Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Alberta, 2010. / A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education, Department of Elementary Education, University of Alberta. Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on April 29, 2010). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2008. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 173-178). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Using transcribed data from six Spanish-English bilingual children (1;8 to 3;3) from the Perez corpus in the CHILDES database, this thesis examines Parental Discourse Strategies (PDS) used to influence child language use in a minority language context (Spanish in the United States). PDS (Lanza, 1992; 1997) are situated within a language socialization framework (Ochs & Schieffelin, 2011) and can be viewed as part of the emerging field of family language policy (King & Fogle, 2013; Schwartz, 2010). This study looked at the overall language use, including the frequency and complexity, of English, Spanish, and mixed utterances by each parent and child in the corpus. The presence and rate of use of the PDS was calculated, as well as their successfulness in encouraging the children to use the minority language, as measured by the language of response to each PDS found. These strategies have been placed on a monolingual to bilingual continuum (Lanza, 1992) based on their expected success in influencing a child to use the language preferred by their parent. Results from a descriptive quantitative analysis of the data at the group and individual levels generally support the Parental Discourse Hypothesis, that is, the claim that certain strategies are more effective than others. Interestingly, it was found that the more successful strategies were used less frequently by the parents, while the less successful ones were more common. This apparent contradiction can be explained by conflicting pressure on parents to promote minority language use while also keeping fluid communication and preserving family harmony. This is discussed and further supported by some qualitative observations of child responses within discourse samples, highlighting children’s role as agents capable of negotiating their own linguistic socialization.

The language situation in Tanzania has changed greatly since the overwhelming spread of Swahili, the national language and one of the official languages of Tanzania. Previous studies have reported that Swahili has encroached on the domains of ethnic community languages (Legère 1992, Meka- cha 1993, Yoneda 1996), and its linguistic influence can easily be recognized throughout the ethnic community languages of Tanzania, even in remote areas. This situation has been described as ‘Swahilization’ of ethnic community languages (Yoneda 2010) or ‘language drift’ (Brenzinger & Marten 2016), as opposed to a clear language shift. This study describes the influence of Swahili on Tanzanian ethnic community languages, presenting specific examples to substantiate the previous studies (e.g. Yoneda 2010, Marten & Petzell 2016, Rosendal & Mapunda 2017, among others). It shows that the language shift that Batibo (1992) expected has not taken place. Instead, people have kept their ethnic community languages, developing a new type of language use to enable meaning-making for the community in this changing world. The ongoing process in an ethnic community consists of Swahilization of their language, rather than its disappearance through a complete shift away from its use. In addition, the influence of language contact between Swahili and ethnic community languages is not a one-way effect; Swahili is also affected by the various ethnic community languages. As a result, each language is forced to undergo ‘-ization’ by the other and their differences are, not only sociolinguistically but also structurally and lexically convergent.

No description available.

The study investigates prediction factors of children's proficiency in Russian among children from Russian-speaking families in Saskatchewan. For that purpose, 5-7 year old children and their parents were interviewed about their language use, proficiency, and language attitudes, as well as children's Russian language proficiency was measured and compared to monolingual children in Russia.

The field of heritage language maintenance lacks an in-depth look at the social networks that make-up the linguistic interaction of heritage speakers of Spanish. Moreover, the social network studies that have focused on language maintenance have all investigated the maintenance of a first language spoken by immigrants or the use of a dialect. Undoubtedly, there is a lacuna of research with regard to heritage speakers of a language, which is the focus of the proposed study. There is an even greater deficit in the study of linguistic insecurity among heritage language speakers and the correlation that there may be with regard to social networks. The present research fills this gap by examining these issues within a population of heritage speakers of Spanish at the University of Arizona.This study examines correlations between linguistic insecurity, social networks and language use in heritage speakers of Spanish. The population investigated are college aged students registered in the beginning and intermediate courses of the Heritage Language Program at the University of Arizona, Tucson (SPAN 103, 203, and 253). Linguistic insecurity is measured using an adapted version of the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope, 1986) and language use is measured through an online questionnaire. The subjects' social networks are identified using an adapted on-line version of the Cochran, Larner, Riley, Gunnarson, & Henderson's (1990) social network questionnaire. This study details the social networks of heritage language speakers of Spanish and presents the correlation between these networks, the participants' use of Spanish and their linguistic insecurity in a discussion regarding the speakers' prospects of maintaining the heritage language. Secondly, it presents correlations between the linguistic insecurity of heritage language speakers of Spanish, Spanish language use, oral proficiency and social network structure. The information provided by this study will help in the understanding of the function of social networks in the maintenance of a heritage language. It will further assist in the understanding of linguistic insecurity and provide a foundation for further research into how to address linguistic insecurity in the heritage language classroom.

Sub-cultural languages in South Africa – languages which do not enjoy official status amongst other qualities – have not received much attention academically. Existing theories of maintenance and shift accommodate mainstream languages in their role and function within dominant society. However the sub-cultural languages, in which Fanagalo will later be categorised, and their role and function in society are unclear. This may be the result of the inefficiency of current theories of maintenance and shift to explain the functionality of sub-cultural languages and the process they undergo leading to either maintenance or shift. Furthermore, failure to recognise the role and function of such sub-cultural languages may be attributed to their non-official status as they are not officially supported by language policies. The purpose of this study is therefore to understand the process of maintenance or shift a sub-cultural language undergoes. This process is accommodated by developing a theoretical model related to maintenance or shift for sub-cultural languages. This model, specifically based on Fanagalo, will expand on the boundaries set in existing theoretical models of maintenance and shift in order to accommodate sub-cultural language. It is important to stress that the period during which the data was collected on site at Mine X in Rustenburg, is volatile in nature. The unrest in the social context concerning the mine workers themselves during the period in which this data was gathered alludes to the value of the data and provides a unique insight not achievable under non-adverse circumstances. The unrest began in 2012 during which a “strike over pay ha(d) escalated into alleged turf war between unions” (Smith & Macalister, 2012) in Marikana, Rustenburg where more than thirty people were killed on the 17th of August, 2012. A year later, an agreement between Amcu (Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union) and Lonmin was signed which, according to Mathunjwa, president of Amcu, was quoted as saying, ‘This shows that the victims did not die in vain and we pledge to continue with their fight for a living wage” (Mathunjwa, 2013, quoted by Steyn, 2013). This pledge was upheld as on 28 August, 2013, Amcu was, “asking for increases as high as 150%, and Solidarity are still engaging” (Nicolson, 2013). As the interviews as part of the data collection process for this study were conducted on 14 August 2013, the value of the data should not go unrecognised. / MA (English), North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2014

Thesis advisor: María Estela Brisk / Linguistic assimilation has been historically regarded as a cornerstone for nationalistic sentiments in the United States. Schools have been utilized as influential filtering sites where non-English languages are marginalized, and then assimilated into the dominant American English ways of languaging (Crawford, 1992; Flores, 2014; Heath, 1976; Nieto, 1999; Wiley & García, 2016). Drawing on theories of language policy (Spolsky, 2004) and governmentality (Foucault, 1991), this dissertation examined the links between family language policies and educational language policies at two public elementary schools in the state of Massachusetts during its final year of enforcing an English-only educational policy (Chapter 71A of Massachusetts General Laws). The participants were four fourth grade children, four parents, and eight school staff at two public elementary schools in two different districts (one urban and one suburban). The families spoke Cape Verdean Creole, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Spanish as their heritage languages. The study was designed as a qualitative multiple case study to conduct a multi-sited analysis of language policy. The data for the case studies were collected through surveys of parents, language logs filled by the children, interviews with the children, the parents, and the school staff, as well as weeklong school observations of each child. The units of analysis were family and school as two main language policy contexts the children regularly navigated. Qualitative thematic analysis was used to analyze the data (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The findings indicated that although the families and the schools seemed to appreciate bilingualism, they were still strongly influenced by the historical monoglossic ideologies of the society that convinced them to eventually conform to English in the name of ensuring success for the children. These ideologies were communicated between schools and families as “unspoken dialogues” through children who navigated language policies in both contexts. The findings highlight implications for teacher preparation, curriculum development, language policy research on schools and families, and educational language policies that impact children of immigrants. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

While language shift is common in immigrant families by the third generation, maintenance of the heritage language is not impossible, depending on geography and other language socializing contexts such as parental communication and interactions with monolingual relatives of the minority language that provide the third generation with opportunities to use the language. The scholarship on the language shift to monolingual-English and the maintenance of Spanish in Latino immigrant families in the United States typically only considers how earlier generations socialize later generations to use one language over the other, without much attention to third-generation individuals themselves. Therefore, the purpose of the present thesis is to examine the narrative accounts of third-generation Mexican-American adults—the generation that typically loses the heritage language—in order to understand how they construct the experience of being socialized to use English and Spanish throughout their lives. Data consist of ten, hour-long, transcribed audio-recorded interviews with ten third-generation Mexican-American individuals. The interview questions were quite open-ended about their use of Spanish. I conducted discourse analysis with the purpose of identifying narrative accounts that conveyed these third-generation individuals’ constructed realities regarding their own Spanish use and their interactions with various Spanish-speaking family members. The findings indicate that the participants construct themselves as linguistically insecure with regard to their Spanish use. They explain their lack of ideologically “pure” Spanish in relation to socialization as they have interacted with various Spanish-speaking relatives throughout their lives. Moreover, they justify their lack of “pure” Spanish by constructing a third space for their Spanish use. They claim to use a new, localized variety of Spanish, which they consider to be illegitimate, thus self-defining as monolingual English speakers. However, I argue that their narrative accounts actually de-dichotomize bilingualism by opening the possibility of Third Space Spanish. Implications include the need for further research on the relationship between socialization, linguistic insecurity, and contested third space Spanish.