and the processes through which they attempted to valorize Spanish with their children. The study found that many families formed support groups in order to transmit language and culture to their children. A cross-case analysis revealed that the families further exerted their agency by strategically turning these spaces into “safe houses” to resist assimilation and into venues for the Spanish socialization of their children, which enabled them to also transmit cultural values, such as familism. The families conceptualized Spanish maintenance as an emotional connection to the parents’ selves and as a bridge between the parents’ past and the children’s future. It was also constructed as a key that opened doors, as a bridge for learning other languages, and as a passport to a cosmopolitan worldview. Detailed discourse analyses revealed how the families utilized explicit and implicit directives, recasts, and lectures to socialize children into Spanish language ideologies. These analyses also showed how children at times resisted the parents’ socialization practices, but other times displayed their nascent understanding of their parents’ language ideologies in their own use of cross-code self-repair. The study offers unique insights into the complexity of L1 maintenance and the dynamics of language socialization in the lives of linguistic minorities and concludes with implications for policy, pedagogy and research.

Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of supporting home languages for linguistic-minority families in multilingual settings, as the family language is the means through which they can more successfully socialize their children into the beliefs, values, ideologies and practices surrounding their languages and cultures. Although there has been some research examining issues of Spanish acquisition, maintenance and loss in Canada, the language socialization ideologies and practices of Hispanic families have not yet been examined in this context. This ethnographic study investigated language socialization in immigrant families from ten Spanish-speaking countries residing in Greater Vancouver. Thirty-four families participated, three of which were selected for intensive case study in their homes and in three grassroots community groups. More specifically, the study examined the families’ desires and goals with respect to Spanish maintenance, the meanings they assigned to Spanish, and the processes through which they attempted to valorize Spanish with their children. The study found that many families formed support groups in order to transmit language and culture to their children. A cross-case analysis revealed that the families further exerted their agency by strategically turning these spaces into “safe houses” to resist assimilation and into venues for the Spanish socialization of their children, which enabled them to also transmit cultural values, such as familism. The families conceptualized Spanish maintenance as an emotional connection to the parents’ selves and as a bridge between the parents’ past and the children’s future. It was also constructed as a key that opened doors, as a bridge for learning other languages, and as a passport to a cosmopolitan worldview. Detailed discourse analyses revealed how the families utilized explicit and implicit directives, recasts, and lectures to socialize children into Spanish language ideologies. These analyses also showed how children at times resisted the parents’ socialization practices, but other times displayed their nascent understanding of their parents’ language ideologies in their own use of cross-code self-repair. The study offers unique insights into the complexity of L1 maintenance and the dynamics of language socialization in the lives of linguistic minorities and concludes with implications for policy, pedagogy and research. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

No description available.

This report addresses the lack of progress in the field of Second Language Attrition (L2A). Review of L2A history and literature show this to be cause by lack of appropriate data. Five criteria for appropriate data are suggested and a corpus of L2A data (57,000 words, spoken Spanish) which meets the criteria is presented. The history of the corpus is explained in detail, including subject selection, instruments and methods of collection, and markup -- XML was used to annotate the corpus with nineteen categories of speech errors, adapted from Nation's (2001) "Learning Vocabulary in Another Language." An example analysis of how the corpus can be used for L2A research is provided with step-by-step instructions on writing scripts for data extraction and post-processing in the Perl language. Source code is included in the text. Complete beginners tutorials on the XML and Perl languages are included in the appendices. The report also introduces a website, developed specifically to host the corpus, where researchers may register, download the corpus and share work they have done with the corpus. All files used in the example project, as well as this report, are available for download at the website. Findings from the example analysis support Plateau Phases, the Regression Hypothesis and suggest the Threshold Hypothesis does not apply to marked forms. This shows the corpus to be of great value to the L2A research community.

Pourquoi, dans un contexte migratoire, certains enfants parlent la langue maternelle de leurs parents tandis que d’autres ne l'acquièrent jamais? Cette question nous paraît particulièrement pertinente dans le contexte multiculturel et plurilingue du Canada, plus particulièrement à Montréal, où on trouve « le plus haut pourcentage de distribution du groupe minoritaire ‘latino-américain’ de tout le pays » (Pato 2010: 1). L’objectif principal de cette recherche est d’apporter de nouvelles connaissances en lien avec la transmission et le maintien de l’espagnol comme langue d’origine à Montréal, sujet très peu exploré à ce jour. Afin de mieux comprendre les facteurs impliqués dans la transmission intergénérationnelle de la langue, nous avons étudié deux groupes, les parents et les enfants, formés de huit participants chacun. Les données recueillies à travers de questionnaires et d’entrevues sociolinguistiques apportent des réponses aux questions suivantes : (1) Quels sont les principaux facteurs impliqués dans le maintien de l’espagnol comme langue d’origine à Montréal ? (2) Quelles sont les attitudes des parents et des enfants face à la conservation et à la perte de l’espagnol ? (3) Quelles types de stratégies emploient les parents pour maintenir l’utilisation de l’espagnol à la maison ? (4) Quelle importance a le bilinguisme (français – anglais) dans le maintien et la perte de l’espagnol à Montréal ? L’analyse de nos données nous permet d’identifier que les cinq principaux facteurs impliqués dans la conservation de l’espagnol à Montréal sont : (i) l’exposition à la langue ; (ii) l’utilisation de la langue formelle ; (iii) la motivation ; (iv) le contact avec la famille ; (v) l’exposition à la culture d’origine. Notre recherche démontre que les familles étudiées ont une attitude favorable face à la conservation de leur langue, ce qui ne semble pas être déterminée par l’implémentation des « politiques linguistiques » ou stratégies explicites à la maison. Pour terminer, nos données démontrent aussi que, contrairement à notre hypothèse, le contexte bilingue particulier à Montréal ne semble pas influer de façon significative sur la conservation de l’espagnol. / Why is it that in multilingual societies some children are able to speak the language of their immigrant parents while other children are not? We consider this question to be particularly pertinent in the Canadian multilingual and multicultural context, and more specifically, in the city of Montreal, home to the highest proportion Latin Americans in all of Canada (Pato 2010: 1). The main objective of this research is to contribute new data on the transmission of Spanish as a heritage language in Montreal, a topic that to our knowledge has yet to be researched. In order to better understand this intergenerational phenomenon, two generational groups (parents and their children), each with eight members, were studied. The data collected through questionnaires and sociolinguistic interviews offer an answer to the following research questions: (1) What are the factors that have the most influence in the maintenance of Spanish as a heritage language in Montreal? (2) What are the attitudes of parents and children towards the maintenance/loss of their heritage language? (3) What type of strategies do parents have to ensure and maintain the use of Spanish in their home? (4) What role does the bilingualism factor (French – English) play in the maintenance and loss of Spanish in Montreal? The analysis of our data reveals that the five most influential factors in the maintenance of Spanish in Montreal are: (i) exposure to the language; (ii) the use of formal language; (iii) motivation; (iv) contact with family members; (v) exposure to the heritage culture. Our data show that the families studied have a strong positive attitude towards the maintenance of their heritage language. We do not have evidence suggesting that the implementation of an explicit language “policy” or “rule” for the use of Spanish in the home contributes to its maintenance, as some have suggested. Finally, the data reveal that, contrary to our initial hypothesis, the French-English bilingual context particular to Montreal does not appear to have any substantial impact or influence on the maintenance or loss of Spanish in Montreal.